in their pretensions to a Crown to which they were not 〈◊〉 no great Inducement certainly for any one to bepersuaded to personate the Royal Heir to set up for a Lambert or a Perkin only for their misfortune and fate Lastly I shall conclude my remarks upon this Kings Reign with an Animadversion upon a Paragraph or two that conclude his piece very pertinent to this place since it relates to the times of which we treat and that is the resolution of the Judges upon the Case of this their King that the Descent of the Crown purged all his defects and attainder This their opinion he refutes as Frivolous Extrajudicial and here Impertinent but I hope to show this Point a most material one the Resolution to be a good Judgment and their reply much to the present purpose First sure it was a matter and that of a high Nature to know how he was qualify'd to sit in the House that was to preside in it as the head And tho he might in some sense be said to have won the Crown with Arms yet he knew it would wear much Better sit much Easier if setled and establish't according to Law and tho a Conquerer that has the Sword in his hand can soon capacitate himself to sway the Scepter yet he 'l soon find the most regular Proceedings tend most to the Establishment of his Reign this made Henry the Seventh who had a Triple Plea for the Crown and that one by discent from the Lancasters consult his Oracles of the Law how far an Attainder past in the Reign of the Yorks would still taint his Blood and make it less Inheritable Secondly their Resolution that all preceding defects were purg'd in the discent was a Judgment both equitable and reasonable for 't was sure but equal that an Heir to whom an Inheritance and that ofa Crown was allowed to discend should be qualify'd to take too for if he was a King no Bill of Attainder could touch him that was past too when he was none And if he was no King all the concurrence of the Lords and Commons cou'd never have made him an Act for his being so there being no Royal Authority to pass it into Law and nothing by the very constitution of our Government can be made a Law without so that such a resolution certainly was highly reasonable and unavoidable that that should purge its own defects which no power had perfection anough to purge wou'd he have a King pass an Act with his two Houses for the reversal of his own Attainder or the two Houses reverse the Attainder of their King If the first the allowing him to pass such an Act supersedes the end for which it should be past and makes him de Facto capable whom they would capacitate if he allows the Latter then he must an Interregnum too extinguish that Monarchy for a while of which the very Maxim says the Monarch can't dye and place that Supream power in the People which all our Fundamental Laws have put in the King Thirdly this Resolution is very pertinent to the present purpose to which 't is commonly now apply'd and that is the Bill of Exclusion But his passion and prejudice would not permit him to Examin the little difference there is between them For certainly that ability that can discharge any attainder is as efficacious for the voiding and nulling any Bill that shall hinder the descent for a Bill of Exclusion would have been but a Bill or an Act of the House for disabling the next Heir And an Attainder can do the same and is as much the Houses Act and to distinguish that in an Exclusion the Discent it self is prevented by a Law makes just no difference for whoever is Attainted has his Discent prevented by a Law too and that antecedently also before the Descent can come to purge him so that they only differ in this formal sort of Insignificancy In an Exclusion the Discents prevention would be the sole Subject of the Bill in an Attainder it is by Consequence and Common Law prevented and so the disability being but the same in both the defects by the same means may and must be purged The president the Judges cite to justify this their Opinion is not only applicable to their Case for which 't was cited but much more so to the very project of Exclusion which I 'll prove too from this Sophisters own reasoning It is the Case of Henry the Sixth who by Act of Parliament was Disabl'd to hold the Crown which was as particular an Act for the depriving him of his presum'd right as this their Excluding Bill would have been of an unquestionable one Town one of the Justices that debated and argued this point vouch't this H. 6. Case as an Attainder but was Corrected by the rest and told that he was not attainted but Disabled to hold the Crown but even that that was void assoon as he came again to wear it and seem to conclude that then à fortiori that an Attaindere would be purg'd away by the Descent and sure if this was then Law and that even for the Line of Lancaster who had Defects of Title to be purg'd besides of tainted blood 'T is strange to me why a York now and such an one too in whom both those so long disputed Titles Terminate and Concenter should be Disabl'd for ever by that Expedient which was resolv'd unable to prevent the Succession so long agon For Argument that an Attainder hinders the Crowns Discent has this presumptious Interpreter of the Law brought the most impertinent piece of Application that the defect of sense could suggest and so has as little reason as Truth to tell us that this Judges Resolution on Attainder is not to the present purpose pertinent for that a discent is insufficient to purge attainted Blood he cites the Sense of the King of France and the Learned advice that was given him to send his Son Lewis Because King John's Blood was corrupted but he might as well have told us because John is said to make over his Kingdom to the Moor we are all now Subjects to the King of Morocco the true reason of the French mans sending of his Son is what will at any time incapacitate the Crowns Discent and that is the Rebellion of the Subjects and yet those very Barons that Rebell'd never insisted on his corruption of Blood never made it so much as a Plea for their Rebellious Insurrection nay themselves thought him so far from being disabl'd by it that they prefer'd him even to the very right Blood which was incorrupted in his Nephew Arthur but allowing it then Law this resolution that such Corruption is purg'd was made long since and must now be as Legal tho the Contrary before had been never so much Law so that here he has only taken the pains to be impertinent and that too for the telling of a Lye But as his Villanous
brought into the Conspiracy and was not Her present Majesty sworn into this Did they not declare the King seduced by Evil Councellors and impeached several of the Seducers Were not several of the Council now impeached and declared Seducers of the King Were not the Judges then impeacht and Jenkins clapt in the Tower Were not Articles drawn against Scroggs and some of the rest declared Arbitrary Were not the Spiritual Lords excluded from their Right in Temporals and did they not now again dispute the Bishop's Right Were not the Ecclesiastical Courts then to be Corrected and that now taken into Examination Was not Manwaring and Montague censured in the House Thompson and several of our Clergy now brought on their Knees Was there not a Councill of Six whom the good old King impeached for bringing in the Scots and have we not had Six of the Senators that have suffered or fled Justice for the same Conspiracy Was not the Militia aimed at now and taken away then Was not the House of Peers Voted useless and now Betrayers of the Liberty of the Subject Lastly did not the whole House take the Covenant at St. Margarets and the Major part to have subscribed an Association now and last of all Did not the Junto at Westminster pass an Act for the King's Tryal and sign a Warrant for his Execution and now a remnant of a disbanded House propose horrid Things that made even some of the Conspirators fly out upon which ensued a discovered Assassination of their Soveraign and was there no danger of a Parliament no sign of a Protestant Plot Only because the King did not leave Whitehall and go down to Hampton Court because there was no Essex in the Field as well as the Plot no King secured at Oxford as well as in the Isle of Wight that there was no High-Court erected at Westminster but only a better expedient found out at the Rye If these are Arguments to render an House of Commons unsuspected and a Plot of the Protestants unimaginable if because here are perfect Parallels of Proceedings as even as if drawn with a Compass Mathematical and which according to their proper Definition I could draw to infinity yet still there must be presumed a great Disparity between the Subversion of the Government that was actually compast and the Destruction of it now that was so lately intended If there be the least Difference between what led to the last setting up an Usurper an Arch-Rebel in the Throne and these late Machinations of Hell to retrieve the same Usurpation bating but the Providence that interposed against its Accomplishment Then will I own what this Villainous Author will have taken for granted That those that have the least Suspicion of Parliaments are the greatest Villains that a Plot of Protestants proved by Confession is still a Paradox and that my self deserve what he has merited a PILLORY The Pages that he spends in declaiming against trifling Wit supersedes all answer and Animadversion which himself has prevented in being Impertinently Witty upon the very thing he condemns The stress of his Ingenuity is even strained in the very declaiming against it And Settle has not so much answered Himself as Hunt here his own Harangue That Gentleman sate down a while for his second Thoughts but this preposterous Prigg sets himself in his own glass at the same time a Contradiction to his own Writings His Observations upon the perjuries of the Popish Priests is so severe that the absolute Argument of their Guilt is drawn from their very denyal their Superstition I abhor as much as the Treasons they dyed for but I pity their Obstinacy which till I am better satisfied I shall not condemn his inhumanity is hard which unless he had good Assurance by Christians must be blamed there is not a Criminal of our latter Conspiracy I will declare Guilty beyond his own Confession and then there is not one that dyed but whom I can well think Guilty His next Observation that is worth Ours Is that upon the Legislative Power and there he makes each of the two Houses to have as much of it as the King and that I deny with better Reason than he can assert that the two Houses are concurrent to make a Law I 'll willingly grant 't is my Interest 't is my Birth-Right But that which I look upon to be truly Legislative is the Sanction of the Law and that still lies in the breast of our Soveraign If Mr. Hunt that in many places is truly Pedantick will rub up his Priscian the Grammatical Etymology will make it but Legem ferre and then I believe his House of Commons will be most Legislative 't is their Duty their Privilege rather to bring and offer up all Bills fit for Laws and the King still I hope will have his Negative in passing them the Commons pray petition to have them past and that implies a consent Superiour to be required that can absolutely refuse the King can with out Parliament charge the Subject where 't is thought for their Benefit and allowed to dispence with a Statute that concerns his own resolv'd by all the Justices the King by himself might make Orders and Laws for the regulating Church Government in the Clergy and deprive them if they did not obey 22. Ed. 3. says the King makes the Laws by the Assent of the Lords and Commons and so in truth does every Act that is made and every clause in it Bracton says the Laws of England by the Kings Authority enjoyn a thing to be done or forbid the doing These are Arguments that our King sure has somewhat more than a bare Concurrence in the Legislative If not he must be co-ordinate and then we have three Kings which is what they would have and then as well may three hundred I love my Liberty better than our Author who has forfeited his yet I remember when too much freedom made us all Slaves The Extent of the Legislative Power is great but then I hope 't is no greater than the King shall be graciously pleased to grant it shall extend And then I hope it must be allowed that Equity and Justice must always determine the Royal Sanction too which cannot of it self make all things Equal and Just should it stamp a Le Roy vult at the same time upon Acts inconsistent and contradictory upon such as were against the Law of Nature and all Reason such would be de facto void 'T is hard to be imagined such Error and Ignorance in so wise an Assembly but what has but bare possibility in Argument must still be supposed but that it has actually been done will I prove possitively and not with some of their illogical Inferrences suggest that a thing must be so only from a bare possibility of Being Be it therefore enacted by the Kings most excellent Majesty and by the Lords and Commons in this present Parliament Assembled 't was then first those
that were by special Act since declared Traytors made their King co-ordinate assumed to themselves so much of the Legislative that they left out the Fundamental form by and with the consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons that the said Earl of Strafford be adjudged and attainted of high Treason provided that no Judge or Judges shall adjudge or interpret any Act or thing to be Treason then as he or they should or ought to have done before the making of this Act as if this Act had never been made This piece of Paradox the Contradiction to Common Law Common Sense and Reason had all the Consents all the Concurrences that could if possible have made it truly Law and even his unhappy Majesties forc'd extorted Complyance But will any Creature that is barely distinguish'd from a Brute that can only offer at the mere privilege of his being Rational debase his very Nature so much as to call it Justice Would they ascribe an Omnipotency to this their power of Parliaments beyond that of the Almighty and blasphemously allow to this their Created God what the Schools would not the Divinity it self to reconcile Contradiction but still these Statute Mongers that can make any Miscellanies of Parliameut for their turn this they will defend to be Legal only because it was past into a Law Let it be so but still there must be much difference between this their Legality which now in their Sense can be nothing but the power of making Laws and common Justice which must be the Reason for which they are made and what is contrary to that and all Reason by the Laws of God and all Nations must be null and void otherways the most Barbarous Immoralities that an Heathen would blush at by such an indefinite Legislative would be truly Legal only because they are past into a Law Murder it self made Statutable as soon as ever those that have the power have Sign'd it for an Act. These Suggestions of Consequences are far from being extravagant because at present the Principles that lead to them are what but very lately have been Printed and Publish'd and the very Practices themselves not long since put in Execution This Author I am handling has made his Legislative not to be confined and that Plato we have pretty well examined allows his People can pass any thing for the good of the Common-wealth and then it may Polygamy too because it was practis'd in his Republick and is now tolerated amongst the Turks and what some Waggs tell us an indiscreet Member was once moving for here But that we can have Parliament Murders too for I cannot call it less since the Law has declared the Contrivers of them Traitors the Case of Strafford the Martyrdom of their King are too terrible Testimonies that our Legislative has been strein'd to make the greatest Injury Law and Treason it self the Statute of the Land for they past an Act for the Tryal of their Soveraign and then declared it Legal because it was past Their God Almighty of the Law Cook himself whose Words with them is all Gospel too tho he in his Pedantick Phraseology puts no period to this Power of Parliament yet in the very next Page condemns the self same sort of Proceeding and that was in the Case that hard Fate too of an other Earl as Innocent perhaps also and as unfortunate Cromwell was attainted in Henry the Eighth's time much after the same manner my Lord Strafford was in Charles the First but only if so great Injustice can be extenuated the latter was more Inhumane For tho the First was Sentenc'd and suffer'd by Parliament without being admitted to Answer A Proceeding against our own Laws those of all Nations and of Heaven it self against all that was Humane or Divine yet Wentworth's Measure was more hard whom they made to suffer with an Attainder after he had argued for his Life confounded his Accusers and convicted some of his own Judges The same sort of Severity Sir John Mortimer met with from this Parliamentary Po upon whom they past a Judgment without so much as permitting him to be arraigned but these Barbarities of Mr. Hunt's unlimited Legislative were condemn'd even by this their learn'd Lawyer tho' he would not did not or dared not question their Authority yet damned them in his own Words if it were possible to dark Oblivion if not to be buried in Silence but this more Dogmatical Judge with his Postscript has rather Encouraged such Injustice and Severity and represented to his Parliament a power they have of Proceeding more unwarrantably when he tells them tho the Succession of our Crown be Hereditary they can alter the whole Line and Monarchy it self by their unlimited power of their Legislative Authority But I shall also shew him that his Legislative power as it cannot justly extend to such great and impious Extravagancies yet but what we see it has been actually stretch'd to so neither can it to some other things that are less so In King Edward the Third's Time there were several Acts past that took away the power of Pardons from the Prince yet all these made void by the Common Law because against the Prerogative of their King And it was resolved by the Judges in King James his Reign that Himself could not grant away the power of Dispensation with the Forfeitures upon the Penal Laws because annext to his Royal Person and the Right of his Soveraignty And if what is only Derogatory from the Crown 's Right and King's Prerogative shall be actually voided by the Common Law as we see it did to the nulling three several Statutes I cannot see how this Bill of Exclusion had it past into an Act would not have been as much null and void unless it can be proved that our Hereditary Descent of the Crown is not so much the King's Prerogative that wears it as the Pardoning of a Felon or the remitting a Fine And that I believe will be difficult to be cleared by those that have spent so much Pains and Paper for its Justification and our Author himself so much Labors for so that even the Common Law it self will anticipate the Work of the Statute and perhaps his Highness need not have stayed till that of Henry the Seventh had taken away his Exclusion as well as Attainder and purged away all his Defects and framed in capacities by his coming to the Crown I have but two Cases more with which I 'll conclude Mr. Hunts great point of Legislative In Edward the Third's Time an Act was purposely declared void that was past and the King had declared to give his consent to it But it seems upon some oversight or error it was not actually done And in the First of King James when they recogniz'd his Right they petition him to put his own Acknowledgement too without which it
