The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• A Defence of the People of England, In Answer to Salmasius’s Defence of the King. *
• A Treatise of Civil Power In Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That It Is Not Lawful For Any Power On Earth to Compel In Matters of Religion.
• Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings Out of the Church. Wherein Is Also Discoursed of Tithes, Church-fees, and Church-revenues; and Whether Any Maintenance of Ministers Can Be Settled By Law.
• A Letter to a Friend Concerning the Ruptures of the Commonwealth.
• The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, Easy to Be Put In Practice, and Without Delay.
• The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence Thereof, Compared With the Inconveniencies and Dangers of Readmitting Kingship In This Nation.
• Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon, Titled, the Fear of God and the King.
• The History of Britain, That Part Especially Now Called England, From the First Traditional Beginning, Continued to the Norman Conquest:—collected Out of the Ancientest and Best Authors Thereof.
• The First Book.
• The Second Book.
• The Third Book.
• The Fourth Book.
• The Fifth Book.
• The Sixth Book.
• Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration; and What Best Means May Be Used Against the Growth of Popery.
• A Brief History of Moscovia, and of Other Less Known Countries Lying Eastward of Russia As Far As Cathay.
• The Preface.
• Moscovia: Or, Relations of Moscovia, As Far As Hath Been Discovered By English Voyages; Gathered From the Writings of Several Eye-witnesses: and the Other Less Known Countries Lying Eastward of Russia As Far As Cathay, Lately Discovered At Several Time
• Chapter I.: A Brief Description.
• Chapter II.: Of Samoëdia, Siberia, and Other Countries North-east, Subject to the Muscovites.
• Chapter III.: Of Tingoësia, and the Countries Adjoining Eastward, As Far As Cathay.
• Chapter IV.: The Succession of Moscovia Dukes and Emperors, Taken Out of Their Chroniles By a Polac, With Some Later Additions. †
• Chapter V.: The First Discovery of Russia By the North-east, 1553, With the English Embassies, and Entertainments At That Court, Until the Year 1604.
• A Declaration of Letters Patents, For the Election of This Present King of Poland, John the Third, Elected On the 22d of May Last Past, A. D. 1674.
• Letters of State to Most of the Sovereign Princes and Republics of Europe, During the Administration of the Commonwealth and the Protectors Oliver and Richard Cromwell.
• Letters Written In the Name of the Parliament.
• Letters Written In the Name of Oliver the Protector.
• Letters Written In the Name of Richard, Protector.
• A Manifesto of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, Ireland, &c.
• The Second Defence of the People of England, Against an Anonymous Libel Entitled “the Royal Blood Crying to Heaven For Vengeance On the English Parricides.”
• Familiar Epistles, Translated From the Latin, By Robert Fellowes, A. M. Oxon.
• I.: To His Tutor Thomas Jure.
• II.: To Alexander Gill.
• III.: To the Same.
• IV.: To Thomas Jure.
• V.: To Alexander Gill.
• VI.: To Carolo Deodati.
• VII.: To the Same.
• VIII.: To Beneditto Bonomattai, a Florentine.
• IX.: To Luke Holstein, In the Vatican At Rome.
• X.: To Carolo Deodati, a Florentine Noble.
• XI.: To Hermann Milles, Secretary to the Count of Oldenburgh.
• XII.: To the Renowned Leonard Philara, the Athenian.
• XIII.: To Richard Heth.
• XIV.: To Henry Oldenburgh, Aulic Counsellor to the Senate of Bremen.
• XV.: To Leonard Philara, the Athenian.
• XVI.: To Leo of Aizema.
• XVII.: To Ezechiel Spanheim, of Geneva.
• XVIII.: To Henry Oldenburgh, Aulic Counsellor to the Senate of Bremen.
• XIX.: To the Noble Youth, Richard Jones.
• XX.: To the Accomplished Youth Peter Heinbach.
• XXI.: To the Accomplished Emeric Bigot.
• XXII.: To the Noble Youth Richard Jones.
• XXIII.: To the Illustrious Lord Henry De Bras.
• XXIV.: To Henry Oldenburgh.
• XXV.: To the Noble Youth Richard Jones.
• XXVI.: To the Illustrious Lord Henry De Bras.
• XXVII.: To the Accomplished Peter Heinbach.
• XXVIII.: To John Badiaus, Minister of the Church of Orange.
• XXIX.: To Henry Oldenburgh.
• XXX.: To the Noble Youth Richard Jones.
• XXXI.: To the Accomplished Peter Heinbach, Counsellor to the Elector of Brandenburg.

