THE LIFE AND REIGN OF King CHARLES, Or the Pseudomartyr discovered. With a late Reply to an Invective Remonstrance against the Parliament and present Government: Together with some Animadversions on the strange contrariety between the late Kings public Declarations, Protestations, Imprecations, and his Pourtracture, compared with his private Letters, and other of his Expresses not hitherto taken into common Observation.  Istud est sapere, non solùm ea quae ante Pedes videre, sed futura prospicere. Seneca. 
London, Printed for W. Reybold at the sign of the Unicorn in Paul's Churchyard 1651.   

The Preface.  
TO write the Lives of Princes, in another world, and fallen, through their own frailties, or by the influence of others counsels from the high pitch of Sovereignty (for regality is a slippery precipice) in charity may be allowed a fair and favourable memorial; but for a King falling by the high hand of Justice, not for common faults and frailties (incident to humane nature) but presumptuous sins, sins of lood, perfidy, cruelty, rapine, wilfully perpetrated in the face of God and man, and without any remorse, to pursue the destruction not of one, but three flourishing Kingdoms, such desperate and violent Princes, deserve no other favour than to be set out to the life of their Tyrannous actions; though in pity to him, who hath already paid his debt to Nature, and his offences, much of his exorbitant government and irregular motions might, and doubtless would have been concealed, more tenderly entreated, and himself sufferered to rest where he is, in the silent grave, had not that madness of his defeated surviving party by their indefatigable instigations, given frequent occasion of taking over the ashes of him, who living (without injury to truth and his memory it may be said) that rather than to have failed in the accomplishing of his designs, (had it lain in in his power) he would have set the World on fire. It was an unhappy and no iningenious expression of 
* Balzack.  him, who hath written it, That there were a sort of men borne to the world, not so suffer it to be at rest; a sentence not more true, than made good in this most unhappy King, had this been put in addition (neither himself to take his own rest, and sleep (as he could not) quietly and peaceably like other men.)  
I am not ignorant what senseless maxims and ridiculous principles have gotten credit in the World (as undoubted Oracles indisputably to be obeyed) as that de mortuis nil nisi bona, but by no means to tread on the sacred Urn of Princes, though living never so vicious and exorbitant, as if death had bequeathed unto them a supersedeas for the covering over their faults and licentious reigns, and to close them up in the Coffin of Oblivion, with a ne plus ultra, not to admit of the least mention that they had done amiss, when many thousands of oppressed and desolated families must stand mute, whilst the malicious partisans of an irregular King, take a liberty to themselves, to vindicate his indefensible actions, and not so content, but asperse and scandalize those that opposed him in his cruelties, and likewise would persuade others to adore him for a Saint, and an innocent martyr, whose Fathers, Brothers, and Friends, have been most barbarously slain to fulfil the lust and pleasure of one wilful man: if to speak truth in due season, or to be the faithful witness to convey the verity of things passed to the present and after times, be a crime unpardonable, or an injustice done to the memory of the dead, the Malignant generation of this age may on the same reason charge it as a fault on those holy and inspired penmen of the sacred Scriptures, which have recorded and left to after ages the wicked reigns of Kings, leaving an everlasting stain and taint on their memories; how profane would it be to tax that holy man (the meekest of men) Moses, for leaving to posterity the fratricide of Cain? the mockery of that wicked Cam? what madness to accuse Samuel, and the Authors of the Chronicles of the Kings of juda and Israel, in leaving to after ages the Tyranny of Saul, in murdering at once eighty of God's priests? that presumptuous sin and perfidious fact of David, in plotting the death of Vriah, that he might enjoy his Wife which lay in his bosom? Rehoboams Tyrannies? the Cruelties and Idolatries of jeroboam, who stands branded, as the Son of Nebat, which made Israel to sin? with what face can it be imputed as an incharity to Tacitus, Livy, Florus, and others of the Roman Historians, for inserting in their histories, the rape of Lucretia by that Tyrant Tarquin? the Tyrannies of Tiberius and his privado Scianus? those of Nero, that Monster of Princes, and the condemnation of him by the Senate? To omit Foreign examples, what offence in reason can be charged on Matthew Paris, Ho●eden, Sir Th. Moor, Daniel, and infinite others, of our own Historians, for describing the vices and tyrannies of our own Kings both ancient and modern? What injury have they committed in their Registers, in setting down that William the first of our Norman Kings, was a known Bastard of Robert Duke of Normandy, an usurper, and from which spurious root all our Kings since his usurpation derive their deified titles, and that most of his descendants ruled tyrannically, and that amongst them all King john was one of the most subtle, persideous and bloody Princes that history hath afforded? That Henry the third his son (admitted by the indulgence of the Barons and People in hopes of his better Government) proved as oppressive and bloody to the Nation as any of the rest: That Richard the third in murdering his Brother's sons, and usurping the Crown, was more wicked than the worst? That Henry the seventh was the descendant of a Bastard son of john of Gaunt, begotten on Catherine Swinford another man's Wife, though legitimated by act of Parliament, yet had no other title to the Crown but that of his Sword? That six of his descendants, and of our last Princes, claym their rights to the Crown from his spurious stock (as if it had been in the fate of the English Nation, to be perpetually chained up to the irregular domination of a race of Kings, transmitted from one bastardized root to another? That Henry the eighth was a most imperious and bloody prince, the pattern and Idea of all Tyranny, and one that neither spared any man in his wrath, or woman in his 
Sir Walter Raleigh.  lust? That his daughter Queen Mary was the spurious issue begotten on Catherine of Austria his elder brother Arthur's Wife, that Allecto, superstitious and bloody Princess; That King james, and our late King Charles, were discendants from the same Stock of Henry of Richmond, the one who most of all our Kings secretly, cunningly, and underhand endeavoured, and laid the plot to undermine the freedoms of the english nation, and King Charles to have followed the design with more plots, wiles, and stratagems, than any of our former Kings, raised more treasure by undue exactions, and spilt more innocent blood than all of the Norman Kings before him?  
If the premises are evident truths, as they cannot be denied; why then should they be concealed, and wrapped up from the sight of the world? being so pertinent to be left as Looking glasses for their Successors to behold the deformed faces of their Ancestors, so fit to be made known to the deluded number of the people, baffled and befooled with flams and Fig-leaves? what injury then or injustice hath the Parliament done to the Nation, in rescuing their Liberties out of the hand of a King, which nothing would content, but their Invassalage? what have they done more in cutting off him with his Posterity (to whom he had entailed his designs) than necessity hath enforced them to do, in preservation of the Nation from that inevitable inthralldome, which eminently was like, and would have befallen the universal people, had they not taken away the Effects by the Cause, and by that Law of Necessity, to which all others are subservient? And have they done more than the Romans of old have left in precedent, in the case of Tarqvinius, and the expulsion of his Posterity for less Tyranny, and to change the Kingly Government into a Republic, when as this most wilful Prince stood so constantly fixed to his depraved Principles, that no persuasions of a Court of Parliament, no reason but his will could prevail, or content him, but to be the absolute Master of such an immensity of power, as that at his own time and pleasure might enable him, not only to destroy himself, but to overpower the whole Kingdom, which to his uttermost he endeavoured, and to wade all over in blood to the accomplishment, as 'tis most manifest by all his actions, and the sequel of his own story? And have not the SCOTS on the same Reasons of State, in divers precedents, acted the like on their Kings, when they found them perverse and intractable to any reason, as 'tis manifest in the fatal examples of Dardanus their 20. King from Fergus, in Romacus their 36 King, and on Alpinus their 68 King, all three of them beheaded for their Cruelties and Tyrannies; besides twenty more of their Kings, either put to death or deposed for their exorbitant Governments? and hath the Parliament in this necessitated change of the late Kingly domination into a Commonwealth done more than the Hollanders were compelled to attempt, and happily accomplished in the very like case, when as on their many (though fruitless, Petitions to Philip the second of the invading of their ancient Immunities, and slaughtering of 100000 of the Natives by Don Alvares de Toledo, and others of his Viceroys, and themselves utterly deprived of all hopes of redress of their grievances, but only to make head against his Tyranny? This question I take the liberty to move to the most rigid Royalist; by what right, equity, or Law of God or man, is any Nation in the World bound up to such a blind and unnatural obedience, as to be deprived of self-defence, and to sit still without seeking their own preservations, whilst an irregular King shall either cut their throats, enslave, or denude them of their Freedoms, when as both Scripture and the Law of Nature and Nations allows it them? and that Royalists themselves, and the most learned Jurists maintain and concur in one joint opinion, that Subjects in such cases, both by God's Law and that of Nature, may defend themselves, contra immanem saevitiem, against barbarous hostility, as 
* Barclay adver. Monarch. lib. 3. cap. 8.  Barclay confesseth, & 
* Grotius de jure belli & pacis, lib. 1. cap. 4.  Hugo Grotius avoucheth it for Law, si Rex hostili animo in totius populi exitium feratur, amittit Regnum, If a King in a hostile way shall attempt to destroy his people, he loseth his Kingdom, and this stands with infallible reason; but leaving this Argument as that which already is in the way of decifion by the sword, which when we have all said what can be alleged, is the best title of all Kings and Commonwealths, and the same on which all or most of the Kings in the world have founded their powers and Sovereignty's; What a strange passion then and madness possesses his surviving party, which during the life time and height of their master's power could not with all their united forces, their many plots and continued practices prevail against the Parliament, or enable him to attain to any piece of his ends, whose boundless ambition, lead him (as we may safely believe) to fight as well against Heaven as his own Subjects, and saw it not, or would not, but pursued his designs so long as any power or hopes prompted him to believe, that happily in the end he might be the Conqueror, but but missing of all his aims, and himself in another world, that there should still remain so many of his defeated partisans, which out of an old and inbred malice have found out a way (as they vainly conceive) how to be revenged on their Conquerors, (is the wonder of the times) by presenting his Book, with his picture praying in the Frontispiece, purposely to catch and amuse the people, magnifying all his misdeeds for pious actions, canonising him for a Saint, and idolising his memory for an innocent Martyr, an imposture without other parallel than that of Mahomet; considerations which for the general satisfaction, and for the better discovery of the truth of all affairs between the King and Parliament, have principally induced me to take (in brief) the true dimensions of this Sainted King and innocent Martyr, and to pull off that false vizard wherewith his juggling party hath decked his Effigies, and presented him to the public view, for the most pious Prince of this age, that so the people may behold him in his native complexon; true it is some other important reasons have moved me to undertake this task, as having seen the many poor, easy, and believing people of this Nation, too long misled, and cozened out of their understanding by his usual protestations, which God willing shall be made evidently clear by the Kings own hand writing, and by the self same artifices wherewith he had so often deluded and prevailed on the belief of too many of his own party pretending to knowledge above the ordinary rank of the vulgar, other reasons have moved me hereunto, as for satisfaction of some obstinate Royalists to whom I have wished well, and with whom I have had several disputes on such particular subjects, as may be seen in the subsequent reply; ranked between the breviary of the King's reign, and the observations on several of his own Letters and Expresses; and lastly to confute a new sprung up scandal most ungratefully and maliciously raised against the Parliament; viz. That the present change of the Government both Civil and Ecclesiastical, the cutting off the King and his Posterity, were Plots and Contrivances of a longer date and standing than this Parliament, though pursued and accomplished by a party yet sitting at Westminster: this being the scope and method of the whole, I have thought it not impertinent in preparation thereunto here to adjoin some thing of the place of his birth, and manner of his breeding; That he was born in Scotland, 1600. and remained there until the second year of his Father's reign, needs no further attestation; That on the ceasing of the sickness 1602. at London (for its ominously remarkable, that two most furious plagues immediately followed the very ingress both of the Father and the Son to their Crowns) under the stile and title of Duke of York, he was conveyed from Edinburgh to St. James' known to many yet living; That during his Infancy, than fitter for the oversight of the female sex, than the masculine, there was such an innated, incorrigible, obduracy, and inflexibility in his nature, that his Nurses and those Gentlewomen that attended him could very rarely devise how to please him, much less to reclaim that intemperature of his natural constitution; which as the Gentlewomen themselves have both often related and protested, so are there yet enough alive which will justify it as a known truth, and of which his mother Queen Anne would often complain, usually calling him her perverse and obstinate Son, and his Brother Prince HENRY, not without a prophetical judgement to befall the Kingdom, in case on King James his Father and his own decease the Crown should descend on him; God knows and I call him to witness that I shall not willingly present a syllable to the prejudice of his memory, otherwise then for truth's sake (abused) and the general satisfaction of such as would be rightly informed thereof, having never had any cause given me to write more or less than becomes me in sincerity, confessing that considering the distance I stood in to be a partaker of his secrets, as having been only a poor servant of his Fathers, until weary of the Court I retired, having seen enough of the vanity thereof, and of both reigns, though on some urgent occasions, in my Addresses to him, I have had the honour of his gracious aspect; and sometimes good words from his own mouth, never any other injury, than in my particular sufferings, involved in the general calamity proceeding from the late fatal war, of which I cannot in justice excuse him whose ambition and wilfulness to rule alone, and without control of any others than hers, which had too long and imperiously overruled him, which the following Animadversions will more amply manifest; Having thus made my Apology, that neither any particular spleen or quarrel to his person hath incensed me to write, as in justice I ought; I come to his education as he arrived to riper years, under the tutorship of Bishops, and men of that Garb (known to many who they were) how he was seasoned both in Learning and Religion: It's most certain that he attained to some competent measure of literature (for a Prince) and as I have some reason to believe sucked in with the most of the Episcopal leven, but as to the Religion wherewith afterward he was seasoned, I am confident he was more beholding to his honest Secretary Mr. Murrey, than to any other of his Prelatical Tutors, though he after proved (at best) a mere formal Protestant; an enemy to the Puritan party, and a friend to Bishops, as proceeding from the instructions of his own Father, and the influence of his Prelatical tetinue; It's a known truth, that in the midst of that long, fruitless, and restless pursuit of the old Kings for a marriage with the Infanta, Secretary Murrey who had then the chiefest influence on his Counsels, had privately dissuaded him from any further thought thereof, as a Match which would neither be well pleasing to God, acceptable to the generality of the people, or propitious to the Kingdom, in respect of the disparity of their religions, which so much wrought upon him, what by the Secretaries own persuasions, and the reading unto him of Mr. De Molins' Tractate on the 17 of Deutronomy, De Illegitimes' Marages, that he was altogether averted to marry in any papistical family; insomuch as the old King making diligent inquiry by whose infusions he was so much alienated from the Spanish Match, it was at last found out to be Mr. Murreys' workmanship, which cost the honest man the loss of his place, and expulsion the Court: Howsoever the King out of his restless desire to match his Son in the House of Austria soon turned his affection, and sends him in person attended with the Duke of Buckingham, privately by the way of France, to Madrid; where after an expenseful voyage, and to no other purpose but to his own dishonour, and disgrace to the Prince (after six month's stay in Spain) he returned to London, the 5 of October following his going from hence, and about 5 months after his arrival the old King died at Theobalds', and the Crown descended upon him, which anon we shall see how he managed it: That he had then so much applause and love of the people in general, even to a kind of veneration, in the hopes that all men conceived of his future Government is known to thousands yet living, and that no Prince sooner lost it, is also not unknown, most men wondering how so suddenly not only the affections of the people were withdrawn from him, but to fall into the general obloquy, was held by the wisest a kind of Riddle, not suspecting and indeed than not knowing, or not observing the reasons thereof to have arisen from his then present steerage of the Helm, by the only Compass of the old King's delineation, whereof more hereafter will appear in his carriage at his first Oxford Parliament; where I must give this caution to the Reader, not to value that late impartial and flattering Author, Aulicus Coquinariae, neither to give over much credit to King james his Court, who in some particulars speaks much more of truth than the other babbler, who with no colour at all of sincerity and knowledge of those times talks at random, palpably and ridiculously rendering King james for the only Platonical, Politic, Peaceable and pious King of his time, a Prince as he would have it believed, the Paragon for his wisdom and care, the fruits whereof no rational man could ever yet discern, when the plain truth was, and the right measure of his peaceable reign was well known to all Europe, to be the only occasion of all the after Wars throughout Germany, and the root of all those of his Successors throughout his Dominions, those in Germany, to the utter undoing of his Son-in-Law the Count Palatyne, and all those Princes which assisted him in the Cause of Bohemia, whilst himself refused, or durst not draw his Sword, through mere fear of offending the SPANIARD in the least punctilio, but sat musing at home how to improve his Sovereignty, to devise projects how to raise monies to satiate his needy and greedy Scotch Courtiers, by privy seals, benevolences, sale of Forrest lands, asserts, woods, and Crown Lands, and to pick quarrels with his Parliaments, and to entail them to his heirs General; his successor proving no ill scholar in putting in practice his Father's precepts, and for the better invading of the libertyes of the Subjects, to suppress Parliaments, which never offended him, but in refusing to supply his prodigalities, when himself had wasted treble the treasure in an idle Peace, than his predecessor the Queen spent in a continued and furious War, with the greatest Prince of Christendom, and yet to leave him the richest King of the Western World, which if the plain truth of the affairs of those times may without offence be made manifest, were the only fruits of his so much magnified and peaceable reign, for I may in sincerity say it over and over again, and no other than a known truth, that the not drawing of his Sword, in the Count Palatines quarrel, to which he was so often importuned, by most of the German Princes, invited, yea pressed by his own Council of State, yet would he not, but hindered in what possibly he could, those that would and did, to their utter undoing by his many expenseful, and fruitless Embasseys, and to the greatning of the Austrian Family, which had long befoold and baffled him even to the derision and scorn of all the Princes of Europe; as to his Justice of which the Court Cook tattels, the whole Kingdom can witness, how he measured it out, by suffering the rigour and uttermost penalty of the Law, to fall on the accessaries in Sir Tho. Overbuties case, and to take the Principals into his mercy, 'tis true (not Somerset into his former favour) yet sure we are to stop his mouth from telling of tales, he gave him at once in pure gift so much of the Crown Lands, as were well worth to be sold 100000 pounds, though it melted away like wax in the Sun, and himself to die a stark beggar, and in infamy, and as to that his most excellent chaste Lady, and Virgin Bride, let the ghosts of Sir james Stuart, Sir George Wharton, and Prince Henry speak, and not him, this is most manifest, that by divine justice, she was known to die living, and of so loathsome a disease, that her own Gentlewomen, have often protested it before many credible witnesses, they could not endure the Chamber where she lay, neither scarce the next adjacent for the horrible stink that a long time before she expired, issued from her carcase, and polluted the air; I could speak much more of the carriage of that foul business, and of others, not pertinent to this place, and so can many more persons of honour yet alive, which will tell the tatler to his face that which he hath either with impudence or out of ignorance published; are both false and abominable adulatious, both in reference to the old King, Somerset, and his Lady, and others of that tribe, Sir Walter Rawly, the Archbishop Abbot, and that of the records, on which he would build the fabric of his untruths, were known forgeryes of their own making; and as to the Archbishop's particular, he comes not near the truth, that honest man alone, as it is well known, withstood the King alone and the other Bishops, in their base compliance in that nullity; insomuch that the King took upon him to convince the said Archbishop in a treatise, dedicated to the unbelieving Thomas, yet to be seen, passages, which as it seems, the talking tatler knew not, neither little of truth, which he assumes to relate, and howsoever he hath farced up a Pamphlet, as to the matter (happily his own or not) yet in good manners he might have forborn, to make use of another man's phrase, which in divers places of his relation it appears he hath stolen out of the Fragmenta Regalia, though varied to the worse, & by him as much vitiated, as by the printer. But I now both leave him and his theft, until I may have the happiness to hear further from him, then doubtless I shall not fail to give him a fuller answer; in the mean time I shall advise him to remember, that he which justifieth the wicked, and condemneth the just, even they both are an abomination to the Lord, a text that will become both of us, to take into our serious consideration, and as I have good reason to believe, best of the two befits himself to look to, who takes upon him with such palpable flattery to present King james for such a Saintlike Prince, when as had he either known a piece of his life and conversation, or the least of his secrets and Counsels (as of those I well know him not to be guilty) surely he would have been ashamed so to have written of a King, who left behind so little evidence of piety, true Religion, temperance, and care of the Subjects welfare, and so much of the structure of absolute Monarchy to his successor, a study to which he had wholly devoted himself, and left it to his Son as an infelicious legacy, and three Kingdoms destruction, which were without all question, the fruits and effects of his peaceable reign. But briefly now to his only Son, and the heir of his father's unhappy peace, and the prosecutor of his own, his posterities, and the Kingdom's ruin.   

