George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 7, 4th edition.

[344] against the cause of freedom. This resignation

Chap. Xxxiii} 1775. June.

gave offence to the court, and was a severe rebuke to the officers who did not share his scruple; but at London the Common Hall, in June, thanked him publicly as ‘a true Englishman;’ and the guild of merchants in Dublin addressed him in the strongest terms of approbation.

On the twenty-fourth of June, the citizens of Lon-

June <*>4.

don, agreeing fully with the letter received from New York, voted an address to the king, desiring him to consider the situation of the English people, ‘who had nothing to expect from America but gazettes of blood, and mutual lists of their slaughtered fellowsubjects.’ And again they prayed for the dissolution of parliament, and a dismission for ever of the present ministers. As the king refused to receive this address on the throne, it was never presented; but it was entered in the books of the city and published under its authority.

The society for constitutional information, after a special meeting on the seventh of June, raised a hundred pounds, ‘to be applied,’ said they, ‘to the relief of the widows, orphans, and aged parents of our beloved American fellow-subjects, who, faithful to the character of Englishmen, preferring death to slavery, were, for that reason only, inhumanly murdered by the king's troops at Lexington and Concord.’ Other sums were added; and an account of what had been done was laid before the world by Home Tooke in the ‘Public Advertiser.’ The publication raised an implacable spirit of revenge. Three printers were fined in consequence one hundred pounds each; and Home was pursued unrelentingly