THE PLAGUE AT WESTMINSTER. OR, An order for the Visitation of a sick PARLIAMENT, Grievously troubled with a new Disease, called the Consumption of their Members.  
The persons visited are, The 

earl of suffolk,  
earl of lincoln,  
earl of Middlesex,  
Lord Hunsdon,  
Lord Barkly,  
L. Willowby of Parham,  
Lord Maynard,  
Sir John Maynard,  
Master Glyn, Recorder of London.    
With a form of Prayer, and other Rights and Ceremonies to be used for their recovery.  
Strictly commanded to be used in all Cathedrals, Churches, chapels, Congregations, throughout his Majesties three Kingdoms, of England, Scotland, and Ireland.  
Printed for V. V. in the year, 1647.   

The order of VISITATION to a sick PARLIAMENT.  

Let all the long-abused people of this Kingdom, speedily repair for the remedy of all their agrievances, to the High-Place at Westminster, and so soon as entred in to the Lords House, let them reverendly kneel down upon their bare knees, and say this new Prayer and Exhortation following.  
O● Almighty and everlasting Lords, we aclowledge and confess from the bottom of our hearts, that you have most justly plagued us these full seven years for our manifold sins and iniquities. Forasmuch as we have not rebelled against you, but against the King our most gracious Lord and governor, to the abundant sorrow of our relenting hearts, to whose empty chair we now bow in all reverence, in token of our duty and obedience. For we now too well( O LORDS) understand that we have grievously sinned, which hath made your Honours give us up a spoil unto Robbers, viz. your Committees, Sequestrators, Excise-men and Pursuivants; besides, your several instruments of torments, distinguished by the various names of colonels, Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, Captains, Quartermasters, and a certain sort of putredinous vermin that you use to line hedges withal, vulgarly called; Dragoons, Troopers, and the like, O Lords, these besides your continual Taxes, Collections, assessments, and the like; a burden that breaks our backs and very hearts, which continually follow one on the neck of another, besides your excises on our very flesh and apparel, with every particular belonging to our trades and livelihoods: Our wives, our daughters, our sons, our houses, our beds, our apparel, our horses, our hey, our beefs, our muttons, our lambs, our pigs, our goose, our capons, and the rest of our goods are forced from us, upon free quarter as they call it: Had wee poor wretched and languishing wretches, mounting to the number of millions of millions, being sufficiently humbled by all these plagues, and punishments( cry to your honours for redress) besides the large portion of our bloods which from the earth cries unto your honours, even as Abels did to heaven, so we to you Mighty Lords, we therefore humbly pray and beseech you, that your honours would be graciously pleased( in your omnipotent power) to raise to life again but half a dozen thousand poor widows their dear husbands and many fatherless children now in a languishing condition, will for ever magnify your Honours for the same, or else your Honours must exexpect the cry of the Widow to Heaven against you, the Curse of the fatherless, and the Cry of the Earth, which already begins to vomit up that blnud in your faces, which so rebelliously and unchristianly you have stained hers withall; shee hath yet been a place of pleasure unto you, yielding no contagious air to infect you with these consuming diseases, that now reign amongst your Honours, besides so many sorrows, distractions, disorders or passions, that visit your Honours consciences; all earthly creatures have been obedient unto you mighty Lords. Finally, she hath yielded all things to your contentment, and nothing to your annoyance: Wee beseech you therefore consider the present miseries of our bodies, as hunger, thirst, nakedness, want of our limbs, deformities, sickness and mortality; the troubles of our mindes, as fancies, fears, perplexities, anguishes, and other imperfections: likewise the general scourges that are amongst us, as Plagues, Wars, and a 1000 other hazardous calamities: Look but into our Hospitals, we beseech you, and see Lazars, Cancers, Fistuloes, Ulcers, and Rottings, what Wolfs, Sores, and festered Carbuncles, with Frenzies, Palsies, Lethargies, falling Sicknesses, and Lunaries. On the otherside( we beseech you) to consider the infirmities of our minds, the furious rages, envies, rancours, and corrosives, the unplacable sorrows and desperate passions, the continual hell, torments, and remorse of conscience( for our late forced rebellion against our King,) and infinite other spritish fits and agonies you have brought upon us. Consider how you have made us incur the heavy displeasure of the most just and Christian Prince, that ever reigned in this Kingdom; the malice and enmity of our equals, the contempt, ignominy and reproach of all Nations; the continual mocks and scoffs we receive of our inferiors, the fraud and treadhery of all sorts and degrees; our frequent molestations by plunderings, sequestrations, loss of goods, limbs, liberties, friends, wives and children, consider what intolerable usage hath been to divers people since the beginning of these unnatural wars, prosecuted by the rage and fury of you who would be called Christians, but indeed, the worst of Tyrants: What spoil of our goods, shedding of our bloods, oppressing of innocents, persecution of godly and orthodox Ministers, that the World was not worthy of, as reverend Armagh, Westfield, Featly, Shute, and divers others learned and holy men; in whose places, what a litter of Foxes you have put into Gods Vineyard, who root up the tender Vines thereof; a crew of such Vipers, that are not worth so much as the naming? What deflowering of Virgins, abusing of Matrons, compulsion unto wickedness and rebellion, and terrifying from all virtue and Christian obedience? What inconveniences and mysteries have ensued by these unnatural and bloody Wars? What alteration of Estates, and Religion, subversion of three flourishing Kingdoms, slaughtering of his Majesties Subjects, destroying of Cities, and confusion of all Order, that it is almost incredible that so many and so strange calamities could befall so happy a people as wee lately were in so short a space. We humbly beseech you to consider these our just plaints, and speedily let us enjoy our King, our Religion, our Laws, our just Liberties and Estates, lest the anger of the Lord take harness, and arm all the creatures to the revenge of his enemies, he shall put on justice for his breastplate, and shall take for his Helmet certain judgement. he shall take Equity as an impregnable Buckler, he shall sharpen hide dreadful wrath into a Spear, and the World shall fight with him against such senseless persons. His throws of thunderbolts shall go directly; and shall be driven as it were from a wel-bended Bow, and shall hit at a certain place. Against them shall the Spirit of Might stand, and like a whirlwind shall divide them, and shall bring all the land of their iniquity, to a Desert, and shall overthrow the seats of the mighty.  
These are shrewd Items, High and Mighty Lords, and may cause you peach one another still, and charge thorough and thorough, as well as round: yet the silly Commons will hardly be gulled so: they hope to cover their wits again; and will now listen to his Majesty; as once they might have done, and have preserved their now lost estates, the twentieth part divided amongst so many sharers, comes but to a very little; Waller's might come to some twelve Butter-firkins full of Gold? John Pym that lousy Squire might have been a second Croesus and had he lived, and Charles his son a very Dives, in spite of Lincolnes inn Pump; but he fears no preaching now, nor Hambden, nor Strowd, nor Stupleton neither; their Charge will hardly be drawn up till Dooms day ith' after-noon, and then the City shall receive their Debts on the public Faith, and learn more wit: by which time Plundering will be out of request, and Sir Pol●tick-woodbees those great Statists, that draw all into their own Coffers; and cry with the devil, All's Mine, will then find to their costs, that their accounts are already cast up, and their Reckoning then upon the paying: in the mean-time, Whilst Thieves fall out, true folks may come by their goods. Therefore, as the Psalmist saith, Gladius ipsorumi●tret in corda corum. Let their own Swords enter into their own hearts; and let their destruction arise from themselves; let them dig their own graves; let them( as they have already) cut off those Anchors that should preserve themselves from shipwreck; let them like enraged dogs break their teeth on that ston that is flung at them, not so much as looking at the hand that flings it; whilst wee miserable wretches in this vassalage and servility are daily oppressed with so many uncessant afflictions, worse then an Egyptian bondage, wee may cry out with the Israelites, Ingemiscen●es propter opera vociferari; Lamenting out intolerable Prayers, Cry out unto God; from whom( and not from your Pharaoh-like Honours) we must expect deliverance. AMEN.   