THE REIGN OF KING CHARLES, Or the pseudomartyr discovered, etc.  
KING CHARLES, than Prince of Wales, began his unfortunate Reign on the expiration of his Father King james at Theobalds' the 27 of March 1627. At his very first entry to the Crown, and after the consummation of the ceremonies of his Inauguration, and the reception of the Queen from France, he was (as his Father before him at high accession) driven away from the Metropolis of the Kingdom (London) by the increase and rage of the Pestilence, as an ill omen both to the Father and the Son, but of a more ominous portent to the three Kingdoms.  
A Parliament at that time was summoned, and sitting at Westminster, but hastily adjourned to Oxford, on the former reason of the increase of the Sickness, and a War likewise was then in preparation, and in design for spain, as an ill presage of the after improsperity in all others which this unfortunate Prince undertook; for what in this kind was ever enterprised by him, was both inauspicious and fatal, loss of Honour to himself, reputation and destruction to the English Nation.  
During the Parliament at Oxford, the King by his Speaker, the Lord Keeper Williams, moved the Assembly for a present supply of moneys in relation to the intended War, the Parliament in reply to the King's desires, as they were to be Contributors to the War, so they humbly moved to be made partakers of the design; this so reasonable a motion was very ill taken, yea scorned by the King, for it even then evidently appeared, that he meant to rule alone, and at will and pleasure. Hence we may observe the first distaste, or rather indeed a picked quarrel against his first Parliament, which shows out unto us, on how small, or no cause at all, he would be quarrelsome with his Great Counsels, and what he would be to all other Parliaments. And the more to show the regret he took at this motion, he commands Glanvile a Lawyer, a Gentleman of choice education and elocution, than a Member of that House, to attend the Fleet at Plymouth, (as he then said, to let him understand what he so much desired to know, as to the design) and upon this miffe abruptly breaks up the Assembly without their assistance, which on all honourable and fitting terms was not denied him.  
The Crown at this time was exceedingly indigent, and indeed so beggarly and indebted, that the Royal Revenues sufficed not to defray the Court expenses; yet so high and haughty was the King's heart, that rather than to be beholding to the Parliament, he was resolved to run any hazard that might befall him, and in the midst of this extreme necessity, sends Sir Sackvil Crow with the Crown jewels (a Gentleman of high esteem with the Duke of Buckingham) to pawn them in the Low-countrieses.  
Wise men might then well believe, that the King could not possibly be so wanting to himself, or so poor in treasure, as to be put on so dishonourable a straight, when as with a good word or two in compliance with the Parliament, he might have had before what in reason he would have desired, and that at that instant the major part of the Queen's Dowry was received; but the truth was, it was as soon spent as taken, in the gaiety of the English Lords, attendants then on the new Queen at Paris; where especially the Duke, amongst others, out vied all the French Lords in the sumptuousness of his expenses, and bravery of his apparel; so that how rich soever the Queen and her attendants were then in their Wardrobes, sure it is, they came home poor enough in purse to the English Court.  
The Queens French attendants and dependants of both sexes being numerous, were doubtless far too many to be maintained with any ordinary expense: She was then not only (in comparison) a mere child, but childish in her carriage, and A la Francoise, petulant in her comportment; the King was then no more but her Tutor, she his Pupil, what after they both were in relation to each other, and how those offices were inverted, time and a little patience will show, but most certain it is, that Madam Nurse (like an other Philippina the Cajetan to Joan Queen of Naples) was both her Oracle and Governess, her only attendants, (or better may it be said) her many nasty French appurtenances were more in number than ever were known to follow such an Emperor's Governess (for so she then was to the Queen) and such vermin they were as that the English Ladies (but in respect to the Queen) held them to be little better than as Scullions for the Kitchen; yet were these the Locusts which then and a long time after devoured all in the English Court, which was at that time with much ado prodigally maintained at Salisbury, whilst the King and the Lords of his Council were all to seek how to defray his own expenses, and the wantonness of a Court, promiscuously pestered, both with domestic, foreign, idle, and useless numbers of both sexes.  
I was then in that Progress, and usually in the Court, and a sad witness into what straits the King was reduced, and were it not within the remembrance of many yet alive, the relation might seem strange, what in so new and green a Reign was both attempted, and with boldness put in execution: The prodigality of the Court then so much outwent the Royal Revenues, that the King's Officers and Purveyors had not wherewithal to defray the expense of the King and Queen's Tables. The King, to begin the first Precedent of his arbitrary Governmen, sends for the Farmers of the Customs, and gains what possibly he could from them, which by reason of the sickness, and damp of Trade at London, would then have put back their contract upon him, however money he had, and would have it of them; but that served not the turn, some other course must be taken for present supply of the King's wants; Sir James Ley then newly made Earl of Marlborow was then Lord Treasurer, Weston and Cottington, (all new men and of very small beginnings) were the men shortly after under the Duke, which principally then and after managed the King's Treasury, and were those which he had chosen and picked out as fit Ministers to be employed in his after arbitrary designs, yet I am confident none of them all durst advise him for any thing which they found not suitable to his inclination. The King's next project than was, how he might raise present moneys (for from London he could not expect farther supplies, the Merchants and the a blessed Citizens being fled the City, by reason of the rage of the Pestilence) whereupon he resolved to take it where he could find it, the City of Salisbury a place of small circuit, and of less trade, was first pressed with a loan of 1000 l. the City of Bristol (as I remember) with 3000 l. which was (by some Aldermen of that City sent to the Court in excuse of their then present disabilityes) denied, but that served not their turns, for they were presently laid by the heels, until the said sum was sent unto him; this Precedent being a caveat sufficient to all other of the Western Cities and Towns to send in what sums were skonced on them; neither would this serve the King's indigency, but he borrowed of all the principal Gentlemen of the West, which were known or conceived to be moneyed men: it is most evident that even then, and at his first access to the Crown he stood not on terms of love or hatred of his people; for what he intended, it appeared plainly he would do, and what he acted he held it sufficiently legal, as a piece of his birthright, and of right belonging to him as a King, without looking into the nature of the English Sovereignty, his will was the law he intended to rule by; as to Parliaments, his meaning as it appears was the same with Lewes the eleventh of France, and in imitation of him to take them down together with their power, as he had opportunity; notwithstanding some few he called, more for the supply of his present necessity, than the good he intended to the public, and in the future as time should enable him to be his own carver of his Subjects estates and fortunes, as that shortly after followed.  
We have thus laid down in sincerity the beginnings of this unhappy Reign. Now this pestilential Summer being well spent, upon the approach of the Winter, and decrease of the Sickness, the King, and the young Queen, with all her French train, draws nearer to the City of London, and being still in his wont predicament of want, in supply of the Court expenses, be pursues the game he was resolved to play, for raising of Treasure (without consent of Parliament) by arbitrary projects, whereof amongst many which followed, he begins with that of Knighthood, and calls to account (under colour of an old obsolete Law) all such Gentlemen and others, within the limitation of that Statute, as attended not his Coronation, though by his own Proclamation, he had before forbidden their attendance.  
Shortly after comes in to his service Sir Thomas Wentworth, who to show what he would be, and how serviceable to the King's designs he might be, was employed into the North, where he rigorously levied a very considerable sum on the Gentlemen and Yeomen of those parts: Weston (another of these Arbitrary beagles) as an overseer to the Earl of Pembroke, and other Commissioners, was employed into the West; the treasure which was by this lawless project raised being come together, was a very vast sum, but it was as soon issued as levied, and served not to defray the moiety of the Court expenses; insomuch as being still necessitated, very shortly thereupon another Parliament was thought fit to be summoned, this was no sooner assembled, but the House of Commons on the tenth of May, 1626. Charged the Duke of Buckingham with the late King's death, and sent up their Charge to the Lords; the King being well acquainted therewith, comes into the Peers House, and tells them, that he could be a witness to clear the Duke in every particular of that charge, and thereupon in terror to the lower House, by his Warrant under his hand, attacheth and sendeth to prison Sir Dudley Diggs, and Sir John eliot, as those which had the managery of that affair, notwithstanding the House of Commons having the proofs and examinations in preparation against the Duke, the King to make all sure, and in arrest of farther proceedings against his chief privado, the 15 of june following in a great rage dissolves that Parliament, and on dis-robing himself, said in a very stern comportment, That it should be the last time he would ever put them on.  
And here we may take into observation, the lamentable effects of that innated duritie, that natural obstinacy and perverseness of the violent will of this most unhappy Prince, who in affront and despite of the justice of a Court of Parliament, would not suffer his own Father's death to be called to account, or any further examination thereof to be taken for clearing the Duke; But God's judgements may not be arrested, and it is he, that maugre the teeth of all humane powers, will in his own good time bring to light, and to judgement, that crying sin of Blood; and have we not seen this verified, to our amazement? the Duke shortly thereupon to have died, by the stab of a knife, with no other words or prayers in his mouth, than God's wounds I am slain; and this most unhappy Prince to have ended his days at his own Gates, by the axe of God's just judgement, and as we may say in fear and trembling, to have taken his leave and last farewell of this world with no other acknowledgement of his faults, and of those crying sins of bloodshed throughout the three Kingdoms, but that of a pharasaical justifying of himself and his innocency, insisting to his last, without any repentance or sensibility of so much innocent blood spilt through his only wilfulness, but only of one wicked 
* The Earl of STRAFFORD.  man's, having throughout the whole course of the late and lamentable contest between him and the Parliament, evermore covered over that stubbornness of his natural inclination with those false colours and delusive umbrages, of his Conscience, Constancy, and Reason, as if his Conscience, by divine appointment, had been the Master Conscience of all the Kingdom, and his Reason that ipse dixit, that must overbalance and regulate the sense and judgement of a Court of Parliament.  
And have we not seen those bold and principal instruments of his, whom he employed in all his arbitrary projects, the Earl of Strafford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the enslaving of the three Kingdoms, condemned to the block, as misleaders of their incorrigible Master, and to have taken their leaves of the world in the same pharasaical way of justifying their innocency, and without so much as one word of the repentant Publican, God be merciful to me a sinner? and yet all of them, by the seduced Malignant party held still in a kind of veneration, and I know not by what strange delusion, reputed for innocents' and martyrs; would they but look upon them as they were the actors and known fomenters of all the miseries we have suffered, yea the only engines and instruments whereby to have wound up sovereignty to the highest pitch of Tyranny, and to make their Master instead of a King over Gentlemen and Freemen, a Tyrant over slaves.  
But having brought the King and his young Queen near to the metropolis of the Kingdom, and the sickness decreasing, I shall in a short narration describe the after deportmeut of this most unfortunate prince; Instead of Prayers and humiliations to God for his great mercy, in the miraculous stay of that raging pestilence, whereby 3. 4. and 5000 weekly died that summer only in London, the Court notwithstanding was instantly in jollity, Masques, Dance, Plays, and Banquets (all in expenseful and sumptuous ostentations) were the frequent and assidual exercises of the Court; on the one side (as to devotion) the Queen had her Mass, and Masspriests, on the other side the King with his Laodicean lukewarm and fawning Prelates, in a mere formality in show of Godliness, God knows without the power thereof, and in as near a compliance one to the other, as possibly their different devotion could permit.  
And here I must not omit, neither exempt out of the scene that part which the Bishops and Prelates acted in this interlude, Comical we may call it, as to the beginning thereof, but God knows tragical enough in the close.  
The Bishops which in the former reign had for divers reasons of State been admitted to the old King's privacies, and had special Influence on his Counsels, were likewise transmitted to the favour and indulgency of this King, but more especially in reference to the Presbytery of Scotland so averse to absolute Sovereignty, so much affected by either King, (A Generation of Vipers which on any terms would have eaten the way to preferment through the entrails of either Church or State) these were the men (the better to ingratiate themselves into the King's favour) that spared not to insinuat how dangerous the Puritan party here in England was (as of a fraternity with the Presbyterians of Scotland) & would be (if not timely looked unto) to the advance of Sovereignty: apprehensions, which as they soon took fire with the father, so as much if not more with the son; hence it was that the most active of them were admitted either to his favour or Council of State, but especially Doctor Laud the Bishop of London, after Archbishop of Canterbury, a person of a very subtle and winding spirit, proud (as one raised out of the dust) haughty and imperious in his place, and as fit an instrument for the Kings turn as possibly he could choose out of the 26. Prelates.  
There was also about this time (as before is intimated) taken into the King's favour, or rather brought in by the allurement of preferment, Sir Thomas Wentworth, whom the King immediately created a Baron, and (on the decease of Weston the Treasurer) Earl of Strafford, a Gentleman of great parts and patrimony; a Commonwealths-man he had been, and one that formerly in all Parliaments as much thwarted, and withstood the arbitrary power of both Kings, as any one whatsoever; the King having won this Gentleman to be his own, bethought himself that these two (with some others of the same stamp) would be sufficient to whom to impart his grand designs, the one for Church affairs, the other for the State, but both suitable to the ends he had in hand; the last being of as high, bold, and haughty a spirit as he could possibly have picked out of all the nobility: Time will show us, and our own lamentable experience may better demonstrate, how the one in Church affairs, the other in civil administrations, behaved themselves, to the after prejudice and destruction of the three Kingdoms; But as we have already said in the end to their own ruin and their Masters.  
To leave this digression, we have left the King and Queen at the Court, let us return where we left them in their different devotions; the truth was, how little care soever there was then taken either by the King or his time-serving Prelates, of God's service and true worship, otherwise than in a formality or show of Godliness, either in the Court or throughout the Kingdom; sure we are, that the Queen's superstitious worship was specially provided for, and a sort of Locusts there were (in addition to her own chaplains) admitted the Kingdom, styled by the name of Capuchins (but cunning knaves) and for these a new Chapel was erected, with an habitation, and large maintenance allowed them, even in the face of the Court, and eye of the Kingdom; and to please the Queen, Masses and Mass Priests were frequently permitted throughout the Land, not only in a tacit connivance, but in an open way of toleration, and in contempt of God's true worship.  
We may well admit, that the ways which the King then took could not be well-pleasing to him, which was never yet pleased with an Idolatrous, mixed, and half-faced worship; or that the gaiety and wantonness of a promiscuous Court, could be maintained without an excessive charge; neither that a perfidious show and offer of a war with France in the defence of the French Protestants, would in the conclusion be well thought of either from abroad or at home, when the King during the treaty of the marriage with the Queen, on the earnest request of the princes of the Religion, had engaged himself to protect them, and to raise the siege then before the Town of R●chell, neither that feigned preparation which the King made by sea in their assistance will in time come to light, when evident it was afterwards to all the World, that in stead of defending them, they were not only slaughtered at Sea by the Kings shipping, but by plain Treachery both their Cause undone, and their forces defeated by Land; a sin, which God in his justice could not pass over unpunished, yet carried on in such a mystical way; & in that attempt on the Isle of Rea, to the loss of honour and blood of some of the bravest men of the Nation; insomuch that the World to this very day hath been held in suspense, to what Religion the King himself stood most inclined or whether the Father or the Son, which with such ardency sought the Alliance of Spain and France, (or else no where) Families, if not incestous, yet of Idolatrous and Superstitious Religions, which hath left the world in another amaze, and in a puzzle to find out others inclination, or whether to any Religion devoted, if it be rightly considered, as either Prince made and continued their secret addresses to the Apostolic see, and that his Holiness in both reigns had his Agents and Nuntios here resident (reciprocally and in interchange of the King's Agents at Rome) many clandestine conferences both with the King and Queen, and the state of the Protestant Religion here, (howsoever openly professed by both Kings) reduced to the next step of conformity with Rome; when as that sordid and base compliance of the Bishops and Court-Clergy, which if grace (more than hopes of preferment) had prevailed with them might have been a Remora or stay to either King, and to have told them plainly how dangerous it was to their well-being, if they attempted to make Religion the stalking-horse to their irregular designs, and to bethink themselves that God was not to be deluded, and how unsafe it would be for them Ludere cum sanctis; But these were the men who even from the beginning of both reigns, had only studied the inclinations of these Princes, and rather took upon them to comply and encourage them than to have withstood either of them in the least of their many irregularities, & looseness in Religion; & such was the baseness of these fawning Sycophants, that the common themes of the Court Pulpits, throughout both reigns, were purposely picked out where on to draw conclusions and doctrines of arbitrary power, which was the usual ladder most of them climbed to preferment; whence also we may observe God's judgements, both to have been shortly after poured out on the persons themselves and their functions, in their extirpation, and total irradication of them, without hopes of their restauration.  
Hitherto we have deduced the History of this unfortunate Prince to the 3d. year of his Reign; we shall now run over the rest with as much brevity as the nature of the subject will permit.  
The King at this time was in his wont condition of want, as his Father before him ever was, so would he be in the same predicament: Two millions of annual Treasure or very near, could not serve their turns, neither would it content them, though in Scotl. 50000 l. per annum was more than ever King James could possibly raise, without the assistance of the Estates assembled. We may see the difference, and what oprations change of Climates can work upon the nature of Princes coming out of poor Kingdoms into richer, and with what Conscience they could dispense the care of their own souls, to become as sponges to suck up the fruits of the poor passive people of England, gained out of the labour of their hands and sweat of their brows, when they had enough, and more than ever any of the Kings of England did raise, and in retribution of their love and loyalty towards them, as by divers manifestations may be made appear, with how many slights and wiles, with how much care, trouble and vexation of spirit, with what expense of blood and treasure did this King labour to enslave the English Nation, and to reduce the poor people (as naturalised vassals) under the bondage of his lawless will and lust? Can we make any other Comment on this subject, but that which wise men have long since observed, that these two Princes never loved the English Nation, but in an odium altissimum, had aforehand designed to oppress them, and utte rly to extinguish the memory of their ancient Freedoms? and can we imagine they intended otherwise, by the whole course of their Government? When it appears what favours, what large concessions, and with what compliance and commiseration the late King took care of the Irish Rebels, without the least retrospect how much English blood had been most barbarously spilt by them (if he were not conscious that no man was more guilty thereof than himself) surely it may well amuse the world, why he should be so pitiful and solicitous to have them spared, and to brand the Parliament with cruelty for pursuing so just a revenge. If we look Northward, and examine what Favours, Privileges, and Counties were without ask offered to be conferred on the Scots, 1641. as he went unto them, on the only conditions, that they would engage with him against the English Parliament. On these considerations, can it sink into any rational man's conception, but that he was an inexorable enemy to the Nation? kind to his own (if they would have served his turn) and an endeared Friend to those bloody Irish, and that on all opportunities his intent was to ruin and invassalate the English Nation, though he and his perished, (as they did) in the attempt.  
But to return to our relation. The King was now in the 15 year of his Reign, and notwithstanding the many ways by which he had raised no small treasure, yet was he still indigent and bare in money, the Court and the French spent it before it came in, and as to any supply by Parliament, it suited neither to the King's good liking, or his grand design; the discontinuance of Parliaments conduced more to the advance of what he intended to raise by power, than he could expect by the aid of Parliament, since he had but even then closed up all ruptures with France and Spuin; and no War in being or in expectation, and consequently no ground left him that might press or induce a Court of Parliament to be over-liberall with the purses of their Electors; yet in this exigent and straight he suddenly resolves to call a Parliament, where amongst many passages and debates, Finch the Speaker of the lower house, played his first prize, in his assidual disclosing to the King what soever past in the House; insomuch as being discovered, and on his usual moving out of his Chair and the House, he was at length withstood at the door by divers bold Gentlemen and Members of the Parliament, and enforced to keep his seat; this miscarriage was instantly made known to the King, who took it as an affront done to his own person, and presently hereupon he not only dissolves the Parliament, but commits to the Tower, Hammond and Hubbard, Knights, Long, Curreton, and some others of the Members: Neither could he be a long time pacified by the Lords of his Council (on the first hearing of this broil) but needs he would with his guard have then fallen upon them in the house (as a presage of that violence which he offered after to this Assembly in his own person;) upon the instant of this dissolution of the Parliament, he publisheth a Proclamation, prohibiting the people not so much as to talk of more Parliaments, and enjoined the Lords of his Council, on any conditions not to mention the word Parliament unto him; a lesson which they all for ten years together at least punctually observed; insomuch as all wise men then conjectured, that the Liberties of the Kingdom were then buried together in the interment of all Parliaments. Ten if not more years passed between this Parliament, and the dissolution of that quinto Maij, 1639. during this interval; the King begins roundly with all sorts of pro●ects, and to raise money both without the leaves of the Subjects, and against the known Laws of the Kingdom; privy Seals and Loans were the first which he put in execution, as a Tax (if we may so call them) that concerned not so much the Subject in general, as private, reputed moneyed men; other levies had likewise their course in their torns; and in policy not to rush in, and too hastily on the subjects propriety, he falls on the sale of the Crown lands in Pe●farm, with the old rents, or those doubled, reserved to the Exchequer; neither could all these projects, though amounting to a very vast sum, serve to defray the wastefullnesse of the Court, which indeed as to his own side, was in some proportion of moderation, yet on the Queen's side it was so excessively profuse, that I aver it on knowledge (besides her Jointure) (then newly consigned) one hundred thousand pound Per Annum sufficed not for to defray her own expenses, and confident I am, what by sales procured by her solicitations, as much more was yearly drained out of the King's purse to satisfy that nasty train of her French followers; Madam Nurse, as to her own particular, besides an expenseful way of living here, at the King's charge, was well known to have transported at several times into France 100000 pound, in good gold; and certain it is, that that Pigmy Mountebank (Montague) the Queen's dancing Master, not worth one groat at his coming over, enriched himself to the least value of 40000 pound; it would be wearisome to recount what sums her Priests and Jesuits, Musicians, Fiddlers, and others of her retinue got and amassed by her only suit to the King, who then denied her nothing that she desired; for it is most true, that before she attained the age of twenty years, she began of a Pupil to be the King's Regent, and the after-story will assure it, she became a fatal participant with him in most of his Counsels, and his directrix in the Government, but after her Mother's arrival both of them to have gained an interest in his inmost secrets and principal transactions of State; an evident truth, and more than stood with the King's honour, much less than suited with the welfare of the Nation.  
These prodigal expenses at Court could not choose but impoverish the King's exchequer, whether very little of the Royal Revenue arrived, as commonly prevented aforehand by assignations to one or other of the Courtiers, hence followed the multiplicity of Monopolies, the engrossing of all the Powder into the King's store, and that to be no otherwise vendible but at double rates, to the former and usual prizes; In order to these followed the preemption of all Tobacoes, to the extreme beggering of the adventurers and planters in the West-Indian Islands; Coat and Conduct money had likewise its turn, and by degrees the King's Patents incircuited and extended to Salt, Butter, Soap, Leather, Wine, Sugar, Alum, Sea-coal, Malt, Cards and Dice, and what not.  
In order to these, that notable project of shipmoney, a device of Finches invention, and shaped for the nonce suitable to the King's designs, it extenden to such a latitude, as that by this one illegal power he might raise moneys in what proportion he would, where and when he pleased, without Parliaments, and so was it stated by the terror which that fluttering bird Finch impressed on the judges to declare it legal, by their extrajudicial sentences, though (for their honour be it spoken) three of them as Crook, Hutton, and Denham withstood it as a most illegal and unheard-of taxation against and destructive to the fundamental Laws of the Land, and Liberties of the People.  
We shall now pass it over, though it was an invention which of itself would require a story not unworthy to be left to posterity; how ever, as long as it was on foot the King made use of it to the purpose, and in two if not three years whilst it was put in practice, raised not so little at 1000000 of pounds.  
It is without question that what by monopolies, the inhancing of the Customs and Rate Books, Knighthood money, and projects of this nature, as the Fines in the Star-Chamber, High Commission, and depopulations, with the sale of the Crown Lands, besides Subsidies, and the Royal standing Revenue, with divers other incomes most oppressive to the people, the King within the space of ten or twelve years raised more Treasure than any two of his Predecessors in forty years, and yet none of our Kings had less occasion, and this King more wanting, as having for twelve years together no wars considerable, neither any in expectation, more than such as wilfully and most unjustly he undertook about the 15th. year of his reign against the Scots, and that to no other end, but to advance his grand design of invassalating the 3. Kingdoms, as hereafter more evidently may be made to appear.  
The King having thus far waded into the depth of his arbitrary strains, to the great regret of the people, and having for ten or twelve years together laid aside all thoughts of making use of Parliament, which might control so many of his illegal and irregular exactions, in farther advance of his grand design, both to rule, and raise money at will and pleasure having by so long a tract of time taught the people to forget Parliaments, or not to hope for them, and as he conceived, well to have forwarded his greater work by the experience he had made of the passiveness both of his English and Irish Subjects, by the activity of his chief Instruments, Strafford, Canterbury, and Cottington, which principally then carried on the design in either Kingdom, both in the Church and State, which by time and degrees had so amated the spirits of the people, as they seemed patiently to bear (though unwillingly, and not without some public murmuration) what loads might in the future be laid upon them, but evermore (in the midst of their resentments) to cast the odium of their oppressions rather on the King's ministers than on himself, with the retention of a reverend esteem towards him, as the least author of their sufferings, when as himself alone was principal, which invited him with the more boldness, and less fear, to the perfecting and speedy accomplishment of his main design.  
We may in the way of our relation avouch it, and that for truth, that both the Father and the Son were the most careless Courtiers of their people of any of our Kings, and as regardless of the love and reverend esteem the universal Nation carried towards them; an inexcusable error, and shows out unto us what in probability were and would be the issues of their Ingratitude. We all know, that popularity in private persons, and the applause of the people, are the ingredients of suspicion, and an error which all wise and cunning Statists shun and avoid, as tending to obscure the worth and dignity of their Master, but in Princes it is a Virtue, that most of all other their deportments takes most and soon in the people's affections; we may boldly say it, that neither of these two Princes were ever guilty of that attractive Virtue, only it hath been since observed, that at his coming out of Scotl. 1641. he was very prodigal in putting off his hat, as he passed the streets.  
But omitting Paraphrases, we have but even now said it, that as to the Queen's side in Court it was excessively profuse, the Kings more moderate; yet not so frugal, but that there were a sort about his person to whom he participated his secrets, and committed the managery of his arbitrary work, which did sufficiently lick their fingers: We shall omit the Duke, for he died within two years of the King's access, Digby and Cottington, which in the former reign had laid the foundations of their after greatness; but they which in this reign, (and in the midst of the King's necessities) spent lavishly, lived at high rates, and amassed most, were Weston the Treasurer, Manchester, Strafford, Goring, and the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, neither did the farmers of the Customs go away empty handed, yet we may see, that as all or most of these had a time of getting and filching from the Crown, so likewise did their Master in the end administer a sad occasion to rid most of them of their illgotten gains.  
Having thus brought the King to the 15th. year of his most unhappy reign, and showed out by what means, ways and instruments he raised monies to supply his necessities, and prodigallities of the Court; what hitherto he acted, was in calm and peaceable times, though not without murmuration; We shall anoncome to the hostile, that fatal and sanguinary part of his unfortunate reign. He had hitherto led on his design in a foregame, yet still in his wont way of want, the Queen-mother arriving, holp on his expenses, Strafford the Archbishop, and Cotington, as the King's prime agents had fitted all necessaries in a readiness; both the English and Irish patient in what formerly they had suffered, and ready to be ridden and spurred to the quick; the mode of the French Government being still in the eye of the King's design (as left unto him by his Father's legacy) and now again revived and quickened by the Queen Mother's instigation, a Lady fatal to all places wheresoever she resided; Strafford having raised in Ireland an Army of Papists, to help on, and at a deah lift: and about this time there were divers Commissions issued out to certain Lords and Gentlemen, with power to impose new and unheard▪ of Imposts on all the commodities of the Land, and in addition to these, Commissions were granted to the Earl of Arundel to take the military charge of the Northern parts into his hands, another to the Earl of Worcester to raise an army of Papists in Wales, as it is well known, to master the West marches & to assist the Irish Army landing at Milford as need should require; and the Precedent my Lord of Bridgewater commanded to wave that place for his Majesty's special service, a person as it seems, that was too honest to be wrought upon: At the same time his Lordship Cottington was likewise made Lord Warden of the Tower, with authority to take in Soldiers, and to fortify that piece, which accordingly was put in execution, and the White-Tower planted with many great Ordnance, with their mouths forced against the City, to the great amazement of the Citizens and the whole Kingdom. What the King meant or intended by these irregular and prodigious acts of his, let the most wilful Malignant make his own judgement, when as the whole Kingdom was never in a greater calm of peace, loyalty and quietness, or in any appearance of insurrection. The Excise at that instant was likewise in agitation, and the very same house, wherein now that office is erected in Broadstreet taken by Cottington to the same purpose, and Strafford much about that time dispatched into Ireland, there to call a Parliament for assistance in relation to the intended Scotch War, where he musters a new the Irish army, gets four Subsidies, & presently returns for Engl. where a Parl. for the same end was likewise summoned; not any thing now stood as Remora, in the way of the King's great design, but those refractory Scots, this was the block that in the first place must be removed; to begin this work of darkness, first fomented by the Bishops, especially Canterbury here, and that pragmattick Prelate of Scotland, Maxwell; with Hamilton and Traquair on the by. These two assisted by Strafford, had the whole managery of that affair.  
We must not too much insist on every particular, this Scotch work alone requiring a volume to derive it from its first fountain and original, as a project of the old Kings, to introduce the Episcopal power and Church Government there conformable to that of England, and to suppress or master that of the Kirk & Presbyterian power, as the only obstruction to absolute Sovereignty.  
God's providence and his ways are insearchable, and the carriage of this work of darkness is very remarkable, it hath left the world in a maze how the King's designs by this Scotch enterprise should turn and overthrow the whole frame and fabric of all his former projections, and of so fair a foregame, so to bring it about, as on the very nick of the accomplishment, to lose both it, his reputation and life, and at a time when all wise men had given the freedoms of the English nation utterly lost, and merely by the wilfulness of his own irregular motions, more beloved, reverenced and obeyed, than any of his Predecessors.  
The state of the three Kingdoms, as abovesaid, but a little before this Scotch enterprise (as to a any War from abroad, mutinies and insurrections at home) was well known to be in as great a calm of Peace and quietness as in any reign since the Conquest, the subject passive, loyal and obedient to the Kings will and pleasure, himself at peace and amity with all his Allies, Confederates, and Neighbour-Princes; nothing could be Imagined to have troubled him but his own ambition, and those restless appetites of his which would not suffer him to enjoy content in the midst of prosperity, and to rest satisfied in the fruition of more abundance than ever any King of England attained unto; In this requiem (could he have seen it) was his soul restless, and as we may of truth say, by no instigation more troubled than by hers which had the honour of his Bed; an unhappy unquietness which his principal privadoes rather added fuel to the fire thereof than water to quench it; they had studied his inclination, which was the rule they walked by, not how to apply wholesome medicines to cure the raging malady of his ambition, which by none was more cherished than by the Bishops and his formal clergy, in the way wherein his will and lust had predominance over his reason, such as had not only taken the same fiery infection, but as much laboured therein, as himself, whose function and office (if grace had guided them) it properly was rather to have applied antidotes than venom to their Master's disease, and to have told him plainly where the fault lay.  
But to return to the relation of this Scotch enterprise; the King as before is intimated, through mere necessity was induced to call a Parliament (not to reform abuses crept into the Commonwealth (better it may be said violently introduced through his ill Government and discontinuance of Parliaments, the ancient remedies of public grievances) but to supply his own wants in reference to the war intended; the King's wants being more pressing than ever, the servants of his own side in Court, a good space before debarred of their Wages, purposely to scrape up moneys towards this needless War; the Queen's Servants on the other side were notwithstanding exactly paid.  
It would be superfluous and impertinent to describe the whole story of this design, so obvious and generally known to all the Kingdom; how first this affair was carried on by sending a new Litturgy to EDINBURGH, as an experiment how the Scots would swallow the first bait to their enthraldom; how there the Litturgy was resented, and with what after disgusts it was not only refused but detested, How that Traquire and Hamilton one after the other were Commissioned with power & instructions to enforce their conformity; what Flames, Invectives, and Comments flew here abroad of the Bishops penning of their Rebellion; how again the Scots stood upon their punctillioes, in defence of themselves and their Covenant against this innovation; how many Petitions and Messages passed between them and the King; how at last on dispute between their Commissioners and his Majesties, at their first Treaty in the North, and the averseness of the King's soldiers to embrace the quarrel, the King granted them his royal Pascification, and sent them home well satisfied; how again on his Majesty's return, his act of Pascification was here in Court resented, by the Queen and the Bishops, and with what Language the King was affronted to have brought home a dishonourable Peace, and obstructive to his own designs; how then this needless and wilful quarrel was revived, and the King's Pacification vilified and burnt by the hands of the common Hangman, and the King easily brought on anew to muster a second Army, to subdue those stubborn and rebellious Scots, as generally then, especially by the Bishops they were styled: when as by the Freequarter of his first Army, most parts of the County of York were beggared and the Soldiery unpaid, how the Parliament and generally the people abhorred this war, and refused to contribute towards it, how thereupon quinto Maij 1649. it was suddenly dissolved, how on the very same day the Cabinet Council sat in close consultation at White-Hall how to raise moneys to defray the charge of this second war, how that Paper (the results of that Council) after (styled, The Juncto) came to be preserved by the means of Sir Henry Vane the younger, and Mr. Pym, who imparted it the ensuing Parliament, as the star which guided them to know the authors and projectors of this & other wilful designs; what preparations the Scots made to defend themselves, and how with a puissant Army they first entered the Kingdom under the Command of Lesley, who made his way by force, with some loss of blood on both sides at Newburn, and after that marched peaceably to Newcastle, which he fortified, and from thence sent a Petition in the name of the whole Nation to the King, that their cause might be heard, before more blood should be drawn, which before was utterly denied them, with contemptuous acerbity, The particulars whereof shall God willing in all sincerity be anon amply declared, together with such discoveries as are not yet publicly known, and so particularly manifested in many points, as in the following Reply and Animadversions may appear, both for the general satisfaction, and such Royalists to whom I have heartily addressed them, as well for their own conversion, as also in vindication and farther manifestation of Truth, and to the everlasting honour of this Parliament, whom God hath visibly enabled with courage both to foresee and withstand the violences of a Prince, who in all his Expresses, Protestations, and overtures for Peace and Accommodation with the Parliament, were inseparably accompanied with dissemble, fraud, wiles and reservations, may be further manifested by the evident proofs of his Letters under his own hand writing, his Commissions, Missives, and many other authentic Testimonies, though many of them noted, and long since exposed and set out to the world, and answered in the Parliaments Declarations, especially manifested in that of No more Addresses; yet not so vulgarly seen, as they may be on a more exact view, and a diligent perusal, and comparing the King's public expresses with his private practices, as may apparently be seen by any that will but take the pains either to read them in his own Character, or mine.  
Whence ariseth the great wonder of the times, how, and with what face, either the King himself living should with such boldness stand on his justification, or that any since his death (endued with common sense and reason) can have the Impudence to defend him dead, who living so wilfully, fraudulently, and obstinately persevered in pursuance of his own lustful and pernicious designs, in invassalating the poor people, which, until himself gave, and prosecuted the occasion of their falling from him, and were enforced to withstand his violent courses, was more beloved, honoured, and obeyed than any of our Kings. A Prince that raised and wasted more Treasure, wilfully spilt more Innocent blood, devasted more the lands and habitations of his Subjects, ruined more families, and more embroiled three flourishing Kingdoms, than all of his Progenitors; and yet for all these his prodigious cruelties and misdemeanours to be enshrined (dead) for a martyr, both alive and dead adored for a Saint.  
We shall now close up the first part of our Breviary, as it relates to his reign, & designs before he erected his Standard, the manner & managery of the hostile part of his life (though both long since sufficiently known, and felt by many thousands of the poor innocent people of three Kingdoms, yet for avoiding of repetitions and some other motives) I have taken the leave to insert a short description thereof in the subsequent reply; leaving out the manner of his arraignment by his Judges, all of them to be adjudged a new at the great Tribnnall of the King of Kings, whether the one (as his Vicegerent) hath ruled and judged the people committed to his protection for their defence, and hath dealt uprightly with them, or not, and whether the others (as ordained by divine providence to do justice on him for his cruelties) have condemned this King for his Tyranny and unrighteous dealing with three nations, to whose justice, in fear and trembling we must all submit.  
Where we may with good reason make this Quaere, Whether the cutting off of our bloody and bloodthirsty Prince, together with the exclusion of his whole posterity, can be a sufficient expiation in the eye of heaven, for the blood of a million of poor innocent souls slaughtered for the satiating of one Princes lustful will and pleasure, since he that reputes not hath said it, that the Land shall not be cleansed until the blood of one murderer be shed, this we may say and safely believe, that Almighty God (for the sins of the Nations) in his wrath and just indignation, sent this most unhappy King (as his rod of judgement) to reign over us, and in his justice hath likewise burnt it, and brought that fatal end upon him, and his Father's house, according to his own and often Imprecations: We shall conclude this first scene of our Narrative with the Kingdom's fate:  
Iratus Deus dedit iis Regem.   

