From ANGEL IN THE WHIRLWIND, by Benson Bobrick
On May 29, 1765, Patrick Henry rose in the Virginia House of Burgesses to introduce a series of momentous resolutions which he had hastily drafted on a blank leaf of an old law book Henry accompanied these resolutions with a fiery speech given the next day in which he concluded, “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell and George the Third”amid cries of “Treason” that arose from all sides of the room “and George the Third,” he continued artfully, “may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it!”
Thomas Jefferson, then a student at the College of William and Mary, was standing in the doorway and heard Henry speak. “I well remember the cry of treason,” Jefferson wrote afterward, “the pause of Mr. Henry at the name of George III, and the presence of mind with which he closed his sentence, and baffled the charge vociferated.” To Jefferson it seemed as if Henry “spoke as Homer wrote”.