A DEFENCE OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND,

IN ANSWER TO SALMASIUS’S DEFENCE OF THE KING.*

[first published 1692.]

THE PREFACE.

Although I fear, lest, if in defending the people of England, I should be as copious in words, and empty of matter, as most men think Salmasius has been in his defence of the king, I might seem to deserve justly to be accounted a verbose and silly defender; yet since no man thinks himself obliged to make so much haste, though in the handling but of any ordinary subject, as not to premise some introduction at least, according as the weight of the subject requires; if I take the same course in handling almost the greatest subject that ever was (without being too tedious in it) I am in hopes of attaining two things, which indeed I earnestly desire: the one, not to be at all wanting, as far as in me lies, to this most noble cause, and most worthy to be recorded to all future ages: the other, that I may appear to have avoided myself that frivolousness of matter, and redundancy of words, which I blame in my antagonist. For I am about to discourse of matters, neither inconsiderable nor common; but how a most potent king, after he had trampled upon the laws of the nation, and given a shock to its religion, and begun to rule at his own will and pleasure, was at last subdued in the field by his own subjects, who had undergone a long slavery under him; how afterwards he was cast into prison, and when he gave no ground, either by words or actions, to hope better things of him, he was finally by the supreme council of the kingdom condemned to die, and beheaded before the very gates of the royal palace. I shall likewise relate (which will much conduce to the easing men’s minds of a great superstition) by what right, especially according to our law, this judgment was given, and all these matters transacted: and shall easily defend my valiant and worthy countrymen (who have extremely well deserved of all subjects and nations in the world) from the most wicked calumnies both of domestic and foreign railers, and especially from the reproaches of this most vain and empty sophister, who sets up for a captain and ringleader to all the rest. For what king’s majesty sitting upon an exalted throne, ever shone so brightly, as that of the people of England then did, when shaking off that old superstition, which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment upon the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been their king, caught as it were in a net by his own laws, (who alone of all mortals challenged to himself impunity by a divine right,) and scrupled not to inflict the same punishment upon him, being guilty, which he would have inflicted upon any other? But why do I mention these things as performed by the people, which almost open their voice themselves, and testify the presence of God throughout? who, as often as it seems good to his infinite wisdom, uses to throw down proud and unruly kings, exalting themselves above the condition of human nature, and utterly to extirpate them and all their family. By his manifest impulse being set on work to recover our almost lost liberty, following him as our guide, and adoring the impresses of his divine power manifested upon all occasions, we went on in no obscure, but an illustrious passage, pointed out and made plain to us by God himself. Which things, if I should so much as hope by any diligence or ability of mine, such as it is, to discourse of as I ought to do, and to commit them so to writing, as that perhaps all nations and all ages may read them, it would be a very vain thing in me. For what style can be august and magnificent enough, what man has parts sufficient to undertake so great a task? Since we find by experience, that in so many ages as are gone over the world, there has been but here and there a man found, who has been able worthily to recount the actions of great heroes, and potent states; can any man have so good an opinion of his own talents, as to think himself capable to reach these glorious and wonderful works of Almighty God, by any language, by any style of his? Which enterprise, though some of the eminent persons in our commonwealth have prevailed upon me by their authority to undertake, and would have it be my business to vindicate with my pen against envy and calumny, (which are proof against arms) those glorious performances of theirs, (whose opinion of me I take as a very great honour, that they should pitch upon me before others to be serviceable in this kind of those most valiant deliverers of my native country; and true it is, that from my very youth, I have been bent extremely upon such sort of studies, as inclined me, if not to do great things myself, at least to celebrate those that did,) yet as having no confidence in any such advantages, I have recourse to the divine assistance; and invoke the great and holy God, the giver of all good gifts, that I may as substantially, and as truly, discourse and refute the sauciness and lies of this foreign declamator, as our noble generals piously and successfully by force of arms broke the king’s pride, and his unruly domineering, and afterwards put an end to both by inflicting a memorable punishment upon himself, and as thoroughly as a single person did with ease but of late confute and confound the king himself rising as it were from the grave, and recommending himself to the people in a book published after his death, with new artifices and allurements of words and expressions. Which antagonist of mine, though he be a foreigner, and, though he deny it a thousand times over, but a poor grammarian; yet not contented with a salary due to him in that capacity, chose to turn a pragmatical coxcomb, and not only to intrude in state-affairs, but into the affairs of a foreign state: though he brings along with him neither modesty, nor understanding, nor any other qualification requisite in so great an arbitrator, but sauciness, and a little grammar only. Indeed if he had published here, and in English, the same things as he has now wrote in Latin, such as it is, I think no man would have thought it worth while to return an answer to them, but would partly despise them as common, and exploded over and over already, and partly abhor them as sordid and tyrannical maxims, not to be endured even by the most abject of slaves: nay, men that have sided with the king, would have had these thoughts of his book. But since he has swoln it to a considerable bulk, and dispersed it among foreigners, who are altogether ignorant of our affairs and constitution; it is fit that they who mistake them, should be better informed; and that he, who is so very forward to speak ill of others, should be treated in his own kind.

