began to call for reformation, in order to which the parliament demanded of the king to unestablish that prelatical government, which without scripture had usurped over us; straight, as Pharaoh accused of idleness the Israelites that sought leave to go and sacrifice to God, he lays faction to their charge.

And that we may not hope to have ever anything reformed in the church either by him or his son, he forewarns him, "that the devil of rebellion doth most commonly turn himself into an angel of reformation:" and says enough to make him hate it, as the worst of evils, and the bane of his crown: nay, he counsels him to "let nothing seem little or despicable to him, so as not speedily and effectually to suppress errors and schisms." Whereby we may perceive plainly, that our consciences were destined to the same servitude and persecution, if not worse than before, whether under him, or if it should so happen, under his son; who count all protestant churches erroneous and schismatical, which are not episcopal.

His next precept is concerning our civil liberties; which by his sole voice and predominant will must be circumscribed, and not permitted to extend a hand's breadth further than his interpretation of the laws already settled. And although all human laws are but the offspring of that frailty, that fallibility and imperfection, which was in their authors, whereby many laws in the change of ignorant and obscure ages, may be found both scandalous, and full of grievance to their posterity that made them, and no law is further good than mutable upon just occasion; yet if the removing of an old law, or the making of a new, would save the kingdom, we shall not have it, unless his arbitrary voice will so far slacken the stiff curb of his prerogative, as to grant it us; who are as free born to make our own laws, as our fathers were who made these we have.

Where are then the English liberties, which we boast to have been left us by our progenitors? To that he answers, that 66 our liberties consist in the enjoyment of the fruits of our industry, and the benefit of those laws to which we ourselves have consented." First, for the enjoyment of those fruits, which our industry and labours have made our own upon our own, what privilege is that above what the Turks,

Jews, and Moors enjoy under the Turkish monarchy ? For without that kind of justice, which is also in Algiers, among thieves and pirates between themselves, no kind of government, no society, just or unjust, could stand; no combination or conspiracy could stick together. Which he also acknowledges in these words: "That if the crown upon his head be so heavy as to oppress the whole body, the weakness of inferior members cannot return anything of strength, honour, or safety to the head; but that a necessary debilitation must follow." So that this liberty of the subject concerns himself and the subsistence of his own regal power in the first place, and before the consideration of any right belonging to the subject. We expect therefore something more, that must distinguish free government from slavish. But instead of that, this king, though ever talking and protesting as smooth as now, suffered it in his own hearing to be preached and pleaded, without control or check, by them whom he most favoured and upheld, that the subject had no property of his own goods, but that all was the king's right.

Next, for the "benefit of those laws, to which we ourselves have consented," we never had it under him; for, not to speak of laws ill executed, when the parliament, and in them the people, have consented to divers laws, and, according to our ancient rights, demanded them, he took upon him to have a negative will, as the transcendent and ultimate law above all our laws; and to rule us forcibly by laws, to which we ourselves did not consent, but complained of. Thus these two heads, wherein the utmost of his allowance here will give our liberties leave to consist, the one of them shall be so far only made good to us, as may support his own interest and crown from ruin or debilitation; and so far Turkish vassals enjoy as much liberty under Mahomet and the Grand Signior: the other we neither yet have enjoyed under him, nor were ever like to do under the tyranny of a negative voice, which he claims above the unanimous consent and power of a whole nation, virtually in the parliament.

In which negative voice to have been cast by the doom of war, and put to death by those who vanquished him in their own defence, he reckons to himself more than a negative martyrdom. But martyrs bear witness to the truth, not to themselves. "If I bear witness of myself," saith Christ," my

witness is not true." He who writes himself martyr by his own inscription, is like an ill painter, who, by writing on a shapeless picture which he hath drawn, is fain to tell passengers what shape it is: which else no man could imagine; no more than how a martyrdom can belong to him, who therefore dies for his religion because it is established. Certainly if Agrippa had turned Christian, as he was once turning, and had put to death scribes and pharisees for observing the law of Moses, and refusing Christianity, they had died a truer martyrdom. For those laws were established by God and Moses, these by no warrantable authors of religion, whose laws in all other best reformed churches are rejected. And if to die for an establishment of religion be martyrdom, then Romish priests executed for that, which had so many hundred years been established in this land, are no worse martyrs than he. Lastly, if to die for the testimony of his own conscience be enough to make him a martyr, what heretic dying for direct blasphemy, as some have done constantly, may not boast a martyrdom?