Countenance this Usurpation for he was soon made sensible that a Crown seldom sits easie on that Head where it has so little Right to sit and indeed before it could be well setled his Lords conspired against him at Westminster set up Maudlin the Counterfeit send to the King of France for assistance Glendour stirrs up the Welsh to rebel the Nobility fell from him drew up the following Articles against himself viz. for having Articl'd himself against his Sovereign for having falsified his Oath in medling with the Kingdom and the Crown for taking Arms against his King Imprisoning Murdering Him that he unjustly kept the Crown from the Earl of March to whom of Right it belonged and vowed the Restoration of Him and His Destruction and our Author now shall know these too are Articles as well deserving to be read and one thing more that deserves as much Observation that this his good Peoples Election was the prime Principal Cause of losing of Millions of Lives and an Ocean of Blood here entred that Line of Lancaster that had almost left the Nation Childless the Nobility and Gentry that escap'd the Sword were still by the prevailing Party chopt off or gibbited and in the space of about thirty year and somewhat upwards they dreined more Blood in England then e're was spent in the Conquest of France or would have been spilt had it been again attempted and that too never have been lost by their Henry the Sixth had it not been for an altered Succession and an injured Heir and the Bloody Consequences of a debarr'd Right And now at last he is forc't to allow an instance of a Prince that succeeded without the least shadow of Election and that in Henry the Fifth to whom himself owns they swore Allegiance without staying for his being declared we are obliged to him for this fair Concession but this Kindness is only because he finds it as clear as a Postulatum in the Mathematicks beyond his own Impudence to contradict but however he must malitiously observe that it was a thing strange and without President and why so because his Polidore tells him such an extraordinary Kindness was never shown to any King before t is strange that his Italian should understand more of our own Government than all our own English Authors 't is no wonder sure if he that was a Stranger to our Affairs should Write as strangely of it and make our Mighty Monarchs of Britain no more then some petty Prince of his own Italy and as Elective as their Duke of Venice But this perverse Gentleman shall know it was not without President and that by several Instances And first Richard the First presently on his Fathers Death without staying for their suffrages seised on his Father's Treasure was girt with the Sword of the Dutchy of Normandy took fealty both of Clergy and Lay and exercised all the Authority that Sovereign power cou'd allow before he came to be recogniz'd by their Suffrages or to his Coronation 2. Hoveden's Account that he gives of King John's coming to the Crown which as some Writers say is the extant says they swore Fealty to him when he was out of England without mentioning any thing of Preceding Election and he had his better Title his Brothers Army then in the field by which he cou'd have made himself soon their King had they not been so ready to receive him 3. Upon the Death of Henry the 3d. the States Assembled at the New-Temple and proclaimed his Son Edward King when they knew not whether he was living or dead swear Fealty to him and cause a New-Seal to be made Here sure are some presidents of Allegiance before their Election unless he 'll make Declaring or Proclaiming to be so and then in Gods Name in that sense let them as he contends for be Elected for I think all will allow they are proclaim'd But suppose on the death of a Predecessor there was no convention of any of the Nobility or Commonalty for Parliaments they then can have no Existence when the Breath is gone that gave them Being as all other Communitys are de facto dissolv'd If I say there were none met to Declare or Proclaim his Succes must the common Maxim be contradicted and the King dye too for want of their Popular Breath to give him Life or do our Laws admit that this interval between his Predecessors expiration and the proclaiming or crowning his Successor shall be call'd an Interregnum they know the Constitutions of our Government admit no more of this than an Exclusion They know that immediately by Descent King James was declar'd to be completely and absolutely King and that by all the Judges of the Kingdom I know the Kings Successor is always immediately proclaim'd upon his death and that perhaps is more for the proceedings of judicial Processes and that Writs may presently run in his name But were such a Proclamation obstructed I am satisfi'd he commenc'd an absolute King upon the very Minute of his Predecessors Expiration and if the Law Maxim won't allow an Haeres viventis there can be no Heir at all if he begin not to be so presently upon his Predecessors Death and for an Evidence of Fact as well as Reason this very King of whom we now treat catcht at the Crown while his Father was catching at his last breath seised it as his own as being his Right assoon as the gasping Monarch did but seem dead who only reviv'd to let him know how little that Right was by which he claim'd and so sealed the wrong he had done with his last breath the Successor declaring his own Sword should maintain what his Fathers had got Immediately upon this Henry the Fifths Death his Son Henry the Sixth succeeded This Author himself can talk of nothing of Election here neither but that he succeeded as his Fathers Heir but to make the power of Parliament prevail in this Kings Reign he is forc't to fly to a President that prevents any other Confutation of his whole History for whereas he has contended all alone for a Parliamentary priviledge for altering the Succession here he has brought upon the Stage one that condemns it self for doing so here we find a Duke of York too by the power as this Gentleman would have it of a Parliament but rather a perfect Vsurpation upon the Crown for a long time excluded from his Birthright and to make way for one of their Usurpers that was a Monmouth too That Exclusion was begun but with a Rebellion and it ended in as much Blood is our having been wretchedly miserable an Argument for our tempting the Almighty to make us once more so shall we Plot against Heaven for our Destruction and defie Fate to make us happy 't is matter of Astonishment to find the very Presidents of our Nations ruin to be preferr'd as expedients for its Preservation unless they think a Prince whose Just
Burgesses elected by themselves but this can't be gathered from Eadmerus the much better Authority who in the Titles and the Stile of near Nine or Ten Councils of his time not so much as mentions them King Stephen what he wanted and was forc't to spare in Taxations which were not then granted by the suffrages of the Common People tho they commonly bear the greatest burden of it tho he did not according to the Power he was then invested with raise great Sums upon his Subjects and the greatest Reason because he could not the Continual Wars having impoverisht them as well as their Prince and it has the proverbial Authority of necessitated Truth That even where it is not to be got the King himself must foregoe his Right yet this mighty Monarch's power was such that Confiscations supplyed what he could not Tax and as our Historian tells us upon light Suggestions not so much as just Suspicions he would seize upon their Goods and as I remember the Bishop of Salisbury's Case in his time confirms But tho the Menace of the threatning King the Text be turned now into the clear Reverse and our Kings Loyns no heavier then the very Finger of some of his Predecessors still we can find those that can preach him down for a Rehoboam or some Son of Nebat that makes Israel to Sin Henry the Second resum'd by his own Act all the Crown Lands that had been sold or given from it by his 〈◊〉 and this without being questioned for it much less deposed or murdered whereas when our Charles the First attempted only to resume the Lands of Religious Houses that by special act of the Parliament in Scotland had been settled on the Crown but by Usurpation were shared among the Lords when 't was only to prevent their Scandalous defrauding of the poor Priest and the very box of the poor to keep them from an 〈◊〉 and even a cruel Lording it over the poor Peasant in a miserable Vassallage beyond that of our antiquated Villains and when he endeavoured all this only by the very Law of all the Land by an Act of Renovation Legal Process and a Commission for the just surrendring Superiorities and Tyths so unjustly detain'd from the Crown but our modern Occupants of the Kirks Revenue had far less Reverence for the State chose much rather to Rebel against their Prince for being as they would Phrase it Arbitrary than part with the least power over their poor Peasants which themselves exercised even with Tyranny This was the very beginning of the first Tumults in that Factious Kingdom and 't is too much to tell you in what they ended Richard the First had a trick I am sure would not be born with now he pretends very cunningly to have lost his Signet and puts out a Proclamation that whoever would enjoy what he had under the former must come and have it confirmed by the new and so furnisht himself with a fine fund he could fairly sell and pawn his Lands for the Jerusalem Journey and as fouly upon his return resume them without pay And all this the good peaceable Subject could then brook without breaking into Rebellion and a bloody War and as they had just then none of their Great Charter that made afterward their Kings the less so neither had they such Rebellious Barons that could not be contented even with being too Great as they were then far from having granted so gracious a Petition as that of Right so neither you see so ready to Rebel and that only because they could not put upon their Prince the deepest Indignities the greatest wrong And these warrantable proceedings of our Princes whose power in all probability was unconfin'd before the Subjects Charter of Priviledges was confirm'd must needs be boundless when there were yet no Laws to Limit them yet these two Presidents were as impertinently applyed by the Common Hackney Goose quils whose Pens were put upon by the Parliament to scribble Panegyricks upon a Common-wealth to prove all our Kings a Catalogue of Tyrants tho the Presidents they brought from those times were clear Nonsense in the Application and no News to tell us or reproach to them that those Princes were Arbitrary when they had yet given no grants to restrain their Will Here I hope is sufficient Testimony and that too much to Demonstrate that our Kings of old by long Prescription were so far from being guided and governed by a Parliament as our Factious Innovator would have them now that in truth they never had any such Constitution and the People then insisted so little on their own Priviledges that they could not tell what they were and the Princes Prerogative so great that even their property could hardly be called their own But these being but Presidents before their Charters were granted or the Commons came in play tho these preceding Kings might deviate from the common Custom of the Realm in many that some may call irregular Administrations yet the Customs of the Kingdom relating to the Royal Government in all those Reigns were never questioned much less altered they never told their Kinge then as this piece of Sedition does now that their Nobles were to manage their Affairs of State as well as he would have even a Council of Commons We come to consider now whether from the granting them Charters which was done in the next Reign that of King John when the long tugged for Liberties were first allowed or from the Constitution of admitting the Commons to consult which by the greatest Advocates can't be made out handsomely before this Kings time or his Son and Successors who might well be necessitated to Consult the meaner sorts when all the great were in Arms and wisely flatter their Commons into peace when the Lords had rebelled in an open War tho' still good Authorities will not allow them to be called in either of their Reigns not so much as to be mentioned in any of their Councils and that even to the 18 of Edward the First wee 'll see I say now whether from these as they count them the most happy times That blessed Epoche wherein their Kings were first confined down to those which Posterity will blush at the Period of Villany when this Proposition was among the rest proposed whither ever the Parliament pretended unless when they actually rebelled as they did here to manage their King and his Affairs of State The greatest Lawyer and the most Equitable one that lived in this Henry the Thirds time tells us the King has a power and Jurisdiction over all that are in his Kingdom that all are under him that he has not an Equal in the Realm and sure the Project of putting the Parliament upon choosing of his Council for the managing of his Affairs or assuming themselves to manage it certainly would make the Subject have some power over him make him more then Equal or
Co-ordinate as the more modern Contenders for the Peoples Supremacy very Magisterially are pleased to Phrase it In the Reign of Edward the First the Parliament declares they are bound to assist their Sovereigns at all Seasons and in that very Sessions declared the Supream power to be his proper and peculiar Prerogative and so far from taking upon them to manage Him or His Affairs or the setting a Council over Him as a superintendent In Edward the Second's time they several times confirm'd to him the power of the Sword as his Sole undoubted unquestionable Prerogative and that he could distrain for the taking up of 〈◊〉 all that held by Knights Service and had twenty Pounds per An. and I think that allowed him to be his own Adviser when it put him into an absolute Condition to Command But I confess his Seditious and Rebellious Subjects afterward served Him just as these our Proposers did their Soveraign took upon themselves to reform his Council managed His Affairs till they did all the Kingdom too deposed him with that power of the Sword they themselves had several times in his very Reign put in his Hand as ours also denyed His Majesty the Commission of Array which they well knew the Laws allowed But as this Usage was shown to both so was it done to bind them both that both might be more easily Butchered In the following Reign of this unfortunate Prince's Son too forward to mount the Throne before his Father had thoroughly left it which he could not be said to relinquish but with his Life there I 'll grant this Republican his own Rebel Tenent was as stoutly maintained but by whom why by the very same Wretches whom too several Parliaments had condemned for the same sort of damnable Opinions and solemnly sent them into Exile too the daring and presumptuous Spencers who being the first Authors of that Seditious Sophistry that damnable Distinction of parting His Majesties Person from his political Capacity that is making Allegiance no longer Law than their King could maintain his Authority with Arms for that must be the meaning of such Treasonable Metaphysicks for if they 'll owe but Obedience upon that political account of his being a King assoon as they can but find out some blessed Expedient for the proving of him none that is Misgovernment Arbitrary Power Popish Inclinations and the like pretty Pretences to make him fairly forseit it why then truly all the Majesty vanishes like a Shadow before this New Light and if he can't hold his Scepter in his Hand with the power of his Sword why they have Metamorphosed Him into a common Man and may pluck it out with theirs And truly the Peoples Politick Capacity is such they will soon make their Kings uncapable when once they are grown so strong in the Field as not to fear it Here was the Rise of that Rebellious reasoning that run all indispensable Obligation of our Obedience to the Prince into the Capricious and Arbitrary Conjecture of the People whose Title and Deposition must depend upon his own Demeanor and that to be decided according to the diversity of thought which in a discontented Vulgar deserves the better Epithet of Distraction The good King would have a Right to his Crown as long as his kind Subjects would be pleased to think so and we have more than once found their Politicks have too soon made them uncapable to Govern and then deposed and murdered their very Persons for the want of this their politick Capacity I am sorry to say and posterity will blush to hear that such Seditious and sophisticated reasoning obtained even to the making Three mighty Monarchs in a most miserable manner to miscarry and it appears still too plain in their Prints and those too Charactered in Royal Blood that they never 〈◊〉 severing our late Soveraign's Person from his Crown till at last his Head too from his Shoulders I could not but with some passionate Digression reflect upon this pernicious Principle and so the best of it is I can be but pardonably impertinent but which I would apply pertinently to this Republicans and Parliamentary Proposition for their managing all State Affairs is one of the Consequences that may be drawn and which those Sycophants the Spencers did actually craw from this their damnable Doctrine for so they did conclude from it too as well they might That in default of him their Liege Lord his Lieges should be bound to govern the Affairs of State and what Newes now does this Devilish Democratick tells us Why the very Doctrine of two damnable Parasites whom themselves have condemned for above two or three hundred years agon who to cover their own Treason as they then too call'd it committed against the People and that but in Evil Counselling of their King invented very cunningly this popular Opinion to preserve themselves and please the Rabble they had so much 〈◊〉 And could after so many Centuries after so long a series of time the Principles even of their execrated Enemies by themselves too be put into practice and what is worse still shall the sad effects that succeeded the practising it so lately encourage our Seditious Libellers for its Reimpression if this most Rebellious Nonsense must re-obtain all their declaratory Statute the determin'd Treasons of their good King Edward may pass for a pretty piece of Impertinence they may do as once they truly did they may Fight Shoot at Imprison Butcher the Natural Body the Person of their Soveraign and tell us the Laws designed them only for Traytors when they could destroy him in his politick The same Laws make it Treason to compass his Queens Death or Eldest Sons and must it be meant of their Monarchs being Married in his politick Capacity as well as murdered or of his Heirs that shall be born by pure political Conception they might e'n set up their Common-wealth then if these were to be the Successors to the Crown But yet with the same sort of silly Sophistry that they would separate the Kings natural Capacity from his political did the same Seditious Rebels as Iremember make their own personal Relation to a politick Body Inseparable Rebellious Lumps of Contradiction shall not your Soveraigns sacred Person be preserved by that Power and Authority derived even from the 〈◊〉 and whose very Text tells us touch not mine Anointed and yet could your selves plead it as a Bar to Treason because perpetrated under a political Denomination and a Relation only to that Lower House of Commons that was then only an incorporated Body of Rebels and Regicides and this was told us by that Miscreant Harrison the most profligate the vilest the most virulent of all the Faction concerned in that bloody Villany the MURDER OF A KING the silly Sot had it infused by his Councel as Senseless as Seditious That it was an Act of the Parliament of England and so
