THE REMONSTRANCE OF THE COMMONS OF ENGLAND, TO The House of Commons assembled in PARLIAMENT: Preferred to them by the hands of the SPEAKER.  
Printed in the year M.DC.XLII.   

THE REMONSTRANCE of the Commons of England to the House of Commons assembled in Parliament, preferred to them by the hands of their SPEAKER.  
Master Speaker,  
PRejudge us not, we pray you, because the title of this paper is a Remonstrance, not a Petition; the cause is, for that Petitions have had ill success of late, yet the matter will be the same, though the form differ.  
We send this (whatsoever ye will call it) to the Honourable House of Commons, who are the representative body of the whole Commons of England, and we desire to present it by you, who are the Speaker of that House.  
The end of our desire is Peace, and we hope we shall not err in the way, when we entreat you to be our mediator. Master Speaker, all that we desire of you, is to deliver this to the House, to procure it to be read, and to obtain as good an answer unto it, as you may.  
And now we address ourselves to the honourable House itself.  
WHen this Parliament was called (after several unhappy breaches of some former) we comforted ourselves with an hope of a redress of all our grievances, & we made choice of you for our Knights, Citizens, & Burgesses, to serve for us there, and we did put our confidence in you, and believed that you according to our trust without any by-respects, would have studied only the peace and good of the kingdom; and we cannot be yet out of hope, but that ye will perform it in the end.  
But you must not take it amiss, if as persons grieved we tell you where our griefs lie. And to prepare our cure the better we must desire you to call to your remembrances,  


1. That we are still the true body of the commons of England; you, but the representative.  
2. That we have not so delegated the power to you, as to make you the governors of us & of our estates; you are in truth but our Procurators, to speak for us in that great council.  
3. That in right we ought to have access to those whom we have thus chosen, and to the whole House, as there shall be cause, to impart our desires unto you, and you ought not to refuse us.  
4. That by involving our votes in yours, we had no purpose to make you perpetual Dictators.  
5. That we never intended, that you should have that latitude of power as to embark us all in a civil war, to the destruction of us and our posterities.  
6. Much less had we a thought, that by any your votes ye would or could draw us into any Acts of disloyalty or disobedience against our natural liege Lord, to whom by the laws of God and man, we do owe and will pay all allegiance and fidelity.    
Wherefore we must claim this freedom which belongs unto us as freeborn Subjects, and as persons interessed in the good and safety of this kingdom, as well as yourselves; that ye will speedily take those things into your wise and Religious Considerations, which belong to our peace, and which we out of the deep sense of our present miseries, and of the apparent ruin of us all (if not timely prevented) do now offer unto you.  
None of which shall be any new fancies, or dreams of distempered brains, but shall be such as have their grounds upon apparent truth, and a clear evidence.  
For first, we do profess to all the world that we are resolved with our lives and fortunes to maintain the true Protestant Religion established by the laws in this Church of England: To maintain our well settled Government under a Monarchy, according to the known laws of this Land: To maintain the just liberties of our persons and property of our Estates, according to the Rule of those laws: To maintain the just privileges of Parliament, without which our laws can hardly be continued.  
And in the asserting of these, we believe we have the concurrence of both the Houses of Parliament, for such have been their daily Protestations from time to time.  
And for the King's majesty's Opinion herein, he hath by many Declarations, solemn Protestations▪ and religious vows, before God and Man, declared himself so fully and so freely, that it is his unchangeable Resolution to live and die in the maintenance of all these; that we hold ourselves bounden in reverence to his person, and in Christianity, to believe that he will faithfully perform his word with his people.  
And we have this further assurance thereof, in that he hath descended so low from his throne as to acknowledge some errors which have slipped him in his by past government, and to undertake not to give way to the like hereafter.  
We wish with all our hearts, that you would with the same ingenuity acknowledge your errors also, and amend them; so might we soon (by God's blessing) have our peace restored again, and by your industries be made a happy nation.  
Let us then clearly and freely express in what things we find ourselves grieved, which have been voted, ordered, and acted by you during this Parliament, whereby the cure intended is become much worse, than the diseases under which we formerly languished; and we must with as much clearness and freedom protest against them, if they be not speedily reformed and remedied.  
The particulars are these. 

