The crisis. Number XXIII.

The crisis. Number XXIII.

Table of contents

CRISIS. NUMBER XXIII.

To his Tyrannic Majesty—the DEVIL.

To the Lords BUTE and MANSFIELD.

[Page]

[Page]

CRISIS. NUMBER XXIII.

To his Tyrannic Majesty—the DEVIL.

Most infernal Sir,

DO not affect the utmost astonishment at this address; it comes not in the tremendous form of a Petition; of these your sulky Majesty shall have no more during the short time you can hope to tyrannize over us in a regal shape. What I humbly offer now, concerns, not your infested and afflicted kingdoms, so nearly as your dear self and favourites. Your Majesty's best beloved spirits, Bute and Mansfield, the whole astonished world consider as the blackest imps in all your train; and yourself, as their humble executioner. They advise, and you most condescendingly administer, Destruction. Their ascendancy and your humility, their patriotism and your discernment, their wisdom and your humanity, are subjects of universal admiration. But of all your most diabolical virtues, satanic Sir, the most conspicuous is Hypocrisy. The blaze of it, upon one occasion, in particular, the death of Lord Chancellor Yorke, (as Milton says) "far round illumin'd hell." As you can practice it so successively for the desolation, let me intreat you, gloomy Sir, to assume it now (by way of frolic only) for the preservation of mankind; but, above all, for your own precious interest, much [Page]dearer to you than the salvation of an inferior universe. Your Majesty has disported yourself amidst the dangerous indulgencies of three most unprincely passions; pride, anger, and revenge, for fourteen years past; ever since the demise of our good King, George the second; in whose reign your most hypocritical highness was advised to wear the mask of decency and circumspection. You then cast a favourable glance only at corruption; but you have since spurned the reign of policy, and broke out into such uncommon tyrannies, such bloody inhumanities, unprovoked, that your despotic Highness must now either desist, or expect to be deserted and deposed. My great tenderness for two of your Highnesses dearest friends, the Scotch Lords, Bute and Mansfield, obliges me to give you this timely notice Should you still continue, dread Sir, to "have entire confidence in the wisdom of your Divan," should you still, "Steadily pursue those measures which they have recommended"—your reign can be but short; your animating supporters Bute, and Mansfield, must surely fail. When these hellish instigators of your pride are gone, your unhappy reign must end, when those arch fiends of corruption and iniquity, are no more; your wise Divan, will fall off from you like water, they will neither support your wanton slaughter in America, nor your pious designs upon Great Britain, your faithful pensioners will faint for want of those heartening supplies, with which they are now daily refreshed in plenteous streams, by your Majesty's feeder Lord North, under the provident eye of your best subjects, Bute and Mansfield. When these fountains of milk and honey, cease to flow, your Majesty's hired majority will grow languid and relaps into what [Page]they once were, and ever will be, mere dissemblers of patriotic virtue, even your sovereign tool of all, who now audaciously plumes himself upon their support, will then foreswear any further attachment to them, or you. When your chief agents Lord Bute and Mansfield are extinct, what must become of ways and means, arbitrary taxation, and most effectual methods for carrying these pregnant schemes into a daring execution, by sword and famine? Your angels, Bute and Mansfield are excellent at these devices; but their fervent zeal for your Highness's cause, has, at last transported them beyond the bounds of judgment. Call these winged hell hounds off in time, great Sir, if you value the preservation of your despotic power; and as you have hitherto played the tyrant for your pleasure, begin now to play the hypocrite for your safety. Should you permit these Scotch imps of yours to proceed farther, you will hazard all. We now feel certain stretches of your persevering powers too great for human nature, or human patience to support long; assume therefore, most steady Prince, in this dangerous Crisis, a virtue to which you are, in truth, a stranger. Play off, once more an appearance of clemency; it will be better timed now, than it ever was in the case of Sodomites, wanton murderers, and military cut-throats. Dissemble your causeless anger, and effeminate thirst for blood. By this stratagem you may, probably, make the easy, long suffering, passive fools, whom you wish to destroy, believe that your Majesty is really sincere, when you condescend to call them (with inward reluctance and disdain) "Your faithful and beloved people." Believe me, most infernal Prince, this is the only way to compass their utter ruin, with the [Page]least probable security to your gracious self, your wise Divan, your faithful minions, your obsequious assassins, and pensioned parricides. By these means, and by these alone, you may still live in prosperous and plenteous infamy. Thus, and thus only, can you hope to introduce, with safety to yourself, that destructive plan of tyranny, by which your beloved Bute and Mansfield, will immortalize your reign. It must be introduced, my Prince, by gentle, slow degrees. By your obdurate steadiness, and precipitate perseverance (virtues not unworthy of a Devil) your darling schemes may be suddenly extinguished, before you can have time to declare again how much you are astonished at those sufferers, who despise and detest you as much as

CASCA.

