Primary tabs
Address of the Gentlemen, Clergy, Merchants, Freeholders, and principal Inhabitants of the Borough and neighbourhood of Leeds, in the County of York, presented to His Majesty by Edwin Lascelles, Esquire, one of the Representatives in Parliament for the County of York.
The humble Address of the Gentlemen, Clergy, Merchants, Freeholders, and principal Inhabitants of the Borough and neighbourhood of LEEDS, in the County of YORK.
Most Gracious Sovereign:
We, your Majesty' s most loyal and dutiful subjects, humbly beg leave to approach your throne, to testify our grateful acknowledgments for the many blessings we enjoy under your Majesty' s auspicious Government, to the gentleness and mildness of which we owe the rapid increase of our manufactures, giving full employ to all our poor, even at advanced wages; and to the protection therefrom derived, attribute the extension of our commerce abroad, and the consequential flourishing situation of this populous Country.
Silence in us, therefore, would be criminal, at a time when sedition, fomented by the misrepresentations of artful, ill-designing men, working upon the minds of narrow and self-interested people, hath, in some of your Majesty' s Colonies in North-America, erected the standard of rebellion — a rebellion as unnatural as unprovoked; the abetters whereof, for want of real grievances to palliate in any degree their treasonable
Impelled by a grateful and just sense of the happiness we have enjoyed under your Majesty' s reign, we, your Majesty' s most faithful subjects, deem it a duty incumbent upon us, as good citizens, thus publickly to declare our utter abhorrence of the conduct of those traitorous and rebellious people, who are striking at the root of American liberty, which can only be preserved by due obedience to the legislative authority of Great Britain; that we sensibly feel the insult offered to the supreme authority of these realms; and with the greatest sincerity assure your Majesty that we will, to the utmost of our abilities, exert ourselves in supporting the execution of such measures as shall be found necessary to bring the Colonies to a due sense of their dependence upon the Mother Country, and a proper obedience to the laws of this Kingdom.
Address of the Gentlemen, etc., of the Borough of Leeds
v3:1216
v3:1217
v3:1218
purposes, are obliged to have recourse to speculative opinions and ideal doctrines, incompatible in practice with every form of Government.