no particular Members questionable for what was done by the Body I consess the good excluded Members and the bubbl'd Presbyterian Senate would not allow it for a Parliamentaty Process and why because themselves did not sit in it and truly upon that unexpected and most blessed Revolution might hugg themselves and shrink up in a silent Joy that they were kept out And I cannot but smile to see two or three sit upon the Bench and upbraiding the Prisoner for pulling them out of the Parliament and making themselves none Persons whom Policy had only placed there when the poor Prince was forc't to compound with a party for a Crown forc'd to prefer those that had dethroned his Father before only the better to settle himself in it and to compass more easily the punishment of those that murdered him after Persons and a great one too that I could name that have serv'd him as ungratefully since and been as deservedly rejected Persons that had his late Majesty's Arms been but as Victorious as his Cause was good had been as much liable to the Laws and their Crimes as Capital for fighting him in the Field with an Ordinance of the House as those that brought him to the Scaffold and Butchered him on the Block from the time that their Tumults forc'd him to fly from their Houses they were no more a Parliament than those were afterward that pulled them out and it lookt a little loathsome to see some sit a simpering and saying all Acts must be past by the King who themselves once had helpt to pass many without and they could no more justify themselves had it been but their turn to be brought to Justice by their Memberships political Referrences to the two Houses then the Criminal at the Bar by his Relation to the Rump I have their own Authority for it their very Houses Act that they declared designed and actually made their King a Prisoner For they told the persidious Scot that his denying their Propositions and what were those but Expedients to destroy Him had debar'd him of his Liberty and that they verifyed too when they had got their poor purchase at Holdenby in a usage of their Prince with a restraint that would have been Cruelty to a Peasant and which even his very Murderers enlarged when their Joyce took him from his Jaylers And I am sure t is provided that to Imprison him till He assent to Proposals shall be High-Treason by particular Act as well as to Murder him is made so by the 25. And whatever the Mildness of Mr. Hunt the Moderator of Rebellion would have this Mystery of Iniquity would not have it so much as remembered it was these his own darling Daemagogues whom he defends and adores and that even for Restorers who stript him in his politick Capacity anticipated his Murder and then left his naked Person to be persued by the Wolves that worried it they had turned their House into a Shambles and that of Slaughter and were the Butchers the less Bloody that only bound Him and left to their Boys the cutting of his Throat yet this Barbarity must be defended this extenuated by them and the help of their Hunts and such Advocates the guilt not to devolve to each individual Member because an Act of an Aggregated House But base Caitiff's to use even the very Lawyers own Language your selves know that a politick Body may be guilty of a most political Treason and tho the Laws tell us it has no Life or Soul and so can't suffer yet it s constituent Members may lose both be Hang'd and Damn'd in their proper Persons and that for committing it too against such another political Constitution It would otherwise be a fine Plea for Corporators that have been many times Defendants in the Case when their King has been Plaintiff And against whose more dangerous Sedition there was lately made special Provision by a particular Oath Lastly to conclude the Confutation of this sad silly sort of Sophistry this Seditious Nonsense 't is shrowdly to be suspected that from the same sort of Sophisters fallacious Inferences was first insinuated that prejudicial Opinion I call it so because it looks like a Doctrine of some concerned party That Societies were not punishable in the next World for the Villanies they had committed in this That is the Members were not to suffer there for what they had acted in Relation to such a BODY here this Religious Absurdity has been publisht by some Seditious Pens from the Press I wish I could say not imposed upon Loyal ones too both from that and the Pulpit for Errors especially when coloured with the bait of Interest tho first hatcht by the Brooders of all bad Principles till well examined may delude the very best I know it may be returned with some seeming Reason that Crimes committed here as a Member of a body politick can't well in Justice be laid to the Charge of any particular Person hereafter for upon the dissolution of the natural one the Relation to such a Community â—â—asing the Guilt and Crime contracted should dye too But the Judge of Heaven has declared he won't be mockt tho they thought those of the Land might How contentedly would some of the Regicides have given up the Ghost could they have pleaded to the Almighty their Innocence of the Royal Blood from the shedding it in Parliament But tho National Sins may require reasonably the sufferings of a Nation and no more than what for this very Sin our own has since suffered therefore to suggest the single Individual the singular Sinner shall escape with Impunity hereafter because not punisht here or that because several of them suffered here for that Martyrs Blood and the Treasons of an Vniversal Body seem'd to be punisht in as general Conflagration that therefore the Criminals have superseded their sufferings in Hell and may now dare Heaven for my part seems an Opinion as ridiculous as the Popish Purgatory and their being saved by a fantastick Fire T is almost an Irreligious excuse for all manner of Crimes and Immoralities the Constitutions Circumstances of Men being so various that I dare avow scarce any Villany but may be committed by Communities or the Politick Relation of the private Person to some publick Society In short such Law and such Divinity would make the worst of 〈◊〉 that is incorporated ones fear Hell no more than they would the Hangman and baffle the Devil as well as the Gibbet And I may well here so warmly condemn these sort of damnable Doctrines when they were so hotly maintained by the rankest of our Rebels and Republicans and this very Daemon this Devil of Sedition can only countenance his Rebellious Positions with the making use of His Majesties Authority for the Ratification of his Proposals that is the Destruction of his own Person For 't is a great Truth I wish I could not say an experimented
Optimacy is made up of so many more And where then into what form to whom shall we run for the best maintaining of this popular Darling this dangerous Violation that has been clamoured for rebelled and fought for the Peoples RIGHT but to that Soveraignty which our very Laws say can do no wrong to a Monarchy where Mechanicks can never meddle with Affairs of State to make them truckle to their own or the Nobility so powerful as to be all Soveraigns and under what Prince can we better acquiesce for this enjoyment than the present that has so often declared for its Protection And shall the Speech of some Noble Peer be better assurance promise more than the word of a King All Subjects under him have either Riches or Honor for their private Aim to make them act more partially for the publick and which the Laws presume therefore they may injure and have therefore made the greatest punishable But him exempted from all Statutes that are Penal And these sort of Arguments I can assure them their King himself has used to prove the publick Interest his own and that he alone of all the Kingdom can be presumed most impartially concerned for the good of the publick A Reason worthy of so good a King and which the worst the most Seditious Subjects cannot Answer Did not the Parliament in Richard the Third's Time give even that Vsurper an Arbitrary Power greater than any they can dread now from their most Lawful Soveraign Did not they declare him their Lawful King by Inheritance tho they knew they made him Inherit against all Law Did not they declare it to be grounded upon the Laws of God and Nature and the Customs of the Realm whereas we now can oppose this Divine Right from the panick fear of making our true Legal King too powerful and the Succession of a Right Heir must be questioned by our Parliaments now when their Predecessors declared it unalterable even in a wrong Did they not to him but an Usurper a Tyrant own themselves Three Estates without including himself and say that by them is meant the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and Commons and shall the Press be pestered under our undoubted Soveraign and the mildest Prince to make him Co-ordinate with the People Did they not make particular Provision in Parliament for the preservation of His Person that was the very Merderer and Destroyer of His Subjects And shall our 〈◊〉 ones Associate for the Destruction of the mildest Monarch whose greatest Care is their Protection Was this Monster ever questioned or censured for the Murder of several of His Subjects as well as the more Barbarous Butchery the spilling almost of his own Blood in his Nephews and must our most gracious one stand the mark of Malice and Reproach and that only for desending that of his Brothers who Reigned more Arbitrary and managed all Affairs more Monstrously than this very Monster of Mankind And must a Parliament be now the Manager of the mildest Monarch and think him dangerous if not governed by themselves The two Succeeding Henries had their Power as much confirmed Henry the 7th had his Negative Voice the thing those Seditious discontented Grumblers so much repine at maintained asserted for his undoubted Prerogative It is at present by the Law of his Time no 〈◊〉 if the King assent not A Prince beloved and favoured only because he was their King who tho he had as many subsidies granted more than any before him His Subjects you see never thought it a Grievance then to contribute to their 〈◊〉 being Great but acknowledged his Supremacy even under their greatest pressure His 〈◊〉 upon penal Statutes Historians call and the Law the most 〈◊〉 way for raising of Money that was ever used yet still had he the Hearts of his People as well as their Purses They thought Rebellion then could not be justifyed with clamor of Oppression as since by Ship-money and Lone tho levyed by a King whom themselves had Opprest The simplicity of those times made them suffer like good Subjects and better Christians when the refined Politicks of such Authors and a 〈◊〉 age can tell them now to be Wise is to Rebel I need not tell him who managed Affairs in Henry the Eighth's Time when Parliaments seemed to be frightned into Compliance with a Prown and Bills preferr'd more for the pleasure of the Prince than the profit of the People Their Memberships then so far from medling with the measures of the State that they seemed to take them for their sole Measures so far was then an Order of the House from controuling that of the Board And I can't see that the Peoples Petition of Right has since 〈◊〉 away too the King's Prerogative yet it was affirmed for Law in this King's Time that he had full power in all Causes to do Justice to all Men. If the Parliament or their Council shall manage Affairs let them tell me what will become of this Power and Law His Son Edward succeeded him and tho a Minor a Prince whose Youth might have given the People an opportunity for an Encroachment upon his Power and the Subject commonly will take advantage of the Supremacy and that sometimes too much when the Soveraign knows but little what it is to be a King I am sure they were so Seditiously Wise in that Infancy of Henry the Third and yet he had Protectors too as well as this But notwithstanding such an Opportunity for the robbing the Rights of the Crown you shall see then they took the first occasion for the asserting them In the very First year of his Reign it was resolved that all Authoritie and Jurisdiction Spiritual and Temporal is derived from the King but this Republican has found out another Resolution of resolving it into the power of the Parliament And in this very Reign too it was provided as the common Policy and Duty of all Loving Subjects to restrain the Publishing all manner of Shameful Slanders against their King c. upon whom dependeth the whole Unity and Universal weal of the Realm what Sentence then would the Parliaments of those times have past upon Appeals to the City vox patriae's and a Plato Redivivus upon a Libel that would prove the Kings Executive power of War forfeitable and that the Prerogative which is in the Crown hinders the Execution of the Laws tho I am sure those very Laws are the best Asserters of the Prerogative there next resolve would have been to have ordered such an Author to the 〈◊〉 by the Hands of the Hangman instead of that Honorable Vote the thanks of the House In Queen Mary's Time too the Law left all to her Majesty tells her all Jurisdiction does and of Right ought to belong to her In Queen Elizabeth's Time what was Law before they were obliged even to Swear to be so Every Member of the House before qualified
of Allegiance what it's form was of old and what he would have implyed in the word HEIR therein mentioned to whom we swear and here at the same time that he would deliver the poor people as he pretends from the sad delusions of Error and Sophistry does he put upon them the greatest Falsehood and fallacy and the quaintest Sophism a Quirk in Law viz. That the King's Heir in possibility cannot be meant in our Oath of Allegiance because 't is a Maxim forsooth in our Law that no Man can have an Heir while he is living And with this silly Solaecism a sort of Sense merely Sophisticated this Elaborate Gospeller in the Law lays himself out in the pains of two or three Pages to prove the prettiest Postulate which we would have granted but for an asking that in this our Oath we did not swear Actually Allegiance to the D. of Y. And truly I am much of his opinion too in that point and that he was not then our Soveraign tho he had a possibility to Succeed But can ever a more Senseless Inference be made by a pretender to Sense or a more Jesuitical Evasion by the most dexterous Manager of an Oath First I would ask him what he thinks was the Design of its first Imposition what was the Reason of Inserting including the Kings Heirs and Successors in those Oaths of SVPREMACY and ALLEGIANCE Was it to perpetuate or acknowledge an Hereditary Succession or to warrant an Exclusion of the Right Heirs Did the Parliament design in the framing them the Lineal Discent of the Crown when they Swear to defend the Authority of the Kings Lawful Successor as well as his own or did they then reserve to themselves a power of declaring who should be his Successors by Law But if the Divine Gentleman would have reason'd pertinently and to the purpose tho it would have been but an absurd sort of Reasoning this he must have inferr'd that because we there swear only to be faithful to the Kings Heirs when they come to Succeed therefore this Oath non Obstante we are left at Liberty to prevent any Heir from his Succession and then I would have this Political Casuist tell me What would be the Difference between this Evasion and a direct Perjury for we swear to be faithful to the King's Heir that shall Succeed him and truly in the mean while we make them our own suffer only whom we please or just noneat all to Succeed for by the same Law Equity and Reason that we interrupt the Succession of one we may that of one thousand too and still be true to our Oath if we abolisht the whole Line of Succession for then those Juglers with a turn of hand and a Presto will tell us very readily why truly we swore to obey his Majesties Heirs and Successors but must needs be absolved now since there are none that do succeed And such were the Casuistical Expositions of some of our Late Divine Assemblies even in this very point when they had Murdered their Prince and denounced Death to His Heirs and were urged with their Allegiance But is not this first Perjuring themselves to Commit a Crime and then justifieing its Commission by their being Perjur'd May we not as well Murder one that would be the Successor and then plead our Innocence we did not suffer him to Succeed or truly did they not design such an Impious and Execrable countenancing of the Villany when they Associated for his Destruction and swore to destroy him would not they then too have Absolved themselves thus in Johnson's Sense and the Jesuits from any obligation to this his Majesties Heir because the Law Maxim did not yet allow him to be so and they had helpt him now from being so for ever Will a Nice point of this his Law resolve does he think as tender a Case of Conscience This his Law makes it but Manslaughter where a person is kill'd without Malice Propense but will this be no shedding of Blood to be required at his hands by the Judge of Heaven because he had his Clergy allowed here upon Earth can he Prescribe with the Laws of the Land to impunity from the Decalogue and tell the Almighty some Killing is no Murder Here his God his Saviour is invoked in a Solemn and Sacred Oath upon the Gospel and one that should be a Divine Expositor of both consults upon it the Readings of Mr. Hunt and a Resolution of the Common Law here he Swears to the plain meaning of the Words without any Mental Reservation whatsoever and yet this Mungrel in Divinity means now to take it in his mind according to a ereiv'd Maxim in the Law And this Libeller of the Primitive Christians looks like an Apostate that was as Primitive who kept pointing to the papers he put upon his Breast while he was Swearing to others that he held in his hand But yet I dare Appeal even to his own Breast who without doubt had often taken these Oaths being graduated in an University and Ordain'd a Divine tho unworthy of both whether the Words Heirs and Successors were not understood by himself of such as were to Succeed by an Hereditary Right by Birth and Blood to the Crown and whether that he did then Reserve to himself only such as did Actually succeed by Consent of Parliament and whether he did not think that by them he was not only obliged to obey those Heirs when they came to the Crown but also to do all that in him lay to promote in the due time their coming to wear it certainly to confine their Sense only to those that shall de facto succeed is but Swearing an Implyed Allegiance to any Rebel or Vsurper and the word Lawful that still accompanys Successors will not mend the Matter with such men for all is presently Legal and just with them that has but the shadow of a Parliamentary power for it's pretence And I am well assured That those that would have thought such an Exclusion just and equal with their King 's passing it would have thought it as Legal could they havesate till they had made it pass without The good old King at first disputed his Militia as hard with them and who could have believed any sort of men could have thought it the Parliament's without his Consent But assoon as the Rebel House had made their Ordinance for the Seizing it which of those Miscreants did not think it as much Law And the more than probable project at Oxford shrewdly Insinuates they would have warranted an EXCLVSION without their Kings leave Legal had they been allo'w but a further progress in their Vnwarrantable Proceedings But as much as Mr. Johnson Triumph's with this his Maxim of the Law as if he were the first Divine that had discover'd this deceitful Evasion this Jesuitical interpretation of his Protestant Oath Tho he and his Hunt and all his Lawyers in the Hall
