An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Though It Be of His Worst Enemies.: Being A True Account of His Conduct in Public Affairs. — John Shaqi
An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Though It Be of His Worst Enemies.: Being A True Account of His Conduct in Public Affairs.Defoe, Daniel
History
An Appeal to Honour and Justice, Though It Be of His Worst Enemies.: Being A True Account of His Conduct in Public Affairs.
Defoe, Daniel
Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731; Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1660-1714
During this time there came out a vile abhorred pamphlet in very ill
verse, written by one Mr. Tutchin, and called The Foreigners, in which
the author--who he was I then knew not--fell personally upon the king
himself, and then upon the Dutch nation; and after having reproached his
majesty with crimes that his worst enemy could not think of without
horror, he sums up all in the odious name of FOREIGNER.
This filled me with a kind of rage against the book, and gave birth to a
trifle, which I never could hope should have met with so general an
acceptation as it did; I mean The True-born Englishman. How this poem
was the occasion of my being known to his majesty; how I was afterwards
received by him; how employed; and how, above my capacity of deserving,
rewarded, is no part of the present case, and is only mentioned here, as
I take all occasions to do, for the expressing the honour I ever
preserved for the immortal and glorious memory of that greatest and best
of princes, and whom it was my honour and advantage to call master, as
well as sovereign; whose goodness to me I never forgot, neither can
forget; and whose memory I never patiently heard abused, nor ever can do
so; and who, had he lived, would never have suffered me to be treated as
I have been in the world. But Heaven for our sins removed him in
judgment. How far the treatment he met with from the nation he came to
save, and whose deliverance he finished, was admitted by Heaven to be a
means of his death, I desire to forget for their sakes who are guilty;
and if this calls any of it to mind, it is mentioned to move them to
treat him better who is now, with like principles of goodness and
clemency, appointed by God and the constitution to be their sovereign,
lest He that protects righteous princes avenge the injuries they receive
from an ungrateful people by giving them up to the confusions their
madness leads them to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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