1. That under the colour of advancing the true Protestant Religion, encouragement is given to Anabaptists, Brownists and all manner of Sectaries, which multiply in every Corner; which must be reformed, or our true Religion is lost.  
2. Under the pretence of hatred of Popery (which we also detest, as far as their superstitions & idolatrous tenets are inconsistent with the true reformed Protestant Religion) the book of commonprayer (which is established by Law) is cried down by many, and all decent orders in God's outward worship; and every man left to the dictate of his private spirit: but let the laws against Papists and Sectaries (the two extremes) be put in due execution, we shall thank you for it.  
3. Under the colour of regulating the ecclesiastical Courts, and taking away the High Commission Court, all spiritual Jurisdiction (for the coërcive part thereof, which is the life of the Law) is taken away, so that now no heinous crimes, inquirable by those Courts, as Adultery, Incest &c. can be punished: No heresy or schism reformed: No Church can be enforced to be repaired: No Church-officers, as Church Wardens, &c. are compellable to take upon them their offices, or perform their duties, no not to provide Bread and Wine for the Communion: No Parsons or Vicars can be enforced to attend their Cures, or to give satisfaction for the pains of them who do, No Tithes can be recovered by their Law, nor other Church duties; We beseech you think what will be the end of these things at the last.  
4. Under the name of reforming the Church Government, ye endeavour to take away the function, and very being of Church governors as Bishops, and their Assistants, the Deans and Chapters, so to take away at once the preferments of learned men, and the encouragements of learning: In the name of God let the abuses be taken away, but not the good uses also.  
5. For the rectifying of matters amiss in Church Discipline, and some things in Doctrine also, (as is pretended) an Assembly of Divines is propounded to be convocated and consulted with: The matter is right, but the manner is surely amiss, and so we are likely to lose the benefit of the substance for the errors in the circumstance; which is, That in this intended Convocation, the Divines are not nominated by Divines, who can best judge of their abilities (which is the legal way) the greatest part of those who are named, are known or justly suspected to be persons ill disposed to the peace of the Church, and addicted too much to Innovation; you yourselves (being all laymen) are to be the only Judges of what shall be propounded, and what determined; the Divines but your assistants, and the King is totally to be excluded from having any voice or hand in it: And (as it propounded) this is to be a perpetual Convocation, if the Houses of Parliament so please.  
6. Under the colour of freedom of Preaching, seditious Sermons are preached daily, even in the hearing of many of yourselves, who traduce the King's Sacred Person, flander His Government, and in express terms, encourage the maintaining and continuing of this unnatural and unchristian civil war, and yet none are punished for it; which makes us fear that this is, and long hath been made by some, to be the principal engine to kindle this fire of Hell, to the just scandal of all good men, and slander of our Religion, this doctrine coming so close to that of the Jesuits.  
7 And divers worthy, learned, and painful Preachers have been committed to prison by you for delivering their consciences freely and religiously, and preaching of obedience to their sovereign▪ these things we observe unto you, as tending mainly against the maintaining and propagation of the true Protestant Religion.    
Touching that part which concerneth the maintaining of the laws, we shall observe also some things unto you, wherein your own practice differs much from your professions: a preposterous way to persuade us, or any other bystanders. 

1 Ye assume that power to yourselves, that ye by a bare vote without an act of Parliament, may expound or alter a known Law; whereas the Commons house formerly assumed to themselves no such power, but in order towards the making of a new Law: nor did the House of peers challenge any such thing: But they having the power of Judicature, as Judges they proceeded according to the Rules of the known laws, and upon their honours are answerable for the justness of their judgements, as other Courts are upon their oaths.  
2. Ye make your own orders and ordinances to be as Laws▪ and compel them to be observed, and with a stricter hand: which may bind the Members of your House in their privileges, but have not nor ever had the force of laws, until by both houses and the Kings Consent they were confirmed.  
3 And for your own observation of the laws of the Land, ye take yourselves to be so far above the reach of them, that by your orders and ordinances ye enjoin the Judges and Ministers of Justice to forbear (contrary to their oaths) to proceed in their ordinary courses, where ye please.  
4. Ye make an Ordinance to put the Militia of the kingdom into such hands as ye please, and shall confide in; and this without the King, and expressly against His Command.  
5. Ye possess yourselves of the Navy royal, and appoint admirals and other Officers by Sea without the King, and use those ships against the King himself.  
6. Ye take the King's Castles, Forts and Ports, the places of greatest strength in the kingdom, and keep them against the King himself, as Hull, and Portsmouth, and Windsor Castle; and these three last actions appear to us to have been done by design, for  
7. The pretence at first was for the preservation of the kingdom, against some foreign Enemy; but when none appeared in many months, (and we now believe none such in truth ever were) a war for the Parliament, against the King himself was raised for the preservation of the King.  
8 And those who refuse to join in this war with you, or to contribute unto it, with giving or lending of money, horse, arms etc, ye proscribe as Malignants, and persons ill affected to the commonwealth; although we see not how it can be less than Treason against the King to join with you therein.  
9 But to all those who are your Commanders or Officers of your Army, ye give large and even profuse entertainments and rewards; but out of our purses, who give you little thanks for it.   Thus much may suffice to give a taste how the laws are and are likely to be maintained in the course we are now in.  
And for the Liberty of our persons, and Propriety of our Estates, we shall say a little in the next place, and by a few particulars judge what we may hope for therein. 