As for the constitution or repeal of civil laws, that power lying only in the parliament, which he by the very law of his coronation was to grant them, not to debar them, not to preserve a lesser law with the contempt and violation of a greater; it will conclude him not so much as in a civil and metaphorical sense to have died a martyr of our laws, but a plain transgressor of them. And should the parliament, endued with legislative power, make our laws, and be after to dispute them piecemeal with the reason, conscience, humour, passion, fancy, folly, obstinacy, or other ends of one man, whose sole word and will shall baffle and unmake what all the wisdom of a parliament hath been deliberately framing; what a ridiculous and contemptible thing a parliament would soon be, and what a base unworthy nation we, who boast our freedom, and send them with the manifest peril of their lives to preserve it, they who are not marked by destiny for slaves may ap prehend ! In this servile condition to have kept us still under hatches, he both resolves here to the last, and so instructs his son.

As to those offered condescensions of a "charitable connivance, or toleration," if we consider what went before, and what follows, they moulder into nothing. For, what with

not suffering ever so little to seem a despicable schism, without effectual suppression, as he warned him before, and what with no opposition of law, government, or established religion to be permitted, which is his following proviso, and wholly within his own construction, what a miserable and suspected toleration, under spies and haunting promooters, we should enjoy, is apparent. Besides that it is so far beneath the honour of a parliament and free nation, to beg and supplicate the godship of one frail man, for the bare and simple toleration of what they all consent to be both just, pious, and best pleasing to God, while that which is erroneous, unjust, and mischievous in the church or state shall by him alone against them all be kept up and established, and they censured the while for a covetous, ambitious, and sacrilegious faction.

Another bait to allure the people is the charge he lays upon his son to be tender of them. Which if we should believe in part, because they are his herd, his cattle, the stock upon his ground, as he accounts them, whom to waste and destroy would undo himself, yet the inducement, which he brings to move him, renders the motion itself something suspicious. For if princes need no palliations, as he tells his son, wherefore is it that he himself hath so often used them? Princes, of all other men, have not more change of raiment in their wardrobes, than variety of shifts and palliations in their solemn actings and pretences to the people.

To try next if he can ensnare the prime men of those who have opposed him, whom, more truly than his meaning was, he calls the "patrons and vindicators of the people," he gives out indemnity, and offers acts of oblivion. But they who with a good conscience and upright heart did their civil duties in the sight of God, and in their several places, to resist tyranny and the violence of superstition banded both against them, he may be sure will never seek to be forgiven that, which may be justly attributed to their immortal praise; nor will assent ever to the guilty blotting out of those actions before men, by which their faith assures them they chiefly stand approved, and are had in remembrance before the throne of God. He exhorts his son 66 not to study revenge." But how far he, or at least they about him, intend to follow that exhortation, was seen lately at the Hague,* and now lateliest at * Of Dr. Dorislaus' murder at the Hague, Clarendon gives the following

Madrid; where to execute in the basest manner, thougn but the smallest part of that savage and barbarous revenge, which they do nothing else but study and contemplate, they cared not to let the world know them for professed traitors and assassinators of all law, both divine and human, even of that last and most extensive law kept inviolable to public persons among all fair enemies in the midst of uttermost defiance and hostility. How implacable therefore they would be, after any terms of closure or admittance for the future, or any like opportunity given them hereafter, it will be wisdom and our safety to believe rather, and prevent, than to make trial. And it will concern the multitude, though courted here, to take heed how they seek to hide or colour their own fickleness and instability with a bad repentance of their well-doing, and their fidelity to the better cause; to which at first so cheerfully and conscientiously they joined themselves.

He returns again to extol the church of England, and again requires his son, by the joint authority of "a father and a king, not to let his heart receive the least check or disaffection against it." And not without cause; for by that means, "having sole influence upon the clergy, and they upon the people, after long search and many disputes," he could not possibly find a more compendious and politic way to uphold account :-"Whilst he was at supper, the same evening that he came to the town, in company of many others who used to eat there, half-a-dozen gentlemen entered the room with their swords drawn, and required those at the table 'not to stir; for that there was no harm intended to any but the agent who came from the rebels in England, who had newly murdered their king.' And one of them, who knew Dorislaus, pulled him from the table, and killed him at his feet: and thereupon they all put up their swords, and walked leisurely out of the house, leaving those who were in the room in much amazement and consternation. Though all who were engaged in the enterprise went quietly away, and so out of the town, insomuch as no one of them was ever apprehended, or called in question: yet they kept not their own counsel so well, (believing they had done a very heroic act,) but that it was generally known they were all Scottish men, and most of them servants or dependents upon the Marquis of Montrose." (History, &c. vi. 297, 298.) In the same volume of his work the historian has to relate the trial and execution of this same Marquis of Montrose, who was condemned by the parliament of Scotland "to be hanged upon a gallows thirty feet high for the space of three hours." (p. 419.) Numbers of his adherents underwent the same fate; among them probably the murderers of Dorislaus, of whom one, it seems, was saved, under I know not what pretence. (p. 421.) The murder of Ascham by the royalists, at Madrid, took place under circumstances similar to those which attended that of Dorislaus.-ED.