and a Case upon our late Elections much 〈◊〉 and to say as some 〈◊〉 That such a Prescription cannot be forfeited proceeds from a confounding of the word in this Case with that Prescription by which some of them have a Title to their Estate for their Common Objection about this their Elective power is That the King may as well deprive them of their Birth-right when this their Birth right might commence by an Original Right but the Power of this Electing must Necessarily and Originally first come from the Crown But yet they know too that this their very Birth-right is in many Cases forfeitable by their own Act to the Crown and for their Burgage it self should we abstract from that Elective power that attends it nothing else but an 〈◊〉 tenure of their very King And if in the Saxons time as the popular advocates would persuade us the Commons were call'd to sit in Parliament 't is certain they could not come as Burgesses too for all that Borhoe in their Toungue signified if we can believe my Lord Coke and from which the word Burgh was since deriv'd its signification was only this Those ten Companies or Families that were one anothers pledge and so should they prove it to us as clear as the Sun as well as they have left it much in the 〈◊〉 still those their Commons could never be of those that had any Right to come but only such as the Grace of the King should call and even in Edward the first 's time those very Barons some say that were only most wise were summon'd by the King and their Sons if they were not thought so prudent as their Fathers were not call'd to Parliament after their Fathers death Therefore since Prescription since Parliament it self depended all heretofore upon the pleasure of the Prince I cannot see how the Subject shall ever be able to make it his Original Right and tho some are so bold as to say such a prescription cannot be forfeited or resign'd by the Subject resum'd or restor'd to the Crown for they must maintain those propositions or else they have no reason for their Murmering since there has been none alter'd or destroy'd but what has been by Inquiry of the Kings Quo Warranto or their own Act of Resignation yet sure if the Common Law did not favour the King in this Case Common Equity would since those Priveleges were but the very Grant of his own Ancestors But if we must consider nothing but Mr. Sidney's Original Power and Right and all that lodg'd in his good People of England it may be their Birth-right too to Rebel they may and must Murder their Monarch and that by their own Maxims when they think him not fit to Govern or Live I have heard it often said that the Members in Parliament represent the people and for that Reason are call'd their Representatives but if this Original Power which is delegated to them upon such a Representation must Subject their Soveraign as Mr. S. will have it to these his Judges of the particular Cases arising upon such a Subjection then they must e'en represent their King too and every Session of Parliament that he Summons is but an unhappy Solemnity whom himself Assemblies for his own deposition if such positions should obtain 't is those that indeed would make the Monarch fearful of Parliaments and not those idle Suggestions of Mr. Hunt that the Weekly Pamphlets were endeavouring to make him forego them and it was this very opinion that promoted the last War which he would not have so much as mention'd Lastly if this Original Power of the People be delegated to their Representatives this People that did so Communicate it can at their pleasure recall it and exercise it themselves for that is essential to the Nature of a Communicated Power for upon supposition of the peoples having such a Power it would be of the same Nature that their Kings is for Power of Supremacy wherever it be lodg'd is still the same and you see that the Power which the King has is often Commission'd to the Judges in his several Courts of Justice and yet I cannot see how his Majesty by Virtue of such a Commissionating of his Servants does Exclude himself from the Administration of those Laws that he has only allow'd others to Administer or from a recalling of that power to himself which he has only delegated to another for 't is a certain Maxim in reason that whatsoever Supream does empower others with his Authority does still retain more than he does impart tho I know 't is a Resolution in our Law Books that if any one would render himself to the Judgment of the King it would be ofnone effect because say they all his power Judicial is Committed to others and yet even they themselves will allow in many Cases their lies an Appeal to the King But what ever was the Sense of my Lord 〈◊〉 in this point who has none of the fewest Faults and failings tho his Voluminous Tracts are the greatest ease and Ornament of the Law his resolution here is not so agreeable to Common Equity and Reason therefore I say in reason it must follow That Mr. Sid. people having but delegated their Power to the Parliament still retain a power of concurring with preventing or revoking of that power they have given but in charge to their Representatives and if so then they can call them to an Account for the ill exercise of that power they have intrusted them with set up some High Court of Justice again for upon this very principle the last was erected not only for the Tryal of their King but for hanging up every Representative that has abus'd them as they are always ready to think in the exercise of that Original power with which he was by his Electors intrusted these sad Consequences which necessarily flow from this lewd Maxim would make their house of Commons very thin and they would find but few Candidates so ready to spend their Fortunes in Borough Beer only for the Representing of those that might hang them when they came home upon the least misrepresentation of their proceedings and these sad suggestions of the sorrowful Case of such precarious representatives are 〈◊〉 Consequences from the very 〈◊〉 of our Republican even in those very Arguments that he uses for the subjection of his King for if his King 〈◊〉 man must be Subject to the Judgment 〈◊〉 his People that make him a King 〈◊〉 he cannot be so Impudently 〈◊〉 but he must allow his Members of Parliament that are much more made by them by Continual Election and 〈◊〉 very breath of their Mouth 〈◊〉 be as 〈◊〉 accountable to their Makers for if 〈◊〉 should recur in this Case as he has 〈◊〉 other refuge to the Peoples having excluded themselves from this 〈◊〉 Power once in themselves by conferring it on their Representatives 〈◊〉 farewel to the very Foundation
several Kings and particular Princes The Druids as may be gathered out of Caesars Commentaries had in those Ignorant days all the Learning and the Law But too little alass to let us know whether their Princes were absolute Monarchs or limited Hereditary or Elective though 't is to be suspected they were both unconfined in their power as well as succeeded by their blood those poor Embryo's of Knowledg the very primitive Priests of Barbarous Heathens that in their highest felicity were no happier than the first asserters of the Gospel under Misery and Persecution their reverend Hermitages but the Woods the Dens and Caves of the Earth were far sure from disputing the right of Sovereignty when only capacitated to obey far from transmitting to us the frame of their Monarchy unless they had known the Egyptian learning of writing on the Barks of Trees and made their Libraries of the Groves in which they dwelt The Princes and Monarchs of their Times were wont to frequent those pious places for Worship and Adoration and had a Veneration too without doubt for those reverend Bards that sacrificed but were far I believe from subjecting their Regal Authority to that Divinely Pagan tho' then the sacred Jurisdiction tho' 't is reported that upon Caesar's invading them the very power of Life and Death and the Punishment for all manner of offences was in their sacred Breast and such as would not stand to their award were forbidden their Sacrifices which Interdiction then was the same I believe in effect with the modern power of our Church to Excommunicate but besides another reason and the best too why we have nothing delivered from those sacred Oracles of Religion and Law why the History of those times is still uncertain and was never transmitted is because they were expressly forbidden to transfer any thing to Posterity or to commit it to Books and Letters tho somewhat of that sort of Communicating must be supposed by that Inhibition to have been Imparted to them from the Egyptians Greeks Romans those Eastern Climes through which Learning and Letters had their first Progress But whether their Ignorance or such a prohibition were the Causes why nothing descends to us of the Government of our old Britains 't is granted by all and by this Author himself that it was Monarchical that Kings Reigned here ab origine if not Jure divino Though I look on their Antiquity no small Argument of their Divine Right and for the probability of their Haereditary Succession which I insinuated above can I confess since we are so much in the dark be only guessed by the light of Reason and that I shall make to warrant the Conclusion from the present Practise and Constitution of all barbarous Nations where the next of blood still mounts the Throne unless interrupted by Rebellion and that 's but the best Argument of our Author for the Power of his Parliaments and if only for this certain Reason we have more Authority to conclude it was then Haereditary then he only from the uncertainty of the Story has to conclude it otherwise In the next place I see no reason why his Sentiments should determine other Peoples thoughts and why we should not think that the following Heptarchy of the Saxons tho they had their seven Kings yet still might agree in one rule of Succession nay tho their Laws were so different too as he would insinuate which is not absolutely necessary to suspect neither for they being all one Nation and then but just called from their home by our British King Vortiger for his assistance may probably be supposed to have retained for the Main the general Rules and Laws of their own Countrey tho when divided into those seven Kingdoms they might also make a sort of private by-Laws according to the different Emergences of particular affairs that occurred in their several Governments Can he prove that the Succession of the Saxons in their own Countrey was not Hereditary when they inhabited in their small Dukedom of Holstein and that consequently they retained the same sort of Election in their new acquired Government here that they left in their own at home this he does not undertake to suggest because not able to prove there having been a probable Monarchy all along Hereditary if Paternal Right was wont to descend so for that is proved by most learned Pens and these Saxons are believed to have been the relict of the race of Cimbrians that inhabited that Chersonese so called from its Inhabitants of whom Gomer the Son of Japhet was the Original Father or Prince But what ever was their Government before he allows them to have set up seven Monarchies here only can't think they agreed in one Rule of Succession because governed by different Laws which tho granted is so ridiculous an Infinuation that greater Differences atpresent between greater Kingdoms and Nations far more remote in Place far more different in Religion contradicts the Suggestion who for the most part now over the whole World agree in an Hereditary Succession to the Crown and the Argument would have been as strong and as apparently foolish if he design'd it for a Specimen of his folly that since France and Spain Sweeden and Denmark are govern'd by different Laws we can't imagin them to have one sort of Succession Which very Rebound of his own Pen wounds his Cause more than any direct stroak of his Adversaries for since we see those more different more distant Nations agree in one Rule 't is sure a Logical Inference a Majori that those that were less different might And for the Changes and Consusions of those Times which he urges as an Argument of their uncertain Succession that is in effect his very Alpha and Omega and his praefatory Suggestion only proved through his whole History that in times of Confusions and Rebellions Succession is uncertain and so is all Property and Common Right all meum and tuum all that the Law of God or Man can make his own But as obscure as he makes our Succession before the Romans came 't is not so dark and unintelligible but that we may gather light enough from it to have been Hereditary We won't rely on the Fable of Brute and the Catalogue of near 68 Kings that are said to have Reigned Successively here before the coming of the Romans yet allowing it an entire Fable we may draw from it this Moral at least that a Fabulous Tradition sometimes has somewhat of reality for its ground as the patching up a Centaure a Chymera with a thought results from several Objects that are simply real abstracting from the compounded Fiction And tho we might not have 68 Kings successive before the Roman Conquest yet that there were several appears and he owns and I conclude Hereditary from the common rule in all Barbarous Nations when ever discovered in which the further back we run in the History of the Old World the more we are confirmed
matter and Evidence enough to make him a Monarch and the Government of Rome Monarchical which surely Contradicts his extravagant Assertion That it was a Democracy unless he can reconcile the Contradiction of Sole Soveraignty with the Government of a numerous Senate Another of his pretty Paradoxes is that all Empire is founded in Dominion and Property and that must be understood too of a Propriety in Lands so that where a Prince has not a foot of Land he can't have twelve Inches of Power a Position that would confine some Princes Authorities in the Dimension of a Span notwithstanding Kings are said to have such long Arms but pray let this positive Politician tell me How it comes to pass that the Property of an owners Land is so inconsistent with the Prerogative of a Prince over those very Lands that he owns or why those that have the greatest Interest in this his property must presently have the greatest Portion too of Power and Property in the Government that is only to contract his Absurdity why the Peasant that has two Acres of Land and the Prince that has but one should not presently be prefer'd to be the Prince and the Prince Condescend to be the Peasant The Question might be soon answer'd with another Quere Why this King cannot be as well Born an Heir to the Crown as his Countryman to the Cottage tho the latter commonly has Land about it when perhaps a Crown may have none For certainly according to his Position a King must have but an Insignificant Power that has not a Foot of Crown-lands and then to have it to any purpose to extend his Empire over all his Subjects the Hereditary Lands of the Crown must by his own Rule necessarily make up more Acres then all the Kingdom besides and as he observes that within this 200 years the Estates of our greatest Nobility by the Luxury of their Prodigal Ancestors being got into the hands of Mechanicks or meaner Gentry by his own Platonick Dogma these Plebeians must have the Power and Authority of our Nobles that is a Rich Commoner must presently run up into the House of Lords and a Lord perhaps less wealthy descen'd into their lower-House for they must allow their Lyes more power in our House of Peers they being a Court of Judicature which the other can't 〈◊〉 too The Disorders Confusions and Revolutions of Government 〈◊〉 would ensue from the placing this Empire and Power only in Dominion and Property which according to his own extravagant Position I think may be better render'd Demesn would be altogether as Great as those absur'd Consequences of this Foolish Maxim are truly ridiculous for we must necessarily have new Governours as often as a new Demesn could be acquir'd for meaner Persons must have greater share too in Publick Administration's assoon as they grow mightier in possessions But besides this simple suggestion as full of Folly as it is carries in it's self as much Faction too it is but another Invention of setting our Parliament again above our King and the making him according to their old Latin Aphorism Greater than a single Representative and less than all the Body Collective for he thinks it may be possible the King may have a greater portion of Land than any single Subject but I am sure it can never be that he should have more than all but this Sir Polilick 〈◊〉 has wander'd so much in the wide World that his Wits are a straggling too so full of Forreign Governments that he has forgot the 〈◊〉 of his own Is it not a receiv'd Maxim in our Law that there is no Lands in England but what is held mediately or immediately from the King that are in the hands of Subjects does not himself know we have nothing of an Allodium here as some Contend they have in Normandy and France tho they too are by some of our best Civilians contradicted and as great many Eminent Lawyers of their own tell us that the Feudatory Laws do obtain and are in force through all the Provinces of France too so that their Lands are there held also still of some superiour Lords and he knows that our greatest Estate here in Fee is not properly free but held mediately or immediately of the King or Donor to whom it may revert and 't is our King alone as our Laws still acknowlege that has his Demesn his Dominion free and holds ofnone but God and our Lord Cook tells us whom this Gentleman may Credit as having in some things been no great Friend to the Monarchy as well as himself yet that Eminent Oracle tells us that no Subject here has a direct Dominion properly but only a profitable one not much better perhaps than the Civilians usufructuaries and what becomes now of this Gentlemans the peoples Power Empire founded in Dominion and Demesne must the King have the less Power over his Tenants only because they hold the more and can't he have a right of Soveraignty over the Persons and Estates of his Subjects without Injuring them or their property or must his Subjects according to this unheard of Paradox as this their Property grows greater encroach the further upon his Power and Praerogative none but our Elect Saints must shortly set up for our Governours and I know this Factious States-man can't but favour his Friends Anabaptists and Quakers his absurrd Politicks here Extraordinarily suit with some of their mad extravagant Principles he lets them know Empire is founded in Dominion and they thank him kind Souls and tell him Dominion is founded in Grace Two or Three whole Leaves the Copious Author has alotted for the service of the Church and Glergy and there we find the Devil of a Re-publick has so possest the Politician that he openly declares against God and Religion and his Atheistical Paracelsus that confirms his Brother Brown's Aphorism to be none of his Vulgar Error that 't is thought their Profession to be so I mean the Doctor in his Dialogue interrogates his Matchiavel what he thinks of our Clergy why truly 't is answer'd He could wish that there never had been any the Christian Religion would have done much better without He presumes much it seems upon his own Divinity but if that be no sounder then his Politicks either of them is enough to send him to the Devil and on he goes in a tedious railing against the Frauds and Rogueries of our Church when t was Romish all impertinently apply'd to the present that is now so much reform'd But would not the most refractory Jew take this Snarling Cur for a Mungrel Christian that libels that only Church that maintains the Gospel in it's greatest purity and as a wise Prince well observ'd the most reform'd in the whole Christian World And 't is 〈◊〉 wonder now that such irreligious Impostors who have so little veneration for the Church should broach such pernicious Doctrines against our
