(1714–December 6, 1788), was the bishop of St. Asaph Anglican Church in London, and a friend of Benjamin Franklin. In 1774, he appealed in the House of Lords:
At present we force every North American to be our enemy. … It is a strange idea we have taken up, to cure their resentments by increasing provocation. … That just God, whom we have all so deeply offended, can hardly inflict a severer national punishment than by committing us to the natural consequences of our own conduct.547
I look upon North America as the only great nursery of freeman left on the face of the earth.548