To the Lords BUTE and MANSFIELD.

What Seas of Blood will Civil Discord shed?

Dire Fiend! by George's Friends, Bute, North, and Mansfield, bred.

My Lords,

YOUR Lordships will pardon me, and I am sure your brother North will readily excuse me, if I pass him by, for the present, as a mere expletive in your execrable triumvirate. He is, in truth, my Lords, (and the world sees it) no more than the ostensible leader of that fawning, false, corrupt confederacy, who arrogantly groupe themselves under the specious name of King's friends. Like designing traytors, they, and you, my Lords, assume this mask for the worst of purposes; that of enriching your wretched selves, by the spoils of this unhappy country; whilst your deluded, passive Sovereign, is but your stalking horse. Poor, mean, obsequious, flexible Lord North, (like the rest of your servile herd) is no more than the humble and callous executioner [Page]of your infernal selfish views, your inhuman warrants, your destructive bloody policy. In a word my Lords, you are the subtiles, and he is the face.

To your Lordships, therefore, and to your Lordships only, as principals, as the earliest and most indefatigable deluders of weak and ductile Majesty; I now address myself, not in terms of pleasing flattery, but in the rough, and odious language of disgusting Truth. Such, my Lords, as the Sovereign is, the nation has received him from your hands. He was born a Briton; you, my Lords, have taught him not only to forget, but to shame his birth. He was born a Prince; you have levelled him with the worst, the most inhuman, and meanest of his subjects. He became (too soon alas!) a King; you, my Lords, have debased him to a tyrant. His mind, though enligtened by no auspicious ray from heaven, was yet capable of receiving some moderate degrees of culture; it was in its infant state, open at least to the impressions of humanity; you, my Lords, in that early period, gave it a most unhappy bent; you moulded, you contracted, you steeled it, for your own wicked purposes. To say the best of it, it remains, after all your painful lectures, either totally unprincipled, or most attrociously perverted. Hence, my patriotic Lords, have flowed (and still flow) all the grievances of the present inglorious, ignoble, and inhuman reign. Let me ring them in your ears, my Lords:—Court—and Ministerial Assassinations, of which Martyn, Dun, and Talbot, can remind you, in Wilkes's case. In the same case, in Bingley's and some others, royal persecutions, Star Chamber inquisitions, erasing records, inveigling, byassing, misleading, deceiving, over-bearing, and [Page]even packing juries, by Lord Mansfield. Daring corruptions and perversions of justice, by the same hand, in the last resort (the once righteous house of Lords) in the late case of Thickness and Leigh, under the infamous, illegal, and unprecedented conduct of Lord Apsley, Lord Mansfield, Lord High Chancellor of Great-Britain. The unjust proceedings in this case will (to your immortal infamy, Lord Mansfield) be handed down to the latest posterity—even a Jeffereys would have blushed at them. As for your shadow, Apsley; your dependant Scots, Carthcart and Galloway, and your bully Denbigh, they are but tools in your Lordship's craft, they live by the breath of your Lordship's nostrils, and are too inconsiderable to be named either by historian or reporter; but Lord Mansfield's name and doctrines will be faithfully recorded.—Now, my Lords, I return to grievances, the offspring of your Scotch politics. Among others, you may recollect the violation of the freedom of election, and the lives you have to answer for at the Middlesex election, in support of your court tool, Sir William Beauchamp Proctor. Your Lordships, and your royal pupil, countenanced a still greater violation of the rights of election, which was most impudently and perfidiously avowed, and sanctified by a corrupt House of Commons, in the case of that insignificant time server, Col. Luttrel, the King's brother in law. Let me now remind your Lordships (for you are too callous to be shocked with the sound) of Murders (repeated, wanton murders) at the Brentford election, and in St. George's fields, even of Women and Chilren. The barbarous carnage of young Allen (naked and unarmed) must be attoned for. By whose advise, and with whose privity, my Lords, did your [Page]Pupil return public thanks for this slaughter of his subjects; who in the one case were but curious gazers, and in the other, were discharging their duties as honest, independent electors, above ministerial bribery and corruption? let me ask you, my Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England (whose duty it was to bring these ministerial cut-throats to condign punishment) why were these guilty miscreants screened, protected, pardoned, pensioned? Why and by whose orders (unless yours, my Lord) was so much affected tenderness, management, brow-beating of the prosecutor's councils and witnesses, such nice caution in summing up the evidence, such menaces against those who dare to print these public trials, but particularly that of young Allen? why did your Lordship's upright, holy, and favourite judge, Smythe, so signalize himself, and labour with such uncommon partiality? why were the laws of England, dispenced with in the case of the military Scotch ruffians, who spilled the innocent blood of Allen in St. George's Fields? who suggested the happy thought of dissolving the last Parliament on a sudden, and of smuggling and packing (by means of private in [...]ions to the Court-Members) a corrupt majority in the present House of Commons in support of the ruinous and despotic plan laid by your Lordships, and carried on by your obsequious instrument Lord North, and his pensionary subalterns in both Houses of Parliament? How, and by whom, are the Seats of Justice to be filled for the future, my Lords, and for what purposes? I will not ask, what knowledge of the laws, but what interest, what reasons, made such a man as Hotham, a Baron of the exchequer? This is a new grievance and a real one.