If it be asked, why we did not then attack him sooner, why we suffered him to triumph so long, and pride himself in our silence? For others I am not to answer; for myself I can boldly say, that I had neither words nor arguments long to seek for the defence of so good a cause, if I had enjoyed such a measure of health, as would have endured the fatigue of writing. And being but weak in body, I am forced to write by piecemeal, and break off almost every hour, though the subject be such as requires an unintermitted study and intenseness of mind. But though this bodily indisposition may be a hindrance to me in setting forth the just praises of my most worthy countrymen, who have been the saviours of their native country, and whose exploits, worthy of immortality, are already famous all the world over; yet I hope it will be no difficult matter for me to defend them from the insolence of this silly little scholar, and from that saucy tongue of his, at least. Nature and laws would be in an ill case, if slavery should find what to say for itself, and liberty be mute: and if tyrants should find men to plead for them, and they that can master and vanquish tyrants, should not be able to find advocates. And it were a deplorable thing indeed, if the reason mankind is endued withal, and which is the gift of God, should not furnish more arguments for men’s preservation, for their deliverance, and, as much as the nature of the thing will bear, for making them equal to one another, than for their oppression, and for their utter ruin under the domineering power of one single person. Let me therefore enter upon this noble cause with a cheerfulness, grounded upon this assurance, that my adversary’s cause is maintained by nothing but fraud, fallacy, ignorance, and barbarity; whereas mine has light, truth, reason, the practice and the learning of the best ages of the world, of its side.

But now, having said enough for an introduction, since we have to do with critics, let us in the first place consider the title of this choice piece: “Defensio Regia pro Car. Primo, ad Car. Secundum: a Royal Defence (or the king’s defence) for Charles the First, to Charles the Second.” You undertake a wonderful piece of work, whoever you are; to plead the father’s cause before his own son: a hundred to one but you carry it. But I summon you, Salmasius, who heretofore skulked under a wrong name, and now go by no name at all, to appear before another tribunal, and before other judges, where perhaps you may not hear those little applauses, which you used to be so fond of in your school. But why this royal defence dedicated to the king’s own son? We need not put him to the torture; he confesses why. “At the king’s charge,” says he. O mercenary and chargeable advocate! could you not afford to write a defence for Charles the father, whom you pretend to have been the best of kings, to Charles the son, the most indigent of all kings, but it must be at the poor king’s own charge? But though you are a knave, you would not make yourself ridiculous in calling it the king’s defence; for you having sold it, it is no longer yours, but the king’s indeed: who bought it at the price of a hundred jacobusses, a great sum for a poor king to disburse. I know very well what I say: and it is well enough known who brought the gold, and the purse wrought with beads: we know who saw you reach out greedy fists, under pretence of embracing the king’s chaplain, who brought the present, but indeed to embrace the present itself, and by accepting it to exhaust almost all the king’s treasury.

But now the man comes himself, the door creaks, the actor comes upon the stage.

• In silence now, and with attention wait,
• That ye may learn what th’ Eunuch has to prate.

—Terent.