The Author's reply to an invective Remonstrance against the Parliament and present Government, wherein the whole managery of the late War is exactly described.  
SIR,  
HAving diligently perused the replication you sent me, I perceive that you are no changeling, but one and the self same man in your opinion, both in justifying the late King's Actions, and in aspersing the Parliament with raising the late War against him, as a premeditated Plot long since hatched by a factious party amongst them, and to change the Government, and pull up Monarchy and Episcopacy by the roots; Strange Chimeras indeed, that dropped lately out of the Clouds and Vapours of your own and your parties gyddy-braines; neither do you rest there, but you proceed to charge those which now sit at Westminster with many other fowl Calumnies; to all which in their proper place I shall not fail to give you a particular answer; though I could have wished, that you had fixed your cogitations on some other subject suitable to truth, and the ingenuity you pretend unto, and not after ten years' revolution of time to fall flat on a mere suggestion of your own without any other proof than a bare allegatiou, and that so destitute of possibility, either of thought or intent in the Parliament to effect, as that the affirmation seems to me a mere malicious fiction of your own rather than a simple verity, and so unbecoming a Gentleman of your quality, as that in plainness I take the boldness to tell you, you might on better reason with Copernicus his Disciples, have averred another world to be in the Moon, th●n to have devised and broached so vain and senseless an untruth; But since 'tis more of your will than chance, to fall on so groundless a fable and on a theme so old and overworn; might I have advised, you should have turned your tone (which would have been much more for your honour) and averred, that the King, even from the very first entrance of his reign (answerable to his Father's instructions) began his arbitrary work, and in pursuance thereof had laid sundry destructive and dark plots, how to invassalate the three Nations, and by degrees to reduce them all under one Entire, arbitrary and absolute sovereignty; and when they took not the effect he desired, being discovered and opposed by this Parliament, then to set up his Standard and array the poor people against themselves, which never any King of England durst attempt, otherwise than by public consent, and against a foreign enemy, and at last to wage open Narre against his own subjects, and the representative of the Nation, Plundering, Fyring, and desolating the Kingdom to the utmost of his power; had you avouched thus much, you had hit on the right, and showed yourself both a friend to truth and your Country; but it seems you still stand close to your old destructive principles, as at first you sided with the King living, so dead you persist to make good his cause, whether right or wrong it mattered not much, with most of your party, the truth is, how good or bad soever his cause was, it was the bare name of a King and hopes of preferment which drew your Iron into the field, and 'tis the very same at present which invites all of you to flatter and soothe up yourselves with the empty name of Loyalty to bring in the new Crowned King of Scots on the old score, without looking to the preservation of the Liberty of your Country, and proprieties of your own posterity and the sad consequence thereof, as if the public interest ought to be given up, for the fulfilling of your desires, and of one man's wilful pleasure, a strange dotage that hath possessed you, and more strange it is, that you should now fall a fresh on a subject that loathes any man of ingenuity to think on it, much more to treat on a theme so stale, were it but in reference to the memory of him who is at rest: But since I find that a kind of confidence possesses your intellectuals, that all your allegations are unanswerable, and that your provocations amounts to a challenge, the fault must be yours not mine, If in vindication of truth, I lay open the grossness of all your errors, in the manifestation of his which with such eagerness and confidence you think yourself able to defend being forced through your importunity, and the nature of the task you put upon me, to run over the whole progress and managery of all the late King's designs, visible and long since very well known to all men of common understanding; though I confess, I do not much marvel that yourself (amongst the rest of the facile belief) have been deceived by the King's wonted and plausible protestations, especially as he handled the matter, in the cunning and umbragious carrying on of all his close and hidden designs: for I very well know many knowing▪ Gentleman which have had a long conflict with themselves, what judgement to make on the first difference arising between the King and Parliament, his Majesty so often protesting, how much he intended the welfare of all his subjects, how unwilling to imbrue the Kingdom with blood, how willing to embrace and conserve the peace of the Land, how resolved to maintain the true Protestant Religion, how careful and studious to uphold the Laws and Liberties of the People, how ready to preserve inviolable the privileges of Parliaments, and how forward to supply his distressed Protestant Subjects in Ireland; all which (as a Copy of his counterfeit Countenance) he so often protested, and confirmed with Imprecations, that truly the spirits of many wise men were amazed and a long time stood staggering what to be. lief in the case, and doubtful whether the King's cause or the Parliaments was most just, which party gave the first offence, which began the War, and of this number I confess myself to be one, which stood sometimes diffident in a controversy so variously attested; but having made a diligent search into all the passages, and transactions between both parties, both from before the Sword was drawn, and after to the year 1645, when the King's Cabinet Letters were taken at Naseby, and other manifests elsewhere, I then began to bethink myself (that which before I only admitted in a kind of Ambitious belief) that the Parliament had then to deal with a King (howsoever heretofore valued as a Prince of no deep reach) who was not to seek without the help and influence of a malicious Council) to play his own part, I shall not say better, but more dextrous and cunningly for his own ends, and to the reducing of the Kingdoms under his absolute power, than any of those could direct him, whom he most trusted with the mannagery of his designs and secrets; truly, Sir, on that discovery (on the publishing of his Letters) let me tell you there were many thousands which fell off, and from the opinion they held of his integrity and the justice of his Cause, it being in the next degree to a miracle that after so full a disclosure of the Kings juggle and dissemble there should any remain to take his part, and the wonder is the more remarkable that since his death any man should believe him to be a Martyr, but whom God hardens they shall be hardened, let the Charmer Charm never so wisely some will be deaf and diffident of visible truths never so clearly manifested, of which number that you should perceveere to make one, as by your sundry invectives it appears, surely it hath not a little troubled me, to see the excrescencies of your inveterate malignancy to break out even to obstinacy, and so long to have blinded your judgement, from discerning of truth from falsehood, and to have bard you from the right use of distinguishing between reason well weighed, and fraud umbrated and attested, with the usual artifices of the royal protestations, a faculty (by your favour) too too common with the King and those acquaint penmen which attended him; with plausible Declarations, frequently sent abroad, ad faciendum populum, to catch fools, and as the King's usual phrase was to undeceive the people, (prepossessed with the reality of the Parliaments Remonstrances) when in truth the King's ends were no other than to decoy the poor credulous Animals into an opinion of his good meaning towards them, when he intended them most harm, as we find it evident in the silly devises and acquaint impresses of his money coined at Oxford, pretending that he took up arms in defence of the Protestant Religion, the Laws and Liberties of the People, and the Privileges of Parliament, when the direct contrary appeared by all his Actions; and when as it was manifest, that before he began to quarrel with the Scots, he tacitly intended, and even then designed to suppress Parliaments, or so to qualify them, that they should be only useful to his own ends, not to the people, and likewise to invade the Liberties of the subject, & adulterate the true Protestant Religion with the superstitious mixture of Popery, as it manifestly appeared by his admittance of a Jesuitical crew into his own Court, & Cappuchins at Somerset-house with large maintenance, even in the face of the Court, and eye of the Kingdom, with a general connivance, amounting to a tacit toleration to all Papists, together with idolatrous Masses, both in his own house permitted, andused throughout the Kingdom in most Papists houses without control, & in imitation of Solomon, after that by his Wives he was turned Idolater, to set up the abomination of 
* ●1 Kings 11. 4, 5, 6, 7.  Ashteroth, even in the face of Jerusalem: And as to his invading of the Libertyes of the people, with his many other oppressions and irregularities, we all know, and have good cause to remember them.  
The Breviary of his Life and unfortunate Reign, manifestly declares as to his intent of suppressing of Parliaments, and future oppression of the people, the observations I intent to send you, with his own Letters sufficiently demonstrates, & by whose motion and Counsels those exorbitances were first by his own Father's Instructions pursued, found in his Cabinet at Theobalds' immediately after his departure, and whereof one was to quit himself by degrees of all Parliaments, as too bold Copartners in the Government with their Kings, & to run the future course of his government answerable to that of France; and to verify this I shall point you to King James his own Speech in open Parliament, 1609. March 21. Where you may see what preparations he had provided for his Successor to rule by: parallelling himself with God who he saith, Hath power to create or destroy, make, or un make at his pleasure, to give life, or send death, to judge all, and to be judged or to be accountable to none, to raise low things, and to make high things low at pleasure, and to God are both Soul and Body due; the like power, saith this King, have Kings, they make and unmake their Subjects, they have power of raising and casting down, of life and death, judges over all their Subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God alone, they have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and to make of their Subjects like men at Chess, a pawn to take a Bishop, or a Knight, and to cry up and down their Subjects, as they do their money.  
Whence you may observe this King's Principles, which in the Speech itself every where extant you may find, that even this King, whom the world styled the Platonical King, and was reputed a pious Prince, took the hint of his tyrannical principles from a 
* Montague.  Bishop, who in the very face and audience of a Court of Parliament, preached all these fine arbitrary doctrines, and yet in the Speech itself, fol. quarto, you shall find the King defends him: Hence you way perceive by whose counsels the late King steered all the course of his government after his accession to the Crown, with the reason of his seldom calling of Parliaments, and his often dissolving of such as he did call without their due effects. I shall now faithfully relate the whole progress of the War, and by what female advice he was directed to the reducing of all the three Kingdoms under his absolute power, and for your better satisfaction shall by the way present you with the original cause of his hatred against this Parl. and by what strange means it was summoned, and at a time when all wise men had given all Parliaments for lost, which although long since, and by many more able pens than mine have been sufficiently manifested to the world, yet for your sake, I shall adventure to present them a new, as having little more in addition to the elabourate pains of others, than in some particulars which I find not as yet produced to the light of the world: Briefly then, It is a known truth that the King in that his unnecessary raising of a war against the SCOTS, and through the prodigality of the Court, especially the petulancy and lavishness of the Queen's side, had so exceedingly exhausted both his Exchequer and Credit, and reduced himself to that extreme Indigence, that he knew not whither to turn himself, neither (as in the Breviary of his Reign is exactly laid down) could that great head-piece, & the grand Master for carrying on of all his Arbitrary work, show him how to disentangle himself out of that harle, wherein his own wilful Inclinations had encumbered him: We all know, that the King on the entrance of the Scots at Newborne, in August 1640. took a posting journey Northward to his Army, Strafford being Commissioned General in the room of the Earl of Northumberland, whither they were no sooner arrived, but they found the Soldiery in little better than mutiny for want of their pay; the whole army then lying on Freequarter on the County of York, and the King without so much money as would pay half a Regiment, the Scots possessed of the Town of Newcastle, the Nobility having been exhausted in their attendance the Summer before, yet to show their loyalty, they again repair to York; amongst the rest, the Earls of Hartford and Essex in their journey take an occasion by the way to address themselves to the Queen, to whom they declare the sad condition wherein both the King and Kingdom were then reduced, and that they saw no possible means, other than a Parliament, whereby to repair the State, relieve the King, and piece up the rents and breaches between both Nations; on this expostulation they prevailed with the Queen to write her Letters to his Majesty, to move him to condescend to the summons of this Parliament, the mention whereof they very well knew without such a mediatrix would be very displeasing unto him; these Lords being thus provided with her Majesty's Letters, repair to York, and presented them to the King, and upon consultation with the rest of the Lords then attending his Majesty, five and twenty of them join in a Petition to that purpose: The Scots likewise, and 200 Gentlemen of the County of York concurring in the same suit for a present summons of a Parliament. Thus was his Majesty (as I may say) beleaguered on all hands, not anyone but Strafford dissenting; in the end, what between the King's urgent necessities, and a concurrency of Petitions, together with the Queen's Letters (which weighed most with the King) was this Parliament contrary to the expectation of all men, produced, to the admiration of the Kingdom, though against the King's express vow, taken at the putting off his robes (as before is mentioned) when he dissolved his second Parliament, and in a contemptuous deportment, threw them from him, protesting that it should be the last time of their putting off or on: Hence we may discern through what difficulties and straits this Parliament took its beginning, we may well say, by God's special providence, and by hers principally as the instrumental cause thereof, which soon after was its greatest Enemy, and not by the King's choice and inclination, as it is shamefully averred in his Pourtraicture, whereas, the bare name and mention of a Parliament was well known to be odious unto him, and the very motion of calling any more prohibited, by his own express charge to all of his Council of State, as that which he foresaw would be the only impediment to the accomplishment of all his arbitrary designs so merely brought to their ends, but the summer before he waged the first war against his native subjects the Scots, an enterprise which the World knows was the only Remora that checked and choked all his projections in the maturity of their birth, which to recover on sight, and his sense of the Parliaments proceedings he soon found he had no other way left him but by open War and force to suppress them, the mannagery whereof I shall now briefly present unto you.  
The Parliament had its Summons from York (as all the Kingdom knows) and the third of November 1640. sat down at Westminster, where according to the usual Ceremonies, the King in his own person, in a set speech made a very gracious protestation, viz. That he was fully resolved to put himself wholly on the love of his People and Parliament, which if it proved not prosperous and a happy Parliament the fault should be none of his, and that he was fully determined to commit the reformation of all things amiss to their regulation. A profession which both took much with the House and all the Kingdom, which had he been pleased to have performed, and to have made good his word, in not protecting the many delinquents, questioned within a few months after the Parliaments first sitting down, as with justice, honour, and his Coronation oath he was obliged, and in reference to his own profit he might very well have forborn, such tragical issues could never have befallen himself and the 3. Kingdoms: but having then entertained other designs, and perceiving the Parliament to fly high, and at his chief Ministers and woork-masters of his former arbitrary projects, and on those which had fomented that unnecessary War against the Scots, as the Earl of Straf ford and the Archbishop (principally) the Prelates and dissolute Clergy, most of the judges and the Farmers of the Customs, (not for common faults, but very high misdemeanours) the King to cross them, most ignobly and against the justice of the Kingdom, not only provoked, but openly showed himself both a defender and protector of their Delinquencies, and upon the distaste he took on the commitment of Strafford, was instantly known to have laid sundry plots and practices, how he might dissolve the Parliament, or utterly to destroy it, which the Parliament perceiving, and that the Queen under colour of accompanying the Princess Mary into Holland, was sent thither with the Crown Jewels to buy Arms, and procure forces to be sent him, and Digby employed to the same purpose; whereupon in prevention of the storm which they evidently then saw was like to fall on themselves and the Kingdom from beyond sea, they moved his Majesty that the Kingdom might be put into a posture of defence, and the militia deposited in such hands, as they might confide in, which he utterly refused to grant them as inseparables to the Crown (as he alleged) he was resolved to keep solely in his own power; The Parliament in answer to this, insist, That the King's power therein, by the Law of the Land, was only fiduciary, always in reference to trust, & the public good & safety of the Kingdom; hence the contest by degrees grew to a separation, and in furtherance of the dispute, he also denied the house to disband the Irish Army, raised long before by Strafford, and composed of Papists, a storm which could not otherwise be expected but would (if not timely prevented) fall on them from Ireland, whereof the 
* Vide the Juncto.  Juncto at their very first sitting down had sufficiently informed them out of strafford's own mouth for what use and end that Army was raised, viz. where he tells the King, you have an Army in IRELAND to reduce this Kingdom, when it was manifestly known to the world, that it never was in a greater calm of peace and quietness, and the universal people in a more absolute obedience, and as ready to be ridden as any slaves under the Grand Signior.  
During this conflict, the King would needs take a journey into Scotland, notwithstanding the House by sundry petitions had earnestly moved him, either to lay it aside, or at least for some time to retard it, (but howsoever the King carried on his plots & intentions in the dark, & with as much cunning as possibly could be devised) yet they had then good reason to suspect, that his journey Northward was to some other end, than in leaving them to visit his Scotch Parliament, as it after proved; but on he would for Scotland, and before he took his journey, in a seeming providence to disburden the Kingdom of the charge of the Scotch Army, he first pressed the house to disband (with all their expedition) that Army, and to pay pay that of his own raising in the North, but not a word of disbanding it; upon this motion the House took it into their serious consideration (apprehending it for a provident, careful, and timely motion of the Kings) and thereupon bethought themselves, how first to disband and quit the Kingdom of the Scots until Mr. Stroude standing up, told the Speaker, That they ought not in such haste to depart with the Scotch Army, lest the sons of Zerviah (in their absence) would be too hard for them, this speech the house soon apprehended, and instantly resolved not to disband the one without the other army, which the King perceiving, & being daily pressed with Petitions of the Officers of his own Army for their pay, and himself not possibly able to content them, as also, that 25000 l. per mensem, allowed to the Scots Army, with 300000 l. by way of brotherly love given them by the Parliament in compensation of their losses through the King's needless and unnecessary molesting them, during the two Summers before, amounted in the total to so vast a sum, as that neither himself was able to contribute a groat, or the Parliament otherwise to discharge, but by borrowing it on the Public Faith.  
It would amaze those which are happily ignorant of the managery of this work, if I should tell them in what extremity of want the King was then reduced, and how he durst adventure to struggle, and after to trip up the heels of a Court of Parliament, which, without the least upraiding him with his profusions, and irregular Regality were not only willing and ready to pay all those vast scores of debts contracted through his own wilful misgovernment, but then had it in agitation, how to improve his Revenues, and to enable him to live of himself without squeezing his Subjects, in honour, splendour and plenty beyond any of his Progenitors as it is well known to many of his own party who were of that Committee, 
* Sir John Broke, Sir Ralph Hopton, Mr. Partridge, and Mr. Green, were of that Committee.  touching the improving of an annual revenue to be settled upon him by act of Parliament, out of one particular, the Customs amounting to 400000 li. per annum, proposed by old Mr. Turner the Farmer of the Allom works, and the same so much forwarded, that it was committed by Votes of the Parliament, to a select number of Members, to be considered, and shortly after was stated to a proportion of 200000 l. more per annum than ever he received out of the great and petty farms, but that the world may know the wilfulness of this King, after that he was gone from the Parliament, and had erected his Standard at Nottingham, he sent word by Master Levison by name, and one of his Bedchamber, to Turner, That if ever he meddled with the Parliament about that business thenceforth, not to look him in the face; whence it evidently appears, that he meant not to take any thing of the Parliament by way of gift, having it in design to take what he pleased, as power should enable him. God knows I send you no Fables, but shall willingly be accountable of any thing which you shall find herein inserted, if it suit not with the naked truth and sincerity of him, who would not that yourself and so many of the English Nation should be any longer deluded and flammed with untruths, and nursed up in a belief of want of the Parliaments good and loyal intentions towards him, until he had wilfully and desperately made himself uncapable of the love and loyalty of his people; and such was the ingratitude of this unhappy King, for proof whereof amongst many instances that I could present, and of his careless paying where he borrowed, and ruining of many of his servants, let this one suffice of Mr. Turner, tow hom he owed no small sums, promised much and often, as he did to many others, but performed nothing, when it was the least thought of his heart; the after-story, as a known truth, will both show forth his ingratitude, and the extremity of his want, with those sordid shifts he was put unto, both at the sitting down of this Parliament and long before, when the poor old man petitioned him for the nomination of a Baron, which is most true, that the King granted him without scrupie, provided he named a Gent. & of worth; in short, it was my Lord Capel, and he was to give him in ready money, 10000 l. but the King sending for the old man, told him of his want, and that he would gratify him otherwise with double that sum; so the King as it is well known flattered the good old man out of his money, which was presently given to the Queen Mother for her Transportation hence into Germany, and the old Gentleman left to seek his bread, and to die a very poor man; many instances of this kind I could relate, but to return to our relation: the Parliament than moved the City for the loan of so much present money as might serve to discharge the arrears due to both Armies, which the Citizens denied, unless an act might pass for the Parliaments sitting during pleasure; the Citizens well remembering the King's wont and sudden dissolving of all the Parliaments of his Reign.  
The King then finding where the Remora lay, readily past that bill in relation to his own debt, which hath been since both by himself and his party so much magnified for an Act of Grace surpassing all of his Progenitors, and shortly thereupon takes his journey towards Scotland, which considering his own hidden designs, was chosen in so fit a conjuncture of time, as that he overtook the Scotch Army in their march before they passed the borders, where what overtures he made to the Commanders to join with him against the Parliament, best appears by the notice thereof given and sent by them to the Parliament and their own Commissioners here then residing The King then finding that neither the English or Scotch Armies would be wrought upon, answerable to his designs, posts to Edinburgh, where he very well understood, that to keep the Scots quiet, necessarily he should be compelled to give that Parliament all the content they desired, as 'tis maifestly known he did in all things they demanded, and in many Acts of Grace, which to the English Parliament he utterly denied, and stood upon even to the last, as the Militia, the choice of their Admiral, Chancellor, Judges, etc.  
During the King's abode in Scotland, which was near upon four months, it is well known the Irish Rebellion broke forth in October 1641. and that rising authorised under the great Seal of Scotland, as both the Rebels themselves averred, and that attested by divers witnesses of credit, which had seen it under Seal: the Parliament here at that time had a recess, only so many of the Members as might keep up the reputation of a Parliament resided at Westminster, the rest were retired unto their habitations until November following, when by order of the Houses they were all to re-assemble, in the mean time, whilst most of the Lords and Commons were in the Country happened that Rebellion; the Parliament by this time and at their coming together, had to their old, a new work cut out to their hands, what the King could not accomplish either in England or Scotland, by the way of insurrections and disturbances in both those Kingdoms, he had forelaid the way to do it in Ireland, howsoever grossly palliated and denied in his Pourtracture, yet so suspicious of fowl play, as that on a right understanding of the mannagery of the peace, and the sly carrying on of the whole business, between himself and the marquis of Ormond, (to be seen in his own Letters) makes it plain that he had a perfidious hand therein.  
Now as to his preparations from France and Holland, wherewith to Invade the Parliament, its manifest he had then in readiness a very considerable proportion of all sorts of ammunition, and many men, at least in expectation, to be sent him at a call.  
About the beginning of December following the King (having (as he conceived) made sure work with the Scots) comes to London, where at his first coming to the House, he makes open profession, what content he had given to his Scotch Parliament, even to a kind of ostentation, and as to this Parliament some dislikes he was pleased to take against them for that in his absence they had no better forwarded their work; and as to his reception in the City it was magnificent, and as it seemed very well pleasing to himself, sure it was to the people and all the spectators, which suspected nothing of his ill meaning towards the Parliament.  
The King by this time having been at home much about 20 days had a new and another kind of game to play than that of merriment, he found that the Parliament was then much distracted (as good reason they had) with the apprehension of the Irish insurrection, and that horrible slaughter there committed on the poor English Protestants, and that they stood not a little in jealousy and affrighted at their assidual intell igence received from beyond sea of the King's preparations, and that his heart was not right towards them; but of this he had determined to put them soon out of doubt, and the more to confuse them, conceiving that the Citizens would on all occasions be wholly for him, having in his approach to the City in his return from Scotland, and his entry into the Suburbs, and throughout all the City, courteously saluted the people by the often putting off his Hat (as before is intimated) a favour which till then neither himself or his Father before him had never bestowed upon the vulgar (when (as it after appeared) his design was to make use of them, having in readiness, and shortly after filled whitehall with the forlorn Officers of his Cashiered Army, he takes an occasion under pretence of suspicion of Treason to send for Sir Arthur Hasterigge, Mr' Hollis, Mr. Pym, Mr. Stroude, and Mr. Hamden, of the Commons House, and my Lord Kimboulion of the Lords House, by one of his Sergeants at Arms, which being denied him by the House (as a plain breach of their privileges.)  
The very next day being the fourth of January, he comes attended with his guards, and those armed Cavaliers, and entered into the House of Commons, sits down in the Speakers Chair, and demands the foresaid six Members, which, upon private intelligence given them of the King's intent, had absented themselves; the King missing his prey grew exceedingly into choler, and vowed that he would have them wheresoever they were; his own comportment and the demeanour of the Cavallers, both in desperate words and big looks was so terrible to the Parliament that they forsook the House and sat in the City, sending out a Declaration of the high breach of their Privileges, together with a Petition to his Majesty that he would be pleased to grant them a guard for the security of their persons and sitting, which true it is it, was granted them, but with such a person for the command, as that they durst not accept of him, but were compelled to remain for their safety a longer space in the City, until the Lord Major and the Citizens readily assisted them, and for their better security brought them in Coaches strongly guarded to Westminster, whither also resorted a considerable party daily passing along by Whitehall Gates to their rescue in case the Cavaliers should have again disturbed their consultations, on this party the Cavaliers falls a beating them whereof some they killed, even at the Court gate, until a greater number came to their assistance. The King finding himself then deceived in his expectation, and that the people were generally devoted to the Parliament, he makes several visits into the City, where in a public audience be partly complains of the affronts done to him by the Parliament in their detaining the six Members, and partly excusing his unadvisedness in his entering the house in that manner as he did (which is evident by his own Declaration) but finding at last, that his hopes failed him to have any assistance out of the City against the Parliament, he stood some time in doubt what course to take, but in the end resolves under the specious pretexts of his Insafety by reason of the Tumults, (as since himself styles them) not to stay at Whitehall any longer; thereupon he departs from his own Court and the Parliament, as more fully hereafter I shall take occasion to remember. Hitherto I have presented you with nothing but that which is obvious, and long since known to all the Kingdom, having as briefly as I could, deduced the story, from the third of November 1640. which was the very day that the Parliament sat down, to January 1641, near about the latter end whereof the King removed from Whitehall to Hampton-Court, Windsor, and Theobalds', accompanied with his wont guard of Ruffians; the Parliament continuing still to petition him for his return, and concurrence with them; but no persuasions or arguments would prevail, but on he goes Northward, and makes his residence at York, whither he draws by degrees many of the Lords and Commons from the Parliament, most of the Delinquent party resorting unto him, together with my Lord Digby from beyond sea, though with his own approbation long before proclaimed Traitor; thither also (notwithstanding the several affronts done to the Parliaments Messages and Messengers) they ceased not to importune his return; but nothing could move him against his will and inclinations, for now he had another game to play, having hitherto failed in all his practices, and (as he conceived) his designs then grown to maturity, his next plot was to seize on the Town of Hull, by the Earl of Newcastle, where a very great Magazine of Arms and Ammunition had been deposited the Summer before, which the King had also refused to return to the Tower; and the Town of Newcastle by Colonel Legge was likewise to be seized on, both maritime towns and of great importance for the letting in of all strangers to his assistance; whereof the Parliament having certain intelligence, and by all the Kings former courses being more fully assured from abroad apprehending the dangerous consequence thereof thought than it more than high time in what possibly they could, (for the safety of themselves and the Kingdom) to prevent the mischiefs, which they then evidently perceived threatened the universal Nation, and thereupon they suddenly dispatched the two hotham's with Commission to prepossess the Town by the Trained Bands of those parts: here you may see the first arms that ever the Parliament appeared in, unless you shall urge the guards which the City sent them for securing their persons from the fury of the Cavaliers, which admit, it was only defensive, to preserve themselves and the Kingdom, in what possibly they might, and in prevention of future storms, which they inevitably saw were sure to fall upon them from abroad; and had they not gone farther, in seizing on the Navy, the Tower, Forts, Castles, and Ammunition, together with the Crown Revenues, which are the Nerves and strengths of the Kingdom, which had they neglected, no man can make doubt but they would have been perverted from their proper use, and turned against the Kingdom; surely then when they perceived that nothing would work upon the King's obstinacy, but that he was resolved to make War, and to embroil the whole Kingdom, and let in strangers, they would have been deemed unworthy of the places they held in the behalf of their Countries, had they not done as they did. But as to the King's part, please you to look over all the progress of his designs, and take them once more into your second consideration, and you cannot in any reason believe, but that from the very first commitment of the Earl of Strafford to the lower, whose escape he had privately plotted, and to send him into Ireland, (as in part is before noted) but that he intended to force the Parliament to his will, or utterly to annihilate it, especially when he found that the Earl was condemned, and his execution pressed (as a public example) to die, after which its most certain he meditated nothing more than war, and to be revenged on the Parliament as it evidently appears by his sending over the Queen into Holland to buy arms, Cockram into Denmark, and Digby in the same errand, as also by his practising of the Army in the North to fall upon the Parliament, together with the flight of Percy, Jermin, and Suckling, as the only persons first engaged in that Plot, which durst not stand to the Test, and in order to these, his peremptory denial to disband the Irish Army, and his private addresses to other foreign Princes and States to supply him with men, money, and arms, all which his practices were visibly known to the Kingdom, to have been in agitation some of them before the Earl of strafford's execution, other shortly thereupon, which evidently shows, that he was resolved at any rate, and by force of arms to suppress the Parliament. In the universal disturbance of the whole Kingdom, you may further observe, how in pursuance of his mischievous designs, notwithstanding the dislike the Parliament had of his determination to go into Scotland, and their humble motions to him to lay that journey aside, or at least for some time to retard it, as before is laid down, yet would he needs go, and the reasons thereof are perspicuous, considered as he made choice of his time to overtake the Scotch Army before they came to the borders, and to attempt to corrupt the Commanders to turn to him, and if that failed, yet to give his Scotch Parliament all the content they would desire; take the design farther; What work was made there concerning the Irish Rebellion? what after his return home he made here, in his assaulting the House in a warlike posture, and his accusing the six Members (as the most noted Commonwealths-men) in terror to the rest, upon no other ground but on a vain surmise of his own making, of suspicion of Treason, where the proof is so plain by the first shedding of blood at his own doors, and the hostile manner of his entering the House attended with 300 armed men, and most of them of desperate and forlorn Fortunes, that the very bare denial that the King made not the first Ware doth surpass even impudence itself: I am not ignorant that the Kings many protestations, and not a few of them fortified with imprecations, hath taken a firm footing in the belief of many half-witted men, that his Cause was much better than it was, but the wiser sort make their judgements of men by their actions, not by their professions, and they believe by the testimony of their senses, what they see and feel they are bound to believe, especially when a King in his private inditements which are the dictates of the Soul, & those addressed to a person which had gained an absolute power over the faculties of his reason and understanding, such unbelievers are not fit for humane society. But omitting repetitions and further Comments, we have left the King at York, where for your better satisfaction it is fit that I put you in remembrance how there he pursued the War, in raising the people, and inviting the Counties both far and near to rise and side with him against the Parliament, which in the Observations I shall send you will be made more manifest. But that it may more fully appear upon what further grounds the King forsook his own house and the Parliament besides the pretended fear of Tumults (of his own causing) it was suggested unto him, and he was made to believe, That without his presence and concurrence with the Parliament they could not, neither durst they vote or act any thing, though never so relative to the safety of themselves and the Kingdom, so that its apparent, that either by fraud or force he was resolved to put an end to this Parliament, and for farther proof of this I refer you to the Observations.  