Then let the parties if they find no redress, turn unto the House of Commons, and say as followeth.  
WE humbly beseech you the Knights and Burgesses chosen ▪ and put in trust by your several Countreys, to redress our grievances;( not to make us new grievances, to cure our Maladies, not in a desperate madness, to kill us in stead of curing us) to keep us from robbing, not to rob us yourselves. That you would with the eye of compassion, look upon our manifold M●series, before recited, in supplication to the Lords. Wee must aclowledge and confess that you have done the part of a body without a Head; and taken great pains, though but to little purpose in pulling down Crosses off the Churches and Steeples, and breaking glass Windows, whilst ye have erected greater Crosses in our Religion and Estates, that makes( at this time) the glazed Windows of our eyes to over-flow. You taken mickle pains, in making Votes, Orders and Ordinances, yet we never the better, but rather worse and worse, whilst you are divided amongst yourselves, now you have divided our Inheritance; and divided the King from his royal Spouse, Children, and P●●l●●ment; and would have divided him from his Honour, and Coronation Oath; divided the Souls from our bodies, as well as our shoes; divided Religion into a thousand Sects, schisms, Heresies, and Blasphemies. Even against the Persons in the Sacred Trinity; And now will you leave us in this mist of errors and Calamities: & every one take shipping, as lately Waller, Staplet●n, Nichols, and many others, which increaseth our fears, that you will give but an ill account of so many of our lives, so much of our estates, &c. &c. &c. you may guess what I mean. You may give losers leave( through lamentable experience) to speak, though I believe to little purpose, therefore, vale, our trust is in the Lord, &c.   

Here let all the people sing Psal. 43. Judge and revenge, &c. And then facing about to Henry the Sevenths chapel, Let all the people rehearse the Articles of their new Reformed Faith; And after say as followeth.  
MOst holy Fathers, whether universal, national, provincial, consistorial, classical Synodians, whose learned Consultations, pious Debates, sacred Conclusions, spiritual Decrees, Evangelicall Counsels, infallible Divinity hath lost us so many thousand pounds for the space of almost these five years, to compose the two Tables of the Law, the Gospel, the Ordinance for Tithes, and the Directory; Wee magnify your Sanctity, wee adore your holy Reformation, and highly commend your unerring Spirits, for the great pains you have taken in your several Sciences of Equivocations, mental Reser●ations, false Glosses, Comments, Paraphrases, Expositions, Opi●ions, and Judgements, that for a long time have cheated and deluded us; for your pious Zeal, and affection for the Cause, in setting us on to kill one another, and freely to venture all, all but the Tenths, tithes, Offerings and Oblations; those are yours jure Divino: besides all the sat benefices and goodly Revenues that belong unto you, besides the four shillings a day, and the Fees of your classical Courts, and the ten Groats for drinking a Sundays— Wee beseech ye by all these, pray against the plaguy diseases your hypocrisy hath brought upon the two Houses of Parltament, and the whole Kingdom by heresy, Poverty, Impeachments, Charges, Banishments and the like. AMEN.  
Then let the people sing the 41 psalm and so depart.   
FINIS.