Dictates of this Daemon this Devil of a Republick that has possest the Nation for this five years with greater Phrensy then e're he did before the Restoration when by the very Finger of God he was first ca lt out and would now return too with more worse than himself only because he finds it swept and garnisht For I defie the most diligent Perusers of the most pernicious Libels that were Printed in the most Pestilent time when Treason was Epidemick and spread as the Plague it self more than once did and that in their Mighty Babylon their Metropolis too I challenge even those to shew me so much Penn'd even then to persuade the setting up a Republick as has so lately been Published in this very piece His Majesty upon the presenting these their Proposals I have parralleld told them they designed him for a Duke of Venice and that they only dared to do when they had bid him defyance to his Face and made him fly for refuge to his Friends when they had a fund for Rebellion in the City A General and an Army in the Field but here we have a single Republican declaring expressly for the good Government of the Venetian Arraigning of our Monarchy condemning of our Courts reforming of our Councils only to set up their Republick for the framing their Decemviral the constituting their Quarantia the making every Member of Parliament but a Noble Man of Venice and his Mighty Prince that presides in it by Law as a Principal Head but a plain puny Doeg and all this at a time the Government stood firm upon its Foundations and the best of Basis its Fundamental Law to what an height of exalted Insolence was the very Soul of Sedition then aspired to to suffer such a Serpent to see the Light that hist at the sight of a Soveraign and spit its Venom in the very Face of Majesty And whatever Recommendation this virulent Republican gives us of the Venetian Justice he would find sufficient severity sublim'd Cruelty instead of Law distributed to such daring Offenders as should offer at a Monarchy there tho but a mixt and of which they seem to have some necessitated resemblance in their constant creating of a Duke as if there were yet some remains of Royalty left which they could not extirpate and like Nature it self whom all the Art of Man can never expel the Libeller would not be long then without an Halter the Jealous State would soon send him the sight of his Sin and Sentence together and that by the Hands of his Hangman and some little Gondula to Ferry him to the deep No Magna Charta no Petition of Right no privilege of a Tryal of Peers or even a Plea allowed to the Prisoner and whom with a Praevious Sentence too they many times dispatch assoon as seiz'd And shall a Monarchy here founded upon on its Fundamental Law and that for fifteen hundred years be invaded with impunity by the Pen of every virulent Villain each Factious Fellow that can but handle the Feather of a Goose. I confess when they were arriv'd here to their Acme of Transcendent Villany when Vice had fixt her Pillars here and that in an Ocean too but of Blood when they had washt their Hands even in Insuperable Wickedness and shed that of their Prince when by a Barbarous Rebellion they had subverted thebest of Civil Governments our Monarchy and establisht their own Anarchy a Common Wealth then they might well be so bold as to write their Panegyricks upon their own Usurpation when they were to be paid for it by the Powers instead of Punishment Then they might tell us as indeed they did that the greatest of Crimes was the committing of High Treason against the Majesty of the People That the Romans gave us good Presidents for Rebellion in the turning out of their Tarquins and the Government together that Caesar Usurpt upon the power of the People Marius and Sylla on the Jurisdiction of the Senate Pisistratus turned Tyrant at Athens and Agathocles in Sicily that Cosmus was the first Founder of a Dukedom and a fatal Foe to Florence that Castruccio made himself the Lord of all Luca and oppressed the Liberty of all the Freeborn Subjects of the Land that all our Kings from him they called the Conqueror to the Scottish Tyrant were but the same sort of Usurpers upon the power of the People All this with much more Execrable Treason was Printed Publish'd and Posted through the Kingdom with Approbation of Parliament and which we shall in its proper place represent in its own blackness black as Hell it self the seat of such Seditious Souls full of Anarchy and Confusion But why we should now have so lately left us such daring desparadoes to retrieve to us the same Doctrine to tell us that Affairs of State must be managed by a Parliamentary that is in their own Phraseology a meer popular Power could proceed certainly from nothing but the deepest the most dangerous Corruption of the Times from the desperate Condition of a Government ready to be undermined by Treachery Plot and Machination brought so low that it did not dare to defend it self and its boldest Assertors so far frightened into a dishonest and imprudent sort of Diffidence as to distrust the strength of their own Cause and that was evident too from the sad servile Complyance of some fearful Souls otherwise well affected that seemed to give up their Government like a Game lost that had rather sink then swim against the Tyde But for a more direct Answer to this Proposition we shall shew that Affairs of State must be managed by our Monarch that matter of Fact has prov'd it by Prescription that it is our Kings Prerogative by the Lands Law and his unquestionable Right by the force of Reason For the first 't is evident from History that for above 600. years near a thousand before the Conquest we had Kings that had an Absolute and Soveraign sway over their Subjects as appears from the most Antient Writer of our British History it is apparent that all our Monarchs Britains Saxons and Danes exercis'd unlimited Jurisdiction without having their Affairs Govern'd by any estabisht Council much less a Parliament and that to be prov'd beyond Contradiction from the several Authors that Lived Wrote and were Eye Witnesses of the manner and Constitution of their Government and then sure must be suppos'd to understand that to which they were Subjected from those good Authorities can be easily gather'd that the power of Peace and War was always in the Prince that they were Govern'd by him Arbitrarily and at his Will that he call'd what Councils of whom when and where he pleased so far from being Limited that the most popular Parliamentarians would be loth his present Majesty should prescribe to such an Absoluteness and which nothing but the kind Concessions of some of his Predecessors to their Clamourous
all their Principles at least unfortunately transcribed them by Inspiration which I may demonstrate with as plain a Parallel as any Corollary can be drawn from a Mathematical Proposition when I come in the next Chapter to handle that Reproach to Christianity that Opprobrium of our Church In the mean while give me leave to close this with these few Animadversions upon some of this Lawyers Sentences before we come to the Lewd Maxims of the Divine He tells us with Passion and transport that this Opinion of a Divine Authority in Kings renders us all Traytors and this Doctrine of their Divinity is dangerous to the Peace of the Kingdom and pregnant with Wars Nothing but a Zeal that had overcome his Senses could precipitate him upon such Paradoxes the only thing that prevails most with me and I believe with all that are not open Enemies to the State or fled from its Justice for an entertaining of this Religious Principle of our Loyalty is that nothing can possible with Christians be a better Argument for their living peaceable under so good a Government or were it not so good than to believe that those that are their Rulers have Authority from their God and sure his Anointed is preserved the sooner from being toucht from the regard an Heathen would have to any thing that has a power Sacred and Divine what can be a stronger Conviction to a Reasonable Soul of the good the peaceable Consequences of such a pious Doctrine than that those that contend so much against it are still found to be Disturbers of our Peace Can he prove that the Consecration of a Church and the very presence of God in the Tabernacle shall be an Encouragement for Sacrilege and an Invitation for a Villain to rob it of its Candlestick Chalices Offerings and Oblations Only that he may break the Tables before the Face of his God that gave the Law But whenever our Peace is interrupted by this Doctrine It is only by such Sacrilegious Desperado's as dare attempt Majesty and that upon the same account for Plunder and Prey At the last he is mighty tender of his Fanaticks and their Throats from the Papists but sure he may be now less concerned when we can match them with an intended Massacre of their own as clearly proved as the noon-day but may well be disbelieved by such who can not only side with the Turks in their Arms but almost most in their Infidelity But I can tell them a more Ingenuous a better way of denying their Plot by confessing it by owning what indeed it was a bare-fac'd Conspiracy a Resolute Rebellion Hitherto Mr. Hunt has been animadverted on as his Lewd Expressions and the more abominable Principles in a Person pretending to so much sincerity lay scattered promiscuously so that our Remarks must have made a Miscellany as well as his Book but its whole substance of Sedition I shall reduce now to three several Heads First * That Assertion of the Legisative which he would not allow in the King Secondly That Divine Right which he would rather place in the People Thirdly That Succession of the Crown to depend upon a Parliament or the power of both The first Reason that he gives for the first is from his Rule and Inferrence in Arithmetick where a Unite added to two makes a Third And the Conclusion is because none can say therefore those two do not go to the making that number and what then Therefore the King hath not the Legislative and this is the Logick of this Body of Law when it sets up for the Mathematicks and would demonstrate the King's Co-ordinacy as plain as a Probleme and he might have told us too without turning pedant in his Latinisms of Vnites and Triads that one and two makes three which no body can deny as the burden of the Ballad has it and here upon the strength of his Performance he has found out this wonderful discovery I know not what kind of Figure he would make of the King here but I am sure such kind of Seditious Souls could with all their Hearts make him pass for a Cypher I could find in my Heart to cap the pretty fimile with another as silly A three legg'd Stool take away one and all tumbles to the Ground they being all Equal and Co-ordinate powers for the supporting of this Supremacy in Cathedra which sounds as well as their Curia or Camera their old musty Metaphysicks that distinguisht once the King from his Crown And this obliging Metaphor will serve Mr. Hunt's turn much better For here every foot of this Magisterial Stool is commonly made of the same Matter and Mold joint Supporters of the tripple Dignity whereas his Unite even amongst Mathematicians is allowed somewhat of Precedency and to be the First the Foundation of all number But to be serious if possible in an Inference so silly must he not suppose in such a simile of two Figures which by the Accession of an Unite is made a Triad and the two concurring as much to the making that number as well as that one must he not suppose I say this to result from the equality of every single Unite so that one can not confer more to the Composition of this Triad than another If they be not equally concerned or impowered then one would concur more to the making up that 〈◊〉 than the rest so that this Law Philosopher this Cook upon Hereboord will be reduced to this Dilemma either they do not equally go to the making up that number or they do If they do not he denies his own Supposition and gives himself the Lye if he grant they do then his simile is Nonsense in the Application and a very begging of the Question For we say that our Monarch who if he please shall be the Vnite for once is more than either of the other Two and if the peevish Malecontent won't be angry I 'll tell him more than Both his Assent is such an One as is attended with a power to deny and neither of them will pretend to the Negative and that is the true Reason we find all our Republicans so furiously contending for the taking away the Kings It was for this Pryn Printed and Pestered the Press For this he trump'd up his Treatise That his Majesty 's had not an absolute Negative Voice to deny Bills of Common Right For this Plato tells us That His Majesty having it evacuated the very ends of Government For this Hunt Harangues and says He is so bold to say That never any Bill in Parliament wanted the Royal Assent that was presented by the Desires of the People And I think 't is bold enough said with a Witness For is not this King left at last by the Laws of all the Land Sole Soveraign Judge what is really fit for his Peoples good to be past whereas he presumes that their bare presenting signifies the Desires of the People and
to such a Protestant is the making her much worse than the Wildest Paganism Had he consider'd how unreasonable it was only from the selected Instances of some Turbulent Spirits how Irreligious and Vncharitable it is from a few furious provok'd Persons to have cast such an industrious blemish and blot upon the Practices of all the Primitive Christians of those Times certainly he would have found it much unbecoming his Profession more his Religion Why does he not conclude from thence too that in those days we never had any Martyrs or that all Fox's mighty Martyrology is nothing but a mere Romance for he 'll find Her Majesty the persecuting Mary in many places as severely handled Why does he not tell us in her time Wyat Crofts and Rudston REBELL'D And then conclude we had no Cranmer Latimer and Ridly that suffer'd Why does he not tell us of the Protestant Tumults of her time that there were those then could throw Stones and Daggers at a Bonner or a Bourn and not a word of the more Meeker men a Bradford or a Rogers that bid them be Patient and appeased them for his Maiden Virgin that Reviled Julian he could tell us too that of one Crofts a Maid that Mutter'd out as much Sedition against Queen Mary from the Wall and let him but deal as disingenuously in Conclusions here too the Reform'd Protestant will be as little Obliged to him as the Primitive Christian. In short if Julian abounded with such a Spirit of Meekness as he in many places makes him to demonstrate where then was this Terrible Persecution with which he makes such a dismal din If they were really Persecuted and Opprest how came they to be so powerful as to make such a signal resistance If his Old man in Berea was only rebuk'd by him for raging so hotly against his King and his Religion and only bid by his Prince in so much mildness as Friend forbear railing if at the Reproaches of the Antiochians he only declared against seeing them any more if as in his ridiculous Instance of old Father Gregory's kicking of his King he was so terfify'd and awd what is become of the Tyrant and all the Bloody Persecution that attended him to the Throne And if as in another place he has prov'd there was much the greater part that remain'd Christian where was this General Apostacy to the Pagan In my poor Apprehension the several Examples he has cited did in some sense tho beyond his design as much oblige his Adversaries cause and the late Case of Succession as some of the Loyal hearts that labour'd so much in its defence for they most of them prove that notwithstanding the perswasion of their Pagan Prince the Christian Religion flourisht as much as ever and he never Punisht any Person but for reviling him for his Apostacy to his Face and that they might have enjoy'd their own opinions quietly had they not so much molested and opposed his And must the Christian Religion then be made so Rebellious only because there were those that could revile their Prince and his perswasion that could call their Julian Goats beard Bull-burner Impious Apostate and Atheist Why then this Gentleman himself may infer that the Protestant we 〈◊〉 is as Rebelliously inclin'd and that because some Seduced Souls were not long since so much possest with Sedition as to Rebel against the Succession because a poor Perjur'd wretch could call his Soveraign Dog Devil and Traytor because M. 〈◊〉 himself suffers now a deserv'd Imprisonment for representing now his own most Christian King for ten times as great a Persecutor as the worst of the Pagan Emperors or because Protestant Subjects actual Rebels and in Arms against their Soveraign with an Arch-Traytor Attainted long since legally have publisht in his 〈◊〉 of a Declar'd Rebellion that their Liege Lord by the Laws of God and Man that is Seated in the Throne of his Ancestors by the Protection and Providence of God tho so much endeavour'd to be Destroy'd and Excluded by the Plots and Practices of these Devils and that because such Rebel Subjects have declared this their undoubted and Merciful Soveraign an Vsurper and a Tyrant Our Protestant Religion I say by the same reason may suffer for the sake of those Seditious Souls themselves from several of their own examples of a Rebellious resistance as well as in their Arguments that traduce the Principles and Practices of the Primitive Christian. The very Rebel Books that are so much Consulted by our Asserters of a Common-wealth and the Favourers of a Republick because they make a Monarch so Mean and Contemptible even those have largely treated of the same Subject that Mr. Johnson thinks he himself has only so 〈◊〉 handl'd The Author of the Rights of Magistrates makes it most of the matter of his pernicious piece in the last Question which he proposes which is in these words Whether those that are to suffer for their Religion can resist that Prince that opposes the true Religion I confess he with abundance of Foreign Impertinence tells us of Princes being bound to maintain the true Religion a thing that no one ever doubted but then I doubt whether every Prince would not believe his Religion to be most true but when he comes to the Question whether the 〈◊〉 can resist if the Soveraign design for them a false then he comes to our Mr. Johns Resolution of the Case of a Religion Establisht by Law the point in which he deluded unhappily his Patron the late Lord Russel then he tells us the same Triumphant notion and discovery in which this Divine was so much exalted that the Roman Emperors had never allow'd the Christian Religion any publick exercise But yet this very work which some would have a Catholiques but which I can hardly believe from his Brutish rage that he shows in his railing against that Church whom in several places he is pleas'd to call beast whore and Bloody Harlot that it sounds too much like the Language of the Disciplinarians of those times which were nothing else but what we now call the Fanaticks of our own yet this very piece sufficiently pernitious by both parties disown'd and discommended wont allow them to resist the Soveraign when he alters the Religion only by the same Authority by which it was Establisht but then alone calls him a Tyrant when he would abrogate it by his own Arbitrary Power whereas our Julian is a Bar beyond the best of their Advocates and would have had us resisted before we had known whe ther our Religion was to be alter'd by Law or without it whether it was to receive any Alteration at all or whether the Prince they so much Libel'd would have come to be capable as a King to Subvert or defend it for the Bill which this Libeller whom the very Law has made since so and a Court of Justice would have
so necessary to be past by the same Reason that we use Remedies against the Plague that was only a Resistance of the present Authority in an Altering the Discent of the Crown which their own Laws Declare unalterable and that only by providing against Contingencies that might never have happen'd which is a sign that they aim'd only at the Succession it self more than any danger that they fear'd from it because the Successor might be supposed at the worst possible and perhaps willing to preserve to them their Religion which they so vainly fear to lose as well as he has since ratified it with his Royal word and at the present is the Defender of our Faith too as a King as well as he had often promis'd before he was so and Mr. Julian might have spared his Plaguy Metaphor of his Pitch and Tarbox till he felt more fumes of an infected Air and some better symptons of the Plague for while their is nothing but Cypher to that Disease in the Weekly-Bill the people would take this Doctor for a Mad-man should he run about the Streets with his Antipestilentials his Fires and his Fumes But yet in this his own Case had our Author oblig'd himself but upon a great penalty not to use his preparation of Pitch and Tar to prevent the distemper I fancy he would run the risk of an Infection rather then have than forfeited the Condition And I should think an Oath taken to be true to the Crowns Heir should oblige as much prevail upon his Soul as well not to use such means and methods as would make him forsworn tho it were for the prevention of an ascertain'd danger And I cannot see how such a Bill that dissolv'd the very band of our Allegiance could be call'd any thing less then an Act of Parliament for a Statutable Perjury for none but a Johnson or a Jesuit will allow that the same Lawful Authority that impos'd an Oath to be taken can command its violation after it is took and that sticks so much at present with some of our moderate Covenanters that they cannot think themselves by special Act of their Lawful King absolved from an Oath of Rebellion administer'd by none but Rebels and Usurpers And tho this Gentlemans Oracle of the Law was pleas'd to call them but Protestant Oaths I might as well tell them they are Christian ones too if they believe the Testament to which they swear And as this Gentleman agrees with and perhaps has borrow'd from this old Disciplinarian several of his Doctrines so has also Brutus's Vindiciae handled the same Question which he has propos'd in this form whether it be Lawful to resist a Prince that Violates the Laws of God and lays waste his Holy Church But from that Excellent Author our Julian might not only have prov'd the Doctrine of Resistance to be the practice of the Primitive Christians but that it was much Older and Commanded by God himself to the Jews and as the former Author his Predecessor can only from the Text tell us of the Kings of Israel being oblig'd to propagate the true Religion such as David Solomon Asa Johosaph Hezekiah Josiah c. All Foreign to the Question so does this Brutus tell us an idle tale and the Fancy of his own Brain that therefore the People of Israel fell with Saul because they would not oppose him when he violated the Laws of God that the People suffer'd Famine for their not opposing his persidiousness to the Gibeonites that they were punish'd with the Plague because