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[THE HUMBLE ADDRESS OF WILLIAM TAGGERT IN] BEHALF OF THE CROWN. MAY, 1715 [caption title] by [Taggert, William]:
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$1,250.00
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Book description: [London? 1715].. Broadsheet. [1]p. plus printed docket title on verso. Dbd. Small folio. Early folds and early stab holes in left margin. Most of first line of caption title lost to close trimming. Light foxing. Overall very good. A rare political leaflet relating to the Reverend Doctor John Leslie, a Williamite landholder in Ireland who claimed to have performed "extraordinary service" in the Siege of Derry. Shortly after the Glorious Revolution, King William made a grant to Leslie of £400 per year, which Leslie, according to William Taggert, the author of this leaflet, maneuvered into a grant of forfeited Irish estates worth nearly six times that amount per year. Following a recent act of Parliament recalling William's Irish grants, Leslie appealed to the Parliament to allow him to keep the estates because of his heroic service at Londonderry. He persuaded Parliament, writes Taggert, that "he was the Man who had saved Londonderry out of the Hands of the Papists, when besieged by the late King James's Army, and that by his Management and extraordinary Service in that city, the War was shorten'd, and this Kingdom saved thereby from a vast expense of Blood and Treasure." Taggert, however, declares that Leslie had never in fact been at Londonderry during the siege and had defrauded the British government of fifty thousand pounds in land, when actual defenders of the city and widows and orphans were living in extreme states of poverty and deprivation. He writes that during Queen Anne's reign he had traveled from Ireland to London several times to expose Leslie but, "for want of Money to Pay Managers or Friends in the Ministry," was always slighted, "with much Loss and Damage to himself and Family." With the accession of the new King and election of the new Parliament, Taggert hopes to expose Leslie once and for all, along with similar frauds, and prays that he "may be Protected by this Honourable House, until this matter be Try'd and Determin'd..." A curious and very rare petition, printed in the early days of lobbying literature, which began to proliferate during the changing governments of the mid-1710s. ESTC records only one copy, at Oxford.
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