A Worthy SPEECH Made by The Right Honourable the Lord Brooke, at the election of his Captains and Commanders at Warwick Castle, as also at the delivery of their last Commissions.   woodcut of man on horse 
February the 26. Printed at London for john Underwood. 1643.   

A Worthy Speech made by the Right Honourable the Lord Brook, at the election of his Captains and Commanders at Warwick Castle.  
GEntlemen, Countrymen, my noble friends and fellow Soldiers, I have a few words to deliver to you which may deserve your attentions; and will I hope meet as good welcome & acceptation from you, as they came from me, with the true zeal to your safeties and the welfares of the afflicted Country: we behold the flourishing and beauteous face of this Kingdom, overspread with the leprosy of a Civil War: In which, since we are forced for the safeguard of our lives, the preservation of our liberties, the defence of God's true Religion (invaded by the practices of Papists and Malignants) to become actors: I doubt not but each of you will play your part with that noble resolution and Christian courage as the greatness and meritoriousness of the work does challenge. No man is born for his own use only, saith that great Commonwealths-man of the Romans, Cicero, his friends and Countrymen claim an ample share in his abilities, as your friends, your Country, nay your Religion and God himself demands in yours. And surely it would be both unnatural and impious to deny such powerful suitors your assistance. I need not remonstrate what it is you are to fight for, the Cause is so open and obvious to every understanding. It is for your wives, your children, and your substance, your lives and liberties, nay that which is more powerful to move men's affections, the testimony of good consciences, and what ever can be to humane frailty dear and precious; all these, as if they sought the way to new mischiefs through the old ones, are pointed at by the Popish malignants now in arms against us: they have plundered our neighbours, ravished their estates out of their possessions, and committed inhuman and unheard of barbarousness in every place where the tempest of their fury has had licence to show its malice: And can you imagine they would stay there, that their insatiate avarice & thirst of blood will be quenched and appeased with these petty spoils: No Gentlemen, they aim at you, at all our ruins, desolations, & deaths, are machinated by these vipers, who would knaw a passage to their ambitions, through the entrails of their mother the Commonwealth; whose destruction they have pursued as craftily and violently, as is possible to be expected from persons of so much acrimony and spleen to the Subject's liberties, and aversion of true Religion and all goodness: persuasions to valiant men, as I know you to be, are useless, and if I thought there were any of you that was not incited more by the justice of the quarrel, than my Oratory to fight in this Cause, surely I should rather wish his room then his company; for if the Nobility and bravery of the Cause be not sufficient to animate cowards, and make the meanest spirits courageous. I know not what possible can stir up mortal men to put on undaunted resolutions: Behold your wives with tears in their eyes, and their little infants at their breasts or in their hands, imploring safety and defence from your arms, and should you desert them and expose their innocence to the rapine and fury of the Malignants. I doubt not but they would be ready to meet you as those Roman Matrons of old did their flying persons and husbands, and ask if they thought to creep again into their mother's wombs and hid themselves. Nay, which should be more prevalent, to excite your courage to fight this good fight for the Lord of hosts; your Religion and freedom of your Consciences, which far transcends your corporeal liberty, invoaks you to stand up its champions against those Papistical Malignants; who would strike at God through the very heart of his known truth, so long practised amongst us: And surely nothing can be dearer to any of Conscience, than the security of this his Conscience, and it's unvaluable freedom: you have viewed and heard my good friends and Countrymen, with what severity and spightfulness these adversaries to all truth and humanity, have depopulated the neighbour Towns and Countries, leaving them neither money nor victuals, and which is worse, depriving them of all means to supply those necessities, or rectify those wants, by carrying away their cattles and horses, the instruments of their husbandry and tillage: expect you the same measure, Gentlemen, if you quit not yourselves like men: and whereas the going against the King may stagger some resolutions, I shall easily disabuse you from those vain surmises and incertain imaginations, 'tis for the King we fight, to keep a Crown for our King, a Kingdom for our Sovereign & his posterity, to maintain his known rights and privileges, which are relative with the people's liberties, from a sort of desperate State incendiaries, that in seeming to fight for his Majesty