they did not resist David's numbring of the People and that the People suffer'd for Manasses poluting of the Temple because they did not oppose it But where stilldo any of these prove that the People did resist their Kings or were commanded so to do 't is but an Irreligious Presumption to think the Almighty should punish his chosen only because they did not Rebel against his Anointed when that Rebellion even by the same sacred Text is declared worse than Witchcraft and that primitive one of Corah and his Accomplices was so remarkably punish'd But I know these Authors will tell us That Eliah destroyed the Priests of Baal notwithstanding that Ahab their King countenanced their Idolatry That Jehoida the Priest set Joas on the Throne and not only rebelled against his Mother Athalia but destroyed her to restore the Worship she had abolish'd But in both these Instances they may do well to consider 1. That what was done here was by the express Direction of the true Spirit of God in his Prophets to which when our inspired Enthusiasts our Oracles only of Rebellion can prove their right as well as they but pretend it they shall be better qualified to Judge their King when he offends against the Laws of his God And does not the Text tell us upon these very Occasions always That the Word of God came to his Servants 2. Athalia here whom the People resisted deposed and slew had no Title to the Crown but what she waded through in the Blood of all the seed Royal Religion was not there the rise of the Rebellion but the right of the Crown 's Heir which was in the young King Joas whom they set on the Throne of his Father Ahaziah and for which Heavens had preserved him notwithstanding the 〈◊〉 and Design there was to destroy him 3. If Religion were the Occasion of such Insurrection as it really was not yet the Worship then introduced was altogether Pagan which by the express Command of God they were bound to extirpate And whatever our Apostate fansies in his Comparison of Paganism and Popery my Charity will oblige me as a Christian not to look upon the Professors of the same God and Saviour like to so many Turks and Mahometans unless they can prove to me from the Text that by the Worshipping of Baal is only meant the Catholick Faith and to believe in Christ is to be an Infidel In the fourth place they do not consider that even their own Arguments make all such Applications to all ourpresent Kings altogether impertinent For these Republicans that maintain these Doctrins tell us too that the Kings of Israel were always to be regulated by the seventy Elders as those of Lacedaemon by their Ephori that to these seventy the high Priest did always preside as Judg of the most difficult Affairs so that Arguments and Presidents brought from such Topicks where they make the Kings to be govern'd by their Subjects can't be applyed to Monarchs that are Modern and more absolute tho this their very Assertion that makes against their own Application is no less than a great Lye For we find both the Kings of Israel and Judah from the Chronicles the very Records of those times to be Princes altogether absolute and to have executed too that unlimited Jurisdiction I have related these few passages out of the fore mentioned Authors to let this
this Be it enacted by the King Lords and Commons for that is the General Stile of the Enactive part of most of the Statutes of those Times and this was most agreeable with their mighty Notion of his Majesties making but up one of the THREE that so they might the better conclude from the very Letter of their own Laws That the TWO States which the Law it self implyed now to be Co-ordinate must be mightier and have a Power over their King whom the same Laws confest to be but ONE and the Reason why the forms of their Bill and the draught of the Lawyers and the Lower-House might be past into Act without any Alteration or Amendments of this Clause was I believe from a want of Apprehension that there ever could be such designing Knaves as to put it in to that Intention or such Factious Fools as to have inferred from it the Commons Co-ordinacy For the Nobility and Loyal Gentry that 〈◊〉 commonly the more Honesty for having the less Law cannot be presumed so soon to comprehend what Construction can be drawn from the Letter of it by the laborious cavil of a Litigious Lawyer or a cunning Knave and therefore we find that those Acts are the least controverted that have the fewest Words and that among all the multiplicity of Expressions that at present is provided by themselves that have commonly the drawing of our Statutes themselves also still discover as many Objections against it to furnish them with an Argument for the Merits of any Cause and the Defence of the Right of their Clyent at the same time they are satisfied he is in the wrong And for those Enacting forms of our Statutes whatsoever Sense some may think these Suggestions of mine may want That some Seditious Persons got most of them to run in so low so popular a Stile in the latter end of King James and Charles the first 's time such as Enacted only by the Authority of the Parliament by the Kings Majesty Lords and Commons yet upon the Restauration of Charles the Second the Words With the consent of the Lords and Commons were again reviv'd and afterward they bring it into this old agen With the Advice and Assent of Lords Spiritual Temporal and Commons according to the form of Richard the 3d. and Queen Elizabeth that resolv'd them to be the THREE STATES and this runs on through all the Acts of his Reign and even in several of them the Commons humbly beseech the King that it may be so enacted I thought it necessary to bring home to our present tho most profligate time as much Acknowledgement as possible I could of my Kings Prerogative from the Laws of our Land and the very Statutes themselves because that some great Advocates for the power of the People some times pretend to plead for them too from Acts of Parliaments tho I think in this last lewd and Libellous Contest against the Crown that lasted for about five year in that Lustrum of Treason there was but one that was so laboriously Seditious so eminently popular as to endeavour to prove the Peoples Supremacy from Rolls and Records and Acts of State and for that recommend me to the good Author of the Right of the Commons Asserted tho I should rather approve of such an undertaking when endeavored to be done from the tracing the dark and obscure tracts of Antiquity and the Authority of a Selden than the single Assertion of a Sidney and the mere Maxims of some Modern Democraticks that have no other Foundation for their Establishments than the new Notions of their Rebellious Authors and that ipse dixit of such Seditious Dogmatists But I am satisfied too that this Gentleman who has laboured so much in vindicating the Commons Antiquity and their constituting an essential part of our Saxon Parliaments did design in it much more an Opposition of our Antient Monarchy and the Prerogative of the Crown than a mere clearing the dark foot-steps of our Old Chronicle and a real defence of Matter of Fact and the Truth And this is too clearly to be prov'd from the pestilent Pen-man's P-tyts own Papers that were publish'd at such a time when there was no great need of such an Asserting the Commons Right when themselves were more likely to have Usurp'd upon the Crown and as Mr. Sidney and his Associates would have it made themselves and the People Judges of their own wrong For to see such a task undertaken at a time when we are since satisfied such dangerous designs were a-foot looks only like a particular part of that general Plot and Conspiracy that has been since discovered and that all sorts of Pens were imployed as well as all Heads Hearts and Hands at work for the carrying on Mr. Sidney's OLD CAVSE as indeed all this Gentlemans Works tended to for which the Almighty was supposed so often to have declared and signaliz'd himself and illustrates only this That there was not any Person qualified for undermining of our Monarchy either from his Wit or Parts Boldness or Courage from his Virulency in Satyr or his Knowledge in History from his skill in any Science or Profession but what some or other of the most eminent was made Serviceable to this Faction and contributed his Talent to the carrying on the Design according to the gift and graces that they had in their several Abilities to promote it neither can this Gentleman think himself libell'd in this Accusation unless he would give his own works the Lye for who but him that had such a Design for the subverting our Monarchy would at a season when the Succession of our Crown was struck at in the Commons Vote a Succession that several Laws of our Land have declared to be Hereditary even by that of God who but one so Seditious would not only have encouraged such unwarrantable Proceedings which was the late Kings own Words for 't in such an Assertion of the Commons Right but in that too brought upon the Stage several Arguments from our History several Presidents of our Soveraign's being here Elected by their Subjects when they might as well too tell us That our present Soveraign was so chosen because the Question was put to the People upon his Coronation but yet this elective Kingdom of ours did this Laborious drudg of Sedition drive at too Does he not tell us William Rufus and several others were Elected that is Henry the First King Stephen King John tho I am satisfied that consent of the Clergy and People they so much rely upon was nothing more than the Convention of those Persons that appeared upon the solemn Coronation or at least the Proclaiming of the King Themselves are satisfied all our old Statutes clearly confirm'd the sole Legislative Power of the Prince and therefore they won't when they are objected to them allow them to be Statutes at all because made I suppose only by their King but so my Lord Coke
says they said of the Statute of Edward the First which notwithstanding he calls an Act of Parliament but yet however we see that the Style of all other Acts of Parliament put all the enacting part in the power of the King so that Mr. Sidney's making his People and Parliament the Supream Judges of their Kings violating the Laws is only a Position that opposes every Act in the Statute Book from the Great CHARTER to the last grant of our late King CHARLES But our Author Triumph'd as he thought over his Adversaries in forcing back their own Argument upon his Foes for says Mr. Sidney if no man must be Judge because he is party then neither the King and then no man can be try'd for an Offence against him or the Law I confess with such a sort of disputants as are resolv'd to beg the Question and take their Premisses for principles of eternal truth you cannot avoid the Conclusion tho it be the greatest Paradox and an absolute Lye for he presumes the Parity of Reason and then concludes they are both alike Reasonable he takes it for granted the People may judge the King tho party as well as the King the People who must be suppos'd as much partial and that is truly just as if he had said when we believe as they do and what then Why then we shall be of their mind i.e. that it would follow the King or his Judges could not hang a Fellow for Fellony or this Author himself for a Traytor to the State Nay more as the Gentleman has manag'd the matter it is made an Argument à Fortiori for he supposes the Absurdity to be such that if the King in his own Case must Judge the People and not the People the King in theirs that this Contradictory Consequence would be as much conclusive That the Servant entertain'd by the Master must Judge him but the Master by no means must the Servant or in the Metaphor of his own more Blasphemous Sedition The Creature is no way bound to its Creator but the Creator it self to the thing it has Created and now all is out and all the large Volume all his mighty Treatise not to be finisht in many years is founded upon that first Principle of all Republicans The Peoples Supremacy or as Mr. Sidney says the Soveraign being but a Servant to his Subjects a Creature to these God Almightys of the People the Creators of their King truly this they are resolv'd we shall grant or as resolutely suppose we cannot Contradict and so put upon us their presumptive absurdities for our own and make them the Consequence of those Concessions that were never yeilded who taught this Gentleman who granted him that the Magistrate was the Peoples Creature but a Brutus in his Vindiciae or that as a bominable a Book De jure Magistratuum and for this must it follow that Filmer is so absurd only because he does not suppose the very pernicious principles of those very Rebels and Republicans he endeavours to refute It is an easy sort of a Conquest and you may soon prove your Foes to be Fools too if you 'll oblige them to maintain their own positions from the Contradictory Maxims of their Enemies they oppose and this Collonel that once was a Souldier and in Arms for his Common-wealth as well as a Polemical pen man against the Monarchy would soon have remain'd sole Master of the Field had the Measures of his Foe been forc't to be taken from the Rules and Maxims of the Enemy which he fought and many would think the Man a little mad that could imagine two Armies that faced in their Fronts to meet so as to stand upon the same ground It can't be well effected without a penetration of body neither can Mr. Sidney conclude us in that absurdity unless he would make us mingle Principles a thing perhaps as repugnant to our Nature as that praeternatural Coition of Matter for have we not all the Laws of our Land on our side and that besides Sense and Reason to whose determin'd sanctions even those themselves must submit for I look upon our Argumentative reasoning in such matters to be somewhat like Belief which all our Learned in the Metaphysicks will allow to determine it self upon demonstration and Commences knowledg'd and a science and so must our Positions at last in the Politicks no longer pass for indifferent Notions or disputable Opinions when they come once to be ratified by some supream Establishment or unquestionable Authority for as the result of demonstration is some Theorem or Postulate that requires our assent so are the Sanctions of the Supream power some Statutes or Laws that Command our Obedience as the one is prov'd so the other Enacted and let any one Judge from the several we have cited or any single Act themselves can cite whether all and every one do not expressly assert or absolutely imply the Soveraign so far from being the Servant of the Subject or the Peoples Creature that they many times maintain him to be under none but God and in all places acknowledge him above all the People and is not the absurdity on their side and a Contradiction even in Terms when they contend for the contrary And as that Author of the Right of the Magistrate and the like writings of the most Eminent Republicans led on and seduc'd Mr. S. in some Points so has also so his predecessor or Co-eval for I think they liv'd in an Age W. Pryn imposed upon him in others and I am sorry to see Mr. S. that valu'd himself upon his parts to rely upon that which that pest of the press plac'd so much confidence in and that are the words of Bracton where he says as Mr. S. would have it God the Law and the Parliament are the Kings three Superiors But even Pryn himself the perverter of all that was not for his purpose does not deal so disingeniously as this Gentleman in the Case for he recites it more Exactly as it is in Bracton which is the Kings Court instead of the Parliament which in the time that Antient Author writ very probably consisted only of his prelates and Lords so that if granted them Pryn's Commons and Mr. S. his People of England are not comprehended in the words of that old writer and then besides it is the opinion of some that those words the Laws and the Kings Courts were not originally in the writings of that Loyal Lawyer who in several other places of his works carries up the Divine Right of his King and that absolute Power of his Prince as high as any of the most Modern whom Mr. Hunt has represented and libell'd as first introducers of this new Notion this dangerous and damnable Doctrine for that grave Judge for above 4 or 5 hundred years agon told us our King was under none but God that he had none above him
that is made to Kings For Nature there is nothing from it more evident than a whole series of Subordination and that to single Soveraignty setting aside even the paternal among Human Creatures almost to be made out among Insects and Animals Bees and Beasts And if some King indulged this their People to appropriate to themselves all the Supream Power which we never heard of any of ours that did or to participate part of their Prerogative which we know many Indulgent ones of ours to their Parliaments have done then still this their power can't be Original because 't is derivative and I dare swear no Prince ever granted them a power of being Superiors as they must be if they would Judge him or ever accepted a Crown upon that Condition supposing it were as they would have it conferr'd For the very Act of being such a Conditional King would absolutely make him none at all and therefore those whom the Lacedaemonians compounded withal to be regulated by their Ephori were in effect not so much as the Dictators of Rome and so not to be reckon'd to Reign as Crown'd Heads or mentioned among those that we call our Monarchs In the third place if by this Original power of the People delegated to the Parliament the two Houses are constituted the Judges of their King I cannot see how Mr. Sidney could avoid or any of his Associates can this Grand Absurdity and as great a Lye that the Parliament have a Natural Liberty not only to Judge but to lop off the Sacred Head of their Liege-Lord and Soveraign For 't is certain they can have no more Authority than the People they represent and 't is as certain they must have as much Now this Original Power must be a Natural one because not deriv'd from any grant and then this Parliament of theirs must have an Original Power by Nature tho it be but to commit the most unnatural Barbarities I confess we had such an one that upon the same Principles proceeded to the perpetrating that most Execrable Treason and the very Villany that any time may be the Consequence of such Positions A Parliament which this good Author presided in or very well understood the Scandal of our own Nation and the shame and reproach of our Neighbors now I say If this his Original power of the People be delegated to this Parliament as Mr. Sidney says it is then this Parliament hath a Natural and Original Power of being their King's Judges because their People has it whom they represent I confess this is a Bar beyond the Seditious Doctrine of their Author in his Right of Magistrates For he is mighty sollicitous least he should be misapprehended as if he design'd the common People should judge their Soveraign therefore tells us very carefully none but the subordinate Magistrates themselves can Judge the Supream and their Brutus that succeeded that Assertor of Rebellion says such only as the Spartan Ephori and the seventy of the Israelites the Centurions or Equestres among the Romans and if the People had any Right to this Judicial power those Miscreants more modestly place it among the most eminent whereas our brisker Assertor of this Anarchy makes it out That therefore our more eminent Memberships have this Original Power only because Communicated them from the meanest People so that now we have a Parliament that has an Original Natural Liberty of the People tho their very Constitution it self commenc'd from the very Grant Grace and Favor of the King I could never meet with any Record yet that rehearsed these Privileges of Parliament But we have many extant and Presidents even of the House of Commons themselves that their Privileges and much of their Power proceeds from the Liberalities of their Prince more than this Natural Liberty of the People not to mention that their very being was first the result of such an Act of his Grace for from whom pray had they that freedom of Speech they upon every Session desire by their Speaker but from that King before whom they are to Speak who is it that fills their Chair those that present him or the King that accepts or disapproves whom they have presented who is it that gives them access to his Person the Commons that desire it or he from whom 't is desir'd 2. Lastly who impowers them to consent to a Bill those that supplicate his Majesty would be pleased to enact or his Majesty that says Be it enacted could this Natural Original power of the People be communicated to their Representatives the dispute about the Commons Right would be carried for ever on their side and we need not date their Original from Henry the Third or the Barons Wars or from the Saxon Heptarchy it self to be sure they then had their Representatives assoon as they had this Power and this Power it seems was assoon as they were a People And by this Original Power which they delegate for ought I see they may by the same rule as well retain it suffer no Representatives at all but assemble themselves and exercise the Soveraignty If the People delegate an Original power and a Natural Liberty to this Parliament it cannot certainly be comprehended how these Parliaments as now constituted could commence by the Grants and Concessions of the Prince and yet all will allow tho they disagree in the time that they did begin at first to be so Assembled by the Bounteous Permission of the King and that all the Privileges they claim were the result of an entire Favour of the Soveraign and not the Original freedom of the Subject if they 'll call that an Original Power to send Representatives it must be somewhat like that Author 's Secondary Original we so lately consider'd and that tho they prescribe to it for this seven hundred year as well as they cannot for above four or five 100 still it will recurr to this That this first power was the Grant of the Crown And these prescriptions as themselves allow being whenever they begun the result of the Soveraigns Bounteous Permission I cannot see why those Immunities may not be resign'd to the same Crown from which they were once receiv'd or those Franchises for prescription it self in this case is properly no more may not be Absolutely forfeited by those that at best can but be said to hold them on Condition I know the Common Law Favours a Prescription so far as in Inheritances to let it have the force of a Right when their cannot be made out any other Title but this I look upon to be of another Nature when the Original of what they prescribe too by their own Concessions was the Grant of their King and even this Common Law commonly in all its Customary Rules excepts the Prerogative of the King nay this very Prerogative of his by that very Law is allowed to be the Principal part of it I urge this because it is both apposite here