Now as to the main of your accusations, the taking away of the King's life, and disinheriting of his Posterity, I crave leave to defer this point to the last, and to the conclusion of my animadversions, where hapyily you will find the true reasons thereof; and shall now proceed to the Change of the Government which you charge on the Parliament to be so long since plotted, and as a power usurped and exercised by them in a dispotical way way of Tyranny, in raising of money, imposing of taxes, and intolerable contributions on the whole Nation; to take them apart I shall begin with the change of the Government as it is now established in the nature of a Republic, which you know to be gotten by the Sword, and likely so it is to hold, by the same weapon as the Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans got their Dominions here by Conquest, and as the late King on that mere foundation intended to make his power absolute and A la Francoys, in the needless endeavour whereof, and to be more than stood with the constitution of the English Sovereignty, you know how he lost all, together with his life; if your conscience cannot brook the present government as now it is established, I see no other remedy left you, but to quit the place you now live in (and quietly if you would) it sufficeth my Conscience that I live under it, in the enjoyment of somewhat wherewith to subsist, which I am sure was more than myself and many thousands more could do, when and weresoever the late King's armies were prevalent; as to the Taxes and Contributions, whereat you so much repine as insufferable, and most illegally imposed on the people, all that I shall say to it is that we which suffer them, may all of us thank your party for it, as enforced on the States by your only means, for the defence of the common freedom of the Nation, which as in the beginning of the late Wars, your party under the royal Commissions invaded, so you continually endeavour to subvert them, by all the secret plots and practices you possibly can invent, whereas could that malicious tumour of yours, and that unquietness of your spirits by allayed, and yourselves persuaded by reason, before it invades you, the taxes you may be sure on't, would soon be abated, why then can you not rest content with that change and government, which, were you not hoodwinked, you might manifestly see Gods high and overruling providence to have carried on the work both in a series of the many and miraculous victories of the Parliaments, as also in disappointing all the late King's designs, and in discovering all your plots and practices, even from the very beginning of the war to the present, which although they weigh not with you, as men bewitched, and as I may say, besotted with an incapacity or hardness of heart not to be convinced by any force of reason, or arguments, though providence itself visibly shows it out unto you, that not only Gods special hand is in this great change of affairs, but that he hath yet some greater work depending on this, which in his own good time he will bring to pass, in throwing down that proud papal Monarchy, and utterly to confound that man of sin who sits in the temple exaulting himself above God.  
Sir, Here may you be pleased to take in your more serious consideration by whom King's reign, and cease to reign, and soberly to observe for what sins almighty God usually strikes down the proud Sceptres of Kings, and binds their Nobles in chains of Iron, and you may without presumption say, and find it most true, throughout all the sacred Scriptures, that where Idolatry, Injustice, Oppression, and Bloodshed have had predominance, there God's wrath hath inseparably attended the Authors, and favourers, and most severely punished those sins above all others, and what in these sins have been either permitted, acted, or connived at by the late King (howsoever faced out and denied by himself) and most of your party, and his cause shamefully defended, yet I suppose you cannot but acknowledge that they have not only been winked at, but backed and authorised cnm privilegio. And here give me leave to tell you, that I have stood amazed at the impudence of your royal bookmen, I shall only instance (amongst ma ny) in a sew, as Judge Jenkins his Lex Terrae, and other of his juggling fragments, the Regal Apology, the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae; but especially in that grand imposture of the King's Pourtracture; in all which, that they should give the plain lie to truth, conceal and smother the true intent of the laws of the Land, and contradict the Kings own Letters and expresses written with his own hand, augments the admiration, and much the more that they should with such acerbity exclaim against the ripping up of the faults of the dead, when they themselves give the occasion, in their frequent invective Pamphlets against the Parliament, and in their justifications of a Prince, whose inclinations lead him to the fulfilling of his own will, though to the apparent loss of his Crown, and his dearest friends, so violently were his inclinations driven on to the accomplishing of his designs, when as neither the junctoes of France, Spain, Denmark, the States of Holland, or scarce any Prince Christian, (though most of them of his nearest allies, and solicited by all the artifices that man could invent) would own own him when they understood the ways and enterprises he most wilfully undertaken, and all of them (upon due examination) as unnecessarily undertaken, and needlessly pursued with as much violence and craft, as if they had some necessary dependence on his own salvation, and the safety of his people, when as God knows, they were most destructive, the misshapen, and illegitimat births of his own wilful inclinations.  
Now it would not be much impertinent to the subject you have sent me, if I should tell you that I find not any one Nation in the world that hath had any great reason to be overmuch enamoured with their Kings, sure I am neither of us both (how different soever in our principles) have had any great cause given us to dote on our last, considered, as he reigned in blood and oppression, and handled the matter both with his friends and foes whether foreign or domestic; witness those needless Wars he engaged himself against spain and France in the entrance of his reign, afterwards with the Scots, but especially with this Parliament and the subjects of three Kingdoms, not only to the beggering of them, but the ruin of himself and his posterity; and yet is this most wilful and bloody Prince the only King which your party have so much admired, defended and believed living, and dead, adored and esteemed for a Saint and a Martyr.  
Sir, You are a Gentleman well versed in History, I shall therefore take the boldness to advise you, to take the right dimensions of all the Kings you have read of, either in the sacred scriptures or profane, observe well all their actings, and I dare be bold to say that you shall very rarely find any of them which have strictly tied themselves to the duty of their office or to have executed their powers otherwise than to the extreme detriment of their Subjects, take them wheresoever they have been admitted either by the suffrage of the people (as that hath been the best means to keep them within the bounds of moderation) or permitted by the absurdity of succession, whether wisemen or fools, whether Children or of mature years or assuming their Sovereignty's by the power of their Swords, and doubtless you shall find few of them which have been over-mindfull of the good and welfare of their people, neither to have had any due retrospect to the right ends of Government, and that salus populi the safety and good of their Subjects, for which all Kings had their powers originally ordained and given them from God, never for their own private interests, which most of the Kings of the World have evermore studied to advance, and generally per fas et nefas right or wrong, endeavoured to enforce, as in this point we have all of us had a late and a lamentable experience; where take this in the way, that, without all dispute, all Kingly power, and that despotical domination of that great hunter Nimrod, which was first by him usurped by force, and from him as the first pattern of Royalty, dispersed throughout most parts of the World, yet we find not in all the Scriptures any vestigia or authentic proof, that the succeeding Kings of the Nations, came to their powers by any immediate institution from God, but only permissive, though it is most true, that when such powers were in being, and how usurpatiously soever obtained, yet submission hath been by God himself enjoined to those which lived under them, until for their injustice and extreme Tyranny God in his justice determined to transfer their powers to others, as you may transparently see he hath done in our late change; since then other powers than Kingly are now with us in being, you and I both, which live under them, are bound in conscience to submit and obey them, for all 
* Rom. ●●.  powers are of God. And let me remember you, for its worth your observation, that the Israelites for a long time had no Kingly Government, but in Egypt, in the Wilderness, and after in the Land of Canaan, for many hundred years together were no other than Ambulans Respublica, a walking Commonwealth, and only governed by Judges and the Princes of their respective Tribes, never by the absolute power of any one man, Moses himself having his assistants, even the Princes of the People, until through their own wantonness and contempt of that Government which God had set over them, and in his providence and love towards them, knew to be fittest for them, they obstinately rejected the gentle government of 
* 1 Sam. 8. 3, 4, 5.  Samuel, and weary of their own happiness (surfeiting as they did in the Wilderness on that delicious food of Quails and Manna, and wishing for the fleshpots of Egypt) in imitation of the Heathen, they thirsted after a King, and not unlike to Esop's Frogs, they pressed Samuel to change their quiet and peaceable Block into a furious and devouring Stork, their freedom into slavery, as first with these Arguments, That thy sons walk not in thy ways, but have turned aside after lucre, took bribes, and perverted judgement, (foul faults indeed and happily too true) for wheresoever power (without grace) is invested, faults there will be, and many times foul ones too; But this was not all that they resented, it was their ambition and desire of novelty in a vainglorious affectation that swayed with them to be like their Neighbour Nations, and to have an illustrious and pompous domination over them; but how this pleased God that Chapter with others shows us in a very sad dialect; for, God in his wrath gave them a King according to their desires; yet he commands Samuel to show them what would be the manner of a King, and what Tyrannies he would exercise over them; howsoever their hearts being set on a Kingly Government (a glorious thing indeed in the outward show and splendour thereof) have a King they would without more dispute, alleging other Arguments to Samuel, viz. That he may judge over us, go out before us, and fight our battles; But how most of their Kings executed judgement, and what needless battles they fought for them, and how much blood of theirs was in many of their Kings reigns wilfully and profusely spilt by most of the Kings of Judah and Israel, as also what taxes and tributes were unnecessarily imposed on them, their own Chronicles will best inform you, and all this Kingly work, what doth it amount unto, more than to fulfil the will and pleasure, and to maintain the pomp and splendour of one man and his whole family, in the open and privileged oppression of a whole Nation?  
Now if the History of the Kings of judah and Israel be not sufficient to inform your judgement of the oppressions and Tyrannies exercised by most of their Kings as a just judgement of God on the whole Nation, (for I may of truth aver, that they were a stubborn generation, and God answerable to their own hearts desires gave them their belly full of Kings when it was too late for their repentance) than you may pick and choose amongst all the Kings of the World, and you shall find the best of them little better than Tyrants (yea David himself a a man of blood, and most perfidious in the case of honest Vriah) and as the greater Fish in the Sea which eats up the lesser, so Kings on the Land are commonly no more than Cannibals, man-eaters, and as a good Author describes them to be ex genere bestiarum rapacium, a sort of ravenous beasts (an undeniable truth) especially where absolute Sovereignty is usurped by any one man, and that derived in a succession, which is the evil of all evils, and the very same which your malignant party so vehemently drives at, to introduce on the English Nation, and to enslave a free borne people, when yourself being a rational man, very well knows that no man ab origine was born a slave, but either by his own consent, or by the ambition and pleasure of Tyrants was made so; for who koows not that all men are of the selfsame mould as Kings; neither were Kings ever ordained of God to govern their people, otherwise than for their 
* Rom. 13▪ 4.  good, never to be oppressed and trampled on at their own wills and lustful pleasures: But happily you may here charge me to entrench, and press with the most on the Honour and Power of Kings, I answer, I honour them as Gods own Ordinance amongst other Powers, and am commanded by the Apostle to make prayers and supplications for them all, especially for Kings, (and great reason we all have so to do, lest they devour us alive) but if they presume to break over those limits and boundaries which Almighty God hath set unto them, (as of those, and what they are you may best instruct your self out of 
* Deut. 17 19 Ezek. 45. 9 46. 18. ●  Deutronomy and 
* Deut. 17 19 Ezek. 45. 9 46. 18. ●  Ezekiel, where you shall find the King to be tied up to strict rules, as to read the law, and to observe it all the days of his life, that his heart be not lifted up above his brethren; and as the Prophet tells them, take away your exactions from my people, remove violence and spoil, and execute judgement and justice, etc.) Upon these considerations I hope you will not blame me, though I have not made one amongst so many which have sided with our late King in raising of war against his people and their Representative, neither in plundering and desolating the Kingdom, which howsoever those exorbitances (amongst other of his faults) have been palliated with as much fineness of wit, as the art of man could possibly devise yet I beseech you let truth appear, which with a little of your patience you may more fully understand, and then happily you will adjudge him guilty of much more than hath been yet vulgarly charged on his account; in the mean time remember our blessed Saviour's oracle, That it is fit offences should be, but woe to those which occasion them: Excuse me then, though I tell you, that I know none more guilty of the occasion of all our barbarous and brutish wars, bloodshed, rapine, and of the imminent danger and utter desolation, which at present threatens and hangs over three late flourishing Kingdoms, than he who ended his vexatious days at his own gates, and she which had the Honour of his bed, together with her which was the mother, and of all the mischiefs which befell all the places wheresoever she made her abode. But happily you may again reply, that I speak as a loser, and true, and so may you and one hundred thousand more of poor innocent sufferers speak in the same sad dialect, as having felt the fearful effects of the perversity of one man's will, who in the power of a moderate SOVEREIGNTY and the love of his people, by whom, and by this very Parliament (so hateful unto him) never any King of England was more honoured, beloved, obeyed, and more courted; and when time was might have been what a just Prince would have desired; and should I ask you what might he not have been had he either at first, and long after this Parliament late down, yea and long after the War began complied with them (as great reason there was he should have done) and not to have protected Delinquents, neither to have sided with such as most treacherously deserted their trust, but to have relied (as at first he promised) on his faithful Council the Parliament, I presume you will acknowledge it for a manifast truth, that none of his progenitors, were, or could have been greater it honour, power, wealth, and in reputation at home and abroad; but the truth was, so powerful a domination his inclinations had over any other reason than his own, that the ways of the Parliament (though never so relative to his own honour, justice, profit, and welfare of the Kingdom) were so averse and contrary to his genius, then rather to be controlled, or suffer any reformation to have been accomplished by them, either in the Church or State, and his disordered government to be regulgted by their advice, he would and did run the hazard of his own ruin, his Posterity and people. And as already I have showed you, 'tis a manifest truth that he tacitly had designed, many years before this Parliament sat down, not only to quit himself of this Parliament, but of all others, and as power should enable him, to invade the freedoms and liberties of the English Nation; howsoever in these particulars (amongst many other of his faults) it is far otherwise attested in divers of his expresses, as also protested in his late book (be it his own or not) the evidence of his own private letters, and the observations on them will clear that doubt; Where then, I beseech you tell me, should the subject have had any propriety, which by time and degrees would not have been swallowed up in that vast gulf of a prerogative royal, where into, not one year before the Parliament sat down, all that the subject had was in a fair way of ingulfing? neither wonder at this, for it is an infallible truth, that most Kings affect their own ends, and injustice, oppression, and commonly tyranny are faculties inherent to most of them, very seldom to look back to the proper ends for which they are ordained of God to advance the good and welfare of their subjects, but generally you shall find them only to seek the improvement of their own powers, & sovereignties, yea often times without any sensibility that their people are composed of the same flesh and blood as themselves, to make havoke of their lives and fortunes, sometimes to maintain their power, pride, prodigality, and luxury, and that which is worse, if worse may be, to fulfil their perverse wills and lustful pleasures in the beggering and slaughtering of millions of their subjects, for proof whereof, we need not go far for examples, the endeavours of our own Kings to enslave their subjects, yields us plenty of precedents, and the French to this day feel the yoke of slavery imposed on them by Lews th' eleventh in taking away their Conventio de le Estates, and reducing that Government to be at his own disposement; neither was Ferdinando of Spain quiet in mind, until he had quit himself of the Justice of Arragon, a Court not unlike the Ephori amongst the Lacedæmonians, or our Parliaments in England and Scotland, which limited their Kings, and kept them within the bounds of moderation; the Hollanders also have had lamentable experience of the Ambition of Philip the second, who on the massacre of 100000 of the Natives endeavoured to take away their ancient Immunities, and to invassalate the whole 17 Provinces under his absolute power; a strange passion in princes, when no power will content them, but that of absoluteness, to be masters over their Subjects lives and Fortunes; surely if there be any anallogy between Shepherds and Kings (as no doubt there is) our blessed Saviour tells us, that bonus pastor ponit vitam pro ovibus, the good Shepherd, or King lays down his life for his people, and not to expose theirs to fulfil his own lustful pleasure; a sad and lamentable precedent whereof, we have all felt in our late King Charles.  
But to proceed, I would fain know, what your aims are, that moves you with such impetuonsnesse to revile the present Government, since I cannot imagine what other cause you have, but in your endeavour to bring in the new Crowned King of Scots on the old score, thereby to re-make yourselves in the unmaking and invassalating the rest of the English Nation, which duly considered as the posture of affairs with us now are, is so senseless (in reference to the bettering of the people's conditions) as that it exceedeth all the Chimaeras of the old Romances, and which you cannot expect may possibly be accomplished without the effusion of an infinity of more blood, and by the swords of the Scots and barbarous Irish (excellent cohabitants for the English (if you think on't) when as you know they are generally hated by both those Nations, though probable it is, that your imaginations prompt you to believe, that all of your party shall assuredly rise with them, though in the undoubted fall of the rest of the Nation; and not unlikely you flatter yourselves (out of the old remote potential hope) with the plunder of London, as the only magazine of wealth, that will make you all abundantly rich, though in this too you may miss of your aims, unless at an instant you can change your native dialect, and speak Scoth Presbytery and Irish Tanestry in a trice, neither ought you to believe that the Citizens will stand still whilst you cut their throats: But what a strange piece of poverty possesses your intellectuals, to believe that in such a change and turn of Fortune (as all of you so much desire) an English man (howsoever principled) shall long enjoy either life, liberty or estate, otherwise than at the discretion of the Conqueror; and when the King, either or both those Nations and other foreigners shall come in upon us and Lord it over us, in a far higher strain of Tyranny than ever the Danes exercised in that short time they were here masters over our Ancestors; If you foresee not this misery, and the fatal consequence which necessarily must follow such a turn of Fortune, I must leave you to your own will and expectance, yet must I not forbear upon these considerations to commend unto your more serious thoughts, what kind and race of Princes which with such zeal you endeavour to bring in to govern over the English Nation, where I shall present you with a very formidable observation, as you may find it in the History of the Scotish Kings, and it is this, that seven, if not eight of the last Scotish Princes of the name and family of the Stuarts (one only excepted) came all to their ends by violent deaths (a fearful fate if you please to observe it) and some of them to make away one another; as for instance, james the first who for his Tyrannny was cut off by the Nobility, the second was slain at Roxborough, the third at Bonoxborn, the fourth at Plowden field, the last three in as needless quarrels as our late King Charts engaged first against his native Subjects the Scots, and on the heels of that War against the English and their Representative, only james the fifth had the fortune to die of a natural death, but as to his only Daughter Queen Mary and mother 〈◊〉 King james the sixth, it is manifestly known that she caused Henry Lord Darnley her second Husband to be cruelly murdered, and only to make way to her third Marriage with Earl Bothwell her Paramour, whom the States banished, and shortly after called her to account for her Husband's murder, and for that fact and other conspiracies against the State, by the Votes of the major part of the Peers and Commons in Parliament she was adjudged to die, whereupon she fled into England, where contriving sundry plots with the Papists and the Duke of Norfolk against Queen Elizabeth, and restless in her ambitious contrivements to dispossess the Queen Regnant of the Crown, you know to what end she came at Fodringay, where we may safely believe that Gods just judgements overtook her, when she little dreamt to have died at the block; what since became of her only Son King james, and his two sons Prince Henry and our last King Charles? though the manner of the two first deaths are still held in dispute, yet we all know to what a fatal end the last came, even at his own Gates, and in the same place where the first blood was spilt by his own servants the Cavaliers; pardon me then, If I present you with an opinion of my own, which I am confident is an infallible verity, that almighty God in his justice suffers not any man to come to a prodigious end but for such sins by him committed, as are equivalent to that sin for which he suffered; it is Gods own Oracle, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and he that kills by the Sword by the same weapon or the like he shall surely die; for a conclusion, take this as a known truth to all the Nation, that both the late Kings, as they were natural Scots, very rarely loved an English man, sure we are, not the Nation in general, and that very seldom either of them admitted any of the English into their Bedchambers, (for generally they were all Scots) neither took they any of the English (Buckingham excepted) into their secrets, and as their privadoes, until Strafford was taken into our last King's favour, but no otherwise than as a mere Statesman and a bold instrument to act any thing conducible his Master's designs, and such projects which were suitable to his endeavours and inclinations, otherwise I never knew any that were fit servants for him; and it is most certain, that both the Father and the Son laid more subtle and cunning snares to ensnare the English Nation, than all of the Norman race before them; the Father to have laid the foundation, and the Son to build up the whole fabric of absolute Sovereignty, as insensibly at first, and from the beginning of their reigns, as possibly their designs could permit, but King Charles towards his last, and long before the Wars began, openly, and shortly thereupon in hostility, and with mortar tempered with more English blood than ever hath been so wilfully and profusely spilt by any one Tyrant in the World; and for what cause, and on what grounds (I beseech you tell me) more than for the Nug● and idle fictions of a divine prerogative, and to rule alone without other Law than his own Will, and without account to any but to God alone? they are both the Fathers and the Sons own Maxims, just Tyrantlike, quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, and yet, which is the mystery and the wonder of the times, is this wilful King cried up, by his many partisans, for the only paragon of Princes, and that which is of more admiration, his Protestations in the common belief preferred and credited before his visible actions, and Cabinet Letters, which if mwn were not besotted, I am sure best of all other evidences, lays open the most hidden secrets of the heart: But it is most certain, that before, and a long space after the battle at Edgehill, he refused all overtures of Peace, though 'tis confessed he made many motions for Peace to the Parliament, but ever no other than on such disadvantageous terms as were utterly unfit for the Parliaments embrasure, and the Kingdomrs security, for we find them evermore accompanied with such restrictions, reservations, and ambignous conditions (howsoever gilded over with plausible pretences) that the Parliament at length durst not either trust him, or any of his specious Declarations, as in the observations on the Reliquiae Carolinae are manifested, for it is most true, that as soon as he had attracted a very considerable Army to his assistance, by his artifices, and the several visits and the orations he made to the respective Sheriffs and Gentry (before and after the setting up of his Standard) of the Counties of York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Leicester, Chester, Stafford, Denby, Flint, Salop, Oxford, and Berks, wherein he neither spared any pains or travel, or lost a minute of time, both to deceive and win the people to his cause; and 'tis evident, that he had not only written his particular Letters to most of the prime Gentlemen of the Kingdom to side with him, but had sent his peremptory commands to most of the Colonels of the Parliaments Army sent into Ireland for the assistance of the distressed Protestants, to repair to his aid against the Parliament, a treachery and a testimony beyond all others of the falseness of his heart, considered (as hereafter it shall be made more apparent unto you) with the seeming zeal and care he pretended to bear to those poor Irish Protestants. It is worth your further observation, that this most unfortunate Prince, having so often accustomed himself to fraud and dissimulation, that it came at last to this sad issue, that all his after Messages and Overtures made to the Parliament (in the declination of his power, and after he was a Prisoner) though happily more really intended than formerly, and atested with exceeding specious & plausible Protestations, & some of them confirmed with his wont Imprecations, were not believed, but suspected for fallacious; so long had this most unhappy King (like the Fly that plays with the flame, which comes in the end to burn himself out of his own fury) such power had his will and natural inclinations over his reason; where you may take an instance or two in the way for a proof thereof. When he first raised his Army at York, for which he endeavours to flame off the Parliament, that those forces were only raised as a guard for the security of his Person, and to confirm this, he caused divers of the Fugitive Lords then attending him, shamefully to attest, that he had no intent thereby to levy War against the Parliament, when immediately thereupon he began to march, and to run from place to place as before is noted, to raise more force, and that which is most perfidious, after he had erected his Standard at Nottingham he continued the same strain, utterly denying and protesting that he had not then any manner of intent thereby to wage war with his Parliament, as hereafter you shall more plainly see, a strange delusion to flatter himself, in dancing unseen in a net, and that that he should not only be able to deceive the People by his Protestations, but to delude and cozen a Court of Parliament out of their understanding, as you may see this verified in his own Expresses sent to the Parliament from Nottingham; and what a strange trick would he have put on the Parliament, when from York he sent them a Message, that he had taken a resolution to go in person into Ireland to chastise those Rebels, and to that purpose had determined to raise 2000 Foot, and 200 Horse in and about the County of Chester for a guard to his person, and to flatter himself with such a senseless device to delude the Parliament, as if they understood him no better, than to believe his design to be real, when they perceived his drift was, First to raise here a considerable force, & then to join with the Irish Army there, and in the end to turn all his power on the Parliament. It would be too wearisome to me to recount all the perfidious practices of this most unhappy Prince, and too tedious to yourself to read them, I shall therefore for the present conclude and refer you to the animadversions and observations on the contrarity between his public protestations, and private Letters, which you shall God willing receive very shortly, and wherein I doubt not but that you will find so much fraud, deceit and dissimulation of this King, as will amaze you, and turn the strong tide of your belief, (hitherto poisoned with flams and such subterfuges) as may shame any rational man to be so long cozened and deluded by them. No more Sir at present but that I desire and wish you to believe no otherwise of that which I have sent you than in your judgement you shall find suitable to truth, and that as you shall see just cause, to esteem me, (as I am) your well wishing friend.   

