A SPEECH delivered by the right honourable WILLIAM Lord marquis HARTFORD, in the councel-chamber at Oxford, TO The King's most Excellent Majesty, and the Lords of His Privy Council, on Saturday january 14. 1642.  
Wherein he fully sets down his opinion concerning the present Wars, and an Accommodation of Peace between His Majesty and his high Court of Parliament.  
LONDON, Printed for HENRY BENSON, jan. 20. Anno Dom. 1642.   

DOCTRINA PARIT VIRTUTEM  depiction of a device with an open book, a sword, scepter, and surrounding motto  
A Speech spoken by the right Honourable William Lord marquis of Hartford, in the councel-chamber at OXFORD.  
May it please Your Majesty,  
MY long absence from this honourable Board, of which by Your Majesty's favour I am a member, may privilege me to beg licence for a few words: wherein I shall freely deliver to Your Majesty and these Lords, my opinion concerning the present affairs of this Your distracted and dis-jointed Kingdom; which is so far out of frame & order, by the occasion of these long continued civil wars, that it hath need (and very urgent need too it is) of all the means that can be used to rectify and bring it into its old state and condition. Your Majesty and these Lords all know, with what integrity I have engaged myself and fortunes in Your Majesty's service, and in it I did discharge the duty I was bound in to Your royal Majesty: But as much as I can with my best judgement gather in all my progress about several parts of this Kingdom, during the process of these wars, it had been far better they had never been begun at all; or since heaven for the sins of this land hath suffered them to be begun, it were (in my poor opinion) extremely requisite, for the safety and tranquillity of Your Majesty, and of all us Your Subjects, that they were speedily ended; they being justly to be resembled to a violent disease, which if it be in the beginning of it resisted with wholesome medicines, may be overcome; if permitted to run too long, is hardly or not at all curable. For first, if we respect the conditions and affections of the people, especially those whom I have conversed with in Wales and elsewhere, we shall find them very difficult to undertake Your Majesty's quarrel against the high Court of Parliament, the very name whereof is so firmly and with that reverence rooted in the breasts of the English Nation, nay in the hearts of the very mountainers of Wales, that with a determined faith they believe and so far, as they dare affirm that the Parliament is in the right, that Your Majesty is misled and ill counselled against the Parliaments proceed, which have always been so happy to the Kings of this Realm Your ancestors: and with an infallible confidence they protest they can never be drawn willingly to take up arms against those honourable and faithful men, that were by their own choice elected and appointed to look after the affairs of the Kingdom, to treat in Council for the amendment of the disorders of the Commonwealth, which before this present Session of Parliament were grown up to a formidable and oppressive number, to the great prejudice of the liberty and property of the Subject. So that those few men which I have been able to draw in those parts to your Majesty's service are for the most part men of mean fortunes, and such too in whom we may or can repose no great confidence, since they may be imagined to come to these wars rather for fear then affection, and where men come to employ their hands against their hearts there can be expected no great expression of courage, much less of fidelity. For moneys (so please Your Majesty) I must really inform You, that in all those parts where I have been conversant there is little or none at all to be procured, at least for Your Majesty's assistance: The Gentry and people of fashion cry out, they cannot possibly part with that which they have not, their stores being quite exhausted by former payments: and if some of them for fear (whom we were sure had money) were won to part with some small pittance out of it, they as soon as their backs were turned from us, with much murmur exclaimed, that their money was extorted and borrowed from them by force; that to prevent taking away the whole they were glad to forgo part of their estates. So that by these expressions your Majesty and these Lords may plainly perceive which way the game will go, when Your necessities shall compel Your Highness to stand in most need of assistance or supply from their bounties. Besides, an exceeding murmur is rife in every man's mouth in Wales and the borders thereof, that Your Majesty (contrary to Your expressions and Declararations) doth entertain daily great store of convicted Popish Recusants into Your service, as they instance in my Lord Herbert, son to the Earl of Worcester, whose Forces are compounded almost altogether of such public Delinquents, enemies to the true Protestant Religion: And the name of Papist is so execrably odious to the People in general, for their former treacherous practices against the State and Religion, that they do confidently now believe, since such men are permitted to fight under your Majesty's Ensigns, that they are displayed merely for the ruin and subversion of their liberties; that those malevolents to Gods true Religion, must needs be drawn together, to overthrow the true and sincere profession of it in your Majesty's Dominions, and so possessed with these fears, which (considering the persons) are not altogether vain or causeless, they suggest to themselves a thousand strange chimaeras of dangers, all which, their imagination leads them to believe, are derivative from your Majesty and your Counsellors, that permit the public foes to Religion and the Commonwealth to be armed, pay, put swords into their desperate and ill governed hands.  
