HKB
his king, and compel him to fight, though it may be against his father, brother or son. My countrymen! will you submit to these miserable remnants of priestcraft and despotism?
There is no principle of law or government, that has been more deliberately or more solemnly adjudged in Great Britain, than that allegiance is not due to the king in his official capacity or political capacity, but merely to his personal capacity. Allegiance to parliament is no where found in English, Scottish or British laws. What, then, had our ancestors to do with parliament? Nothing more than with the Jewish Sanhedrim, or Napoleon's literary and scientific Institute at Grand Cairo. They owed no allegiance to parliament as a whole, or in part. None to the house of lords, as a branch of the legislature, nor to any individual peer or number of individuals. None to the house of commons, as another branch, nor to any individual commoner or group of commoners. They owed no allegiance to the nation, any more than the nation owed to them; and they had as good and clear a right to make laws for England, as the people of England had to make laws for them.
What right, then, had king James 1st. to the sovereignty, dominion, or property of North America? No more than king George 3d. has to the Georgium Sidus, because Mr. Herschell discovered that planet in his reign. His only colour, pretension or pretext is this. The pope, as head of the church, was sovereign of the world. Henry 8th. deposed him, became head of the church in England; and consequently became sovereign master and proprietor of as much of the globe as he could grasp. A group of his nobles hungered for immense landed estates in America, and obtained from his quasi holiness a large tract. But it was useless and unprofitable to them. They must have planters and settlers. The sincere and conscientious protestants had been driven from England into Holland, Germany, Switzerland, &c. by the terrors of stocks, pillories, croppings, scourges, imprisonments, roastings and burnings, under Henry 8th. Elizabeth, Mary, James 1st. and Charles 1st. The noblemen and gentlemen of the council of Plymouth wanted settlers for their lands in America, and set on foot a negotiation with the persecuted fugitive religionists abroad, promised them liberty of conscience, exemption from all jurisdiction, ecclesiastical, civil and political, except allegiance to the king, and the tribute, moderate surely, of one fifth of gold and silver ore. This charter was procured by the council at Plymouth, and displayed off as a lure to the persecuted, fugitive Englishmen abroad; and they were completely taken into the snare, as Charles 2d. convinced them in the first year of his actual, and the twelfth of his imaginary reign. Sir Josiah Child, enemy as he was, has stated, in the paragraphs quoted from him in a former letter fairly and candidly the substance of these facts.
Our ancestors had been so long abroad, that they had acquired comfortable establishments, especially in Holland, that singular region of toleration, that glorious asylum for persecuted Hugunots and Puritans; that country where priests have been enternally worrying one another; and alternately teazing the government to persecute their antagonists, but where enlightened statesmen have constantly and intrepidly resisted their wild fanaticism.
The first charter, the charter of James 1st. is more like a treaty between independent sovereigns, than like a charter of grant of privileges from a sovereign to his subjects. Our ancestors were tempted by the prospect and promise of a government of their own, independent in religion, government, commerce, manufactures, and every thing else, excepting one or two articles of trifling importance.
Independence of English church and state, was the fundamental principle of the first colonization, has been its general principle for two hundred years, and now I hope is past dispute.