A LETTER Sent from a Gentleman in OXFORD, To His Friend in LONDON;  
Concerning the justice of the KING's Cause, and the unequal proceedings of those against Him, who are now found to be the Enemies of our PEACE and happiness.  
OR A SHORT CHARACTER Of the actions of our New State-Reformers; in which the seduced people may see to whom to impute the beginning of these miserable distractions, and the continuance thereof.  
Printed in the year, 1646.   

SIR,  
I Have received your Letter, and with as much care as you desired, I have perused it; and for your advice I return my thanks to your error, not your love: believing from that Spring all your lines have been derived, and that like People infected with the Plague, your desires have still been to corrupt others; mistake me not neither: I blame not your Endeavours, in gaining all you can to your Party, since it is multitude, not the justice of your cause that must nurse up that Birth, your Deceit hath begot upon the fears and Jealousies of the People, and that those Routs (the pillars of your new model) might the better be fashioned, into what forms were most convenient for your designs, it was extremely necessary, you should take from them all the rules and squares both of civil and ecclesiastical Government; and that you have most fully and amply done, by a new way of pulling down the old Religion, and setting up of many, nay, any that might serve either your ambition or your gain: and like Jeroboam in your new Government, when it could not be safe for you to erect another, you adulterate the old; Certainly, if you seriously reflect, if you review this act of corrupting Religion, with a recollected judgement, you cannot but find, that you have clean mistaken the way you pretend▪ though not that which you intend; for whoever yet would so much cashier his reason in things of the smallest moment, as to leave a certain positive good, for an uncertain accidental one? take heed; the same mistake cost the seduced Prophet his life: and if you take the maxim of the Law for umpire, that the same cases are to be judged by the same reasons, you have cause to fear, it may in time prove your own.  
But admit this form, this new Directory for the Church were as pure as you would have the People believe it, or yourselves desire it, and that ours were as great an abomination, as the forsaken Tribes Idolatry was to Israel; yet give me leave to tell you, and from Scripture, (from whence you say you borrow all your directions) that from thence you are so far from drawing any argument, that can give you authority to plant your Religion by the Sword, that you can hardly find any will allow the defence of it by arms: Surely, when I consider these things, you must give me leave to believe, you are much a kin to those that followed our Saviour for the loaves, and the relieving their necessities, rather than the love of his gospel, and like Demetrius' crew, serve the goddess of your own setting up, because it brings much gain, much wealth to your coffers.  
And now that in silence I pass over the Extirpation of Bishops, both root and branch, wonder not at all; it is but Consonant, that to Silver Deities, there be Leaden Priests; and therefore, you did well to forbid the standing by of such Gamesters, as would quickly see more than the Players: And because the fall of the Church is commonly a Preface to the ruins of the State, take this small gloss upon the defections, you have caused in that too▪ and in this I meet first with the Power, by which you have erected all this Pile of desolation; and here I find Jacob in his Elder brother's Clothes, for from the King first that power issued, and by his Writs you were called, and now surreptitiously like Prometheus you have stolen Fire from Heaven to animate the fond Conceptions of your own depraved wills, and as if in this act you meant to give earnest for all the evils you meant to practise you have eaten through the bowels of your own Mother, devoured the womb that first disclosed you: Certainly, when the King first Assembled you thither, as He intended not to trench on your privileges, so He never meant, never believed so ill on you, that you had the least thought of wresting His Power from Him, (wresting, so I term it) for I know of no act by which He either lent or gave it away to you; and therefore you must excuse me, if with you I consent not to believe your Power legitimate.  
But admit His Majesty for the good of the kingdom entrusted His Power with you; truly I think it was far from Him to imagine, you would have given it to the Scot, and make the representative Body of the kingdom, a Committee, to work journey-work for them, who if things succeed according to their expectation, will be so much your friends, as to allow you the same favour Polyphemus did Ulysses, and too late than you will begin to find with the countryman, you warmed the Snake, that shall hiss and sting you, and your Generation from your so long enjoyed Possessions; which will be some allay to my misery, when I am undone by you to see you perish by yourselves and them, Nec lex est justior ulla, &c.  
But why extends not this Communion of Power to the Irish, as well as Scot; who, if we confide in Proverbs, are as faithful as they? truly I'll answer for them, they were star-crossed, and mistaking the scene, entered in the Prologue. For had they stayed but two minutes longer, they might have Rebelled by precedent and confirmed it by Authority; but I pass over this with the observation of the Poets. In quo quis peccat in eo punitur: you have stolen the King's Power from Him, and fooled both your own and His to the Scot; which every English man will find a greater breach of the privileges of the Parliament of England, in joining yourselves to them, and refusing to receive any thing from the King, in which they are not made your Partners, then that which you allege in the King for a breach in naming the common-council with you for a Security for His Person.  
But my hopes at last are, that if this Power have any thing of the Ingredients of Pythagoras' soul in it, it will transmigrate into the first owner; And so leaving the right of Power, I come to survey the use of it; and here at the first fight I perceive the giant's Club too big for your hands; you can wield it to nothing but destruction.  
