recital of the most unparalleled falsehoods that ever disgraced a sheet of paper; witness the infamous misrepresentation of the affair of Lexington, (which must be also wilful,) and the notoriously false position, that Britain cannot support her Navy without the aid of North-Carolina Commodities, calculated to gull the people into a surrender of all the benefits of Commerce to the idle and absurd speculations and decrees of the affectedly omnipotent Congress at Philadelphia. It proceeds upon these false and infamous assertions and forgeries to excite the people of North-Carolina to usurp the prerogative of the Crown, by forming a Militia, and appointing officers thereto, and finally to take up arms against the King and his Government; impudently apprehending the people of this Colony for their inactivity in treason and rebellion; and concluding with a most contradictory, insidious, and nonsensical jargon of exhortation to the people, affronting to and inconsistent with reason and common sense, to exert themselves for the preservation of Britain; to strengthen the hands of Civil Government; to preserve the liberty of the Constitution; to look up to the reigning Monarch of Britain as their lawful and rightful Sovereign, and to dare every difficulty and danger in support of his person, crown, and dignity, after monstrously, in the same breath, urging the people to the distress and ruin of Britain; to the subversion of all Civil Government; to open rebellion against the King and his authority, and in the most pointed terms prompting them to arms and resistance; thus insidiously attempting to reconcile allegiance and revolt, and inviting the people to actual rebellion under the mask and guise and profession of duty and respect—a shallow concealment of horrid treason, that I have no doubt every honest man will explode and treat with its merited contempt and abhorrence; while no man can wonder at the absurdity of the Address, as it must invariably attend every like attempt to reconcile things in reason and nature inconsistent.

The treasonable proceedings of an infamous Committee at Newbern, at the head of a body of armed men, in seizing and carrying off six pieces of artillery, the property of the King, that lay behind the Palace at that place; repeated insults and violences offered to His Majesty’s subjects by these little tyrannical and arbitrary combinations, and, among others, to some of my own servants, who have been stopped when employed on my business, and forcibly detained and searched; the unremitted assiduity of those engines of sedition to sow discontent and disaffection, and the base artifices they employ to alienate and prejudice the minds of His Majesty’s subjects, by confidently and traitorously propagating the most base, scandalous, and monstrous falsehoods of the King’s religious and political principles, and of ill designs of His Majesty’s Ministers, daring thus to defame; and traduce even the sacred character of the best of Princes, whose eminent and distinguished virtues, by universal acknowledgment, irradiate with unexampled lustre his imperial diadem, and whose piety and strict and inviolable regard to the happy Constitution of his Kingdoms, in Church and State, and to the welfare and happiness of all his people, stand confessed and admired throughout the world, and confound and reprobate the infamous, traitorous, and flagitious falsehoods and forgeries to which faction hath upon every occasion resorted to prop and support the most unprincipled and unnatural rebellion that was ever excited in any part of the world upon which the light of civilization had once dawned; the dangerous, unconstitutional, and illegal measure to which the people are invited by an advertisement I have seen, signed. Samuel Johnston, of electing Delegates to meet in Convention, on the twentieth instant, at Hillsborough, that is subversive of the whole Constitution of this Country, and evidently calculated to seduce and alienate His Majesty’s faithful and loyal subjects in the interiour and western Counties of this Province, whose steadfast duty to their King and Country, that hath hitherto resisted all the black artifices of falsehood, sedition, and treason, and hath already, on my representation, received the King’s most gracious approbation and acceptance, which I am authorized and have now the high. satisfaction to signify to His Majesty’s subjects throughout this Province, and particularly to those in the Counties of Dobbs, Cumberland, Anson, Orange, Guilford, Chatham, Rowan, and Surry, who have given me more especial and publick testimonials of their loyalty, fidelity, and duty, and to give them assurance of His Majesty’s most firm support, which I am confident will not only confirm the good dispositions of this faithful people, and strengthen them to baffle and defeat every effort of sedition and treason, but prompt them also to resist their first approaches, by withstanding the now meditated insidious attempt of the intended Provincial Convention to steal in upon them the spirit, and erect among them the standard of rebellion, under the cloak and pretence of meeting for solemn deliberation on the publick welfare.

And I have no doubt that they will convince the traitorous contrivers and abetters of this plot of the vainness of their treacherous devices to sow sedition and disaffection in that land of loyalty, by indignantly spurning from them the said intended Congress, or Provincial Convention, and not suffering its corrupted breath to pollute the air of their Country, now the pure region of good faith and incorruptible loyalty; to whose virtuous inhabitants, I trust, is yet reserved the glorious achievement of crushing unnatural rebellion; of delivering their Country from lawless power and wide-spreading anarchy; of restoring and preserving in it the free and happy Constitution of Britain, with all that train of envied rights and blessings which belong to that great and admired system of true and genuine liberty, now most alarmingly threatened with overthrow by rebellious, republican, and tyrannical factions throughout America.

To the end, therefore, that the people of this Province at large may be acquainted with the enormities, violences, and disorders herein before recited, which manifestly tend to the destruction of their peace and welfare, and to the utter subversion of His Majesty’s Government, and the Laws and Constitution of this Country; and that I may faithfully discharge my duty to the King and His Majesty’s people in this Province, (whose welfare and prosperity have ever been my constant study,) and in order fully to forewarn the people of the dangers and calamities to which the men who have set themselves up for leaders in sedition and treason are courting them, to support them in their flagitious enormities, or to screen themselves from the penalties to which they know they are become liable, by extending their crime among numbers of their innocent fellow-subjects, for whom I have every tender feeling of pity, compassion, and forgiveness, I have thought it proper to issue this Proclamation, hereby to exhort His Majesty’s subjects, the people of this Province, as they tender the invaluable rights and privileges of British subjects, that they do seriously reflect upon and consider the outrages and violences into which the innocent inhabitants of many parts of tills Province, and in the Counties of Duplin, New-Hanover, Craven, and Brunswick, in particular, have been betrayed by the seditious artifices of certain traitorous persons, who have presumed to take the lead among them; and to attend to the obvious and ruinous consequences of following the wicked and flagitious counsels of men, who, intent only upon romantick schemes and their own mistaken interest and aggrandizement, are cajoling the people by the most false assertions and insinuations of oppression, on the part of His Majesty and his Government, to become instruments to their base views of establishing themselves in tyranny over them, treacherously aiming, by specious pretences of regard to their rights and liberties, (that have never been invaded, or intended to be invaded,) to delude the people to work their own destruction, in order to gratify, for a moment, their own lust of power and lawless ambition, that would undoubtedly carry them, if they could possibly succeed, to reduce the people, upon whom they now call and rely for support in their criminal designs, to the most slavish submission to that very arbitrary power to which they would now climb upon the shoulders, and by the assistance of the people. Let the people but consider coolly and dispassionately the cause in which their infamous leaders would engage them, they will see it, from the beginning of the discontents in America, founded in erroneous principles, and to this day supported by every art of falsehood and misrepresentation; their best coloured and most specious arguments, fraught with sophistry and illusion, have shrunk back from the light of truth, and vanished confounded before the standard of right reason; yet still unabashed, the tools of sedition have impudently and unremittingly imposed falsehood upon