To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.
The humble petition of the Freeholders of the County of Middlesex.
Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, your Majesty’s dutiful and loyal subjects, the Freeholders of the County of Middlesex, beg leave, with all affectionate submission and humility, to throw ourselves at your royal feet, and humbly to implore your paternal attention to those grievances of which this county and the whole nation complain, and those fearful apprehensions with which the whole British Empire is most justly alarmed.
With great grief and sorrow we have long beheld the endeavours of certain evil-minded persons, who attempt to infuse into your royal mind notions and opinions of the most dangerous and pernicious tendency, and who promote and counsel such measures as cannot fail to destroy that harmony and confidence which should ever subsist between a just and virtuous prince and a free and loyal people.
For this disaffected purpose they have introduced into every part of the administration of our happy legal constitution a certain unlimited and indefinite discretionary power, to prevent which is the sole aim of all our laws, and was the sole cause of all those disturbances and revolutions which formerly distracted this unhappy country; for our ancestors, by their own fatal experience, well knew that in a state where discretion begins, law, liberty, and safety end. Under the pretence of this discretion, or, as it was formerly, and has been lately, called, Law of state, we have seen
English subjects, and even a member of the British Legislature, arrested by virtue of a general warrant issued by a secretary of state, contrary to the law of the land.
Their houses rifled and plundered, their papers seized, and used as evidence upon trial.
Their bodies committed to close imprisonment.
The Habeas Corpus eluded.
Trial by jury discountenanced, and the first law officer of the crown publicly insinuating that juries are not to be trusted.