embroil his people in seditions, to betray his own forces to be slaughtered by enemies, and raise factions against himself." All which things having been done by many kings, and particularly by Charles the late king of England, you will no longer doubt, I hope, especially being addicted to Stoicism, but that all tyrants, as well as profligate villains, are downright mad. Hear what Horace says: "Whoever through a senseless stupidity, or any other cause whatsoever, hath his understanding so blinded as not to discern truth, the Stoics account of him as of a madman: and such are whole nations, such are kings and princes, such are all mankind; except those very few that are wise." So that, if you would clear king Charles from the imputation of acting like a madman, you must first vindicate his integrity, and shew that he never acted like an ill man.

"But a king," you say, cannot commit treason against his own subjects and vassals." In the first place, since we are as free as any people under heaven, we will not be imposed upon by any barbarous custom of any other nation whatsoever. In the second place, suppose we had been the king's vassals that relation would not have obliged us to endure a tyrant to reign and lord it over us. All subjection to magistrates, as our own laws declare, is circumscribed, and confined within the bounds of honesty and the public good. Read Leg. Hen. I. cap. 55. The obligation betwixt a lord and his tenants is mutual, and remains so long as the lord protects his tenants; (this all our lawyers tell us;) but if the lord be too severe and cruel to his tenant, and do him some heinous injury," The whole relation betwixt them, and whatever obligation the tenant is under by having done homage to his lord, is utterly dissolved and extinguished." These are the very words of Bracton and Fleta. So that in some case the law itself warrants even a slave, or a vassal, to oppose his lord, and allows the slave to kill him, if he vanquish him in battle. If a city or a whole nation may not lawfully take this course with a tyrant, the condition of freemen will be worse than that of slaves. Then you go about to excuse king Charles's shedding of innocent blood, partly by murders committed by other kings, and partly by some instances of men put to death by them lawfully. For the matter of the Irish massacre, you refer the reader to Εικων Βασιλική; and I

refer you to Eikonoklastes. The town of Rochel being taken, and the townsmen betrayed, assistance shewn, but not afforded them, you will not have laid at Charles's door; nor have I anything to say whether he was faulty in that business or not; he did mischief enough at home; we need not inquire into what misdemeanors he was guilty of abroad. But you, in the mean time, would make all the protestant churches, that have at any time defended themselves by force of arms against princes, who were professed enemies of their religion, to have been guilty of rebellion. Let them consider how much it concerns them for the maintaining their ecclesiastical discipline, and asserting their own integrity, not to pass by so great an indignity offered them by a person bred up by and amongst themselves. That which troubles us most is, that the English likewise were betrayed in that expedition. He who had designed long ago to convert the government of England into a tyranny, thought he could not bring it to pass till the flower and strength of the military power of the nation were cut off. Another of his crimes was, the causing some words to be struck out of the usual coronation oath before he himself would take it. Unworthy and abominable action! The act was wicked in itself; what shall be said of him that undertakes to justify it? For by the eternal God, what greater breach of faith and violation of all laws can possibly be imagined? What ought to be more sacred to him, next to the holy sacraments themselves, than that oath? Which of the two do you think the more flagitious person, him that offends against the law, or him that endeavours to make the law equally guilty with himself? or, rather, him who subverts the law itself, that he may not seem to offend against it? For thus that king violated that oath which he ought most religiously to have sworn to; but that he might not seem openly and publicly to violate it, he craftily adulterated and corrupted it; and lest he himself should be accounted perjured, he turned the very oath into a perjury. What other could be expected than that his reign would be full of injustice, craft, and misfortune, who began it with so detestable an injury to his people? And who durst pervert and adulterate that law, which he thought the only obstacle that stood in his way, and hindered him from perverting all the rest of the laws: but "that oath," thus you justify him, "lays no other

obligation upon kings than the laws themselves do: and kings pretend that they will be bound and limited by laws, though indeed they are altogether from under the power of laws." Is it not prodigious, that a man should dare to express himself so sacrilegiously and so senselessly, as to assert that an oath sacredly sworn upon the Holy Evangelists may be dispensed with, and set aside as a little insignificant thing, without any cause whatever? Charles himself refutes you, you prodigy of impiety, who, thinking that oath no light matter, chose rather by a subterfuge to avoid the force of it, or by a fallacy to elude it, than openly to violate it; and would rather falsify and corrupt the oath, than manifestly forswear himself after he had taken it. But "the king, indeed, swears to his people, as the people do to him; but the people swear fidelity to the king, not the king to them." Pretty invention! Does not he that promises, and binds himself by an oath to do anything to or for another, oblige his fidelity to them that require the oath of him? Of a truth, every king swears fidelity, and service, and obedience to the people, with respect to the performance of whatsoever he promises upon oath to do. Then you run back to William the Conqueror, who was forced more than once to swear to perform, not what he himself would, but what the people and the great men of the realm required of him. If many kings" are crowned without the usual solemnity," and reign without taking any oath, the same thing may be said of the people, a great many of whom never took the oath of allegiance. If the king by not taking an oath be at liberty, the people are so too. And that part of the people that has sworn, swore not to the king only, but to the realm and the laws, by which the king came to his crown; and no otherwise to the king than whilst he should act according to those laws, that "the common people," that is, the house of commons, should choose; (quas vulgus elegerit.) For it were folly to alter the phrase of our law, and turn it into more genuine Latin. This clause, (quas vulgus elegerit,) which the commons shall choose, Charles, before he was crowned, procured to be razed out." But," say you, "without the king's assent the people can choose no laws;" and for this you cite two statutes, viz. Anno 37 H. VI. cap. 15, and 13 Edw. IV. cap. 8: but these two statutes are so far from appearing in our statute-books, that in the

