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
As they go on in these things with too much success, it is a very sad
consideration to all true British protestants to find that a party of
men among us, who yet call themselves protestants, fall in with them
in many things, fomenting the divisions and breaches that are among
us, weakening the constitution, and pursuing such principles as tend
to destroy our liberties; by whose arts, and by the subtle management
of which party, the revolution wears every day more and more out of
date; the principles of liberty decay; the memory of King William
sinks in our esteem; the heroic actions of that prince, which were
once the just admiration of all the honest people of Great Britain,
begin to be lost upon us, and forgotten among us, and to become as a
mark of infamy to the nation!
Every considering protestant cannot but observe with horror, what
swarms of popish priests from abroad, and jacobite emissaries at home,
are spread about among us, and busily employed to carry on these
wicked designs; how in disguise they run up and down the countries,
mingling themselves in all companies, and in coffee-houses, and
private conversation, endeavouring to insinuate with all possible
subtlety, favourable notions of the pretender into the minds of the
people, thereby to pave the way, and to prepare you for receiving him;
such as, that he is the lawful son of King James; that he is a
protestant in his heart; that he will abjure the errors of popery as
soon as he has an opportunity; that the late King William promised to
prove him a bastard, but never could do it; that it is hard to reject
him for what was none of his own fault, and the like.
Although thinking men can and do see through these things, yet, as
they are calculated and prepared to deceive the ignorant people in the
country, it is earnestly desired of those who have their eyes open to
the said popish delusions, that they would endeavour to undeceive
their brethren and neighbours, and earnestly persuade them not to be
imposed upon by the jesuitical insinuations of the popish faction,
furnishing the poor honest people with just reasons for their adhering
to the protestant settlement, and full answers to those who go about
to deceive them: which answers are such as follow:--
1. It seems absolutely necessary to remind them of the reason of the
late revolution; how King James II., by his popish counsellors,
priests, and jesuits, had laid the foundation of overwhelming all our
liberties, in an arbitrary, tyrannical government, ruling us without a
parliament to redress our grievances, and, by a standing army, to
execute forcibly his absolute commands; how he had engaged in the
overthrow of our religion, by undermining the constitution of the
Church of England, erecting an arbitrary ecclesiastical commission to
dispossess our universities, and displace our ministers in every
parish, and then to establish popery throughout the whole nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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