"Your Petitioner thinks it his duty to lay before your Majesty, with great humility, a short account of the unprovoked and outrageous murder committed by a Scotch officer, and three soldiers of the same regiment, upon the innocent body of your Petitioner's only son: a youth that, all who knew him are ready to attest, was perfectly sober, temperate, humane, dutiful to his parents, and a sincere lover and worshiper of his God. It was a murder of so complicated a die, and attended by so many barbarous and cruel circumstances, as can hardly be paralleled in any former age, and is a disgrace to the present, which was proved to a demonstration, before an honest impartial Jury summoned by the Coroner, and the officer and soldiers brought in guilty of _Wilful Murder_; yet, by the powerful interposition of the great, and the artful and sinister means of some of your Majesty's Justices, who ordered the soldiers to fire, and suffered one of the murderers to make his escape, and the others have been screened from the punishment they so justly deserved; and, as your Petitioner has been informed, some of them rewarded for committing this most execrable crime. "That if your most gracious Majesty, the father of your people, would permit your unhappy Petitioner to lay the whole state of his case before you, he is well persuaded your Majesty's fatherly heart would sympathise with the still bleeding agonies of the disconsolate parents of so amiable a child, snatched from them by the hands of ruffians in the bloom of youth and innocence; of a daughter who did not long survive the untimely death of her beloved brother, and of a most afflicted mother, who (though still alive) incessantly moans and weeps over the cruel death of the best of children, and cannot be comforted. Your Majesty can never be offended with your most afflicted Petitioner for applying to your Majesty for justice against the cruel murderers of his beloved child, whose blood cries aloud for vengeance.