great and their strength so formidable that they sought Kings and were 〈◊〉 by Princes And now let them prove that this paternal Power of these Patriarchal Kings was no more than that of a Burgher in the Town of Amsterdam or that the Cities that were several of them then erected and where the sacred writ expresly says Kings and Princes Reign'd that those were nothing else but as perfect Republicks as Venice Geneva or the united Provinces in the Netherlands And cannot our Seditious Souls be convinc'd that this their Patriarchal Power was Monarchical unless we can prove every patriarch a Crown'd King should we oblige them to make out their Common-wealths of those days after the same manner their Modern ones are now Establish'd they would be put to find out in those primitive times some general revolt of a Rebellious people from their Lawful prince For that was the first Foundation of their 〈◊〉 Republick in the Low-Countries as Mr. Sidney himself will allow tho against common Sense and Reason he cannot let it be called a Rebellion And also is it not one thing to say a paternal Right was once Monarchical but must it make all Monarchs to Rule by a paternal Right conquest of the Sword grounded upon a good pretence of Right is what a great many Kings claim by a long series of Successive Monarchs makes the Title of a great many more as much unquestionable and yet I cannot see why Monarchy may not still be said to have been first founded in a paternal Right tho the claims to Soveraign power since in such several Kingdoms and Nations where it is now Establish'd are 〈◊〉 as several sorts too as there are Subjects that have submitted to be govern'd by it It is a pleasant sort of Diversion to see Mr. Hunt Harangue out half of his Treatise in an impertinent pains to prove the Father of every Family at present not to be the King of it we would have granted it him quietly and the postulate should have been his own in peace without raising upon his War of Words and the thundering charge that he gives this Opinion of puzzl'd senseless vain unlearned paradox For once every parent shall not be a Crown'd Head and every City but a Common-wealth of Kings for that is all they must contend against and then what 's the Contention but just about nothing but that parents have nothing in them that is Analogous to a Monarchical power that they have no Right to govern those very Children they have begot as this Gentleman with his mighty performances thinks he has perfectly prov'd that I think will be found at last to be the greater paradox if not a perfect Lye For first the very Decalogue declares the contrary And the command we have to Honour our Father and Mother implies an Authority that they have that requires Obedience by the Levitical the Laws of the Jews the Rebellious Son was to be ston'd to Death and if the very Bible can call it Rebellion Certainly it must suppose some power against which he could Rebel And what does Mr. Hunt who himself admits of this say to the refuting the very Objection that he raises why he says this was an unnatural severity permitted the offended parent that is an unnatural severity commanded by the very God of Nature For all those their Laws were so many Divine precepts for the regulating his own Theocracy and the very Text tells us this exemplary punishment of Dissobedience to parents was shown that Israel might fear i.e. fear those parents in whom the Almighty's Law had lodged such a power and then if we consider it in the Abstract from any positive Law of God or Divine precept if we look upon it in a pure natural State as the result of Generation for all whatever the postscript impertinently suggests with his 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 and all the distracted noise that he makes with the procreation work being such an Act of Affection and mere impetus of Love I cannot see why by that darling work that delights Mr. Hunt so much the power of governing those very Children he has begot should be superseded The Gentleman among his many Melancholy moods had it seems some pleasant Fancies For in effect he tells us no more than this that Coition being an Act of Love to the Mother the Government over the Child that she bears him must by no means be call'd a power and if this be not indeed a puzzl'd senseless Opinion I submit to persons that abound with more sense and if it have the least shadow of a consequence I will forfeit all my Right to Reason might it not be as well infer'd too that every Father that chastises his froward Child is an absolute Tyrant because that sort of severity savors of Anger and fury but the Generation work obliged him never to exercise it because that was an Act of extream Love But besides that precept in the Decalogue Honouring our Parents is an Eternal Law of Nature engraven in our Hearts as well as it was in the two Tables of Stone and whereever there is a Natural Veneration there is at the same time an imply'd subjection for those we always reverence most to whom we are most Subjected I know there are inferior Objects upon which many times we place our affection and may in some sense be said to have for them an Esteem but that cannot be properly call'd Honour but is better exprest by the Name of Love and this is that 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 that Friends have for one another tho they are Equals or Parents to their Children tho Subject to their power but if we consider the word Honouring it self which in all the Versions of the Decalouge is still render'd so as if it would remember us of the subjection we owe to those we are commanded to Honour that very word it self implys Power in the Person that is to be Honoured for if we abstract our selves from any prepossessions and Engagements of Love we still find we still Honor those most that are also most in power thus our Nobility are respected by us as Honourable because they are in great places of Power and Trust And our King more Honoured by us agen because the very Fountain of Power it self And lastly what strikes us more into a Venerable Horror of the Majesty of Heaven but that awful attribute of his being Almighty so that uncorrupted Nature it self from the Rules of Common gratitude obliges us to Honour our Parents as well as the express precept of the Divine will and then by Consequence subjects us to those whom we are requir'd to respect so much and esteem for Nature as it never according to the Maxim of the Naturalists in Philosophy is said to do any thing foolishly or in vain so neither will it require any thing that is so from others to be done and therefore there is no Natural Law that obliges us to
the Pest and Plague of the People are priz'd with our Republicans as the Philosophers and the Schools do their propositions of Eternal truths they imbibe the Poyson and exalt improve it too they sublimate the very Mercury of Mr. Hobs and whereas he equals us only in a state of Nature our Levellers will lay us all Common under the Inclosures of a Society and the several restrictions of so many Civil Laws But to what tends this their turning all the Power of a Parent into Tyranny as if a Father could not have an Authority over his Child unless he be bound to make it his Slave as if the Chastisement of a Father could not Evidence his Supremacy over his Son unless like the Saturn of the Easterlings he Sacrifice him to the Fire and torment it in the Flame But this paternal Right of the Father must suffer by these Factious Fools from the same sort of Inferrences they bring against the Divine Right of their King which may only serve with some Loyal Hearts to confirm the great sympathy there is between them for as by the Law of Nature a Father can't be said to injure his Son so neither by those of the Land can our Soveraign wrong his Subjects For say these Seditious ones your Divinest Monarchs by that Doctrine can Hang Burn Drown all their Subjects they should put in Damn too for once since they may as well infer from it his sending them to the Devil but cannot common Sense obtain amidst these transports of Passion can they not apprehend a Father to have any paternal Authority over his Family unless he be able to Murder every Man of it The Civil Laws the municipal ones of his Land if a Member of a Society supersede such a feverity and if a Patriarchal Prince must be supposed as were several of old after the 〈◊〉 then the Affection of a Father And the Laws of Nature were sufficient to fecure the Son or 〈◊〉 the Servant from any 〈◊〉 but what some proportionable 〈…〉 so also did this Divine Right 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Soveraign as entirely 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the great Turk yet the 〈◊〉 part of those Civil Sanctions to which the Divinest of them all would be 〈◊〉 or at least the precepts of the Divinity their God under 〈◊〉 they 〈◊〉 that will oblig'd them both 〈◊〉 Justice and Mercy the two great Attributes of him whom they represent But since they would make this Empire of a paternal Power so 〈◊〉 in Reason let us see how it has all along 〈◊〉 in the Letter of the Law and if it has there 〈◊〉 been 〈◊〉 upon as a Notion so 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 The most illuminated Reason of our eminent 〈◊〉 must submit to be much in the dark The Romans from the result of their Imperial Sanctions look'd upon themselves to have such an absolute Power and Authority over their Sons and Daughters that they tell us expressly it was a peculiar Prerogative and privileg'd of the Citizens of Rome and that there was no other Nation that could Exercise such a Jurisdiction they could 〈◊〉 for ever by this Power of the Parent any thing that was acquired by the Son and give it to any whom they pleas'd whereas it might have been an Argument enough of a paternal Power had they been but only usufructuaries and the Dominion remained in the Child and such a Sense of Soveraignty do the Civilians express to reside in the Father of a Family that they gave him the same Appellation with that of a King and tell us by the name of a Family the Prince of it is also understood and tho Mr. Hunt tells us a Story out of the Cabala of the Jews Laws and the Tract of Maimonides that they lookt upon their Children 〈◊〉 of Course when they came to Thirteen and that then they could claim it as their right to be free I must tell him from the Constitutions of the Imperial that must be of more force among us unless we resolve still that even Christians shall Judaize that no Sons were ever emancipated or emitted out of the power of the Parent unless they could prevail upon him for his own consent that by no meanshe could be compell'd to it and they had no freedom de Jure till their Fathers were de facto dead And tho 〈◊〉 in his Comment on that part of the Institution says They became sui Juris at 25 from their Manner and Custome yet concludes the Law of Nature oblig'd them still to their Parent which no civil one could disanull The Duty that their Digests say was due to this Paternal power which they 〈◊〉 almost as Sacred was exprest by the word piety and a learn'd Civilian of our own laments that there is no more provisions 〈◊〉 in our English Laws for the Duty of the Child and the protection of the Parent and with them so great was the crime of parricide that they could not a long time invent an adequate punishment for such an unproportionable Guilt tho they had one for Treason against the Prince And tho our own Laws do not make the Paternal power savour so much of Soveraignty yet we shall see they sufficiently evince that the Parent has a power very Analogous too it whereas Mr. Hunt will not allow it to have the least Relation which remisness of our Civil Institutions might well proceed from a presumption of our knowledge of the express command in the Decalogue of which the Romans were ignorant tho we have no formal Emancipation now in use which does imply a power of Government yet our old Lawyer tells us still that Children are in the power of their Parents till they have extrafamiliated them by giving them some portion or Inheritances and the Custody of them while minors which 〈◊〉 went to the King upon the presumption I suppose of his only ability to be a second Father that was settled in the Parent both by Common-Law and Statute for there lay a good action against any one for seducing a Mans Son as well as Servant out of his power which does imply that there is a power out of which he may be seduced and thus I have endeavor'd to shew the first Foundation of power to have been in the Fathers of Families And it signifies nothing whither every Father of it Reigns in it as a King now and therefore Mr. Hunt his impertinence is inconclusive and part of his Assertion a plainly when he would infer from the continuance of the Parents Authority over their Children together with the Soveraign power distinct that therefore there was never any Foundation of a Patriarchal power for he might as well tell us That because we have no Parents now but what are Subject to the Municipal Laws of the Land therefore there was never any Patriarch in the Bible never an Abraham an Isaac or a Jacob that had an absolute Dominion over their own Families or none now amongst some
Barbarous Nations that have no other jurisdiction but what is Paternal the question is not what jurisdiction those Parents have that are Subjected to the Laws of a Civil Society but what they have by those of nature and 't is as absolute a lye when he says 't is not abated by the Soveraign power for were it not the Parent had a power over the life of his off-spring as the Patriarchs had of old and some Barbarous Nations that are at present unciviliz'd And for the Statute of the 25 which Mr. Hunt brings as an Argument against it because 〈◊〉 is not made by that petit Treason is as pertinent perhaps as ifhe had told us that every Father of a Family was not included in that of Edward the first that settles the Militia in the King for sure 't is not possible to suspect how they can be considered asso many Soveraigns in the very Civil Sanctions that establish a much more 〈◊〉 Soveraignity whose Supremacy in their several Families is founded on the Law of Nature tho we have seen that they are confirm'd too by the general Laws of Nations and the Hypothesis favour'd from our own But as it is impertinently applyd to this purpose so is it as falfely infer'd from that Statute for tho Parricide be omitted and the Judges by that act restrained to interpret its extent from the paty of reason or à Fortiori yet no Man in hissenses can imagin that it was therefore omitted because there was no Relation of Subjection or Soveraignty between the Father and the Son when a Master and a Servant are exprest in the very Letter of the Law when a Prelate and a Priest a Husband and a Wife And is it not against Sense to imagin a Man has not as much Soveraignty over his Son as over his Wife that sits always with him as his Equal and to whom our Courtesie of England gives the Precedence and the Laws of the Land make but one as well as those of God and if the 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 the Impetus of Love and Affection will supersede the Servitude and Subjection I think that by Mr. Hunt's leave is more abundantly exprest to the Wife especially in that point upon which he himself puts it the work of Generation And can it be imagin'd that even a regular or secular Priest whose Subjection to his Primate or Rector is only the result of the Statutes of the Society or the resolution of the Common Law can denote more Soveraignty then the Filial Obedience required by the Laws of God Nature and Nations the citing this Statute of Edward for having omitted the making Parricide Petty-Treason because it argues they had no opinion of the Soveraignty of the Father is the greatest Argument that they had for since they have suppos'd a Soveraign Power which from the suggestiing of such an Argument here themselves do seem to allow and tacitly to Confess in those Authorities the Destroying of which is made Treason by this Act they 〈◊〉 conclude a greater So veraignty to reside in him that has really a GREATER POWER then those that in that Act are exprest for were it 〈◊〉 any impartial Person living Whether a Man has not a greater Power over his Son then his Wife or Servant it would soon be resolv'd that he has he being impower'd only from some civil Constitutions to govern the latter but the former from the Laws of Nature and Nations both so that in Common Reason and Common Equity Parricide must be concluded in the Chapter of Treason according to the receiv'd Rule of Natural as well as Artificial Logick that every greater Crime must be Punishable by that Law that punishes a less of the like Nature and the true Reason why in this very Case the Judges do not make the like Conclusion from the Similitude or Aggravation of the sin is as my Lord Coke Insinuates because the words of the Act it self declare that nothing but what is their 〈◊〉 and exprest shall be 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 but even that very Act foreseeing they might have 〈◊〉 several things that by the same parity of Reason might be included does provide with a sort of reserve that at any time the Parliament might make it more Inclusive and I dare Swear had it it been propos'd to any Session that has sat since the Statute was first Enacted whether by Parity 〈◊〉 was not fit to be made Petty-Treason not a man of Sense in the Senate but would have consented And this Construction of a Parliament is what Mr. Sidney himself forsooth so much rely'd upon who if they will but put upon this branch of the Statute according to his own words a construction agreeable to Reason or Common Sense must conclude that he certainly is as much a Traytor that Murders his own Father as the Servant that kills his Soveraign Master or a Priest that makes away with his Lord the Prelate But besides if this Letter of our Law does not include the 〈◊〉 of the Parent in Petty-Treason yet the 〈◊〉 of my Lord Coke upon this Case will go near to conclude it for he says 't is out of the Statute 〈◊〉 the Son serve the Father for Wages Meat or Drink or Apparel and I cannot see how any Son till he is Emancipated by 〈◊〉 or Marriage or the like can be said to be any other then his Fathers Servant and that for all four for as the Father requires of him filial Obedience so he can and they Commonly do Command their Sons in the Offices of Servants and that Arbitrarily in whatsoever he pleases and find him accordingly the fore-mention'd necessarys to the performance of his duty and above all this it is the opinion of a good Historian recorded by my Lord Coke that before this Statute Parricide was Petty-Treason by the Common Law and then what will become of Mr. H. Triumphant Appeal to the Laws as well as his impertinent applycation to Reason and before this Statute too such a signal sign of Soveraignty was supposed to reside in the Father of a Family That it was Petty Treason too to 〈◊〉 or 〈◊〉 the 〈◊〉 or Signet of the Lord of the Family wherein he liv'd a Signature of Royalty indeed and almosta mark of Majesty it self and the Reason my Lord Coke resolves it into their own omission of this Reasonable part of the Statute is so far from the Postscript impertinency of the Parliaments opinion against the paternal Power that he says those Law makers could never imagin that any Child could be guilty of such a sort of Barbarity and seems to insinuate the pretermission to have been the result of such a probable piece of presumption and that I remember was the very reason among the Romans that there was no punishment for such a sin as superseded a Sentence They had a Law supposed to be made in 〈◊〉 Caesar the Dictators time against those that attempted