1 Ye take the King's Treasure, ye intercept his revenue, possess his houses of access, and all these for his own service; & if any attend him or assist him, they are condemned as Malignants, Popish, evil counsellors and Enemies to the State.  
2 Ye have by messages endeavoured to persuade our Brethren of Scotland to join with you in your Rebellion against your sovereign, and this was not done by some private men alone, but ordered by the Votes of your House.  
3 Ye condemn the rebels in Ireland (and that very justly) for their horrid rebellion there, and yet yourselves do greater and more horrid acts of barbarous hostility against your King, even in his own person, in England: and when ye have been charged with it, ye would excuse it by saying, that it was not your fault, but the fault of the King himself, and of the counsellors and Cavaliers about him, that he went himself in person into the battle, which he did with that magnanimity and Kingly courage, as will add to his honour and your shame whilst the world endureth. Thus your action is become odious to God and Man, and your excuse for it ridiculous.  
4 And as if ye had shaken off all subjection, and yourselves become a State independent, ye have treated by your Agents with foreign States: Such an usurpation upon sovereignty as was never yet attempted in this kingdom.  
5 Ye command your own orders, ordinances, and Declarations to be printed and published cum privilegio: But if any thing come from the King, which may truly inform and disabuse the people, ye forbid those to be published, and commit them to prison who do it.  
6 The moneys advanced by gift, or adventure, or act of Parliament, and soldiers prepared for Ireland to reduce the rebels there, ye have from time to time diverted to maintain this unnatural war in England; so ye do visibly lose the kingdom of Ireland, that ye may be the better enabled to lose the kingdom of England also.  
7 Ye have showed yourselves so averse from peace, that ye have voted there shall be no cessation of arms, lest by a free treaty a peace might ensue; This is your carriage towards the King himself.    
And lest ye might be accused to be juster to the subject than ye are towards your sovereign, these things ye have done to the subject also. 

1 Ye have made an Ordinance that the twentieth part of men's estates must be paid towards the maintenance of this Rebellion, and ye appoint those who shall value that twentieth part; and why by the same reason ye take not the tenth part, or the one half, we see not; and for the levying of it, ye ordain your Collectors shall distreyne for the sum assessed, and sell the distress; and if no distress can be found, the persons of these notable offenders are to be imprisoned, and they and their families banished from their habitations.  
2. But lest this should not have the colour of Law sufficient to blind the world, ye have lately made an ordinance for the Inhabitants of the Counties of Northampton, Rutland, Derby, &c. to pay and be assessed (by Assessors named in your Act) in imitation of the Statute lately made for the 400000 l. and this, as is probable, shall in convenient time be extended to the whole kingdom: so ye first cast yourselves into a necessity to get money, by making an impious war upon your sovereign, and then out of that necessity ye compel your fellow-subjects (who abominate the war) to maintain it.  
3. And ye have yet a shorter and a surer way; where ye understand there is any Money, or Plate, or Goods to be had▪ ye send a Party of Horse or Dragooners, or other strength, to fetch it as out of an enemy's country, because the owners are good Subjects to the King, or you suspect them to be so; and that alone is crime sufficient to apprehend them, to judge them, and take execution upon them, and all this without the Ceremony of Law, by your absolute and omnipotent power, which cannot err.  
4. You discharge Apprentices and Servants from their Master's services, without consent of their Masters and Dames and either persuade them or compel them to serve you in your Army against the King: This is indeed the Liberty of the Subject.  
5. Ye have imprisoned many for petitioning unto you (as if that alone were a crime) if the matter of the Petition do not flatter you in your present courses.  
6. And others ye have imprisoned, some for petitioning, and some for intending to petition to the King, (as those Gentlemen of Hertfordshire and Westminster:) And yet God be praised, the way is open to petition to him in Heaven, and he will hear us in his good time.    
Lastly for your privileges of Parliaments. 

