An Apology for the Ministerial Life and Actions of a Celebrated Favourite
- Anonymous Pamphleteer 1766 (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is an anonymous pamphlet from 1766, published during the heated transatlantic debate over British colonial policy in America. The pamphlet offers a defense of a prominent but controversial ministerial figure — almost certainly a veiled reference to a royal favourite whose policy decisions had drawn significant public criticism. Written at a moment when tensions over taxation and parliamentary authority were intensifying following the Stamp Act controversy, the pamphlet represents a strand of loyalist and pro-ministry opinion that sought to justify the actions of crown-aligned ministers against their detractors.
Like many political writings of the era, its anonymous authorship allowed its writer to engage in partisan defense while avoiding direct accountability, a common convention in eighteenth-century British political print culture.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.