brandish open arms against his sacred Crown and Dignity. For if you will but observe the men of whom the adverse army is compounded, you shall find them either notorious Papists or Popishly affected persons, and then be convinced in your own reasons, if it be possible, that those men should take up arms in the King's defence whom by so many devilish plots and hellish stratagems, have sought not only his precious life, but the lives of his Predecessors Queen Elizabeth, and his Father of sacred memory, as that never to be forgotten powder plot shall for ever testify to their shame & confusion of face: wherein they would at one blow not only have destroyed our pious King that now reigns (and long may he live and reign over us) but his Father, brother, and all the royal Progeny with the chief of the Nobility of the Kingdom. And if these men be competent persons to be entrusted with the King's safety, who have so apparently sought his ruin, let all indifferent men be judge, or that Papists and Jesuited persons will ever fight to maintain that Religion which they manifestly oppugn in their lives and doctrines, and have both by foreign and domestic treacheries sought to root out from the face of the earth, as by 88 and other of their attempts is manifest and perspicuous, that they should be patriots to keep our laws and religion from violation or alteration, whose Justice points them out for disturbers of the public Peace, and renders them able to punishments in their estates and persons, as notorious and convicted Malefactors; as well we may believe the light is a friend to darkness, or that the warring Elements should cease their perpetual difference, as allow that paradox.  
But I would not, Countrymen, be too tedious to you. And touching these Gentlemen, who being strangers come hither to proffer us their service, and in testimonial of their abilities and that they have been Commanders in the German Wars, have here produced their several Certificates.  
I must needs thank the Gentlemen for their kind proffer, and yet desire licence to be plain with them, hoping they will not take it as a disparagement to their valours, if I tell them we have now too woeful experience in this Kingdom of the Germane wars; and therefore cannot so well approve of the aid of foreign and mercenary auxiliaries. In Germany they fought only for spoil, rapine and destruction, merely money it was and hope of gain that excited the Soldier to that service: It is not here so required as the cause stands with us; We must rather employ men who will fight merely for the Cause sake, and bear their own charges, than those who expect rewards and salaries, for by such means we shall never have a conclusion of these wars; for mercenaries, whose end is merely their pay, whereas their subsistence rather covet to spin out the wars to a prodigious length, as they have done in other Countries, then to see them quickly brought to a happy period; we must dispatch this great work in a short time or be all liable to inevitable ruin. I shall therefore freely speak my conscience, I had rather have a thousand or two thousand honest Citizens that can only handle their arms, whose hearts go with their hands, than two thousand of mercenary Soldiers, that boast of their foreign experience. For such make money merely the end of their endeavours, without looking into the Justice of the Cause, when those well-affected Citizens being acquainted with the cause which is for Almighty God, their Religion, the Laws of the Land, the Subjects Liberty and safety will now be a means to be encouraged & be animated to go on courageously in this great work, (knowing that good deeds are rewarded in themselves) if God be not pleased to give a blessing to the work in hand by a fair and honest Accommodation between his Majesty and Parliament to give a cessation to these wars. And yet I hear of many who will neither lend their money nor give their aid and assistance in this so weighty a matter, (as I have said before;) yet look to be defended and kept from violence as well as those men which so freely and voluntarily contribute to the great charges, why should such men stand, and only looking on like cyphers, yet hoping to have share and benefit in the common good; when other men both take the pains, hazard their lives, and spend their estates for them and theirs, what man would not give the twentieth part of his estate to save the other nineteen from being taken from him, nay, and it may be his life too. And so I shall concinde my Speech, and turn into prayer this my Discourse; That God Almighty will arise and maintain his own cause, scattering and confounding the devices of his enemies, not suffering the ungodly to prevail over his poor innocent flock. Lord, we are but a handful in consideration of thine and our enemies, therefore O Lord fight thou our battles, go out as thou didst in the time of King David before the Hosts of thy servants, and strengthen and give us hearts, that we show ourselves men for the defence of thy true Religion, and our own and the King and Kingdom's safety.  
FINIS.