Nor are these all the inconveniences or disadvantages that my observation hath assured me must wait upon your Majesty in the continuance of these wars (if we should be so unhappy as to see them continue) your Majesty's forces are daily impaired and diminished, without any hopes of supplies, unless it were possible the arteries of your slaughtered soldiers could again take life, and rise up to your Majesty's service; the Parliaments army on the contrary side being certain to be reinforced with fresh men whensoever any of the old ones fall, either by the hand of war or sickness, the whole Kingdom being, as it were, at their devotion, all the able men thereof running with willing hearts and courageous hands, to sacrifice their lives in the Parliaments quarrel, which they conceive to be the common quarrel of the Kingdom, the quarrel for their wives and children, estates and liberties.  
In such a variety and labyrinth of disadvantages, walks the army now waiting on your Majesty; and so securely the other, that by the view of their strength, we may easily survey our own urgent infirmities. And which is of all the accidents of this war the most to be lamented, is, that we are engaged brothers against brothers, friends against friends, nay, parents against their dear beloved children, and sons against their fathers, the whole land fraught with nothing but the horrors of war and bloodshed: true Religion in the mean time is neglected and trampled upon; the Laws (which are the Subjects best property, and the Sovereign's largest prerogative) being despised and vilified, and every thing changed from the calmness of its own genuine condition into distraction and fury: the Parliament, which had wont to be the ablest bulwark of the Kingdom, the Subjects security, and the King's constant aider and supplement in all his necessities, rend from your Majesty, and your Majesty separated from them; so that that supreme Council (convocated to settle the distempers of the Commonwealth, to enact good and wholesome Laws for the defence and advancement of the Subjects liberty) is enforced to spend all that precious time which might and should have been employed as aforesaid, upon the composure of these differences, and in agitating means for the Laws and the Kingdom's defence.  
We ourselves, who were Peers and fellows in that honourable society, being voted out of our places and honours; and, so please your Majesty, if your royal self and these Lords will but seriously consider the nature and proportion of their gains and losses in these wars, your sacred self, and all of them shall easily find the loss to be the only thing that can be gotten by these wars. Loss your Majesty is sure to have of your subjects, loss in your revenue, loss in your magnificence, and the extent of your regality being, as it were, circumscribed to this City of Oxford, and deprived of the possession of your royal Palaces, in and about your City of London, which would to God your Majesty had never left, and then these fatal mischiefs had either not happened at all, or at leastwise not been of this lasting and lamentable continuance. For my part, and so I may affirm of all these Lords, we lose as much as we have by these wars. First, we lose our repute with the Parliament, and consequently with the Commonwealth; we lose the enjoyment of our estates, which are published by the Parliament forfeits to the use of the Commonwealth; which is dearest of all to mortal men, we lose the affection and society of all our brethren, friends and allies, divers of which in this quarrel are our utter enemies. But I shall transgress my duty, and tyre your Majesty with too tedious amplification of the inconveniences of these present wars, the zeal I have to your Majesty's service, and the good of the Commonwealth, renders me beyond my own nature, conscious of this prolixity, whose only aim is to beseech your Majesty, for the honour you bear to God's cause▪ and for the love you carry in your royal thoughts to us your dutiful servants, and to all your Subjects in general, to think of some means for a sudden Accommodation of peace betwixt yourself and your high Court of Parliament: nothing can be more acceptable to God than the bringing this peace to pass, nor more fortunate and prosperous to your people. So have I freely, with your Majesty's licence, delivered my faithful opinion and counsel, which I shall hourly pray may suit to as good an effect as I intended it.   
FINIS.