years you mention neither of those kings enacted any laws at all. Go now and complain that those fugitives, who pretended to furnish you with matter out of our statutes, imposed upon you in it; and let other people in the mean time stand astonished at your impudence and vanity, who are not ashamed to pretend to be thoroughly versed in such books, as it is so evident you have never looked into, nor so much as seen. And that clause in the coronation oath, which such a brazen-faced brawler as you call fictitious, "The king's friends," you say yourself, " acknowledge that it may possibly be extant in some ancient copies, but that it grew into disuse, because it had no convenient signification.' But for that very reason did our ancestors insert it in the oath, that the oath might have such a signification as would not be for a tyrant's conveniency. If it had really grown into disuse, which yet is most false, there was the greater need of reviving it; but even that would have been to no purpose, according to your doctrine: "For that custom of taking an oath, as kings now-a-days generally use it, is no more," you say, "than a bare ceremony." And yet the king, when the bishops were to be put down, pretended that he could not do it by reason of that oath. And, consequently, that reverend and sacred oath, as it serves for the king's turn or not, must be solemn and binding, or an empty ceremony: which I earnestly entreat my countrymen to take notice of, and to consider what manner of a king they are like to have, if he ever come back. For it would never have entered into the thoughts of this rascally foreign grammarian, to write a discourse of the rights of the crown of England, unless both Charles Stuart, now in banishment, and tainted with his father's principles, and those profligate tutors that he has along with him, had industriously suggested to him what they would have writ. They dictated to him, "that the whole parliament were liable to be proceeded against as traitors, because they declared, without the king's assent, all them to be traitors who had taken up arms against the parliament of England; and that parliaments were but the king's vassals; that the oath which our kings take at their coronation is but a ceremony y:" and why not that a vassal too? So that no reverence of laws, no sacredness of an oath, will be sufficient to protect your lives and fortunes, either from the exorbitance

of a furious, or the revenge of an exasperated prince, who has been so instructed from his cradle, as to think laws, religion, nay, and oaths themselves, ought to be subject to his will and pleasure. How much better is it, and more becoming yourselves, if you desire riches, liberty, peace, and empire, to obtain them assuredly by your own virtue, industry, prudence, and valour, than to long after and hope for them in vain under the rule of a king? They who are of opinion that these things cannot be compassed but under a king, and a lord, it cannot well be expressed how mean, how base, I do not say, how unworthy, thoughts they have of themselves; for in effect, what do they other than confess, that they themselves are lazy, weak, senseless, silly persons, and framed for slavery both in body and mind? And indeed all manner of slavery is scandalous and disgraceful to a freeborn ingenuous person; but for you, after you have recovered your lost liberty, by God's assistance, and your own arms; after the performance of so many valiant exploits, and the making so remarkable an example of a most potent king, to desire to return again into a condition of bondage and slavery, will not only be scandalous and disgraceful, but an impious and wicked thing; and equal to that of the Israelites, who for desiring to return to the Egyptian slavery were so severely punished for that sordid, slavish temper of mind, and so many of them destroyed by that God who had been their deliverer. But what say you now, who would persuade us to become slaves? "The king, say you, "had a power of pardoning such as were guilty of treason, and other crimes; which evinces sufficiently, that the king himself was under no law." The king might indeed pardon treason, not against the kingdom, but against himself; and so may anybody else pardon wrongs done to themselves; and he might, perhaps, pardon some other offences, though not always. But does it follow, because in some cases he had the right of saving a malefactor's life, that therefore he must have a right to destroy all good men? If the king be impleaded in an inferior court, he is not obliged to answer, by his attorney does it therefore follow, that when he is summoned by all his subjects to appear in parliament, he may choose whether he will appear or no, and refuse to answer in person? You say, "that we endeavour to justify what we have done by the Hollanders' example;" and upon this oc

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