Animadversions or Observations on the strange contrariety between the late King's Declarations, Missives, Protestations, Imprecations, sent at several times to the Parliament, and his Pourtraicture compared with his own Letters taken at Naseby, and some other of his Expresses not yet taken into public Observation.  
SIR,  
I Have now sent you, by your servant, those observations which I promised you, supposing that they will come to your hands so seasonably, as to help to convince you, that neither the Parliament began the late wars, or that there could be any design or plot laid (of I know not how many years standing) either of a factious party amongst them, to disturb the peace of the Kingdom, take away the King's life and his posterity, or to alter the Government, but that whatsoever hath fallen out since the sitting down of this Parliament, hath been enforced by the King himself, and by a concurrency of sundry causes arising from his own wilful inclinations, the sins of the Nation, and Gods special hand therein, as a fearful punishment upon us all: If you think otherwise, and that you shall persist in your errors, I doubt not but these Observations will more clearly manifest unto you, that the King was (in all this tragical contest) both his own enemy and no such innocent Martyr as your party conceives him to have been, and of this let his own actions, and his private Letters speak, and I shall be silent, whose principal endeavour hath been no other than to give you satisfaction (on your own provocation) and that truth may appear to all those whom it concerns besides yourself, and first to the  

Observations on the Treaties for Peace, after the War began.  
The first overture for peace, after the War began, was without all question of the Parliaments at Colebrook, which how it was accepted of by the King, and on the nick thereof pursued, by the drawing up of his Army in a mist, the slaughter at Brayuford best shows out what was the King's meaning, which how he labours to defend it in some of his Expresses, yet without doubt if it were not perfidious, yet very suspicious of no fair meaning; sure it was very retrograde to the procuring of a peace, otherwise than as himself meant to have it by force.  
The next overture for an accommodation was likewise of the Parliaments first motion, and agreed upon to be at Oxford, a place as inauspicious for treaties, as Parliaments; for it came to no other issue than to signify nothing; a game wherein the King was well versed, a proof whereof amongst many, you may find in his eighth Letter to the Queen, Jan. 3. 1644. from Oxford viz. The Portugal Agent hath made me two Propositions: First, concerning the reliase of his Master's brother, for which I shall haeve 50000 l. if I can procure his Liberty from the King of Spain; the other is for a marriage betwixt my Son Charles, and his Master's eldest Daughter: for the first, I have freely undertaken to do what I can, and for the other, I will give such an Answer as shall signify nothing.  

Observation.  
Here you may first evidently see what a fine juggler the King was grown, and into what a straight he had driven himself, to become a broker for money, and instead of Friendship to a King to whose Agent in others of his Letters to the Queen, he acknowledgeth himself to be more beholding for the transport of his Letters, than to the French Ambassador; and then as to the motion of marriage to juggle him out with an answer which should signify nothing, judge you whether it would not have been more Kingly to have dealt more plainly with the Agent, and to have told him that he liked not the motion, on reasons best known to himself, than to have flamed him off with a significavit rather of an affront, than friendship.  
The third motion for peace was also of the Parliaments first overture, and tendered to the King at Oxford, and agreed upon to be at Uxbridge, where how that likewise was aforehand ordered, and his Commissioners tied up to his will, and to the wrack of his own Instructions, from which they were not on any conditions to recede, is made very clear in the Postscript of his Letter to the Queen, number 5th. January 19 1644. from Oxford, viz. And be confident that I will not quit Episcopacy, nor that Sword which God hath given into my hands.   

Observation.  
If the Quaere here should be made whether God had so absolutely given the power of the Sword, into his hands, as at his own will and pleasure to unsheathe it against his own subjects, and the Representative of the Kingdom, whom by his Coronation Oath he was obliged to defend and protect, doubtless no man is so mad to believe, that the King's resolutions (in using it as he did to their destruction) were so religiously biased as it became a Christian King: But that you may further understand, why the King so peremptorily stood to the upholding of Bishops, and to keep the Militia in his own sole power, (for that's the meaning of his not quitting the Sword) which all the world knows to be no otherwise (by the intent of the Laws of the Land, Reason, and the Law of Nature) an inseparable flower of the Crown than Fiduciary, always in reference to a trust given our Kings by Parliament, out of confidence that it shall be used to no other intent or end than the defence of the Kingdom, and not to be perverted against it, as all the ancient and modern Statutes import, both in their preambles and texts; Cast your eyes on his own Directions to the Uxbridge Commissioners number 21. where you may evidently see, that it was not so much the scruple of his Conscience and Coronation Oath, as in relation to his own particular designs and interests; viz. That as it is the King's duty to protect the Church, so it is the Churches to assist the King in the maintenance of his Authority; wherefore my Predecessors have been always careful, and especially since the Reformation, to keep the dependency of the Clergy entirely on the Crown, without which it will scarcely fit fast on his bead; therefore you must do nothing to change this necessary dependence.   

Observation.  
Here you have the true reason wherefore the King so much insisted on the keeping up of Episcopacy, and how likewise the cunning Gypsies the Bishops had instilled it into his apprehension, what sure cards they were to keep the Crown fast on his head, as if the Crown and Myter had been such inseparables, as that the one could not subsist without the other; observe withal what a quaint Aphorism they first coined and broached it to King james, viz. no Bishop, no King; and judge you whether no Porter no King had not been the better maxim, when as it is perspicuous, that most of our ancient Kings had no such Enemies as the Bishops, witness Tho. Becket to Henry the second, Lanfranke to Henry the first, Roger of Salisbury to King Stephen, Orleton to Edward the second, with divers others which almost in every Reign opposed their Kings, and addressed themselves to the Pope for their Palls and Investitures, endeavouring in what possibly they could to free themselves from any dependency on the Crown, until Henry the eighths' time, who first of all our Kings freed himself of that servitude, which had been so fatal to most of his Predecessors. But look a little further and you shall find in the King's 19th. Letter to the Queen on the same subject, Febr. 25. 1645. from Oxford; viz. Thou needs not doubt of the issue of this Treaty, for my Commissioners are so well chosen (though I say it) that they will neither be threatened nor disputed from the grounds I have given them, which upon my word is according to the little Note thou so well remembers, and to this not only their obedience, but judgements concur; again in the same Letter, and be confident, that in making peace I shall ever show my constancy in adhering to Bishops, and all our friends, and shall not forget to put a short period to this perpetual Parliament; but as thou lovest me, let none persuade thee to slacken thine assistance for him who is eternally thine.   

Observation.  
Here we have a true Character of this unfortunate Kings natural obduracy, and the averseness of his Genius to alter any of his resolutions, which once fixed, he would effect on any hazard whatsoever; the Earl of Strafferd, who best of all others of his arbitrary Ministers had most studied his inclinations, needed not to have cherished this humour of the Kings, when as in the prosecution of the wars against the Scots 1639. he counsels the King in 
* Vide the Juncto quinto Maij 1649  haec verba, Lose all I had, or carry all; again you may here see how he had aforehand bound up his Commissioners with such instructions from whence they were not to stir or yield in a jot, as likewise how mindful he was of the little Note, and punctually to observe it, a very fine note of remembrances I believe, had we the honour to have seen it; and were we not all of us of the English Nation, a happy people to see our King governed by the directions and documents of a woman, a strong Papist, and of the house of Medicis by the Mother, a most Imperious and dangerous generation of women, and fatal to all places wheresoever they came? a wife its true she was, but such a one as ruled and overruled that stiffness of his constellation, and effected more with him than either himself could do, or the most inward of his Council of State durst attempt, and on one caveat of hers would rather adventure the loss of his Crown, than not to show his constancy in the upolding of a Mitre; you may remember how much pains he was at with the Divines at Newcastle and the Isle of Wight, and what tenants he held in his dispute with them concerning Episcopacy, and that Bishops were of a Divine and Apostolic Institution, which is true in some sense, as those were which were instituted by the Apostles, but that our late Bishops as they stood here from before and after King Edward's Reformation, that they should be taken in with those of St. Paul's making, in the general notion or latitude of Bishops, without any distinction, as if those Bishops of the Papistical Church were of the selfsame nature, and of like ordination as those of the Primitive times, seems to me a paradox. 'Tis true, that at the time of the Reformation the dispute grew high at the blackfriars amongst the Commissioners themselves whether Episcopacy should remain as it then stood, or to reduce it to the original pattern of the primitive Church, as Bishop Latimer, Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr would have had it; but Bishop Ridly, and the rest of the Commissioners, most of them Bishops (as Sir john Heywood in his first Copy of his 
* The first copy was suppressed & expunged by the Bishops and the old Knight committed by K. JAMES to the Tower by the instigation of the Prelates.  History of Edward the sixth lays it down) would by no means assent unto it; the other three maintaining that Bishops as then they stood were no other than chips of the papistical block, and of no affinity with St. Paul's Titmothy's or Titus' Bishops, neither could they be of any conformity with the ancient and primitive institution, but the mere excrescencies sprouting out of the exuberancy of the Papacy, long after the defection and adulteration of the primitive Church, which defection from the ancient purity began immediately after Gregory the Great, and I am very confident that there are none of our late Bishops so impudent as to maintain, that either the Britain or Saxon Kings (whatsoever is fabled of King Lucius) ever erected any Episcopal Sees, or admitted of any Bishops that came hither before Austin the Monk, and such others after him, as were merely sprigs of the papacy, and that long after the adulteration of the Roman Church; a truth so perspicuous, as that I have wondered on the reading of the discourse between his Majesty and those learned Divines, why it was not pressed by them, that Episcopacy, quatenus, as it stood here since and before the Reformation, was spurious, papal, and of no affinity with the Apostolic, or primitive institution; especially the wonder is so much the more that the King for the upholding of 26 square caps, should with such obstinancy (which he would have to be esteemed constancy) oppose a Court of Parliament composed of 500 Lords and Gentlemen, and pretend so much to honour and conscience, when as about the same time, and as I remember before that the dispute was here in the House for the expulsion of the Bishops, the King had granted the same boon to the Scots. But I beseech you take notice how mindful the King was to remember his friends, and what were they think you more than Delinquents, Soldiers of Fortune, and the losest vermin that the Kingdom could afford him, together with the Papists, many Country Gentlemen, and the Fugitive Members of both Houses which he had corrupted and drawn from their trust, with double ends of his own, not only to make up his mongrel Parliament at Oxford, but to lame or destroy the legal Parliament at Westminster, whose privileges with so many protestations he had so often averred to maintain? In the next place please you to observe how memorative the King was to put a short period to this perpetual Parliament; for this expression manifestly shows how he intended to deal with all others, a Parliament as himself had made it, indissolvable (by any other way than that of the 
* The Militia.  Sword, which by no means he meant to depart withal, until needs he must) and the act assented and granted by himself, on reasons merely relative to the payment of his own debts, contracted by his unnecessary raising of War against his Native Subjects the Scots, and for the more speedy discharge of the arrears due to both armies, which the Parliament was then most willing to defray, without the least scruple, or upbraiding him with the cause of contracting so vast a sum, and all to gain at any rate his love and favour; where I must tell you, that you would have thought it somewhat harsh should they have told him as it was 
* Sir Rob. Cotton in the life of H. 3.  answered in full Parliament to Hen: the third, that they would not pay his debts, neither give him a groat, postquam coepit esse dilapidator regni, so long as he continued to destroy the Kingdom, but you cannot deny how ready they were to expedite the payments, by taking it up of the City on the public faith, which the Citizens (on remembrance of the King's wont manner of dissolving of all the Parliaments of his Reign without their due effects) utterly refused, unless an Act were passed for the continuation of the Parliaments sitting, upon which grounds the King granted that act, which so nearly concerned his own particular, and the sending home of the Scots, whose company was then loathsome unto him. How then it comes to pass, that yourself and so many of your party should think this such an act of Grace seems to me a wonder, when he had so often protested, not only to maintain the Privileges of Parliament, but whatsoever acts he had formerly assented unto; but you see here his own expression, That he would not forget to put a short period to this perpetual Parliament; what than I beseech you do you conceive would have been the issues? otherwise than to recall all those his so much magnified acts of grace (as Edward the third yielded him a precedent) and at last by the power of the Sword (which he says God had put into his hands) to have invaded the Laws and universal freedoms of the Nation as his very next Letter to the Queen manifestly imports March 9 1645. from Oxford, number the 20th. viz. I have thought of one means more to furnish thee withal for my assistance, than hitherto thou hast had; it it this, that I give thee power to promise in my name, to whom thou thinkest most fit, that I will take away all penal Laws against the Roman Catholics in England, as soon as God shall enable me to do it, so as by their means or in their favours, I may have so powerful assistance as may deserve so great a favour, and enable me to do it; but if thou ask what I call that assistance; I answer, that when thou knowest what may be done for it, it will be easily seen, if it deserve to be so esteemed; I need not tell thee what secrecy this business requires; yet this I will say, that this is the greatest point of confidence I can express to thee, for it is no thanks to me to trust thee in any thing else, but in this which is the only thing in difference of opinion betwixt us, and yet I know thou wilt make as good a bargain in this, I trusting thee (though it concerns Religion) as if thou wert a Protestant, the visible good of my affairs so much depending thereon.   

