The ‘Presentment of the Grand Jury’ was presently followed by The Humble Petition of Your Majesty’s most faithful and loyal Subjects, British Merchants and Traders, in behalf of Themselves and their fellow Subjects, Inhabitants of Your Majesty’s Province of Quebec.  ’Their fellow Subjects’ did not, of course, include any ’papist or popish Recusants Convict.’  Among the ’Grievances and Distresses’ enumerated were ’the oppressive and severely felt Military government,’ the inability to ’reap the fruit of our Industry’ under such a martinet as Murray, who, in one paragraph, is accused of ’suppressing dutyfull Remonstrances in Silence’ and, in the next, of ’treating them with a Rage and Rudeness of Language and Demeanor as dishonourable to the Trust he holds of Your Majesty as painfull to Those who suffer from it.’  Finally, the petitioners solemnly warn His Majesty that their ’Lives in the Province are so very unhappy that we must be under the Necessity of removing from it, unless timely prevented by a Removal of the present Governor.’

In forwarding this document Murray poured out the vials of his wrath on ‘the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here,’ while he boldly championed the cause of the French Canadians, ’a Race, who, could they be indulged with a few priveledges which the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at home, would soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in this American Empire.’

While these charges and counter-charges were crossing the Atlantic another, and much more violent, trouble came to a head.  As there were no barracks in Canada billeting was a necessity.  It was made as little burdensome as possible and the houses of magistrates were specially exempt.  This, however, did not prevent the magistrates from baiting the military whenever they got the chance.  Fines, imprisonments, and other sentences, out of all proportion to the offence committed, were heaped on every redcoat in much the same way as was then being practised in Boston and other hotbeds of disaffection.  The redcoats had done their work in ridding America of the old French menace.  They were doing it now in ridding the colonies of the last serious menace from the Indians.  And so the colonists, having no further use for them, began trying to make the land they had delivered too hot to hold them.  There were, of course, exceptions; and the American colonists had some real as well as pretended grievances.  But wantonly baiting the redcoats had already become a most discreditable general practice.