For I remember at His departure from London, He left a City more thronged with Wealth, than People, a kingdom more flourishing with good laws than any, but at His return, I believe He would be glad to find His talon wrapped up in a napkin: for in stead of finding His Wealth increased, it is diminished, His People slain, and the Sword of justice worn in a private sheath▪ The laws which like landmarks, kept the mariner, from a destroying rock, abrogated, in a word you have disanuled them all, and by the narrowest search I can make, I cannot find any that you have either made or kept, and in lieu of these, you present us with an Ordinance, a thing that like Ionas Gourd, is the off spring of a night, & savours so much of an Arbitrary Power, that if it be not a prerogative beyond any the King ever had, I know not what is; for I am sure the King's Power before these times, without a due conviction of Law, could take no man's Estate from him, and by the right of Inheritance, we had the same title to our Lands, that He had to His crown; but now you have not only taken ours, but His too; you have disinherited us, disinthroned Him. Yet in this Convulsion of the State, in this Confused shuffling of all together, our Liberties have scaped at the easiest rates; yet in them our plenty hath made us poor; and in being made more free we are made more Slaves: for what is not lawful now, either to be done or said? Witness, your own actions, and the Licence of so many Scandalous Seditious Pamphlets, that daily infect the air, and like the plagues of Egypt are familiar even with the King's Chambers; Nay, that you might be sure to make your little finger heavier than the King's loins, you have laid more Taxes on the people in your five years' usurpation, than he had done in 17. you have consumed in this war more moneys, which you have forced from the Subject, then have been (if my intelligence fail not) disbursed almost by all the Kings of England since the Conquest, and for the exaction of the twentieth, and the fifth part of every man's Estate, I believe you'll tire History to find the parallel, in the reigns of the most cruel Tyrants; and as if it were too light a Conquest to overthrow our Bodies, our Estates, you endanger our souls, and under the names of Covenants, you impose such oaths, as the King could (I am sure did) never think on, and whatsoever you falsely have imputed to the King, to make Him appear odious to His people, you have yourselves really acted, and with a higher hand, than ever the Extasis of His wishes could transport Him to imagine; and because your Vices have been successful, you believe them virtues; and that you may still deceive yourselves, as well as others, you turn the great end of the perspective upon all your actions, and perpetually tell the world in all your Messages, of your desires of Peace.  
Truly when I see those, I need not wish Democritus from his ashes, every man that reads them is transformed into them; indeed I cannot view them without a smile, especially when (before there was a pistol charged for this war) I look upon all His majesty's Gracious Messages (I may rather call them entreaties for Peace) sent from Nottingham, from York, these when it was begun, from Oxford and other places; those often and present sueings for Peace still denied; you must pardon me, if I refuse to be of your opinion, and think you descended from those that Cry, Peace, Peace, when their preparations are warlike.  
Concerning your last Letters, His majesty hath made so full an Answer, that I shall say nothing, but certainly if you had not thought yourselves guilty of all the Blood that hath been shed in these Distractions, and had not feared, that the unseduced people would have been of your opinion, you had not desired the King to take it on Him, and have raised a Spirit, which perhaps will not so easily be allayed.  
But of all the Riddles which your Sophistry hath obtruded to us, the pleasantest is to think you should fight all this while, for that which when you have, you dare not accept; for your pretences in the raising of your armies have been, to fetch the King from His evil counsellors, and yet when He offers to come, you refuse Him. Pray, though you force us from the goods of our Bodies, yet deprive us not of the Faculties of our souls, though you take our Lands, leave us our understandings, though you make us Slaves, pray make us not fools.  
In a word to sum up all, if this be your Religion, 'tis like the poor Indians that worship the devil, because he should not hurt them, if this be your Obedience and obeisance to your King, I can parallel it to none but Judas his, if this be your fighting to preserve Him, 'tis like the man that killed himself out of a fear to die; if this be your vigilant wisdom to make Him a glorious Prince, 'tis allied to Solomons, in nothing but being apocrypha; if this be your mending the stitch-fallen laws, 'tis like those that repaired Theseus' ship so long, till the first fabric was destroyed; if this be the enlarging our Liberties, 'tis like the man that to increase his fishpond, let the Sea into it: if these be your desires for Peace, 'tis like him that prayed to Jupiter for that he would not have; if this be your Care for the commonwealth, it's like Neros, that wished, Rome but one head, the easier to destroy it; if these be your affections to your bleeding Country, you are like the hunted Ape, that exposeth the beloved whelp to relieve that death was due to her.  
To conclude, for I meant not to send you either a Disputation, or a Volume mistaken for a Letter; my belief is, The sins of the Nation have deserved a Judgement, and your Rebellion hath paid it; but my hopes are, when God's judgements are past, he will burn the Rods; In the mean time I can compare our Condition with none so fitly as Aesop's frogs; we must cry and petition for a Parlialiament, and Jupiter hath sent us one, as devouring as their Stork.  
When I consider all these things together, the Charitablest opinion I can have of you, is to think that opportunity hath made you worse than you intended, and that partly like young Philosophers in approving one error, you have been led into a thousand; and now you must justify and support one ill act by another; if this be the Cure, which at first you promised this distempered State, 'tis worse than the Malady; and for my part I shall desire my Disease again; I am sure there is less pain, less trouble in it; and for your admonition, I shall refer you to a Heathen  
Dominare tumidus, spiritus altos gere;  
Sequitur Superbos ultor à tergo Deus.  
Go on proud men, till you have made the kingdom a deluge of blood; rule till you have undone both yourselves, and us; but remember the God that hath Leaden Feet, hath Iron Hands; and commonly he supplies the slowness of the one with the severity of the other, and always follows those he goes not with, pursues those with his judgements, he doth not lead with his mercies.  
FAREWELL.