Observation.  
The Comment on this his Majesty's 20th. Letter, principally relates to these two most important considerations; first, the invading of the Laws, secondly, to the affront of the Parliament and the Protestant Religion, when he should be empowered by the assistance of the Papists, and a third necessarily ariseth on the neck of the other two, viz. by giving power to the Queen, a professed Papist, and an enemy to the English Nation, to manage the business, and to make the best bargain for him, as she should think most fit, under the seal of secrecy, as being himself ashamed to be seen in the business, (as God knows good reason he had) But in the mean time speak your Conscience, where was then the King's Conscience, and his honour? and what became of his former protestations? wherein he so often avows the maintenance of the Protestant Religion, (without mixtures) and what was his own Religion, more than formal, or like a nose of wax, convertible only as it should conduce to the visible good of his affairs? (they are his own words) and what those affairs were more than his will and pleasure, in his uttermost endeavour to continue to imbrue the Kingdoms with more blood and rapine, by the swords and assistance of Papists, cannot well be imagined; these and a world of his other expressions, compared together with his own Letters, and his Pourtraicture, I must tell you plainly, have very much troubled my spirits, that he should so much and so often pretend to Religion, Conscience, and Honour, in yielding up of Episcopacy, when he made no scruple of Conscience to grant to the Scots the abolishing of their Episcopacy, which in the Chapter of Church-Government in his Pourtraicture, he strives to salve with an ill savouring plaster, but for the retention of it in England, he pleads, and stands stiffly on his Coronation Oath, with the swallowing up of the most essential part thereof, which by far more obligeth the Kings of England to observe, than the preamble to that Oath, penned of old by the Prelates & Churchmen for their own only ends and interests, a very inconsiderable party, in respect of the quality of the Nobility; and Gentry; and that vast number of the Laity, of which it seems the King reckoned of after the Pope's computation, to be extra Caulam, either out of the Church, or at best but the fag end thereof, and accounts little better of them, than as so many cyphers, or his slaves at will, at pleasure, clean forgetting, or slighting the grand & more essential part of his Coronation Oath, which is confidently averred the late Arch Prelate purposely emasculated, and never gave it him at his Coronation, but left him at liberty, which all men knows is that which obligeth the King to rule not only by the Laws in being, but per istas bonas leges quas vulgas eligerit, to govern by such good Laws as the Parliament shall choose, and the reason of this is most most perspicuous, for the Laws of England are not of that stamp as those of the Medes and Persians (unalterable) but changeable according to the vicissitudes of times, and change of men's manners, and at the Election of the people in their Representative, the King's assent being formal, and only a necessary appendent, and by the intent of the Law, his principal power consists in the executive part, the Parliaments in the elective; for it is without all question that never any of our Kings either abrogated or made any Law obligatory to the people by his only lawful power, but by the Parliaments consent and election; the nature of the King's Office being more cumulative than privative, to give rather than to take any thing from their subjects; but here you may see what a latitude of power the King assumes to himself, where he promiseth to the Queen to take away all the penal laws against Papists, as soon as he shall be enabled to do it, without a word of by your leave Parliament, so that you may manifestly see what he intended, and that no other sense than his own is here pinned upon him: you may further observe out of this Letter his windings, doublings, and fold, and how dexterously cunning he was grown, at playing fast and loose with RELIGION, or with any thing else that might promote his mischievous designs, leaving no way unattempted though to profaning of Religion, that he conceived might conduce to the visible good of his affairs (as that was his usual expression) and what was that visible good think you? other than to overpower the Parliament, and then to rule as he listed. But to show unto you what a gamester he was at Hocuspocus, I pray look upon the Postcript of his Letter to the marquis of Ormond February 16. 1648. from Oxford, viz. In case upon particular men's fancies, the Irish peace should not be procured, upon powers I have already given you, I have thought good to give you farther order, (which I hope will prove needless) to seek to renew the treaty for a peace for a year, for which you shall prowise the Irish (if you can have it no better cheap) to join with them against the Scots and Inchiquine, but I hope by that time, my condition may be such, as the Irish may be glad to accept les, or I be able to grant more.   

Observation.  
Hence you may make your own judgement what a Proteus the King was grown; you may take this also into your observation, as suitable to the rest, that in all his Declarations, Letters, and Messages to the Parliament, and after he had lost all and could stand up no longer, and was a prisoner, they were then directed to his two Houses at Westminster, but during his power, and so long as he had any hopes left him to conquer them, he misses not throughout all his expresses to call them Rebels, and in that capacity tacitly treats with them at Uxbridge, (which the Scots at Rippon utterly refused to treat with him unless he would withdraw and disown his proclamations in styling them Traitors) and although he calls them a Parliament, yet was it with a mental reservation not so to acknowledge them, as you may see in his 17 letter to the Queen (where it seems she had schooled him to the purpose for acknowledging them to be a Parliament, for which he makes a very humble and ample apology, and says, If there had been but two besides myself of my opinion, I had not done it, and the argument that prevailed with me was, that the calling did no ways acknowledge them to be a Parliament; upon which condition and construction, I did it and no otherwise, and accordingly it is registered in the Council books, and with the Counsels unanimous approbation, but thou wilt find that it was my misfortune, not my neglect, that thou hast been no sooner advertised of it.   

Observation.  
I need not comment on these fine pieces of the Kings, your own judgement may inform you what a acquaint jesuitical juggler he was grown, by the conversation he had with the Mother and the Daughter, both of them being excellent proficients in the doctrines of Matchivill; and surely, under the Rose be it spoken, himself no very bad Scholar in that kind of learning; yet here you may see what pains he was put unto, how to make a handsome excuse to save himself from a chiding: but I forbear to make further mention of his perfidious courses, more than to put you in mind, that so long as his vain imaginations prompted to overpower the Parliament, and to reduce all to his own absolute pleasure, it's most certain, that he refused all overtures for agreement with the Parliament, other than such (as before I have intimated) he verily believed to make advantage of; and this appears in his 9th. Letter to the Queen, March thirteenth, from Oxford, viz. Dear Heart, What I told thee the last week concerning a good parting with our Lords and Commons here, was on Monday last handsomely performed, and if I now do any thing unhandsome or disadvantageous to myself or Friends, in order to a Treaty, it will be merely my own fault, for I confess when I wrote last, I was in fear to have been pressed to make some mean overtures to renew the Treaty, knowing that there were great labourings to that purpose; but I now promise thee, if it be renewed (which I believe will not) without some eminent good success on my side, it shall be to my honour and advantage, I being now as well freed from the place of base and mutinous motions (that is to say, of our mongrel Parliament here) as of the chief causers, for whom I may justly expect to be chidden by thee, for having suffered thee to be vexed by them.   

Observations.  
We have here a plain proof of the former assertion, that during the King's power, he would entertain no Treaties but such as here he promiseth the Queen, should be both to his honour and advantage, and he renders the reason, viz. That he was then left free to himself to do as he listed, and as his inclinations should prompt him, as being quit of those base and mutinous motions of his mongrel Parliament at Oxford; where you may observe, how well Parliaments suited with the nature of this King; for this at Oxford (which was of his own design, and calling, of set purpose to annihilate the legal Parliament at Westminster) was (as himself styles it) a base, mutinous, and mongrel Parliament, and he might with good reason so account of it, for they were indeed a sort of perfidious Fugitives, false to themselves and their Countries, and the King no doubt in his own thoughts esteemed them no other, for such as would be falls to themselves, the King was not to seek to make his own judgement what they would be to him, on the turn of any tide of advantage, but that at Westminster he calls a Rebel Parliament, though of his own first Summons: The truth was, none would or could please him, neither any council but such as futed to his own will and pleasure. It's true, and it is confessed that after he had lost all, and was a prisoner, he seemed more inclinable to embrace peace, and to that end sent his frequent Messages to the Parliament, but evermore with the old scruples of his Conscience and Honour, persisting to his last (as being fed with hopes of the general rising, 1647. and the coming in of the Scots under Hamilton) to wind himself up again to that power whither his restless ambition (to be more absolute than he ought to have been) lead him to the precipice of his own ruin, and it is more than probable, that during the last Treaty in the Isle of Wight, and the expectation of the success of that rising to his rescue, he had a perfidious hand therein; for it cannot be imagined that such an association of English, Scots, and Welsh, would ever in one conjuncture of time adventure to rise without either his Privity or Commission; howsoever it is manifestly known, that both the English and Welsh had for their undertaking the Prince's Commission under hand and seal, neither is it likely that the Prince himself (during a Treaty so near a period to an atonement) would either authorise that rising, or to have approached at that very time with his Fleet so near the Thames mouth, without either his Father's Commission or approbation, the perfidy showed therein I am more than confident utterly lost him, and was a principal cause that the Parliament could not in reason, or with safety of themselves and the Kingdom, readmit or trust such a Prince with the government, of whose Reformation they could not but despair.    

Observations upon the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae.  
IT is worth his pains who desires to berightly informed of the truth of all passages and transactions between the late King, and the Parliament, his mysterious motions, pretences, and carriages, both during all the wars, and since his death how matters have been managed by his partakers, especially by those which first published his Pourtraicture, and him who hath taken such pains in collecting so many of his papers, printing, exposing and dispersing them throughout all parts of the Kingdom, purposely both to deceive the people, and maliciously to work upon the facility of their affections in commiseration of him, and casting an odium on the Parliament; The artifice which this Impostor uses, is worth consideration, as he hath garnished the approaches to his collections with the King's picture in some places standing, in others kneeling, and as it were ejaculating his prayers to God, and those dressed with sundry devices and mottoes, and all this to invite the eye, if not the understanding of the silly beholder to a belief, that he died an innocent Martyr, a Prince who suffered for his restless endeavour to descend the Protestant Religion, the Laws and Libertyes of his Subjects, as he would intimate by his huddling of the Kings many specious and fraudulent overtures for peace to the Parliament, and avoiding of future bloodshed. In all the Catalogue of his one and twenty Messages of the Kings, (besides additionals) he is pleased not so much as to insert one of the Parliaments Answers in rejoinder to any of the King's Messages, only taking in so many of his Majesties which he conceived might serve his turn to clear the King's innocency, and leaving out such of the Parliaments most material Missives to which the King omitted to give any answer at all; as for instance, let him produce what reply the King made to the Parliaments charge, for rupert's intercepting of the Clothes, Provisions horses and other necessaries, sent by the Parliament in the way to Chester, for the relief of the relics of the poor Protestants in Ireland, true it is, that long after an answer was, such as it was, made (though not by him mentioned) viz. that those provisions might have been better guarded; a proper answer if you please to take notice of it, when its mostevident, that the Kings forces not only took them with his express command but drew over the principal Commanders and Soldiers before sent by the Parliament to his own assistance against the Parliament, now, that you may see how the active part of the war was carried on by the King, take into your serious considerations his Message of the 15 of April, 1642. from Huntingdon, wherein he earnestly desires, That the Parliament will use all possible industry in expediting the business of Ireland, in which they shall find so cheerful a concurrence by his Majesty, that no inconvenience shall happen to that service by his absence, he having all that passion for the reducing of that Kingdom which he hath expressed in his former Messages, being unable to manifest more affection to it, than he hath endeavonred to do by those Messages (having likewise done all such acts as he hath been moved unto by his Parliament) therefore if the misfortunes and calamities of his poor Protestant Subjects there shall grow upon them (though his Majesty shall be deeply concerned in, and sensible of their sufferings) he shall wash his hands before all the world from the least imputation of slackness, in that most necessary and pious work.  

Observation.  
A very pious work indeed, as himself ordered it, if you please to examine it to the bottom, then make your own judgement, whether it was not the Kings reach to gull the Parliament, by pressing them to expedite the sending of Forces to the relief of his poor Subjects of Ireland, and with such words of pity and expressions of his remorse, how deeply he was concerned therein, and how sensible of their sufferings and calamities, which might grow upon them, and just Pilate-like to wash his hands before all the world from the least imputation of slackness in him; when 'tis manifest his meaning was both to make use of any such forces as the Parliament should send over, against them, and consequently to dis-enable them the more in levyes here for their own defence against him, and his preparations, as it evidently appeared within 3. months after by the said seizure of the Horses, clothes and provisions sent by Chester, as also by his remanding over the Regiments sent before into Ireland to make use of them, as it is visibly known he did, against the Parliament. But I pray extend your patience, and look farther into this dark work of the Kings, take a short view of his next Message from Nottingham, where he erected his Standard, it bears date the 25. of August 1642. Next to this his Message of the 5th. of Sept. 1642. with another of the 11th. of September following, in pursuance of the former, peruse them all and you shall evidently see such notable juggle and Matchivilian dissemble, as would amaze any Christian eye to behold them, compared with his actions, his Pourtraicture, and his own letters taken at Naseby: I shall present them all in their order, verbatim, and first that of the 25 of August 1642. viz.  
We have with unspeakable grief of heart long beheld the distraction of this our Kingdom, our very soul is full of anguish, until we may find some remedy to prevent the miseries which are ready to overwhelm this Nation by a Civil War, and although all our endeavours tending to the composing of those unhappy differences betwixt us and our two Houses of Parliament (though pursued by us with all zeal and sincerity) have been hitherto without the success we hoped for, yet such is our constant & earnest care to preserve the public peace, that we shall not be discouraged to use any expedient, which by the blessing of the God of Mercy, may lay a happy foundation of peace and happiness to all our good subjects. To this end, observing that many mistakes have arisen, by the Messages, Petitions, and Answers betwixt us and our two Houses of Parliament, which happily may be prevented by some other way of treaty, wherein the matter in difference may be more clearly understood, & more freely transacted, we have thought fit to propound to you, that some fit persons may be by you enabled, to treat with the like number to be authorized by us, in such a manner and freedom of debate, as may best tend to that happy conclusion which all good men desire (the peace of the Kingdom,) wherein as we promise in the word of a King, all safety and encouragement to such as shall be sent unto us, if you shall choose the place where we are for the Treaty; which we wholly leave to you, presuming on the like care of the safety of those we shall employ, if you shall name another place: So we assure you, and all our good Subjects, that to the best of our understanding, nothing shall therein be wanting on our part, which may advance the true Protestant Religion, opPose Popery and Superstition, secure the Law of the Land (upon which is built as well our just Prerogative, as the propriety and liberty of the Subject) confirm all just power and Privileges of Parliament, and render us and our people truly happy, by a good understanding betwixt us and our two Houses of Parliament: Bring with you as firm resolutions to do your duty, and let our People join with us in our prayers to Almighty God for his blessing upon this work; If this Proposition shall be rejected by you, we have done our duty so amply, that God will absolve us from the guilt of that blood which must be spilt, and whatsoever opinion other men may have of our power, we assure you nothing but our Christian and pious care to prevent the effusion of blood, hath begotten this motion, our provision of men, money and arms being such as may secure us from further violence, till it please GOD to open the eyes of our People.  
Not to trouble you with further search, I shall present you that Message of the 5th. of September 1642. in pursuance of the former, together with that of the 11th. of the same Month, tending all to the same purpose, though the Observations on them you shall find handled separatim, and left to your more mature consideration.  
We will not repeat what means we have used to prevent the dangerous and distracted estate of the Kingdom, nor how these means have been interpreted, because being desirous to avoid effusion of Blood, we aere willing to decline all memory if former bitterness, that might make our offer of a Treaty readly accepted: We did never declare, nor ever intended to declare both our Houses of Parliament Traitors, or set up our Standard against them, and much less to put them and this Kingdom out of our protection, we utterly profess against it, before God and the World; and farther to remove all possible scruples which may hinder the Treaty so much desired of us, we hereby promise, so that a day be appointed by you, for the unvoting of your Declarations against all persons as Traitors, or otherways for assisting of us, we shall with all cheerfulness upon the same day recall our Proclamations and Declarations, and take down our Standard, in which Treaty we shall be ready to grant any thing that shall be really for the good of our Subjects, conjuring you to consider the bleeding condition of Ireland, and the dangerous condition of England, in as high a degree, as by these our offers we have declared ourselves to do, and assuring you that our chief desire in this world is to beget a good understanding, and mutual confidence, betwixt us and our two Houses of Parliament.  
Sebtemb. 5. 1642.  
Who have taken most ways used most endeavours, and made most real expressions to prevent the present distractions and dangers, let all the world judge, as well by former passages, as our two last Messages, which have been so fruitless, that (though we have descended to desire and press it) not so much as a Treaty can be obtained, unless we would denude ourselves of all force to defend us from a visible strength marching against us, and admit those persons accounted Traitors to us, who according to their duty, their Oaths of Allegiance, and the Law, have appeared in defence of us their King and liege Lord (whom we are bound in Conscience and Honour to preserve) though we disclaimed all our Proclamations and Declarations, and erecting of our Standard, as against our Parliament; all we have left in our power is to express the deep sense we have of the public misery of this Kingdom, in which is involved that of our distressed Protestants of Ireland, and to apply ourselves to our necessary defence; wherein we wholly rely on the providence of God, the Justice of our cause, and the Affection of our good people, so far we are from putting them out of our protection; when you shall desire a Treaty of us, we shall piously remember whose blood is to be spilt in this Quarrel, and cheerfully embrace it; and as no other reasons induced us to leave our City of London, but that with honour and safety we could not stay there, nor to raise any force, but for the necessary defence of our Person and the Law, against Levies in opposition to both, so we shall suddenly return to the one, and disband the other, as soon as those causes shall be removed: the God of Heaven direct you, and in mercy divert those judgements, which hang over the Nation, and deal so with us, and our posterity, as we desire the preservation and advancement of the true Pretestant Religion, the Law, and the Liberty of the Subject, the just rights of Parliament, and the peace of the Kingdom.  
Sept. 11. 1642.    

