A Seasonable Warning and Caution against the Insinuations of Papists and Jacobites in favour of the Pretender: Being a Letter from an Englishman at the Court of HanoverDefoe, Daniel
Religion
A Seasonable Warning and Caution against the Insinuations of Papists and Jacobites in favour of the Pretender: Being a Letter from an Englishman at the Court of Hanover
Defoe, Daniel
James, Prince of Wales, 1688-1766 -- Early works to 1800
When set upon the British throne, who are his allies and confederates?
Will he be so ungrateful as not to be always at the devotion and
command of the French king? a prince that took his father in a
fugitive, an abdicated and ruined prince, when his fortunes were
overthrown, and his crown taken from him; that made so many efforts to
restore him, and hazarded his whole kingdom for it: if he forgets the
kindness shown to his father, can he be so ungenerous, so unthankful,
as to forget how the king of France nourished him from a child; how,
after his father's death, he hazarded a second war to proclaim him
king of Great Britain, and what expense he has been at to put him in
possession of it? Should he forget all these obligations, he must be
unfit to be called a Christian, much less a prince.
If he can act so barbarously to the French king, his benefactor, what
must you Britons expect from him, who have done nothing to oblige him,
but have for twenty-four years kept him and his father in exile, and
treated them both with unsufferable indignity? If he can be ungrateful
to the king of France, who has done so much for him, what must he be
to you, who have done so much against him?
Again: if gratitude and honour have any influence upon him, if he has
any sense of his obligation to the French king, will he not for ever
be his most hearty, obedient, humble servant? Will he not always be in
his interest, nay, ought he not to be so? Is he not tied by the laws
of friendship and gratitude to be so?
Think, then, dear Britons! what a king this pretender must be; a
papist by inclination; a tyrant by education; a Frenchman by honour
and obligation: and how long will your liberties last you in this
condition? And when your liberties are gone, how long will your
religion remain? When your hands are tied; when armies bind you; when
power oppresses you; when a tyrant disarms you; when a popish French
tyrant reigns over you; by what means or methods can you pretend to
maintain your protestant religion?
How shall the Church of England stand, when in subjection to the
Church of Rome? You are now mixed with dissenters, and some are uneasy
enough with them too; but our church will then be but a dissenting
church; popery will be the establishment; the mass will succeed our
common prayer, and fire and fagot instead of toleration, as you know
was our case before; for it is not the first time the papists have
been tried.
Nor did Queen Mary promise, nay, swear less than is now promised for
the pretender; for she swore to the Gospellers of Suffolk to make no
alteration in religion; and they, like the blinded protestants of this
age, brought her in, for which they were the first that felt the fury
and rage of the popish party, and so we have great cause to believe it
would be again.
THE CONCLUSION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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