use he has as yet known none, whose motives or rules of action were
truth and the public good alone; of one, who judges, that perjured
magistrates of all denominations, and their most exalted minions, may be
exposed, deprived, or cut off, by the fundamental laws of his country;
and who, upon these principles, from his heart approves and glories in
the virtues of his predecessors, who revived the true spirit of the
British polity, in laying aside a priest-ridden, an hen-pecked,
tyrannical tool, who had overturned the political constitution of his
country, and in reinstituting the dissolved body politic, by a
revolution supported by the laws of nature and the realm, as the only
means of preserving the natural and legal, the civil and religious
liberties of the members of the commonwealth_.

_Truth, in this man's estimation, can hurt no good cause. And falsehood
and fraud, in religion and politics, are ever to be detected, to be
exploded_.

_Insinuations, that this History contained something injurious to the
present establishment, and therefore necessary to be suppressed, serve
better the purposes of mistaken or insidious malcontents than the real
publication can. And, if any thing were by this, or any other, History
to be shown essentially erroneous in our politics, who, that calls
himself a Briton, can be deemed such an impious slave, as to conceal the
destructive evil? The editor of this work disdains and abhors the
servile thought, and wishes to live no longer than he dares to think,
speak, write, and, in all things, to act worthy of a Briton_.

_From this regard to truth and to his country, the editor of this
History was glad of an opportunity of rescuing such a writing from those
who meant to suppress it. The common cause, in his estimation, required
and demanded it should be done; and the sooner it is published, he
judged, the better: for, if the conduct of the Queen and her ministers
does not deserve the obloquy that has been long industriously cast upon
it, what is more just than to vindicate it? What more reasonable than
that this should be done, while living witnesses may yet be called, to
prove or disprove the several allegations and assertions; since, in a
few years more, such witnesses may be as much wanting as to prevent a
canonization, which is therefore prudently procrastinated for above an
age? Let us then coolly hear what is to be said on this side the
question, and judge like Britons._

_The editor