the Army when both Impeachers and Impeach'd had forfeited their Heads to the King They had Counterplotted this with an Ordinance of the House for the Disbanding the Army but the Army found they had a more fearful Ordnance for them in the Field they had under their Command the Militia of the Camp and so resolve to command that too of the City The Contrivance for this is first Fairfax his Remonstrance to which the Commons submit but for that the Apprentices that had served them before against their King come now in as tumultuous a manner and frightn'd them into a Flight to the Army that so their City might retain its Militia The Westminster-men that stay'd plot against the Men at Windsor that were fled call in the Members that their Army had impeach'd for this the Soldiers sign an Engagement send a Remonstrance and themselves as soon conspire to follow march toward the City draw up at Hownslow-heath send their General with a Party to make a new Parliament or patch up the old To prevent the Personal Treaty with the King they drew up their Agreement of the PEOPLE resolv'd on their Votes of Non-addressing which recall'd they again re-extorted rejected the Lords for refusing to Judge their King whom having dispatcht there remain'd the Rump that is the remnant of the Commons the Creatures or rather Created Council of an Army and all the late flourishing Democracy of the long Parliament and the two Houses turn'd into a perfect Oligarchy of Officers And all what those Devils had possest themselves of by Treason before torn from their hands by a Legion of worse with as much Treachery and Plot. And one would think that all Plotting that all conspiring should have been over now but you shall see that the same principles that prevail'd upon the Rebels to ruin the Monarchy and run it into a Republick that promoted the Army to destroy the then Democracy and so set up their own Oligarchy did also incite a single Usurper among those few to set up for himself and turn it into true Tyranny Their own positions first plac'd the Supremacy in the Parliament because the two States were greater than the King that made but one The Army places the supremacy in their Sword because it was greater in the Field than the two States in the House and then comes Cromwel and setl'd the supremacy on himself because the sole Commander of all the Army his success at Dunbar and the routing of the Scot did so much his business that there could remain but little opposition of a Rump and a Man that is made by a weaker power but once a General can soon make himself by his own strength the Generalissimo he had formerly been so prevalent as to procure Petitions Addresses Remonstrances for the establishment of that patch'd piece of Parliament and all our Metaphysicks will allow that what can create can as soon annihilate he found his Omnipotency in this point he knew he had set them up against all Right and therefore had the more to run them down without Wrong and that as he did design so he effected too It was indeed a Parliament of Soldiers and he serv'd them like a General only by signifying to them to Disband and they not daring to deny determin their sitting to be on the fifth of November following But he not willing to tarry so long a Servant to those he could command to obey those that would not so soon Disband he comes and Cashiers by April 1653. and with his Lambert and Harrison sends packing that everlasting Parliament And now here is the result of their principles in a second Plot upon themselves and a new model of Government for the former they had abolisht was but the Government of a few an absolute Oligarchy tho' they were pleas'd to call it the Common-wealth of England as if it had been but Democratical when not the tenth part of the People were represented by those Administrators but so they had the confidence to call them a Parliament too but their words had commonly as much sense in them as their actions had Loyalty But Oliver having Plotted them out of all had now no great need of any Politick Plot for himself It would puzzle now our Politicians to tell me where at this time was their Supream original power of the People their natural Liberty and that Delegatory right they are to communicate to Representatives There was no King no Parliament no Rump and as yet no Protector The Disciples of Mr. Sidney's Doctrine must say forsooth The Supream Power was then in the People but as the Devil would have it Cromwel had got the supream strength Strength and power I confess are mighty different and just distinguisht by the same Metaphysicks the Scots put upon the King at Newark when they would persuade him The Army was one thing and the Soldiers of it another but if this People had then the supream power why did they not assemble themselves into a Parliament since there was no Writ from above to call them to the Assembly But our History tells us Oliver call'd it and what for why say our Republicans That the People might confer upon him their supream original Power which he could not assume without their consent very good So Cromwel was willing this supream power should be settl'd upon him by Parliament therefore he calls the Parliament i.e. gives it the supream power they in common Civility could not avoid to give it him again But where but a grain of sense settle this Supremacy in him that call'd them to assemble or in those that were assembl'd at his call I confess if the cunning Canary Birds could but contrive as once they did design such a rare Parliament that like the Bird of Asia should rise from the ashes of it's Ancestors we might have one then not only long but everlasting But even this tho' then attempted to have been enacted would have been but Nonsense and absurd and sit only to have past in that Parliament which he call'd who made many Laws just as ridiculous for thosethat have a power to dissolve themselves by the same reason would have a power to summon another and then must is sue out their Writs either before their dissolution or after if after then it is without authority and by no part of the Government and if before then a new one must be summoning before the old is dissolv'd and if the Writs should be but of force from the time of dissolution the Country Electors must be said to be conven'd by the supream Authority that is dissolv'd Cromwel and his Conspirators foresaw they would be confounded with such absurdities and they found themselves plung'd into as much confusion and then pray what did they do with this Sidney's supream original power that they did not know what to make of or how to use tho' it lay upon their hands why they
1648. 49. 51. Mercur Pollt n. 64. 65. Vid. Lex Terrae An. Reg. 17 John Vid Dr. B. Introduct p. 72. 105. c. p. 149. The King calls Parl. per advisam entum Concilii Vid. Bract. Parl. 4. Inst. p. 4. and shall they suppress those by whose advice they are call'd Bracton l. 4. Cap. 24. §. 5. ibid. Plat. prop. 〈◊〉 Edw. 1. 〈◊〉 Ed. 2. 〈◊〉 Ed. 2. Vid. dugd Baker 5. H. 4. 1. Jac. Edw. 3d. Exilium Hugon Edw. 2. 1 Edward 3d. C. 2. * Vide Jenkins's Lix Terrae first Edit p. 5. †Vid. Parl. Declarations 41. p. 4. ‖ And Proceeding of L. 〈◊〉 in the Old-Bayly In three several Places in Plowden they are made inseparable p. 234. 242. 213. Corps politick include le Corps natural Son Corps politick natural sont indivisible Ceux Deux Corps Sont as encorporate une Person * Ed. 2. in whose time 't was first started Vid Lex Terrae Rich. 2. because by misdemeanours he had made himself uncapable Vide Trussel * Charles the 1st the Parliament declares because the King had not granted the Propositions i. e. deposed himself he could not Exercise the Duties of his place Answer of the Com. to the Scots Com. p. 20. and the Scots expound their preserving the Kings Person in the Covenant but as it related to the Kingdom i. e. in English if they please they may destroy him * Vid. Cook 4. Inst. C. 2. †25. Ed. 3. * Vid. Tryal of the Regicides page 50. * Vid. Ibid pag. 52. †This was pleaded too by Carew p. 76. Treasonable words sworn against Scot. spoken in Parliament he pleads Priviledges of the House for speaking Treason tho 't is expressly declared not pleadable no not so much as for the breach of the Peace 17. Ed. 4. Rot. Parliament N. 39. Tryal of the Regicides pag. 52 * Answer of the Commons to the Scots Com. that the King had 〈◊〉 the executing the Duties of his Place and therefore could not be left to go where he pleased Anno. 1646. Imprint Lond. p. 20. * Parliam Roll. Num. 〈◊〉 Lex Consuetudo Parl. 25. Ed. 3. El. 1 Jac. ‖ H. post sc. p. 89. †Ibid p. 〈◊〉 * Salmasius has the same sort of simile page 353. defensio 〈◊〉 * Hunt page 94. †21. Ed. 4. 13 14. and noted Catâ—â—â—'s Case ‖ Act for Regulating Corporations where they particularly swear they abhor the Trayterous Proposition of raising Arms by His Majesties Authority against His Person * 1. H. 4. ‖ 2 H. 5. Cap. 6. †32. H. 6. 13. 〈◊〉 334. * 22. Ed. 4. ‖ 1 Edw. 5. fol. 2. * So also in Syracuse ‖ Vid Mercur polit June 17. 1652. * Rosin Ant. Rom. L. 7. C. 9. †Consulum immoderata 〈◊〉 omnes metus Legum 〈◊〉 Liv. Lib. 2. * He can't so much as be a disscisor 4. El. 2. 4.6 The King has no Pcer in the Land and so cannot be Judged 3. Ed. 3. 19. * Vid. Exact Abridgment fol. 713. †Vid. 〈◊〉 717. * 1. R. C. 15. * H. 7. H. 8. ‖ 12. H. 7. 20. 7. H. 7. 14. * Vld. 4. Inst. Baker page 248. †H. 8. * 1 Car 3. ‖ 25. H. 8. C. 21. †Plato ‖ 5 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 c. 11. †〈◊〉 〈◊〉 117. * pag. 237. * 1. Mar. c. 2. ‖ 1 El. c. 1. †Jac. c. 1. ‖ K. 〈◊〉 his Collect. 〈◊〉 1. part 〈◊〉 728. †Vid. wil. Prynns 〈◊〉 right to elect privy 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 ‖ Vid. his Memento to Juncto for the †2d his Parliaments Soveraigns Power For the * 3d. his Lords Bishops none of the Lords Bishops or the Buckle of the Canonical Girdle turned behind * Vid. Answer of our English 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 to the Scots Commissioners The Scots reply from their Camp at Newark The Members to the Army The Armies Answer to the Members The Scots Remonst to the Army The Armies reply An. From 41. to 48. Pamphlets or waste Papers 125. * Act for Regulating Corporations †Vid. Plat. Parl. of Commons begun with H. 3. within 400 y. Kings in Caesars time 1000 y. since ‖ Deliberaturi de arduis 4 Inst. 2. p. * Plato ‖ Cook 5. fol. 62. 9. Ed. 4. Cook 8. f. 145. ‖ 3 El. Dyer 187. Cook 4 Inst. c. 7. p. 73. * Ibid. p. 74. †32. H. 6. 13. ‖ Plowden 334. * Pollid Virg. †4 Inst. 6. 8. ibid. * Mirror c. 1. §. 12. Fleta l. 12. c. 1. Glanvil l. 12. c. 1. and all the most ancient Lawyers speak of it Plato ‖ Prvn's Parl. right to elect great Officers and Judges * An. Reg. H. 3. 22. Dom. 1230. Vid. Baker p. 84 85 86. Vid. Stow. ‖ Vid. Davila pag. 482. ‖ 5 Aug. 1653. Vid. Scob. Coll. * Plat. Red. †Vid. Exact Relation of the Parl. Dissolved Decemb 53. Plat. p. 130. * Vid. Exact Relation of the Proceedings of the Parl. 〈◊〉 Vid. Decemb. 12. 53. ‖ Et pur ceo que nous ne 〈◊〉 in nostre propre Person Oyer Terminer c. Vide 〈◊〉 f. 〈◊〉 Vid. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 * Vid. Bishops Right and Discousre of Peerage 81. ‖ Vid. 〈◊〉 Libel on the 〈◊〉 and 〈◊〉 in England * Vid. Leighton's Sions Plea 〈◊〉 ed 1636. * Beda tells us Augustine the Monk called one of the Britain Bishops An. Dom. 686. King 〈◊〉 a Convocation of Cletgy An. Dom. 727. of the Saxons ‖ The very Words of their Vote against the Cannons Vid. Journal †Register F. N. B. 4. Inst. p. 322. c. 71. * Vid. 25. H. 8. for their Antiquity see Bractonl 3. f. 123. Hol. 303. 6. H. 3. Rot p. 18. Ed. 3. ‖ 26. H. 8. c. 1. †Hls Discourse of Peerage London 1679. whom Hunt himself could oppose 1641. ‖ Mildmay's Oath taken 15. of Junt 43. Scob. Col. page 42. * L. 〈◊〉 Letter ‖ 〈◊〉 of Peerage 16. 89. p. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Hollis †Plat. pag. 237. the 5. Proposition * 35. of 〈◊〉 petition'd to be 〈◊〉 too in the late Rebellion and actually was 〈◊〉 Act for relief of peaceable 〈◊〉 against the Rigor of former Stat. 27. sept 16 57. ‖ Lord F. Speech to the Com. 1641. upon Commitment of the London Petition †L. Digby's Speech to the Com. upon the same Vid. Lord Newark's Speech yet Assembly of Divines declared it against the Acts of all reformed Churches ‖ Vid. Eusch. Lib. 4. c. 5. 6. who tells us Constant 〈◊〉 In his Expedition against the 〈◊〉 had his Bishops about him to consult in a Council of War and is their judging now in Capitals a Crime I am sure that other was a more Bloody Business ‖ An. Dom. 686. Cook 4. Inst. C. 74. pag. 322. * Leg. A. thelst C. 11. Episcopo jure pertiner omnem 〈◊〉 promovere Del seculi omne Legis scitum Burgi mensuram Spelm. p. 402. ‖ Plat. p. 101. Kings Writ of Summons runs cum Prelatis colloquium habere * Vid. 1. Inst. p. 110 ‖
11. * Non est Haeres Viventis * And even that is allow'd by Hunt in his Postscript pag. 74. Vid. Vote of the house in the Journal 1648. Vid. Form of Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy ‖ Vid. King's Speech to the Parliament there * Julian pag. 19 20. Page 19. * A Treatise perswading Obedience in Lawful things to Authority tho unlawful Printed London about 1649 Ibid. Page 10. Ibid. Page 12. * Vid. Also a Religious Demurrer about submission to the present Power Printed London 1649. * Julian pag. 12. Anno Mariae 1. Julian p. 12. * Vid. 〈◊〉 ‖ Julian p. 11. * Wilkinsou of Court 〈◊〉 4th Edit p. 298. * Jul. p. 20 21. Jul. p. 20. * Non est Haeres Viventis * 25. Ed. 3. cap. 2. Jul. pag. 20. * Vid. Britton Coke cap. Treason ‖ 3. Ins. l. 1. p. 9. * My Lord Hales Pleas of the Crown Ist. Edit †25. Ed. 3. * Vid Jul. pag. 19. * Vid. Jrlian the Apostate Post. p. 47. * Brief History of Succession Page 〈◊〉 †22. Aug. 1554. ‖ Vid Burnets Abridgment 2d pt 3. l. * Baker p. 329. * Jul. p. 39. pag. 35. pag. 33. 38. Exclusion †Vid 〈◊〉 Inquiry B. R. * Jul. Vid. Argile's Declaration his Majesties first Speech De jure magist p. 94. Quaest. 10. Jul. p. 7. Edictis Legitimis Rogatis p. 101. Publicum Religionis Christanae exercitum quispiam eorum nunquam concesserat p. 101. * 〈◊〉 meretrico Sanguinariā p. 98 99. Ut illi non fas sit cam pro arbitrio suo sine causae Cognitione abrogare sed eadem Authoritate tantum inter cedecente quā abinitio sancita suit pag. 100. page 18. That Author laughs too as well as Julian at the Martyrdom of the Thebaean Legion * Jul. p. 5. An Liceat resistere Prinicipegem Dei violanti Ecclesiam vastanti 〈◊〉 Juni Brut. quaest 2d ‖ De jure Magis trattuum * 1. Sam. 31. †2. Sam. c. 2. ‖ Sam. c. ult †2. Chro. c. 21. 2. Chron. c. 33. * Junius Brutus quest 2. p. 37. * Haec scriptura nobis definiet quod populo Judaico licuit imo quod in 〈◊〉 fuit nemo negabit quin idem populo Christiano c. Junius Brutus quaest 2. * Junius Brutus Vindiciae contra Tyrannos 1577. †Ficleny de Mag. 1576. ‖ Harringtons Oceana †Needham's Merc. Pol. ‖ Plato Redivivus †Sidney's Systeme * Vid. his Tryal p. 23. ‖ Vid. Paper at his Execution * Vid. Tryal pag. 23. ‖ Generali Lege decernitur nemidem sibi esse Judicem 6. 3. 5. 1. * Nemo Idoneus testis in re 〈◊〉 Intelligitur D. 22. 5. 10. * Ocaeana p. 15. †Ibid p. 20. * Junius 〈◊〉 vind cont Tyran Intelligimus Magistratus quasi Regum Ephoros c. 〈◊〉 in Regno Israelitico denique Praefectos Centuriones Caeteros Vid. 6. 37. Quaest. 2. Rex Qui pactum perfide violat hujus faederis seu pacti Regni officicurii Vindices Custodes sunt Quaest. 4. pag. 169. ‖ Populi ordines jus sibi retinuisse fraenandorum Principum c. Quod ni secerint perfidi in Deum patriam habeantur De Jure Magistratuum Quaest. 6. pag. 73. Edit Francfurt Neque supremum Magistratum pro privatis delictis Coercere quae proprie Personalia sunt ibid. * Publisher to the Reader ‖ Harrington in his Epitome of the whole Common-wealth Oceana pag. 278. * Marchion Needham the supposed Author of Merc. Pol. †The Brutish Principles of Monarchy Merc. Pol. Numb 92. March 11. 1652. * Ibid. ‖ Plat. Red. page 39. Brutus's Vindiclae quest 4. p. 169. ut singuli Principe 〈◊〉 sunt 〈◊〉 universi superiore or Rex major singulis minor universis 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 * Postscr page 71. ‖ Page 73. ‖ Ibid pag. 73. Will. 〈◊〉 against the King's 〈◊〉 voice Tryal page 23. ‖ Ibid. p. 23. The words of a late learn'd Loyal Lawyer of our own are expresly the same Persons must not be Judg'd and 〈◊〉 Jenkins Lex 〈◊〉 Ed. 〈◊〉 48. Page 16. Vindiciae Quest. 2. Falsa est conclusio non debuisse poenas de 〈◊〉 aliquo sumi quia semel sumpte non sunt de jure Magist. Franckfort page 72. Quest. 6. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Ethic. Lib. 8. c. 12. * Treatise of Monarchy p. 28. * Vid 4. Eliz. 2. 46. Ne poet estre diseisor ne faire ascun tort also 4. Ed. 4. 25. B. ‖ Sir Walt. Raleigh History of the World So the Civilians as Baulus says the Prince does do well to observe those Laws to which he is not 〈◊〉 Decet tamen Principē servare Leges quibus ipse solutus est ut inquit Paulus d. 32.1.23 Merc. pol. Num. 65. 1. Samuel C. 8. verse 11 12 c. Verse 18. Tyrannus est qui exteros in praesidiis collo cat Vindiciae quest 3. Page 139 140. Raleigh Hist. Chap. 16. §. 1. Postscript pag. 68 69. Merc. Pol. 〈◊〉 92. Pedes elevabuntur supra Caput part of the Oxford Oracle Vid. Baker ‖ And even Homer a Heathen was of that Opinion 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Hom. Il. 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 Hos. Theog v. 96. Gen. 1. verse 16. * Imperator solus Conditor interpres Legis Zouch Element part 4. §. 4. p. 103. and c. 1. 14. 12. ‖ Quod princi placuit Legis vigorem habet D. 1. 4. 1. * Sacrilegii instar est principis rescripto obviare C. 1. 23. 5. †In 〈◊〉 Imperatoris excipitur fortuna cui ipsas Leges Deus Subjecit Nov. 105. 2. †Si summo dare urgetur ad Regem provocato Lambert in his Laws Edgar 1. 23. 5. * Quod principi 〈◊〉 Dig. 1. 4. 1. The words of Bracton Chief Justice in Henry the 3d's time Rex non alius debet Judicare and in another place Illius est Interpretari cujus est Condere ‖ Britton that Bishop of Hereford by order of Ed. 1. pen'd a Book of Laws tells us 't is the Kings will that his jurisdiction and Judgment be above all in the Realm * Hen. 8. Britton Bract. Vid. Sucron In. vitas Decet tamen Principem inquit Paulus Leges servare quibus ipse solutus D. 32. 1. 23. * Fiat Justitia ruat Coelum ‖ Vid. Paper of the Proceedings upon Armstrong his Outlawry * 'T is a receiv'd rule among civil Lawyers and may be well among our own That a King can't in Law alienate his Crown and that if it were Actually done it were de Facto void besides if the Subject was freed in that Case it would be the result of the Soveraigns Act. ‖ That alienation of King John was suppos'dto have been an Act of State and it has been adjudg'd particularly by particular Parliaments That even a Statute for that purpose made would be of no 〈◊〉 It was resolv'd 〈◊〉 Scotland too * Posts C. p. 113. ‖ Princeps Pater