[Drop-head title:] An Appeal To The People. Consent not with a Multitude to do Evil.

Notes

A scarce pamphlet advocating an armed citizenry against the tyranny of the state in rather florid prose, bound with two further anonymous pamphlets with broadly anti-Hanovarian sentiment. The Appeal is recorded in just 5 locations by ESTC: BL, NLS and Oxford in the UK, and Folger and California in North America. The letter fragment from a previous owner included describes its publication as 'unquestionably an act of high treason,' adding, 'but I suppose the author was never discovered'. Certainly none of the listed holdings venture an attribution, and the printing itself is anonymous, with no tell-tale printers' devices or typographical oddities.
Earbery was a non-juring clergyman who was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest when a book of his, critical of the monarchy, was seized by the government in 1717, and was twice arrested for seditious libel in the decades following; the title of his pamphlet here can be considered ironical.
The third pamphlet here is a little earlier, and was also published with a London imprint in the same year. 'This pamphlet was published before the elections of 1713; it tends to confuse more than to clarify matters in Scotland. Written from an Episcopalian point of view but from an English as opposed to a Scottish angle, it was a complicated review of the distant and recent political past of Scotland, with considerable attention to religious matters' (McLeod & McLeod, Anglo-Scottish Tracts, 1979).