"I liacos intra muros peccatur, et extra."

Within St. Stephen's Chapel, and without;

That All's one scene of guilt, we need not doubt.

Perrot sells out, Hotham buys in, and his seat in parliament[Page]is thus purchased, and filled up by your Lordships. I must interrogate your Lordships still further. Of all your other wicked counsels, what impolitic, diabolical spirit, could instigate you to advise your pupil ever to consent to, much more to persevere, in the inhuman massacre of America? Why were the petitions of the city of London, answered in your reign, my Lords, with sneers, insults, abuse, menaces, indignant frowns, and even with accusations of high treason? I refer your Lordships to your last Bas [...]aw-like answer to the city petition, where you will find, to the general astonishment, that you have almost impeached a part of his Majesty's faithful and beloved people, of high treason, for only making a constitutional supplication to the throne for humbly remonstrating against the pernicious influence of corruption and your lordships, and for expressing natural and just feelings for their fellow subjects, doomed by your lordships to destruction in America.

These my Lords, are some of the most palpable wounds which your Lordships have, by hirelings and dupes, already given, there are others in Embryo, which you are about to give to the British constitution. For these iniquities, when your measure is full, my Lords, you must assuredly account at last, unless, like true cowards, you fly from public justice, or disappoint the meritorious executioner, by the timely application of your own guilty hands, to the rottennest and most detested hearts that ever beat. If murdering innocence and virtue, in the subject, and extinguishing their influence in the sovereign, is tyranny and treason, and rank cowardice, I am no false accuser of your Lordships. The instances I have already given are such as would blacken the reigns of a Nero, or Domitian, but they are such my Lords as sprung naturally from those internal institutes which your Lordships have incessantly penned and preached, for the Edification of a British King; of a King; who neither does, nor possibly can, hold the crown of England upon such principles as your Lordships have laboured to instill, these labours, my Lords, are crying sins against the liberties, and Majesty of the nation, and the wages of these sins is death.

Information about this book

Title statement

The crisis. Number XXIII.

Casca.

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI :

Date

2011-05.

ID [DLPS]

N11039

ID [TCP]

N11039

ID [STC]

Evans 13989

ID [NOTIS]

APW8918

ID [IMAGE-SET]

13989

ID [EVANS-CITATION]

99015188

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early American Imprints, 1639-1800 ; no. 13989.

Notes

(Evans-TCP ; no. N11039)

Transcribed from: (Readex Archive of Americana ; Early American Imprints, series I ; image set 13989)

Images scanned from Readex microprint and microform: (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 13989)

Source

— The crisis. Number XXIII., Casca., George III, King of Great Britain, 1738-1820., Mansfield, William Murray, Earl of, 1705-1793., Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, 1713-1792..

Extent

p. [1], 190-196 ; 22 cm. (8vo)

Reprinted by John Anderson,. [New York :: 1775]. (Addressed "To His tyrannic Majesty--the devil.") (Caption title.) (Signed: Casca.) (Imprint supplied by Evans.) ("To the Lords Bute and Mansfield."--p. 192-196.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.