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Address of the High Sheriff, Gentry, Clergy, Freeholders, and other Inhabitants of the County of Berks, presented to His Majesty by Bartholomew Price, Esq˙, High Sheriff of the said County.
The humble Address of the High Sheriff, Gentry, Clergy,
Freeholders, and other Inhabitants of the County of
BERKS.
We, your Majesty' s most dutiful, loyal, and affectionate subjects, the High Sheriff, Gentry, Clergy, Freeholders, any other Inhabitants of the County of Berks, beg leave to approach your royal throne with the strongest assurances of our steady attachment to your Majesty' s and this Nation' s united cause, in opposition to the insolent efforts of all the enemies of peace, order, and good Government, wherever exerted by factious clamour, or by rebellious insurrection.
An experience, coeval with your Majesty' s reign, hath taught us, that your Majesty' s first and most zealous aim hath been to win the affection and cheerful obedience of all your subjects, by all those methods of indulgence, patronage, and gentleness, which do, in the nature of things, tend to dispose the minds of men to submit themselves, with all thankfulness, to so patriotick a sovereignty; and we cannot, without the deepest concern, observe, that the event of so gracious a trial hath, through the treacherous workings of Republican malevolence, so totally disappointed your Majesty' s just and reasonable expectations, and those of all good men; and that the good will and lenity, which pervade and adorn all your Majesty' s measures of Government, have served only to raise, to animate, to inflame the stubborn spirit of insult and rebellion, especially in your Majesty' s late highly favoured Provinces in America.
The tender emotions of humanity, foreseeing the calamities of the storm which that spirit hath raised, cannot but incline us to wish, that the common sentiments of gratitude had so duly operated in the hearts of our fellow-subjects there, as to have retained them in their most bounden duty of cheerful submission to those mild laws and equitable regulations with which the Legislature of their Mother Country hath an undoubted right to require their most cheerful compliance.
Such compliance, (against which no pleas of exemption have been offered, but what malice and chicane have
And since an obstinate and active rebellion, subsisting in any part of your Majesty' s Dominions, can hardly fail, unless it be seasonably suppressed, of producing events highly calamitous to the whole, and of consequence deeply afflictive to your Majesty' s paternal heart, we do, with all that alacrity and zeal of duty, which grateful subjects owe to such a Sovereign, assure your Majesty, that we are firmly determined, with our utmost ability and influence, to support such vigorous measures as your Majesty' s wisdom and prudence, in concert with that of the great Council of the Nation, may think proper to adopt, for reducing mad and ruinous revolt to quiet and wholesome submission; and for establishing, in its full force, the legislative authority of Great Britain over the Dominions of the British Crown, in their widest extent.
With no small satisfaction we foresee, that, when your Majesty' s firmness and magnanimity shall have obtained this just triumph over the treacherous and ungrateful, you will celebrate one more highly pleasing to you, in "receiving the misled with tenderness and mercy."
Address of the High Sheriff
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laboriously set up, to be, by plain truth and fact, with no labour, overthrown,) such compliance would happily have prevented that lamentable indigence and distress of the Rebel Provinces, that miserable effusion of Christian blood, which, it is to be feared, are now become the necessary though harsh remedies of their pestilential disease.