Observations on the former three Messages of the Kings.  
In these three Messages we have as specious and pious expressions (in show) as possibly can be expected from a King that meant really as he writ, and said as he thought: But on a due consideration of all passages, and the subject matter in them contained, and as the case then stood betwixt him and the Parliament, with as much subtlety, craft and cunning, as can well be devised by the subtlest Disciple of Machiavel.  
I shall take the; liberty to comment, and prove the assertion, out of the first of these Messages of the 25 of August 1642. and so in order to the rest, as they visibly show out unto any rational man their purport, without drawing other Conclusions than necessarily arise out of the expressions themselves, compared with the Kings other Declarations, his actions, and his own private Letters.  
First he tells the Parliament, With what unspeakable grief of heart he beheld the distractions of the Kingdom, until he could find out a remedy to prevent the miseries which were ready to hang over the whole Nation by a civil War. Where I pray tell me, who first gave the occasion, who raised those distractions, or made the first preparations to a civil war, other than himself? Next he speaks of differences betwixt him and the Parliament, which he confesseth to have arisen through mistakes of the Messages, Petitions and Answers, betwixt him and his two Houses of Parliament, which he would have prevented by a Treaty, wherein the matters in difference might, be more clearly understood, and more freely transacted; And could there have been a more fitter place to debate them with honour and freedom, than in the Parliament? whither with welcome he might have come without the least danger to his person, and whither he was so often and humbly invited to come, on no other conditions, but to make him great and glorious, and leaving Delinquents, which he protected against Law and Reason, to the discretion of the great Judicature of the Nation, which would have been both a safe, a profitable, and a short course for him to have yielded unto, and saved him the labour of a dishonourable descending out of his dining room, to dispute those differences with the States of the Kingdom in the Kitchen, and without so many impertinencies, ambages, and subterfuges wherewith he solaces himself seemingly moving for authorising of fit persons on both sides to debate the matter with freedom; a very fine way indeed, and about the wood, when he might have sat still in peace and quietness, and left the obliquities of the Church and State to those to whom they properly belonged to be disputed, regulated, and set strait; whilst himself (without such an unnecessary and un-Kingly engagement) might have taken his pleasure in hunting the Buck, rather than to have needlessly all that Summer traversed his ground, through so many Counties, in hunting after men to kill the best and most faithful of his Subjects (could he have had the grace to have seen it) of his whole Kingdom. But then he comes to an other overture, that if on securing of such Treators as himself should choose, and the like safety by him given to such as the Parliament shall design for a Treaty, than there shall be nothing wanting on his part, to the advance of the true Protestant Religion, the Laws, the Liberty of the Subject, and just Priviges of Parliament; as to Religion, can any man believe that knew how he was principled, that he would have yielded to other than that formal and prelatical Protestantisme which he had vowed to uphold? As to the Laws, should they have been other than should still have lain under his negative power? As to the Libertyes of the Subject, what should they have been, more than the Militia his Sword then drawn against them would permit as he pleased to like or dislike? As to the Privileges of Parliaments, which he takes care to confine with his Epithet (Just) in the promse he makes, what should they have been, but as they might suit to the best advantage of the Crown, and his unlimitable Prerogative? then he concludes, that if that Proposition be rejected, he appeals to God and the World, that he had done his duty, which would absolve him from the guilt of that blood which he says must be spilt; and I believe him, for it seems he meant then to spill blood (as he did afterwards, more than befitted a Christian King) rather than to have missed of the accomplishment of any of his resolutions, having ingraved on his Sword, aut Caesar, aut nullus, Caesar, or no body, to one of which he attained; his close seems to me both monitory and minitory, for he gives the Parliament to understand, how he was provided and what they were to trust to, in telling them aforehand, That whatsoever opinion other men have of our power, our provision of men, money and arm, are such, as may secure us from further violence, till it shall please God to open the eyes of our people; a very brave invitation to peace, with the Sword in his hand, to enforce it, as he pleased to have it, and with an Army of 6000 Horse, and 11000 Foot (as elsewhere he says he had ready to chastise the Rebels;) But look over to his Chapter, upon seizing of the Forts. Castles, Navy and the Militia, there he disclaims to have had any other arms than those of the Primitive Christians (prayers and tears) against their Persecutors, where he is pleased (in a strange contradiction) to make that an Argument of his not raising the first War against the Parliament, though as it is well known at Edgehill he came with 20000 well armed men into the field, with a full resolution to beat the Parliament to fitters; how you will piece these contradictions together, I leave as a task to you, it being beyond my power to reconcile such distant Asseverations.  
Now to his Message of the 5th of Sept. in pursuance of the former, he says, That he never did, or ever intended to declare both our Houses of Parliament Traitors, or to set up our Standard against them, and yet at that instant had proclaimed my Lord of Essex, the Earl of Stamford, and all their Adherents Traitors which necessarily must be intended the Parliament, for they Commissioned Essex, and raised their defensive Army, which he fought with at Edgehill, and all along the competition styles them Rebels; such wide and bold contradictions, that no man knows where to him; which puts me in mind what some of his own domestic servants have often averred, that they could not depend on any of his promises, or believe what he said, and sure I am, and enough there are of no mean rank and quality of his servants yet living, and in beggary; can witness, and have sad cause to remember, that his Letters Patents full dearly paid for and under his Broad seal, could not protect any of them from resuming into his own hands, that he had a mind to, either to make use of them to his own advantage, or to confer them on others, as he was pleased, without other satisfaction, but with fruitless promises, that they should be considered. Next he goes on and says, that on the Parliaments revocation of their Declarations, as Traitors, or otherways for assisting of us, we will with chieerfulness upon the same day, recall our Proclamations, and take down our Standart; but note then, it necessarily follows, that it could not be erected but only against the Parliament, unless his meaning was to erect it against the Man in the Moon; but here you have the kernel of that nut, which stuck so fast in the King's stomach; and was it not a very fine and equal proposition, to put the innocent and the nocent into the balance, the just with the unjust, and either to make War, or free so many and heinous Delinquents that resorted unto him, together with those false and fugitive Lords and Commons, trusted by their Countries, which by the laws of the Land ought not to have departed without leave of the Speaker, and that on urgent occasion? Bethink yourself whether this Proposition suited either with Reason, Honour, Conscience, and the ancient usage and Precedents of Parliaments, or with the King's Justice, to become the screen to Delinquents of so high a strain: but to the close of this Message, where he conjures the Parliament again to consider the bleeding condition of Ireland, and the dangerous condition of England, when as none but himself was guilty of that Phlebotomy, and he alone that first set them, and kept them a bleeding, so long, as that to staunch the vein, the State could not devise a better cure, than to let out his blood, which had let out so much throughout; the three Kingdoms, as would have died the vast Ocean into crimson.  
But briefly to his next Message of the 11th of Sept. 1642. where all the world may see where the Remora lay that stayed him from coming to the Parliament, until he had provided for the indemnity of all those persons, etc. which he says were accounted Traitors to us, who according to their duty, their Oaths of Allegiance, and the Law, have appeared in defence of us their King and Liege Lord (whom we are bound in Conscience and Honour to preserve.) So that it here appears plainly, that no other obstacles than stood in the way of his return to the Parliament, but the absolute Indemnity of all that had appeared in his defence, according to their duty, oaths, & Law, as he would have it believed; his pretended fear of Tumults are not here in question, neither any other material exception, but the indemnity of his Partisans, a goodly Honour and Conscience) could he have brought so great a party with Indemnity into London and to the Parliament, it seems then he doubted not but to make his party good with, or without fight, and what between their own power, and his fraud, its plain that he thought in time he should be enabled to overpower the Parliament, and to carry all other things answerable to his will and hearts desire; but by what law could those fugitive Members depart the House, and fly to him? and by what Law could he protect them which had falsified their Trust? was it their duty to run to him at a call, who before against his duty and his Oath ran from the Parliament, under subterfuges, and pretence of Tumults, and upon no other ground, but by his absence and non-currence (as he was made to believe) to make the Parliament no more than a cipher and that than they neither could or durst act in a doit without him? but having by this time seen his own error, and that the Parliament would and did transact without him, and that in want of his concurrence the people concurred with them in the defence of the public liberty; he than insists on no other scruple than Indemnity for all his party; and here we come to a pure piece of Nonsense, where he says, No other reason induced us to leave our City of London, but that with Honour and Safety we could not stay there, nor to raise any force, but for the necessary defence of our-person, and the Law, against levies in opposition to both: As to his leaving of the City, and the Parliament, that pretence is clearly evinced, by his own former overture of coming to them on condition of the Parliaments withdrawing their Proclamations, against the Delinquents, and fugitive Members, but as to his raising of force for the necessary defence of his person and the Law, both the reason (if there be any) and coherence are at so wide and wild a distance, as that I believe the quaintest of his Secretaryes, or him that writ it, on a review of the Incongruity, would be ashamed to own his own work; and observe it for a known truth to all the Kingdom, did not he first raise a party of Cavaliers to assault the House, to beat and kill the poor petitioning people, before ever the Parliament had so much as a thought of raising one man, when himself was provided with 300 desperate Ruffians, fit and ready to attempt any bold Assassination? and what one man before himself began had offended him, that he of necessity must raise a force to defend his person and the Law? was it Law, when as at London he found himself deceived to raise a strength sufficient to quash the Parliament, and against the Legislative power itself, but he must run into the North, and round about half of his Kingdom to do it, and missing his aims, to come at last and so often with flams and overtures for a Treaty, which he never really meant, or intended, otherwise than in subtlety & his wont fetches to decoy the Parliament and people into a belief of his deep sense of the bleeding condition of the Kingdoms, of which no Prince Christian could be more careless, as it evidently appears by all his actions, examined in the right sense of his own meaning, as anon shall be manifestly demonstrated out of his own refusal of the Parliaments petitions? As to the Levyes made by the Parliament in opposition to him and the Laws, he might have remembered, that none made Levies either against him or the Law, more than his own lawless Will, and that the Parliament made no sooner Levies than it became them, to oppose his Levies, raised against them and the known Laws of the Land; and that notwithstanding all those specious and umbragious Messages sent to the Parliament for Peace and Accommodation, tending to no other end than to rock the Parliament asleep, and by his then frequent placentias to lull them into a slack and negligent remissness, in raising defensive arms against his Forces, whilst himself by protracting of time, might attract such an Army as would enable him to overpower both the Parliament, and whatsoever Forces were (as he says) then in their march against him, which he had no sooner drawn together, but out of his confidence to have beaten the Parliaments Army to pieces; not eight days before Edgehill fight he not only utterly refused their Petition, which would have been presented to him by the mediation of the Earl of Dorset, (for he had a good space before refused all accommodation,) but sent Rupert to the Commissary General (who was to deliver it) to tell the Earl of Essex, then at Worcester, that he would not receive any more Petitions from him or any of the Parliament Rebels of them all: A known truth to many yet living, and some of them sitting at present in Parliament, whereby it manifestly appears, that all his former and many Missives, under the umbrage of Peace, were mere dalliances, both to mock the Parliament, and to cozen the people into a belief of his reality and good meaning, when he meant nothing more than to bob the Parliament by cunning and secret fraud, until he might ruin them by plain and open force, and then to pursue those naturalised appetites, and arbitrary designs of his, which so long before he had cherished in his heart, which neither his Honour, Reason, and his Conscience, (whereof so often he talks) could prevail with him to disgorge, until their over-growth enforced him to an untimely vomit.  
'Tis most true, that they which look on the first face of things, and heed only the outside of objects, without an intentive eye on their insides, are easily deceived; but such as will narrowly look into all his Expresses, compared with his deeds, shall doubtless soon find, that this unhappy King was one of the deepest and boldest dissemblers, of any one Prince which the last Century hath produced; and I am prone to believe, that he took too much of the pattern of Lews th'eleventh of France, who was wont to say, that he desired to leave his Son no other Learning, than Qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare, he that knows not to dissemble, knows not how to play the King; and it hath been feared, and by those which wished him well, that he was too much versed in the principles of Machiavelli, having in his life time practised, and since his death left behind him so many eevidences thereof, that many of the best heads have been induced to believe, that he came not behind any of the ITALIAN Politicians of this age.  
But to take all these his three Messages together, considered by any discreet man, as their purport tends to one and the selfsame end, and the time when they were sent to the parliament, all of them, whilst he was most busy and sedulously studious, how and where to raise Forces both at home and abroad, and it evidently shows, that his intent in all his specious overtures of peace, were to no other end, than to befool the People and Parliament, which he then began to know would not be cozened, as having had sufficient experience of him; practise indeed he might (as he failed not) to continue to delude the vulgar belief, and to keep in with the people; but he than found there was no good to be done on a Court of Parliament, for he perceived they meant not further to trust him, than they saw him; and to have yielded to a treaty circumscribed with such large conditions, and so unequally balanced, as so admit of such as he should send to treat with them, out of Parliament, which not unlikely would have been of those that had both deserted the Parliament and falsified their faith, which to have indemnified, and all other Delinquents as had repaired unto his assistance, (otherwise no peace with him) what effects could a Treaty produce, (so much upbraided (by his party) on the Parliament for refusing it) other than mockery? when himself knew, as well as themselves, that they would not yield unto such a motion, neither himself go less than to take off all the Delinquents with impunity against all reason, law, and the ancient precedent, of all former Parliaments; that alone being the greatest breach of privilege that ever was offered to a Court of Parliament, and such a destructive project to the essence and being of Parliaments, as in the future took away all power and privilege from them, and necessarily conferred it on his own usurped Prerogative, his negative claim being no more, and scarce so much to enable him to do in the future as he listed, when as every vulgar spirit knows it for Law, that the King cannot, neither ever durst any of our Kings, rescue one Prisoner at the Bar, out of the hands of Justice, in any of the inferior Courts of the Kingdom, ('Tis true, that Henry of Monmouth being a rude Prince, though after a tolerable King, came openly and with violence to the King's Bench in Westminster Hall, and rescued Poynes his Servant, arraigned (for robbing and taking away the King's Treasure) at the Bar; but the story tells us, that the Judges laid the Prince by the heels for his pains, and his Father the King thanked them for it.) much less than that this King should presume to rescue so many viperous Delinquents out of the justice of the great Judicature of the Nation, which all of common reading know have acted sundry times in such a power, as to depose several of his Ancestors for their Tyrannies, and hanged many of their chief Instruments: Precedents which with good reason he might have more timely remembered, and not have stood with his Sword in his hand to enforce so unjust, senseless and unreasonable a Proposition for a Treaty.   

Observations on the King's Pourtracture.  
THe King's Book, which hath flown abroad, and throughout the Kingdom, as it were between the wings of Mercury, and hath so much taken in the opinion of the vulgar belief, and esteemed to be such an impregnable rampire, incirculating his innocency, that it hath been thought not assaultable; I confess at the first sight thereof it took for a while, as his protestations formerly had done, in many apprehensions; but on a second consideration of the title (The King's Image) with the dress that is bestowed upon his Effigies in a posture of devotion, in imitation of David in his ejaculations to Heaven, surely I could not believe that such a piece of vanity was of the King's designment, but the mere juggling devise of some hypocritical or Mahometan Impostor, the better to stir up the People and vain beholders to pity him: But entering into the Body of the Book, and considering the choice of the many Subjects whereof it treats, the whole contexture whereof hath already been sufficiently handled without mittens by a Gentleman of such abilities as gives place to none for his integrity, learning and judgement; yet on re-consideration of the whole (amongst others of his Chapters) coming to that of (listing of Armies) and in that to his Interrogations, Whose innocent blood hath he shed? what Widows or Orphans tears can witness against me? Doubtless were there no other evidence throughout all the whole book (as God knows every page yields plenty of such impudencies) those two Interrogatories would be sufficient to prove him one of the bloodiest out-facers of truth that ever was known in the world. Passing by his own acknowledgement, that him-himselfe first begun the late War, and consequently guilty of all the innocent blood spilt throughout the three Kingdoms, it would not be amiss to retort his own Interrogatories, and to ask wether there be any one Family or Kindred throughout three Kingdoms, that yields not a Father, Mother, Brother, Sister, or a Kinsman, whose tears have not cried to Heaven for the infinity of blood spilt through his wilfulness, or for the wounds, or loss of Limbs of so many throughout the Land we which see daily halting & crutching it in hospitals, and in every of our streets; and hath there been no Widows or Orphans tears shed? or no complaints made to himself for the goods taken violently from them, and firing of numberless habitations by his own merciless Soldiers, Commissioned by himself, yea commanded to be put in execution, as it may be instanced in thousands of sad examples, yea by poor Widows crying and kneeling unto him for the rapines committed either in his own sight, or by his permission, when they received no other answer, but his turning about from their lamentations, and saying that he did it not, when it lay in his power, and by his oath and duty he stood bound to see it redressed, which he never was known to have done, but to slight whatsoever complaints were addressed unto him of that nature? And was he ever known to spare either friend or foe, where money was to be had to prosecute his perfidious and bloody designs, which he took not? Amongst thousands of precedents of this nature, did he spare Mr. Ascham, a known Royalist, and one that assisted him in his bloody Wars, when he sent Rupert, that plundering kinsman of his, to rifle the Gentleman's house at Layford in the County of Berks, who took from him ten thousand pounds at once in ready money, and out of his bounty (whereof he was very seldom known to be over liberal) sent back the tenths thereof as a dividend between his two unmarried daughters, and that also on great suit made unto him, and the tears of the Gentlewomen themselves that he would be pleased to consider their distressed condition? with what face could he so much as pretend to innocency, or appeal to the witness of any Widows or Orphans tears, when 'tis openly known, that he never spared any man's blood in his wrath, who was in arms against him, otherwise than for his own ends, and safety of such of his own side as the Parliament had in their custody? when he had granted out Commissions of Oyer and Determiner to his chief justice Heath and others to hang all such as had opposed his Tyranny in taking the Parliaments part, until he was induced to retract those Commissions in regard that two for one of his own might happily by his own Precedent have gone to the Gallows? and do not his own Letters to the Queen confirm his resolution to take money wheresoever he could find it, when he tells her that his only want was money, which good Swords and Pistols would fetch in? and hath not the practice of all his barbarous Wars verified as much as he therein soothes up himself, to be supplied either by hook or crook? If no innocent blood can be found to witness against him, let the ghosts of 200000 poor Innocent souls, barbarously butchered in Ireland speak; if no Widows or Orphans tears can witness against him, let the dumb stones of those demolished palaces of Rasing, Ragland, Belvoyer, and infinite others speak, where those formidable garrisons of his were made to the terror and damage of all men in their vicinity, and whose reducing cost so much innocent blood. Neither let those great Lords and prime Gentlemen of this Kingdom, whose Lands and total Inheritances are lately voted to be sold, in reparation of the public losses, and in defence of the general interest of the Commonwealth (changed) when it could not otherwise subsist, but by rooting up his tyrannous monarchy be silent; And if no other tears of Widows & orphans can be found to accuse him, let his ambition, injustice, oppression, rapine, and bloodshed speak, let that vast number of Gentlemen which have made their compositions (for siding with him in his unjust and destructive Wars at Goldsmith's hall, speak of be silent, whose Wives and Children, live in want, and happily not without tears enough for the indigence whereunto they are reduced through his only means.  
Now if all these sad instances be the effects and Trophies of his seventeen years' reign, which he boasts that the people enjoyed in such measure of peace, justice and plenty, as all the neighbour Nations have either admired or envied; and if this his Pourtracture and Image be that monument which his friends, since his death, or rather before, had prepared in readiness, and stolen the pattern from Mecha, and to hang it in that his ayrery Mahometan regality, supported by this their impostured Loadstone, whereby to present his sacred memory, in his Solitudes, to posterity, surely it may be suspected, they were not so exactly their Crafts-masters, or so much his friends as foes, to Saint him before his time, and in such a shrine, as necessarily must render him to future times (infamous) an imparralelld dissembler, and a greater deceiver than Mahomet ever was, and of the number of those of whom the Prophet David makes mention, which speak peace to their Neighbours, when mischief was in their hearts, (as all the 
* Psal. 28  world knows he hath too often practised to his people and Parliaments) when as it would have much better became him to have left out his many Pharasicall justifications, and to have remembered, that he which covereth his sins shall not prosper, but who so confesseth 
Proverbs 28. 13.  and forsaketh them shall have mercy; this had been the better way to have invited others to have spoken less and more favourable of him, than now in conscience they ought, having such an artificial and faced piece of impudent justifications, exposed and set forth purposely to deceive the poor people, and to affront truth, and the evident managery of his bloody and licentious reign, which necessarily to the World's end will give an occasion to rip up his life, and show to the present and after ages, what a Tomb these juggling impostors have erected for him; and with what Epitaphs of impiety, injustice, blood and rapine, it will be adorned, instead of that glory wherewith they intended to perpetuate to his memory; though sufficient and enough hath already been written, in discovery of this grand Imposture, and to every piece and parcel thereof so much answered as may satisfy all men in their right wits; as to others that are out of them, and have a desire to be cozened out of their understandings, I think an Asian belief would better fit them than an European Faith, a gallymaufried Alcoran, rather than a true and rational Remonstrance, dressed with no other Rhetoric than the naked truth; and shall men be silent when they see it overborne with the multitudinous denials, flams, and falsehoods of his defeated and malicious parties?   

Observations on the Kings going into the Scotch Army.  
THe Kings disguized going from Oxford into the Scotch Army then at Newark, as it was one of his last shifts, so was it a very shrewd one (considered as he had laid the design) That he went first to them was doubtless more out of an apprehension and confidence he had to gain them to his assistance, than out of any great good will he bore towards them, but sure it was out of an inveterate hatred he bore towards the Parliament, the evidence of this truth manifestly appears by the King's Letter to Ormond, Number 27. from Oxford, April the 3d. 1646. I shall present you with the principal part thereof, at your own leisure you may peruse the whole, viz.  
Having lately received very good security, that we and all that do adhere to us, shall be safe in their Persons, Honours and Consciences in the Scotch Army, and that they shall really and effectually join with us, and with such as will come unto us, and join with them, for our preservation, and shall employ their Army and Forces to assist us to the procuring of a happy and well-grounded Peace for the good of us and our Kingdoms in the recovery of our just Right, we have resolved to put ourselves to the hazard of passing into the Scotch Army now lying before Newarke, and if it shall please God that we come safe thither, we are resolved to use our best endeavour with their assistance, and with the conjunction of the Forces under the marquis of Montrosse, and such of our well affected Subjects of England as shall rise for us, to procure it may be an honourable and speedy Peace with those who hither to refused to give ear to any means tending thereunto; of which our resolution, we hold it necessary to give you this advertisement, as well to satisfy you, and all our Council and loyal Subjects with you, and to whom we will that you communicate these our Letters; yet failing in our earnest and sincere endeavours by a Treaty to put an end to the miseries of these our Kingdoms, we esteemed ourselves obliged, to leave no probable expedient unattempted to preserve our Crown and Friends from the Usurpation and Tyranny of those, whose actions declare so manifestly their designs to overthrow the Laws and happy established Government of this Kingdom; And now we have made known to you our resolution, we recommend to your special care the disposing and managing our affairs on that side, as that you shall conceive most for our Honour and Service, being confident the course we have taken (though with some hazard to our person) will have a good influence on that our Kingdom, and defer, if not altogether prevent, the Rebels transporting of Forces from them into that Kingdom; And we desire you to satisfy all our well-affected Subjects on that side, of our Princely care of them, whereof they shall receive the effect, as soon as God shall enable us.  

Observations.  
We have here a most quaine piece of Machiavilisme, moulded under the King's wont and specious pretences of the care he had for the good of his Subjects, in procuring an honourable peace, and for recovery of his just Rights from those (as he says) which hitherto refused to give way to any means tending thereunto: But observe how he intended to accomplish this peace, and to put an end to the miseries of the Kingdom, and you shall evidently see, that it was out of an assurance he had to win the Scots to side with him in a new War, and in causing them to break their Faith plighted to the Parliament, when at that very time they were to receive 300000 l. towards their entertainment; this being but a piece of his design, for to that assistance he flattered himself to receive from the Scots, he also builds on that merciless Army under Montrosse, and such of his well-affected Subjects of the English as shall rise for us, (they are his own words) Speak your Conscience, was not this a fine plot think you, to procure an honourable and speedy peace, when his ends were as visible as the Sun shine to continue the War, and to pollute the Land with more blood under his wont umbragious pretences of peace, and (as he says) to recover his just rights? and what were those rights, more than by a new Stratagem to overmaster all under his power? or at least to enforce such a peace, as might suit to his own desires? then he comes to say that he hath left no means unattempted, and I believe it in his own sense, and that was in the conjunction of both those Armies, and his inviting of all his well-affected Subjects in England to rise for us; and in pursuance of this deep plot he commands Ormond to communicate his Letters to the Council there, and to all his Well-affected Subjects of Ireland, that they might know how carefully he was of them, by the confidence he had in that course, and what a good Influence it would have on that Kingdom, viz. in the deferring, if not to the utter disappointing of the Rebels transporting of supplies to the relief of the distressed poor Protestants of Ireland, and desites that all his Well-affected Subjects there should take notice of his Princely care of them, whereof they should receive the effects so soon as God should enable him; a very Princely care indeed if you mark it: but you may here see that God would not be mocked, neither enable him in his mischievous projects. Speak freely, whether this King meant well, or acted like a Christian in his treacherous endeavour to divert in what possibly he could devise the Parliaments Forces, sent for the assistance of their poor Brethren of Ireland, when as he had so often protested, and born the Parliament in hand how desirous and careful he was to expedite their supplies thither, and by an Act of his own Assent had empowered the Parliament therewith, which here again (in his wont language) he calls Rebels, to speed their recruits against those which he then styles his Well-affected Subjects. On the consideration of the premises, I pray tell me, where is that Sophister to be found, that can handsomely make an Apology for such foul dissimulations? If you cannot find any, I will point you to himself, as you may see it in his Pourtraicture, Cap. XXII. on his going into the Scotch Army, where he says, That what Providence denies to force, it may grant to prudence; necessity is now my chiefest Counsellor, and commands me to study my safety by a disguized withdrawing from my chiefest strength, and adventuring on their Loyalty which first began my troubles.  
Here you have an Apology of his own, though surely it is a very poor one; where first I pray make your own judgement, whether the Scots began his troubles, or he theirs? if you doubt on't, strafford's, and the late Arch Bishops Ghosts will witness, that he would not suffer them to be at quiet; But what prudence was that when he could no longer stand up to infest three Kingdoms at once, then to put himself on the precipice of necessity, and for his safety to go into the Scotch Army? and why not first into his Throne in the Parliament House at Westminster? from whence he fled, as from a Serpent, and by a thousand most humble Petitions, and motions, was invited to return with welcome, until he had wilfully and most perversely made himself uncapable of acceptance, and so imbrued himself and the three Kingdoms with the loathsome leprosy of Innocent blood, that with Vzziah he had made himself more fit for a Cloister, than a Palace. I pray speak your own judgement, whether this his prudence was any other than an indefatigable pursuance to fulfil his own will, in re-involving the Kingdoms in a more direful War, than he had done before? and could Providence do less than to deny him safety? when all his studies were devoted to find out any means to disturb the Kingdom's peace and safety, and to destroy Parliaments, whereby to make himself an absolute Monarch, and of a King of Gentlemen and Freemen, to become a Tyrant over so many inanimated Slaves; you may without injustiee avouch it, that none of his courses were like to thrive, when they were continually known to be accompanied with a spirit of error, and that the effects and ends of studying his own safety chiefly consisted in malice, and laying of new snares to catch others in, in which Providence thought it most fit, that himself should first be taken.    

