the House of Hanover, your royal predecessors, that we, and all your subjects at this time, in a great measure owe that enjoyment of true legal liberty, which we believe no nation in the world can boast of but ourselves. That the same constitutional liberty which we feel, may be felt by all other your Majesty’s subjects, in all the parts of your wide extended Empire, and that every member of it may, acknowledge the sovereignty of Great Britain, is the incessant and most ardent wish of our hearts. And in order to obtain the accomplishment of this wish, we do assure your Majesty that we shall most heartily concur, as far as in us lies, in supporting your Majesty in all such measures as in your great wisdom you shall think necessary to take, to bring back your rebellious Colonists to a submission, in deed as well as words, to your Majesty’s Government, and to the legislative power of the British Parliament.

Given under our common seal, the seventh day of November, in the sixteenth year of your Majesty’s reign.

ADDRESS AND PETITION OF THE GENTLEMEN, ETC., OF THE COUNTY OF BERKS.

Address and Petition to His Majesty, moved for by the Earl of Abingdon, seconded by the Lord Craven, and signed by a very great majority of the Gentlemen, Clergy, and Freeholders of the County of Berks, at the meeting held in the Town-Hall at Abingdon, pursuant to an advertisement from the High Sheriff, “for taking the general sense of the County on the present unhappy differences between Great Britain and her Colonies,” on Tuesday, the 7th of November, 1775.

To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.

The humble Address and Petition of the Freeholders of the County of BERKS.

May it please your Majesty:

Your Majesty’s most loyal and dutiful subjects, Freeholders of the County of Berks, though deeply affected with the melancholy civil dissensions which prevail in your Empire, have acquiesced with boundless confidence in your Majesty’s goodness, and in the wisdom of your Parliament, for the restoration of internal tranquillity to your Dominions, and satisfaction and repose to the minds of all your subjects.

We conceive that the interference of your Majesty’s people, otherwise than by their Representatives in Parliament, (although it be their undoubted right, ) ought to be extremely rare, and reserved for occasions of the greatest necessity. We have therefore beheld, with astonishment, persons who profess uncommon zeal for your Majesty’s Government, discovering a manifest distrust in his discretion; urging your Ministers to a continuance of the violent measures which hitherto have produced none but calamitous effects, and to which the Ministers have shown, and still do show, a disposition which it does not seem at all necessary to stimulate.

These inflammatory addresses, we humbly apprehend, have a tendency to distress your Majesty’s paternal feelings; and by urging coercive measures, as alone effectual and proper in the present disorders, to render such concessions, as your Majesty’s and the publick wisdom may think necessary to make, dishonourable and unsafe to your Majesty and this Nation.

Finding the dangerous and seditious attempts to embarrass your Majesty’s councils, and prevent the restoration of tranquillity, pursued with an earnestness which fills the minds of your Majesty’s peaceable subjects with horrour, we are constrained, very reluctantly, with all possible humility and deference, to lay before your Majesty our faithful sentiments on the origin of the present troubles, on the measures which have been and still are pursued in consequence of those troubles, and on the dismal effects which we conceive must result from them.

As the inhabitants of that part of your Dominions which is the seat of the Imperial Legislature, we have a due sense of the necessity of preserving the supreme authority of Parliament over all the British Empire; but as English Freeholders, who value ourselves on our inestimable right of granting our own property, either by ourselves, or Representatives of our own choosing only, we cannot, without divesting ourselves of every principle of equity, justice, and even of common decency, consider the complaints of millions of our fellow-subjects, separated from us by an immense ocean, on being taxed without any voice, directly or indirectly, in the grant, to be entirely groundless, and the result of nothing but a factious spirit, aiming at the dismemberment of the Empire. The substantial and not nominal assent of the subject, in the grant of their own money, we can never hold to be a frivolous concern to English Freeholders. It can never be exterminated in one part of the Empire, without being endangered in all. And we look with just indignation at the servile and unmanly spirit in which the very principle of that sacred right is treated with scorn and ridicule by several publications industriously circulated, and which we trust receive no countenance from your Majesty’s Ministers; because, if so countenanced, they can have no other effect than to raise a suspicion that the Government of this Country is sliding from its only firm, natural, and constitutional foundations.

We have seen, with much concern, the disorders which have arisen in America on this serious ground. We lament, we blame them; but we cannot think them unnatural, in those in whom the love of freedom is united with the ordinary weakness and imperfection of human nature. It is for that principle, joined with that infirmity, that we presume to supplicate your Majesty’s clemency.

The disorders have arisen from a complaint (plausible at least) of one right violated; and we can never be brought to imagine that the true remedy for such disorders consists in an attack on all other rights, and an attempt to drive the people either to unconstitutional submission or absolute despair.

Sire, the affairs of your Empire are distracted because they are misconducted. The consequences of the measures pursued are as evident as they are deplorable. Your Majesty’s Ministers, finding the forces of your natural-born subjects not sufficiently powerful for, or not sufficiently disposed to the present coercive service, have listened to the offers of foreign nations, who have thought fit, it seems, voluntarily, and therefore in a manner the more alarming to all true Englishmen, to interfere in our domestick differences.

Prostrated before your throne, with faces suffused with shame for this apparent nakedness of our Country, and with hearts oppressed with anxiety for its future destiny, we deprecate, whilst yet it is in suspense, this most perilous and desperate proceeding. English dignity and English government, whilst resting on their true bottom, can never stand in need of Russian assistance for their preservation. They who are necessary to the support of Government, are the Government; and if we cannot preserve America without foreign aid, America belongs to foreigners, and not to England.

It has been the usual course of a rebellious people to call in the arms of strangers to distract their country. This worst part of rebellion has not yet appeared in America. Let this one thing right in their conduct atone for many wrong ones, and let your Majesty’s clemency permit itself to operate in favour of a people whose petitions have not yet appeared before any throne but yours. Let not England set an example, which is but too easily copied, by drawing into a free country the insidious and mercenary aid of foreign forces, trained to the support of a barbarous despotism. The moment that a great army of such, or of any foreigners, shall enter your territories, the liberties of your people are at an end; and your Majesty’s authority will be the more endangered by their assistance, than it can be by any rebellion which can arise among your own subjects.

When we have such terrible objects in prospect, we forget the millions we are spending, and the millions more we are like to spend, in this unhappy and fruitless contest.

Deign, therefore, most gracious Sovereign, to attend to manifest reason, delivered by the affectionate voice of duty and fidelity; strenuous as we are for the honour of our Country, we cannot be forgetful of its peace and concord. It is therefore we abhor the idea of encouraging foreigners to make a prey of this Nation and its dependencies, under the miserable and uncovered pretext of discountenancing faction and sedition among ourselves.