Especially considering the party who talk of these things to us: and this ought to move the good people of Britain to receive the proposals of the pretender with indignation; for who are they, dear fellow-protestants! that persuade you to these things? Are they not the friends of France and Rome? Do not all the papists join with them? Do not all those who hated the revolution, and who long to restore arbitrary government, join with them?
Why, if he will abjure the Romish errors and turn protestant, why, I say, do the papists speak in his favour? Do any sect of religion love apostates! Those who forsake them and abjure them as heretical and erroneous! If they were not well assured that whatever appearing change he may make, he will still retain a secret affection to popery, they could not be rationally supposed to speak in his behalf.
But if that is not sufficient, what do they say to you as to his love of the liberty of his country? Has he been bred up in a tyrannical absolute court for nothing? Can he have any notion of government there but what is cruel, oppressive, absolute, and despotic? What principles of government will he come over with? and as he has sucked in tyranny with his milk, and knows no government but that of the most absolute monarch in the world, is this the man they would bring in to preserve the liberties and constitution of Britain?
When set upon the British throne, who are his allies and confederates? Will he be so ungrateful as not to be always at the devotion and command of the French king? a prince that took his father in a fugitive, an abdicated and ruined prince, when his fortunes were overthrown, and his crown taken from him; that made so many efforts to restore him, and hazarded his whole kingdom for it: if he forgets the kindness shown to his father, can he be so ungenerous, so unthankful, as to forget how the king of France nourished him from a child; how, after his father's death, he hazarded a second war to proclaim him king of Great Britain, and what expense he has been at to put him in possession of it? Should he forget all these obligations, he must be unfit to be called a Christian, much less a prince.
If he can act so barbarously to the French king, his benefactor, what must you Britons expect from him, who have done nothing to oblige him, but have for twenty-four years kept him and his father in exile, and treated them both with unsufferable indignity? If he can be ungrateful to the king of France, who has done so much for him, what must he be to you, who have done so much against him?
Again: if gratitude and honour have any influence upon him, if he has any sense of his obligation to the French king, will he not for ever be his most hearty, obedient, humble servant? Will he not always be in his interest, nay, ought he not to be so? Is he not tied by the laws of friendship and gratitude to be so?
Think, then, dear Britons! what a king this pretender must be; a papist by inclination; a tyrant by education; a Frenchman by honour and obligation: and how long will your liberties last you in this condition? And when your liberties are gone, how long will your religion remain? When your hands are tied; when armies bind you; when power oppresses you; when a tyrant disarms you; when a popish French tyrant reigns over you; by what means or methods can you pretend to maintain your protestant religion?
How shall the Church of England stand, when in subjection to the Church of Rome? You are now mixed with dissenters, and some are uneasy enough with them too; but our church will then be but a dissenting church; popery will be the establishment; the mass will succeed our common prayer, and fire and fagot instead of toleration, as you know was our case before; for it is not the first time the papists have been tried.
Nor did Queen Mary promise, nay, swear less than is now promised for the pretender; for she swore to the Gospellers of Suffolk to make no alteration in religion; and they, like the blinded protestants of this age, brought her in, for which they were the first that felt the fury and rage of the popish party, and so we have great cause to believe it would be again.