The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. As part of this, I’m writing monthly columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today. The events described here took place in July and August 1775. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter here:
We are at war.
Or at least King George says so — in a shocking new proclamation in which he declares that the Colonies are in “open and avowed rebellion” and that such “rebellion” should be crushed.
Just a month ago, our elected representatives in the Continental Congress — a body that Parliament regards as unrecognized at best and illegal at worst — sent to our “Most Gracious Sovereign” a resolution that has been widely dubbed the Olive Branch Petition.
Many of us in the Colonies had held out hope that His Majesty would see what is plain to us — that our complaint is not with the crown, but with Parliament — a Parliament that, in our view, has violated our rights that are clearly spelled out in the English Bill of Rights. If we have now been forced to take up arms, it is not to overthrow the king but to assert our well-established rights to tax and govern ourselves in the king’s name.
The petition, signed by the leading men of the Colonies (including Virginians Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee and Edmund Pendleton), seemed to us to be quite unctuous in tone. The petition speaks of the “reverence” with which Colonial subjects hold the king, how “our breasts retain too tender a regard for the kingdom from which we derive our origin” to do anything that would hurt the king and how those subjects wish nothing more than “to transmit your Majesty’s name to posterity adorned with that signal and lasting glory that has attended the memory” of previous kings.
Throughout, the petition clearly lays the blame on Parliament and beseeches the king to use his influence to “procure us relief.” It even assures the king that once our differences with Parliament are resolved, “your Majesty will find your faithful subjects on this continent ready and willing at all times, as they ever have been with their lives and fortunes to assert and maintain the rights and interests of your Majesty and of our Mother Country.”
It is difficult to imagine a more conciliatory tone. And yet, our sources in London tell us that the king, upon hearing of the petition’s arrival, refused to even look at it. His government — specifically the Colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth — had already resolved to issue a Proclamation of Rebellion, and not even the arrival of our Olive Branch Petition could dissuade the king or his ministers from that course. The king, it is said, regards Parliament as his Parliament, and so acting against it would be the same as acting against himself. He wrote to Lord North, his prime minister: “I have no doubt but the nation at large sees the conduct of America in its true light and I am certain any other conduct but compelling obedience would be ruinous and culpable, therefore no consideration could bring me to swerve from the present path which I think myself in duty bound to follow.”
The current situation in the Colonies is certainly — how shall I put this? — irregular. Blood has been shed in Massachusetts, first at Lexington and Concord, then at Bunker Hill. The Continental Congress has looked to Virginia’s own George Washington to take charge of the patchwork forces that pass for a Continental Army currently facing off with British regulars outside Boston.
Here in Virginia, our royal governor has fled the capital of Williamsburg. Lord Dunmore now governs in name only from on board a British naval vessel in the James River.
These circumstances certainly give the appearance that we are at war; so do the local militia currently drilling in counties across Virginia.
And yet in the midst of this martial activity, what do the supposed rebels and traitors do? They send an obsequious petition pleading for the king’s attention to avert further bloodshed.
The king could have read the petition.
The king could have at least asked his ministers what they thought about the petition.
The king could have acted on the petition.
The king could have come to the relief of his North American subjects — for which we would have demonstrated our undying loyalty.
Instead, he has cast our petition aside as not worth his time and instead affixed his name to this dreadful Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition that declares our leaders — and by implication, their supporters — to be traitors.
With one stroke of his pen, the king has sided with Parliament in our quarrel, without even so much as listening to our side of the matter. By the tone of his proclamation, he has done more than side with Parliament in a legalistic interpretation of the English Bill of Rights. He has effectively declared war against the very subjects who only a month ago wished His Majesty “a long and prosperous reign.”
We sent words of peace; he sends us words of war.
The king’s proclamation doesn’t just promise war against what he considers rebel leaders, but against our very society: He calls on government officials and “loyal subjects” to report anything they know about “all Persons who shall be found carrying on Correspondence with, or in any Manner or Degree aiding or abetting, the Persons now in open Arms and Rebellion against Our Government.”
By these words, the king has made a traitor of any voter who might have written a letter to our elected representatives.
The king has made a traitor of any mother who dares to write her son now encamped outside Boston.
By that proclamation, the king has made traitors of a vast swath of Virginians who have, up until now, not given much thought to the political tumult all around us.
By that proclamation, the king may have done more to stir up the ire of Colonists than any scribbling of an ink-stained printer could do.
These petitions have criss-crossed the Atlantic, but it would appear that, figuratively at least, we have crossed a Rubicon.
Is the last chance for peace now behind us?
The king says we are in rebellion, but are we? If this is truly a rebellion — as the king claims — it is a strange one. Our office-holders still swear allegiance to His Majesty. No serious person has suggested (not yet anyway) that we break those bonds that bind us to the crown and somehow go our own way into the world. By this proclamation, however, it is the king himself who strained those bonds — or perhaps more. Until now, Colonists have always been careful to call the British Army in our midst “ministerial troops” or “parliamentary troops” to emphasize that they are an extension of Parliament, not the king. With the king’s proclamation, whose troops are they now?
It is with some trepidation that I offer this warning: If the king casts aside our offer to negotiate a peace, the day may come when some might dare suggest it is time to cast the king aside.
Sources consulted: Encyclopedia Virginia, “The Last King of America” by Andrew Roberts, U.S. Archives