For whatever the matter is with him, he blusters more than ordinary. “A horrible message had lately struck our ears, but our minds more, with a heinous wound concerning a parricide committed in England in the person of a king, by a wicked conspiracy of sacrilegious men.” Indeed that horrible message must either have had a much longer sword than that which Peter drew, or those ears must have been of a wonderful length, that it could wound at such a distance; for it could not so much as in the least offend any ears but those of an ass. For what harm is it to you, that are foreigners? are any of you hurt by it, if we amongst ourselves put our own enemies, our own traitors to death, be they commoners, noblemen, or kings? Do you, Salmasius, let alone what does not concern you: for I have a horrible message to bring of you too; which I am mistaken if it strike not a more heinous wound into the ears of all grammarians and critics, provided they have any learning and delicacy in them, to wit, your crowding so many barbarous expressions together in one period in the person of (Aristarchus) a grammarian; and that so great a critic as you, hired at the king’s charge to write a defence of the king his father, should not only set so fulsome a preface before it, much like those lamentable ditties that used to be sung at funerals, and which can move compassion in none but a coxcomb; but in the very first sentence should provoke your readers to laughter with so many barbarisms all at once. “Persona regis,” you cry. Where do you find any such Latin? or are you telling us some tale or other of a Perkin Warbec, who, taking upon him the person of a king, has, forsooth, committed some horrible parricide in England? which expression, though dropping carelessly from your pen, has more truth in it than you are aware of. For a tyrant is but like a king upon a stage, a man in a vizor, and acting the part of a king in a play; he is not really a king. But as for these gallicisms, that are so frequent in your book, I won’t lash you for them myself, for I am not at leisure; but shall deliver you over to your fellow-grammarians, to be laughed to scorn and whipped by them. What follows is much more heinous, that what was decreed by our supreme magistracy to be done to the king, should be said by you to have been done “by a wicked conspiracy of sacrilegious persons.” Have you the impudence, you rogue, to talk at this rate of the acts and decrees of the chief magistrates of a nation, that lately was a most potent kingdom, and is now a more potent commonwealth? Whose proceedings no king ever took upon him by word of mouth, or otherwise, to villify and set at nought. The illustrious states of Holland therefore, the genuine offspring of those deliverers of their country, have deservedly by their edict condemned to utter darkness this defence of tyrants, so pernicious to the liberty of all nations; the author of which every free state ought to forbid their country, or to banish out of it; and that state particularly that feeds with a stipend so ungrateful and so savage an enemy to their commonwealth, whose very fundamentals, and the causes of their becoming a free state, this fellow endeavours to undermine as well as ours, and at one and the same time to subvert both; loading with calumnies the most worthy asserters of liberty there, under our names. Consider with yourselves, ye most illustrious states of the United Netherlands, who it was that put this asserter of kingly power upon setting pen to paper? who it was, that but lately began to play Rex in your country? what counsels were taken, what endeavours used, and what disturbances ensued thereupon in Holland? and to what pass things might have been brought by this time? How slavery and a new master were ready prepared for you; and how near expiring that liberty of yours, asserted and vindicated by so many years war and toil, would have been ere now, if it had not taken breath again by the timely death of a certain rash young gentleman. But our author begins to strut again, and to feign wonderful tragedies; “whomsoever this dreadful news reached, (to wit, the news of Salmasius’s parricidial barbarisms,) all of a sudden, as if they had been struck with lightning, their hair stood an end, and their tongues clove to the roof of their mouth.” Which let natural philosophers take notice of, (for this secret in nature was never discovered before,) that lightning makes men’s hair stand on end. But who knows not that little effeminate minds are apt to be amazed at the news of any extraordinary great action; and that then they show themselves to be, what they really were before, no better than so many stocks? “Some could not refrain from tears;” some little women at court, I suppose, or if there be any more effeminate than they, of whose number Salmasius himself being one, is by a new metamorphis become a fountain near akin to his name, (Salmacis,) and with his counterfeit flood of tears prepared over night, endeavours to emasculate generous minds: I advise therefore, and wish them to have a care;

• ———Infamis ne quem malè fortibus undis
• Salmacis enervet.———
• ———Ne, si vir cum venerit, exeat indè
• Semivir, et tactis subitò mollescat in undis.

• Abstain, as manhood you esteem,
• From Salmacis’ pernicious stream:
• If but one moment there you stay,
• Too dear you’ll for your bathing pay.—
• Depart nor man nor woman, but a sight
• Disgracing both, a loath’d hermaphrodite.