Observations on the Irish Rebellion.  
IT is without all question, that the King was more indulgent towards the Irish bloodthirsty Rebels, than suited with his public professions and often protestations; I shall not say so much in projecting that horrible Massacre of the English there, as in protecting those Rebels after the fact was committed, having (to use his own expression) such visible designs and ends of his own, as from the very beginning of the War, and before, to make use of their service against the English and their Representative, as that in any impartial eye could neither look handsome or suitable to the Religion he professed. To treat of the original ground of this rising, or to point out the Author and the authority by which those vile caitiffs enterprised on so barbarous an act, is more than I shall here deliver, for this is as yet a hidden piece of villainy, although this I can affirm from the mouth of a Gentleman well borne, though I dare not say of any great credit, that before the Kings going into SCOTLAND, and before the flight of the Lord Iermin, he being then a kind of an attendant on the Queen, and having many time's admission into Master jermins' Chambers, avers, that he saw nine several Commissions sealed in Master jermins' lodging, for so many Regiments to be commanded by the like number of Colonels in Ireland, whereof one was to Colonel Plunket, but with what seals the Gentleman hath not declared, neither do I believe that he was able to distinguish between the Broad and the Privy seal: But this is most manifestly known, that the Rebels for a long time, and at the very beginning of their rising styled themselves the King and Queen's Army, and that they had good authority for doing that which they had done; and this is most perspicuous, that the King himself was ashamed to be seen or to own his own work, and with what instructions and Commissions he had empowered the marquis of Ormand, as in his own private Letter to him evidently appears, Number 22. December 13. 1644. from Oxford, viz.  
I hope my public dispatch will give you sufficient instructions and power, yet I have thought it necessary, for your more encouragement in this necessary work, to make this addition with my own hand; as for Poynings act, I refer you to my other Letters, and for matter of Religion, though I have not found it fit to take public notice of the paper which Browne gave you, yet I must command you to give him, my Lord Muskery, and Plunket particular thanks for it, assuring them that without it there could be no peace, and that sticking to it, their Nation in general, and they in particular, should have comfort in what they have done, and to show that this is more than words, I do promise them, and command you to see it done, that the Penal Statutes against Roman Catholics shall not be put in execution, the Peace being made, and they remaining in their due obedience; and further, when the Irish gives me that assistance which they have promised, for the suppression of this Rebellion, and I shall be restored to my rights, than I will consent to the repeat of them by Law, but all those of Appeals 〈◊〉 Rome and Praemunire must stand; all this in Cipher you must impart to none, but to those three already named, and that with injunction of strict secrecy; so 〈◊〉 recommending to your care the speedy dispatch of the Peace of Ireland, and my necessary supply from thence, as I wrote to you in my last Letter, I rest.  

Observations.  
We have here in the first place, a manifestation of the King's close and serpentine windings, in the next his injunction of strict secrecy to Ormond, that that which he had written in Cipher, should not be imparted to any, but Muskery, Browne, and Plunket, three of the most desperate Rebels in that Kingdom, which cannot possibly stand with the King's innocency, neither with the breach of his faith with the Parliament and people, or with God in point of his protestations to maintain the true Protestant Religion, where it is evident, that he played fast and loose on all hands as best suited with his necessary affairs and work, (as he calls it) all his ends tending to this only centre, to gain the Irish Rebels to his assistance against the Parliament at any rate, though to the profanation of Religion, and his breach of faith with God and man, as instantly you may see fearfully protested, at the receiving the Sacrament at Christ-Church in Oxford 1643. at the hands of the Bishop of Armagh, where, immediately before his communicating, (he beckoning to the Bishop for a short forbearance) used these following expressions, viz.  
My Lord, I espy here many resolved Protestants, who may declare to the world the resolution I do now make; I have to the uttermost of my power prepared my Soul to become a worthy receiver, and may I so receive comfort by the blessed Sacrament, as I do intend the establishment of the true reformed Religion, as it stood in its beauty in the happy days of Queen Elizabeth, without any connivance at Popery; I bless God, that in the midst of these public distractions, I have still liberty to communicate, and may this Sacrament be my damnation if my heart join not with my lips in this Protestation.   

Observation.  
Having seriously considered this strange Protestation of the Kings, on the taking of the Sacrament, with the imprecation of his damnation, if his heart joined not with his lips, as I compared it with his letter after to Ormond, together with his many other Protestations I profess in the faith of a Christian, I stood amazed what to think of him, and his Religion; considered again, as it was taken before a public audience, and yet the very next year after, he makes no scruple or conscience to promise to Ormond the repeal of all laws against Irish Papists; and likewise in his Letter to the Queen of the 9th. of March 1645. he gives way to her to promise in his name, the taking away of all penal Laws against the English Papists, so that they shall enable him to do it; where it seems he makes no manner of account of a Parliament, without which, as already is said, never any King of England either made or repealed any one Law, surely 'tis here very plain, that he understood not the extent of his own power, neither the nature of the English Sovereignty, or that he was disposed not to know it, but to rule without Parliaments, provided, that by the assistance of Papists he might be empowered to do it, and then that his will should be a Law to the people; just Tyrant like, stat pro ratione voluntas; but take the rest of his Letter to Ormond into your more mature consideration, and then happily it will astonish you, where he hastens him to clap up the Peace with the Rebels, which so soon as it shall be accomplished (he vows haec verba, in his Letter to him Number 23 January 7. 1644.) All the earth shall not make me break it; but not doubting of a peace, I must again remember you to press the Irish for their speedy assistance to me here, and their friends in Scotland, my intention being to draw from thence into Wales (the peace once concluded) as many as I can of my armed Protestant subjects; and I desire the Irish would send as great a body as they can to land about CUMBERLAND.   

Observation.  
Here again we have a sufficient proof of this most unfortunate Prince's inflexibility, his resolutions once fixed, there were no hopes of their alteration (they are his own words) all the earth shall not make me break it, though such resolutions break him in pieces, and sure we are many thousands of his poor innocent Subjects through this only fault of his obstinacy. 'tis an infallible truth, that the wilful man never wants woe, but when one man's perverse will shall be the cause of the destruction of multitudes, that's a fearful judgement and a remediless calamity. We have also in this Letter an evident testimony, what an inveterat hatred he bore towards the English Nation, and those Scots which took their parts, which he hated beyond belief, and all others which never so little fell a thwart his inclinations, where I shall crave your favour to tell all of you that sided with him, (haply more for your own ends than out of conscience) for it is most certain, that he made no other account of you, but to satisfy his own lust, in your destruction, whatsoever he pretended, and to prove this, I will tell you a true story, and it is this; On the death of the late Earl of Northampton, whose Commands in one of his Forests he presently gave away, of which Endymion Porter understanding, pressed him that the young Earl his son, whose father was then newly slain in his service, was fit to have that conferred on him than on any other, on which check of Porters he replied, and hath the Earl done more than became him, to die for his King? This is no fable, but a known truth, whereby you may guess how he esteemed of you all, as if his Subjects were a sort of Sheep ordained to the slaughter, for the obtaining of his lustful pleasure, and not him, as the Shepherd ordained to preserve them as that flock committed to his care and charge from God himself; you may instantly find this very story verified and set out unto the life in his former Letter, in which with what earnestness he presses ORMOND, to hasten over the Irish to his assistance, yea to bring over as many of his armed Protestants to land in Wales, as might enable him to overpower both nations to his absolute domination and revenge. A most brutish resolution, and of purpose to reset all his Kingdoms on a light fire, in setting of Protestants against Protestants, and Papists against both; you may further observe, how his displeasure grew to be so implacable against the Scots his native Subjects, and to lay his design to destroy them together with his English Subjects, and the reason of this you may perfectly see, in his Letter to Ormond, Number 25. Feb. 25. 1647. viz. I do therefore command you to conclude a Peace with the Irish whatsoever it cost, so that my Protestant Subjects there may be secured, and my regal Authority preserved; but for all this you are to make the best bargain you can, and not discover your enlargement of power, till you needs must, and although I leave the Managing of this great and necessary work, entirely to you, yet I cannot but tell you, that if the suspension of Poynings act, for such bills as shall be agreed upon there, and the present taking away of the penal Laws against Papists by a Law, will do it, I shall not think it a hard bargain, so that freely and vigorously they engage themselves in my assistance, against my Rebels of England and Scotland; for which no condition can be to hard, not being against Conscience and Honour.   

Observation.  
You may first observe in this Letter the large extent of the King's Conscience and Honour, in the next place his seeming care for the preservation of his Protestant Subjects in Ireland, with a purpose rather to make use of them against their Brethren of England, than to leave them in Ireland for their own defence, where their service was much more necessary, than to be employed in the slaughtering of the English, with the hazard of their own lives, and for no other end, but to advance their own prodigious, and bloody designs; for observe it in the former Letter, he manifestly declares his resolution, to call them over to his assistance, and here he tells it, that as to the Irish, if the taking away of Poynings act, and the penal Statutes against Papists by a Law will do it, he shall not think it a hard bargain, provided they freely and vigorously engage against his English and Scotish Rebels, for which no conditions can be too hard, not being against Conscience and Honour; here you may safely aver is one of the strangest Consciences, and an Honour so illimitable, as that I am confident, the subtlest Logician in his Oxford Garrison, would be driven to his ne plus ultra, to give either of them a right definition, that close of not being against Conscience or Honour (considered with his former commands to Ormond) without doubt is one of the finest pieces of Nonsense that ever I have seen; and surely had I been in the Marquis' place, that very restriction in the close, would have made me to forbear the putting in execution of any of his commands, for there was not a syllable of them all, but in due construction was, or aught to have been against his Conscience and Honour; sure it was point blank opposite to his many Protestations, and that fearful imprecation of his Damnation on his receiving the Sacrament at Christ-Church; and doubtless in my understanding (all parts of this Letter considered) the very last clause of not being against Conscience or Honour, would have been sufficient warrant for me, to have sat still and done nothing towards the concluding of so Irreligious and dishonourable a Peace; But I beseech you look upon the King's ends, and you shall find them to be no other, than in a brutish manner to set all his Subjects together by the ears, to kill and make havoc of one anothea, English against English, Scots againt Scots, and Irish against both, so that he might thereby accomplish his own pernicious designs; And in the mean time to make no manner of scruple or Conscience of spilling of Innocent blood, & without the least remorse of that horrible Massacree of 200000 of the English Nation, butchered by those barbarous Villains for whom he was so solicitous, to defend them, and to procure a happy peace for them whatsoever it cost; and with so many wiles and fetches he had so often endeavoured to engage them to join with Ormond against Inchiquine and the Scots, as that you may evidently see in the Postscript of his Letters to him, number 24. 1644. from Oxford, as also in his Commissions to Montrosse, first to ruin the Scots, and after to come for his assistance into England.  
Now that you may further understand what Conscience he made of bloodshed, and what care he had to preserve his Subjects in Peace and Prosperity, I shall tell you another story from the mouth of one of his principal Commanders (Gerrard by name) who upon the rendition of his Oxford Garrison came to London, and made his addresses to Sir John Merricke at Essex house, desiring him that he might have the Honour to kiss my Lord of Essex his hands, Sir John told him, That he had not behaved himself worthy of the name and honour of a Soldier, to be admitted to such a favour, having barbarously burnt his Lordship's house at Lamphey, together with most of the gentlemen's houses of the County of Pembroke, and destroyed the whole Country even to desolation; Gerrard replies in his usual Oath, God dam me Uncle, if I did more than the King from Cardiff by two several Letters strictly commanded me to do; and then to march to him with all my Army, for which I have his Majesties own Letters for my Warrant. Here is an excellent Conscience, and care, in a King bound by his Oath to preserve his Subjects from violence, and yet commanding to destroy them with fire and rapine.  
Sir, in a few words more, would you be pleased, on an exact perusal of all this most unhappy King's Declarations and transactions, considered as you shall always find them, sweetened and gilded over with the plausible pretences, and specious professions of his love and care towards all his Subjects (when he meant nothing less) and many of them confirmed with Imprecations; I say compare them diligently with his actions, and the Letters of his own hand writing (which of other evidences are the best keys to unlock the secrets of man's heart) not leaving out that Posthumus Imposture of his Pourtraicture, and I am confident that the contrariety, dissimulation, hypocrisy, and juggle you shall every where find in them, interwoven with a Pharisaical justifying of himself, and defending all his actions, will astonish you, as they have done me; For in all the late horrid War and bloodshed, throughout the three Kingdoms, you shall find it for an infallible truth, that he who spoke and insisted so much on his Honour and Conscience for many years together, never made any Conscience, or was truly sensible of all the blood spilt either in his own behalf, or against him, more than of one wicked 
* The Earl of Strafford.  Man's, though condemned by Law, and the just judgement of a Court of Parliament, and this man also acknowledged by himself to be utterly unworthy to bear any public office in the Commonwealth, and until God in his justice turned the power of his Sword to nothing, then indeed, and as I may judge (really) he ever now and anon deplores the sad condition of his Kingdoms, but never sincerely (as I am bound to believe) till he had done his worst, and all that possibly he could invent to ruin the Parliament, and to destroy all those that stood up in their defence; And towards his last, his principal labour tended to little more than in pitying of himself, and complaining of the hard measure offered him during his restraint, that he was not admitted to a Personal Treaty with the Parliament for the procuring (as he would have it believed) of a happy peace, when in all his Treatyes and specious overtures from the first to the last, his hand was well known to be in one plot or other how to get himself out of that toil and Labyrinth wherein he had wilfully entangled himself and the Kingdoms, being still one and the self same man, justifying himself, and standing on his own innocency with the Pharisee, but little of the Publican, God be merciful to me a sinner; still in his wont inflexibility to the last, utterly refusing to sign (only) Four Bills for the public security; continuing his usual pretences that they were against his Conscience and Honour; When as all the Kingdom long since knew him to be preingaged to the Queen, and that by one word of her mouth, both his Honour and Conscience would easily have been dispensed withal: This I may truly and further affirm for a piece of a miracle, that somewhat before God's just judgements overtook him (though not without a long conflict) he acknowledged himself guilty of all the War, and not without entreaties to a noble Person, on the first motion for a Treaty in the I slay of Wight, That the Parliament would forbear to charge all the guilt of the blood spilt throughout the Kingdoms on his only score, and on that condition he should not be so uncivil, as to impute the least guilt thereof on them; they were his own words, for that was a fear which much troubled him would be charged upon him, and well he might fear it, when his own Conscience was a witness against him; but in the mean time, suffer me to ask you, how shall Almighty God be satisfied for so much blood causelessly and wilfully spilt throughout three Kingdoms, whose wrath cannot be appeased, neither the Land be cleansed, until expiation be made for the blood of one man, by the shedding of his blood which was the murderer? surely than we cannot determine, what account Almighty God will yet require at their hands which have been principal actors with the King in this bloody tragedy (though some of them, as he hath done, have paid their debts to Nature, and not a few by way of Composition) yet they also have just cause to fear that there is an account not yet cleared, which will be called upon: This I shall add by the way of Question, how and by what Fate this most unfortunate Prince came to be so overpowred with the Enchantments of a Woman, betwixt whom and himself, it is well known, a good space after their Inter-marriage, there were many jars, and continued fall out, and yet at last she alone to become his Oracle for the leading on of all his designs; In so much as he durst not offend her in the least punctilio, or to transact any thing of never so little moment without her good liking, and approbation, and so much to dote on her, as not to permit the Prince to stir a foot, or to undertake anything, but by her only direction, such an absolute power and command had this Queen gained over him and his affections; we may put the Quaerie farther, why otherwise than by her Counsel, he first took away the Prince from his Guardians, and not long after the Duke of York, and to send them beyond Sea, unless it were out of an apprehension, that in imitation of former Precedents, this Parliament might Crown the one or the other Brother, instead of the Father, who had been so disastrous to the Nation, as divers old precedents of the like nature might probably induce him to suspect out of his own guiltiness of his misgovernment? as for instance the dethroning of Edw. the second by the Parliament for his misgovernment and bloody reign, and the advancing (in his life time) of his Son Edward the third, as also the deposing of Richard the second for his Tyranny, and the Parliaments setting up of Rullingbrooke, his Cousin German in his room; Precedents which doubtless he deeply apprehended and feared, which to prevent 'tis most probable he sent them out of the Kingdom, though to his own, and the utter undoing of those Innocent Princes, which he had so far engaged in his bloody quarrel, that they became died in the same colour with their wilful Father. I shall now present you with a proof of the former assertion out of the Kings own Letter to the Prince from Newcastle Number 28. 1646. viz. Charles, This is rather to tell you where I am in health, than at this time to direct you in any thing, I having so fully wrote to your Mother what I would have you to do, whom I command you to obey in every thing, except Religion, concerning which, I am confident she will not trouble you; and see you goes not any whither, without hers or my particular directions.   

Observation.  
Here you may evidently see, by what Star not only himself and all his affairs were guided, but that his Son must be tied up, not to do any thing, or move, but by his Mothers or his own particular directions; a very strange obligation laid on a Son, to be bound to such an absolute obedience, as necessarily conduced to his utter undoing, when as no man knows whether a Wife and a Mother, which had such a latitude of power over the Father and the Son, would not be tampering with a Prince (even in the point of Religion) of so tender years as rendered him fit for any impression, and to be indoctrinated with such principles as well concerning Religion, as others best suitable to her own designs. But I beseeeh you judge of the following texts, and tell me whether they suit not with this most unhappy King's disposition, & the ways whereinto the inflexibility of his nature lead him to perseverance, in pursuance of his own destruction.  
He that speaks unrighteous things cannot be hid, neither shall vengeance when it is punished pass by him: For inquisition shall be made into the Counsels of the ungodly, and the sound of his words shall come unto the Lord for the manifestation of his wicked deed. Wisd. 1. 8. 9  
A Sinful man will not be reproved, but sendeth an exeuse according to his will: A man of Counsel will be considerate, but a strange and a proud man it not daunted with fear, even when of himself he hath done without Counsel. Eccles. 32. 17. 18.  
But I have now little more to address unto you, yet more than I would, had not your provocations amounting to a plain challenge invited me to answer your many virulent complaints, wherein I have inserted very little more than what you may find expressly laid down either in the Kings own Letters or Declarations, and with no other comments (as to the Observations) but such as necessarily arise out of the expressee themselves; neither to any other ends, (as to the first part of my Reply, but for the clearing of truth, and to show out unto you both the constitution of our late most unhappy King, and the manner and condition of all other Kings; I could have sent you more, and God knows more terrible, bloody, and barbarous, but this is enough, though I say not to convince you, (for that would be no other than lavare Aethiopem) but to let you know how much you have been mistaken in the late King, a Prince doubtless which was much too dark for every ones understanding, and too hard for most of his Council of State, whom he trusted with the mannagery of his greatest both designs and secrets; though it be most true, that how tenacious and close soever he was in carrying on that arbitrary work to enslave the Nation, yet God in his mercy would not that they should be so secretly hidden, but that he had appointed a time when they should be revealed and manifested to the World, as we all know they were at Naseby and elsewhere, according to our blessed Saviour's own oracle Mat. 12. 2. For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither hid which shall not be known.  
God knows, and so may you on your better consideration, that I have made use of nothing but authentic authority, or took up any passage on bare trust, neither with the least intention to injure the memory of him who is at rest, but only in vindication and manifestation of truth, and to make that more visibly known to you, which long since hath not been unknown to many, which happily if they would might speak more, and that as this most unfortunate Prince was of all others most his own enemy, so had providence decreed it, that he should be most injurious to his friends, a most implacable enemy to Parliaments, and utterly averse to all partnership in government, other than Hers which was the principal instrument of his ruin, the undoing of his posterity, and the lamentable destruction of three flourishing Kingdoms.  
As to the present Government, and change of the Royalty, or any other of your impetuous exclamations, with the exceptions you take to the present Form, different from the forms of ancient Parliament, and as it was so lately altered, without King, Lords, and the major part of the excluded Commons, and that those which now sit at Westminster, are no other than usurped powers acting in Tyranny, as all of your party spares not to belch out both in private and public, I shall instantly give you both a short and satisfactory answer to every of them; and first to the Government, which you know to be gotten by Conquest, and as heretofore I have told you, by the same weapon wherewith the King intended to make it absolutely Monarchical, and A la Francoys As to the difference between the old and this new Form of Parliament, I answer, that the King himself was the first projector, both in lessening, altering and laming of the Parliament, witness his taking into his Council of State the Earls of Hartford, Essex, Bath, the Lords Say, St. Maur, Falkland, and Culpepper, all of them known to be the most noted Commonwealth's men of both Houses, within two months of the Parliaments sitting down, and within one year after to corrupt near the moiety of the Members of both Houses, to make up his Mongrel Parliament at Oxford, of set purpose to confuse and ruin all Parliaments by themselves. As to the late purging of the Houses, it is acknowledged that in the midst of such a confusion as was both raised, cherished and fomented by the King himself, and the Malignant party, it was done by the power of the Army, and as I take it on this ground, that the major part of both Houses voted for the readmittance of the King on such condition which himself refused, which the lesser and more foreseeing part well understood would in the end come to no other issue, than the setting him up into his old power, so to enable him a new to embroil the Kingdoms, having so long before engaged the Prince in his Quarrel, and disciplined him in his designs, in so much as no other hopes were then left the Parliament, but either a perpetuating of the War and more bloodshed, or the invassalage of the Nation, which necessarily would be the consequence, on the admittance either of the Father or the Son; upon these grounds 'tis confessed, that the Soldiery ended the controversy, in assisting the weaker party in Parliament, though doubtless the more able in judgement and foresight of the future evils and calamities which in all probability might and would befall the Nation; which to prevent, on the evidence of the King's obstinacy, it was resolved to remove the Effects, by taking away the Cause, in calling the principal Author of all the former bloodshed to his public trial, to stop which issue it was farther resolved to cut him off, together with his whole posterity, and to cast that pilot overboard, that not more out of ignorance than wilfulness, would obstinately have sunk the Ship of the Public, in the vast Ocean of his Prerogative, had it not been timely rescued, and warped into the safe Harbour of a Republic, and in change the Regal Government into a Commonwealth, as you now see it established, by power, and by the same power, probable it is they will uphold it, which as it is commonly conceived, was the true state and managery of that business Where you may observe it, as a very remarkable event, that even the major part of of both Houses which had stood so constant to the trust of their Countries, to the very Vote of No more Addresses, and were inclined to readmit the King (as we may believe by God's just judgement) were taken away by force, as the King himself by fraud had long before drawn away so many of the Members, purposely to lame and weaken all Parliaments in the future.  
Sir, These are passages of a very transcendent nature, and too high for our understanding, and we know Gods ways and works are unsearchable, yet as the 
* Eccl. ●. 9 10.  Wise man tells us, There is nothing new under the Sun, and is there any thing whereof it may be said, see, this is new? it hath been already fold time, and was before us: howsoever, when you have spoken the worst you can▪ of those which now sit in Parliament, you cannot deny but the most of them are of the old legal Electron, and the relics of the old Form, they which have been the cause of the maiming, or lessening the number and quality of the old Form, you may thank them for it, and not blame those that remain faithful to their trust, for some kind of Government the people must have, and you evidently see, that God hath given them both Courage to stand fast to the last, and power to enable them to act as they do, which as heretofore I have told you will either bend you to obedience, or break you in your resistance. As to the Injustice wherewith you charge them, and the Tyranny you so much exclaim against, I take not upon me to be so much their Champion, as to defend every of their actions, or any Injustice, of which not unlikely some of them may be guilty; for where power is invested, faults there may be, and foul ones too; yet this much may be said in their defence, that those of known integrity, fail not to look into the demeanour of the faulty, and by severe punishment to make them examples of Justice; I shall say no more, but that should they fail in doing righteousness, Judgement stands at their own doors, and the same God which gave them the power they now have, will as soon divest them of it, as he bequeathed it unto them, and 
* 1 Sam. 1●. 15.  Samuel will tell them; If you do wickedly you shall be consumed, both you and your King. Now Sir, for a close, I shall only tell you, that it sufficeth me and all sober spirits (that having thus long lived free from bloodshed and plunder under this Government, which so lately under the Kingly power the whole Nation felt to their great grief and sorrow) it behoves us then that we all rest content with God's good will and pleasure, and leave this great change to him, as a work of his own, which, I may say with Gamaliel, If it be not of God it will surely fall, but if from him, he will establish it, in spite of all those which shall withstand it: 'tis most true, that the Contributions and Taxes, which you urge to be Tyrannically imposed on the whole Nation, are very heavy, to which I have already given you an answer, viz. that we may all thank your party for it, that they are not only continued but increased through your parties only means, which cease not by their assidual plots to disturb the present peace and Government to their own loss, and grief of such as would willingly bear the burden, so they might enjoy their peace and quietness, as having learned the sweetness of that old Adage, defend me, and spend m●. In a word more, I shall advise you in particular to rest content with that Government which Providence hath allotted us, under which you may as yet live both secure and plentiful if you please, dispose yourself therefore to yield that Obedience which becomes all those that love the public, and their own domestic peace; If not, I fear me you will kick against the pricks, hurt, if not utterly ruin yourself and Family, as many thousands of perverse Fools have done, and fail not to remember, that there is a Court of justice that spares none which shall disturb the public peace, and that Government which we may safely believe, God hath and will establish.  
This is the Counsel of him who really hath a care of your preservation, and so rests,  
Your well-wishing Friend if you so please to esteem him.  Lo this is the man that made not God his strength, but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and strengthened himself in his wickedness. P. 52. 7. The words of his mouth were smother than Butter, but War was in his heart, his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn Swords. Psalm 55. 21. But thou O Lord shalt bring them down into the pit of destruction, bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days. verse 23.   
FINIS.