Mr. Bagshaws FIRST SPEECH With the Oath that is given to judges.  
Novemb. 7. 1640.  
London printed. 1641.   

I Had rather act than speak in the weighty businesses of the Kingdom which have been so excellently handled by those four Gentlemen that spoke last, and therefore I shall be short.  
When I do look upon the body of this goodly flourishing Kingdom in matter of Religion and of out Laws, for like Hypocrates twins they live and die together, I say, when I behold both these in the state and plight as they have been presented unto us, Flere magis libet quàm dicere. But this is our comfort, Master Speaker, that we are here met together for the welfare and happiness of Prince and People, and who knows whether this may not be the appointed time wherein God will restore our Religion as at the first, and our Laws as at the beginning.  
The honour consists in the weal of his people: this undoubted maxim his Majesty hath made good by his late gracious Speech and Promise to us to redress all our grievances, the enemies of peace and plenty.  
To make a People rich they must have Ease and Justice: ease in their consciences from the bane of superstition, from the intolerable burden of Innovation in Religion, and from the racks and tortures of strange new fangled Oaths. They must be eased in their persons, being liberi homines, and not villains, from all illegal arrests and imprisonments against Magna charta, being our greatest Liberty. They must be eased in their Lands from Forests, where never any Deer-fees; from depopulation, where never any Farm was decayed; and from Enclosure, where never any hedges were set; They must be eased in their goods from exactions and exspoliations of Pursuiants, and Apparitors, of Projectors and Monopolists, Humanarum calamitatum mercatores, as an ancient Writer finely calls them: and if the first have all these easements, yet if they have not justice, they cannot subsist; Justice is to the civil body as food to the natural: if the streams of justice be by unrighteousness turned into Gall or Wormwood, or by cruelty like the Egyptian waters turned into blood, those which drink of these brooks must needs die and perish. The Law saith that all Justice is in the King, who is styled in our book, Fons justity, and he commits it to the Judges for the execution, wherein he trusts them with two of the choicest flowers which belong to the Crown, the administration of Justice, and the exposition of Laws, that he would not trust them without an oath required of them by the stature of 18. Edw. 3. which is so strict and severe, that it made a judge whom I know, though honest and stout, to quake and tremble at the very mention of it.  
The effect of the oath is that they shall do equal Laws and execution of rights to all the King's Subjects as well poor as rich, without regard to any person, that they shall not deny to do common right to any man, by the King's letters, or for any other cause, and in case such letters do come that they proceed to do the Law notwithstanding such letters, as they will answer it to the King in their bodies, lands, and goods.  
FINIS.