1. First, ye forbid us to dispute them, ye alone are (as ye say) the Judges of them; but in former ages those also might be and have been judged by the laws of the kingdom; only of offences committed by your own Members against your House, of these ye are the proper Judges; and of the elections of your Members.  
2. Yet these we conceive under your good favours, are to be thus confined, that every Member of your House hath and aught to have as free liberty as any of them, to deliver his opinion upon any emergent occasion, and not to be committed, as some have been;— or put out of the House, as others have been, for speaking freely against the sense of the House, or rather of some members thereof.  
3. The privileges of your House were never challenged till now, to extend to any Member which should commit Treason, or Felony: but ye have now declared that no Member of the House, nor any others employed by you in this horrid Rebellion, should be questioned for Treason, but in Parliament; or at least by leave of the House.  
4 Ye have made a close Committee (as you call it) wherein a very few Members of your House only are privy to your Counsels, and what those few conclude upon, is summarily reported to the House, and that taken upon trust by an implicit faith of all the rest.  
5. Many of the present Members of your House have had their elections questioned, but if they incline to those positions which ye lay down to yourselves to uphold your tyrannieall and usurped Government: ye are so busied in the great affairs of State, that in two years' space (for so long and longer ye have continued this Parliament already) ye have no leisure to determine those questions, lest you should lose such a one from your party.  
6. Sometimes when a matter of importance hath been in debate, ye have put it to the question, and upon the question it hath been determined, and the same question again resumed at another time, better prepared for the purpose, and determined quite contrary; this we are well assured was not the privilege of former Parliaments, when many of us were Members thereof.    
We do believe ye have many just privileges for the freedom of your persons for freedom of speech; but we never did believe that ye had a privilege to take the sceptre into your hands, to levy a war against your King, and to compel others to join with you in so execrable an act. We wish from our hearts that all these Observations were but fables and fictions, (as we have met with many from you to amuse us) but they are all undeniably true; our conditions therefore are most miserable, when thus instead of maintaining the true Protestant Religion, the laws of the Land, the just Liberty and Propriety of the Subject, and just privileges of Parliament, they are all of them radically and fundamentally destroyed, and that by you, whose duties and professions are daily to the contrary. And if any thing can be added to our misery, it is this, that we cannot see through the time, when this intolerable yoke of slavery which ye put upon your fellow subjects, shall have an end; seeing by the art of a few ye have contrived an Act whereby ye have perfidiously overreached both the King and people, to make this present Parliament to be perpetual at your pleasures, that so your arbitrary power and tyranny over the kingdom might be perpetuated.  
Yet one thing more may be added to our unhappiness, 
 Fuisse faelices, We were lately a happy people, and are now on a sudden reduced to such a depth of unhappiness, that we are made a spectacle to the whole world, and the very object of their scorn: For, 

We are (before we were aware of it) cast into a war, a civil war, an irreligious and barbarous war, against our sovereign, our natural liege Lord.  
We are put into an inevitable way of poverty, 

By being wasted in all quarters and corners of the kingdom one by another:  
By losing our commerce at home, it being intercepted by the Armies, and almost no debts paid, occasioned specially by the privileges of your Members, and such as ye privilege:  
By losing our trade abroad, it being cast into the hands of strangers.  
We lose our season for tillage and husbandry, which must of necessity introduce a Famine; and Famine doth but usher in a Pestilence: And war, Famine, and Pestilence, are the three great and fearful Judgements of God upon a Nation.      
Nothing can redeem us out of these calamities, but a speedy Peace; and to prepare it a cessation of arms: And then by good laws, as ye have already happily begun, to amend what is or hath been amiss, without plucking up the foundations of Government.  
We beseech you therefore at the last, to lay aside your affections, and in your judgements to provide for us, and for yourselves, and for the honour of our Religion, the peace of our consciences, the preservation of our lives and estates, and for the salvation of our poor souls, to have pity upon us, bind up our bleeding wounds, cure the distractions of the time, and make up the breaches between the King and people, occasioned only by a misunderstanding.  
And if these our Petitions, or Complaints, or Remonstrances (call them what ye will) may prevail with you, we doubt not, but that the King of His grace and goodness will be entreated to bury all your by-past actions in an act of oblivion, that neither the present age, nor the ages to come, may to the shame of this Nation, have cause to remember what hath happened here in this last and worst age of the world.  
But if all this, and all which in your great judgements ye can add unto it, shall not move you; We do and shall protest to all the world, that with the hazard of our lives and fortunes, and of all we can call ours; we shall endeavour to vindicate ourselves from these inhuman courses. Sed meliorae speramus. We hope for better things.  
And we shall incessantly pray to God to perfect our hopes, by blessing your Counsels.  
FINIS.