However meritorious the cause, it was an offence to a king whose mind, never remarkable for lucidity, was then under “the influence of the worst of counsellors,” as stated in the first prayer of the petition. The document--when the petitioners were, after much discouragement, delay, and many subterfuges, and, “although no time could be fixed for its acceptance,” permitted to approach the presence at a levee--was at last presented; but the king made no reply, but, handing the petition to the lord-in-waiting, turned his back on the presenters, who represented the integrity and commercial greatness of the city of London and were its elected guardians, and addressed Baron Dieden, the Danish ambassador, who was standing in his vicinity, on an indifferent topic. After the late fulsome reception of “bogus addressers” nothing could be more contemptible than the studied impertinence with which the Corporation of London was treated, and the affront of leaving the civil magistrate to “skulk about the passages of the Court that he may have a glimpse of His Majesty as he passes along in state, in order to deliver into his hands a remonstrance affecting the most essential interests of above twelve millions of people, who by the sweat of their brow support the pomp and parade of royalty and swell the fastidious pride and coxcombical vanity of empty courtiers.” It was boldly hazarded at this emergency, from the premeditated affront to the representatives alike of the city and the people, that the rulers, blinded to their own destruction, then concluded-- “themselves sufficiently prepared for the final extirpation of liberty in this island, and that by deliberate insults they were urging the people to commit some outrage, which might give them a pretence for putting their scheme of tyranny into immediate execution.” If the city, by its dignified and law-abiding demeanour, disappointed these expectations, it was argued that the Court party would not wait for an excuse to wreak their vengeance under some thin disguise of retributive justice, but would proceed to order out the “Scotch Regiment, as in the affair of St. George’s Fields, without waiting for the least appearance of necessity.” A correspondent of the _Oxford Magazine_, writing under the signature “Philopolis,” referring to the threatened massacres in St. George’s Fields, and, on the grounds that the late firing did comparatively little damage to the rioters concerned, declared:--