Unknown to the King

Graciously to permit your dutiful Subjects the Representatives of your loyal People in North America to approach the Throne and humbly to entreat the royal attention to those Grievances, which have for ten years past, with increasing violence threatned danger and ruin to Antient Constitutional Rights which your Majesties faithful Subjects in this western world have long enjoyed under your Majesties royal Progenetors. The history of these Colonies, may it please your Majesty, is one continued proof of unshaken loyalty to their Sovereigns, of unremitting zeal for the glory and prosperity of Great Britain, to which, their active labors have much contributed. No rebellions, no traiterous dissaffections have ever disgraced their story, or disturbed the repose of the Mother Country. These truths may sufficiently prove to your Majesty, that nothing less than imminent dangers and most oppressive Grievances could now move a numerous people of such steady and persevering Loyalty. Such, may it please your Majesty, are certain Acts of your British Parliament passed in the 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th & years of your Majesties reign, which destroy every idea of property in your Majesties American dominions, and in many cases deprive the Subject of his antient, equitable, and legal trial by Jury, and unncessarily endanger his life, by ordaining its trial in far distant Courts, where want of evidence and assistance of friends may conspire to destroy the most innocent of your Majesties subjects. We say unnecessarily may it please your Majesty, because your Majesties Courts, with compitent Laws, are here open to the punishment of all Offenders who shall dare to commit Treason, or disturb the quiet of Society. It is not to be wondered, may it please your Majesty, that apprehensions of distress and danger do greatly disturb your people in North America, when they see such extensive and unexampled Oppressions fixed by military force on many thousands of your Majesties brave and loyal people of the Massachusetts Bay, without their ever having been called Upon to answer, or heard in their defence, repugnant, as they have thought, to the practise of the just in all Ages. Added to these most alarming proceedings, we have the missfortune Great Sir, to see an arbitrary government and the Roman Catholic religion established in Canada, now so extended along the borders of the Colonies, as to comprehend the greater part of North America; a Religion equally destructive of the indepenc’y of Princes and the Civil and Religious liberties of Mankind, so fatally fixed on the ruin of Protestants, that the Laws of England have, since the Reformation carefully guarded against its admission into the British dominions. Sensible, may it please your Majesty, that the greatness and glory of the Sovereign are best sup ported by the freedom and happiness of his people, and devoted as your Majesties faithful American Subjects are to the Protestant succession in the House of Brunswick, and most earnestly wishing to preserve in its greatest purity the excellent Constitution of England as settled at the Revolution, they feel with the deepest affliction that their happiness and security can never exist with those violent and unconstitutional Councils which are ever ready to be suggested by Tory Counsellors whither in or out of place, Men, whose principles of Government, however artfully concealed, are at fatal enmity with Revolution principles and the Hanoverian Succession. May we be permitted Most gracious Sovereign to assure your Majesty that no machinations of such Men, or any other of your Majesties Enemies shall ever succeed, if they can be prevented by the fullest exertion of the lives and fortunes of your Majesties loyal and affectionate Subjects in North America. Unpractised in Courts and unused to dissemble, we most humbly pray your Majesty to pardon the freedom with which duty and loyalty to our Sovereign compels us to declare that our apprehensions of danger can never cease so long as the unwise and destructive Councils of the Lords Bute, Mansfield, and North are suffered to approach the Throne.

The grievances of your Majesties faithful American Subjects are with great humility, presented, we hope, for the favorable attention of our Sovereign, the Father of all his People.