Petitions and remonstrances began to make ministers tremble lest finally the sympathies of the throne might be turned into the proper channel, and the king be led to espouse the cause of the people, who, to do them justice, remained loyal under both the critical emergencies described as occurring under Charles II. and George III., and which had more than a casual resemblance.

The remonstrances of the citizens were persistently laid before the king, although every obstacle was interposed in the way of their presentation by petty indignities imposed upon those bold enough to approach the presence with objects thus distasteful to the royal ideas of sovereign right—

“Make prayers not so like petitions
As overtures and propositions.”

(Hudibras.)

On July 5, 1769, the Livery of London presented a petition to the king; the lord mayor, Samuel Turner, Sir Robert Ladbrooke,[56] Alderman Beckford, and other friends of popular liberty being charged with this statement of grievances, of which the following extracts must suffice:—

“We should be wanting in our duty to your Majesty, as well as to ourselves and our posterity, should we forbear to represent to the throne the desperate attempts that have been, and are too successfully, made to destroy that constitution to the spirit of which we owe the relation which subsists between your Majesty and the subjects of these realms, and to subvert those sacred laws which our ancestors have sealed with their blood.

“Your ministers, from corrupt principles and in violation of every duty, have, by various enumerated means, invaded our invaluable and inalienable right of trial by jury.

“They have, with impunity, issued general warrants, and violently seized persons and private papers.

“They have rendered the laws non-effective to our security, by invading the Habeas Corpus.

“They have caused punishments and even perpetual imprisonment to be inflicted, without trial, conviction, or sentence.

“They have brought into disrepute the civil magistracy, by the appointment of persons who are, in many respects, unqualified for that important trust, and have thereby purposely furnished a pretence for calling in the aid of the military power.

“They avow, and endeavour to establish, a maxim absolutely inconsistent with our constitution, that ‘an occasion for effectually employing a military force always presents itself, when the civil power is trifled with or insulted;’ and by a fatal and false application of this maxim, they have wantonly and wickedly sacrificed the lives of many of your Majesty’s innocent subjects, and have prostituted your Majesty’s sacred name and authority, to justify, applaud, and recommend their own illegal and bloody actions.

“They have screened more than one murderer from punishment, and in its place have unnaturally substituted reward.

“And after having insulted and defeated the law on different occasions, and by different contrivances, both at home and abroad, they have at length completed their design, by violently wresting from the people the last sacred right we had left, the right of election, by the unprecedented seating of a candidate notoriously set up and chosen only by themselves. They have thereby taken from your subjects all hopes of parliamentary redress, and have left us no resource, under God, but in your Majesty.

“All this they have been able to effect by corruption; by a scandalous misapplication and embezzlement of the public treasure, and a shameful prostitution of public honours and employments; procuring deficiencies of the civil lists to be made good without examinations; and, instead of punishing, conferring honours on a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions.

“From an unfeigned sense of the duty we owe to your Majesty, and to our country, we have ventured thus humbly to lay before the throne these great and important truths, which it has been the business of your Ministers to conceal. We most earnestly beseech your Majesty to grant us redress. It is for the purpose of redress alone, and for such occasions as the present, that those great and extensive powers are entrusted to the Crown by the wisdom of that Constitution which your Majesty’s illustrious family was chosen to defend, and which we trust in God it will for ever continue to support.”

Of each paragraph given in the foregoing the meaning was conclusive, the instance known to all. There is in this petition no statement exaggerated, no sentiment overcoloured, considering that one paragraph alone describes no less than the suicidal measures which dismembered the empire, and cost the mother country the allegiance of “the colonies,” i.e. the continent of America, in these plain words:—

“They [the Grafton administration] have established numberless unconstitutional regulations and taxations in our colonies. They have caused a revenue to be raised in some of them by prerogative.”

However meritorious the cause, it was an offence to a king whose mind, never remarkable for lucidity, was then under “the influence of the worst of counsellors,” as stated in the first prayer of the petition. The document—when the petitioners were, after much discouragement, delay, and many subterfuges, and, “although no time could be fixed for its acceptance,” permitted to approach the presence at a levee—was at last presented; but the king made no reply, but, handing the petition to the lord-in-waiting, turned his back on the presenters, who represented the integrity and commercial greatness of the city of London and were its elected guardians, and addressed Baron Dieden, the Danish ambassador, who was standing in his vicinity, on an indifferent topic.

After the late fulsome reception of “bogus addressers” nothing could be more contemptible than the studied impertinence with which the Corporation of London was treated, and the affront of leaving the civil magistrate to