“They that had more courage” (which yet he expresses in miserable bald Latin, as if he could not so much as speak of men of courage and magnanimity in proper words) “were set on fire with indignation to that degree, that they could hardly contain themselves.” Those furious Hectors we value not of a rush. We have been accustomed to rout such bullies in the field with a true sober courage; a courage becoming men that can contain themselves, and are in their right wits. “There were none that did not curse the authors of so horrible a villany.” But yet, you say, their tongues clove to the roof of their mouths; and if you mean this of our fugitives only, I wish they had clove there to this day; for we know very well, that there is nothing more common with them, than to have their mouths full of curses and imprecations, which indeed all good men abominate, but withal despise. As for others, it is hardly credible, that when they heard the news of our having inflicted a capital punishment upon the king, there should any be found, especially in a free state, so naturally adapted to slavery as either to speak ill of us, or so much as to censure what we had done. Nay, it is highly probable, that all good men applauded us, and gave God thanks for so illustrious, so exalted a piece of justice; and for a caution so very useful to other princes.

In the mean time, as for those fierce, those steel-hearted men, that, you say, take on for, and bewail so pitifully, the lamentable and wonderful death I know not who; them I say, together with their tinkling advocate, the dullest that ever appeared since the name of a king was born and known in the world, we shall even let whine on, till they cry their eyes out. But in the mean time, what schoolboy, what little insignificant monk, could not have made a more elegant speech for the king, and in better Latin, than this royal advocate has done? But it would be folly in me to make such particular animadversions upon his childishness and frenzies throughout his book, as I do here upon a few in the beginning of it; which yet I would be willing enough to do, (for we hear that he is swelled with pride and conceit to the utmost degree imaginable,) if the undigested and immethodical bulk of his book did not protect him. He was resolved to take a course like the soldier in Terence, to save his bacon; and it was very cunning in him, to stuff his book with so much puerility, and so many silly whimsies, that it might nauseate the smartest man in the world to death to take notice of them all. Only I thought it might not be amiss to give a specimen of him in the preface; and to let the serious reader have a taste of him at first, that he might guess by the first dish that is served up, how noble an entertainment the rest are like to make; and that he may imagine with himself what an infinite number of fooleries and impertinencies must needs be heaped up together in the body of the book, when they stand so thick in the very entrance into it, where, of all other places, they ought to have been shunned. His tittle-tattle that follows, and his sermons fit for nothing but to be wormeaten, I can easily pass by; as for any thing in them relating to us, we doubt not in the least, but that what has been written and published by authority of parliament, will have far greater weight with all wise and sober men, than the calumnies and lies of one single impudent little fellow; who being hired by our fugitives, their country’s enemies, has scraped together, and not scrupled to publish in print, whatever little story any one of them that employed him put into his head. And that all men may plainly see how little conscience he makes of setting down any thing right or wrong, good or bad, I desire no other witness than Salmasius himself.

In his book, entitled, “Apparatus contra Primatum Papæ,” he says, “there are most weighty reasons why the church ought to lay aside episcopacy, and return to the apostolical institution of presbyters: that a far greater mischief has been introduced into the church by episcopacy, than the schisms themselves were, which were before apprehended: that the plague which episcopacy introduced, depressed the whole body of the church under a miserable tyranny; nay, had put a yoke even upon the necks of kings and princes: that it would be more beneficial to the church, if the whole hierarchy itself were extirpated, than if the pope only, who is the head of it, were laid aside,” page 160. “That it would be very much for the good of the church, if episcopacy were taken away, together with the papacy: that if episcopacy were once taken down, the papacy would fall of itself, as being founded upon it,” page 171. He says, “he can show very good reasons why episcopacy ought to be put down in those kingdoms that have renounced the pope’s supremacy; but that he can see no reason for retaining it there: that a reformation is not entire, that is defective in this point: that no reason can be alleged, no probable cause assigned, why the supremacy of the pope being once disowned, episcopacy should notwithstanding be retained,” page 197.—Though he had wrote all this, and a great deal more to this effect, but four years ago, he is now become so vain and so impudent withal, as to accuse the parliament of England, “for not only turning the bishops out of the house of lords, but for abolishing episcopacy itself.” Nay, he persuades us to receive episcopacy, and defends it by the very same reasons and arguments, which with a great deal of earnestness he had confuted himself in that former book; to wit, “that bishops were necessary and ought to have been retained, to prevent the springing up of a thousand pernicious sects and heresies.” Crafty turncoat! are you not ashamed to shift hands thus in things that are sacred, and (I had almost said) to betray the church; whose most solemn institutions you seem to have asserted and vindicated with so much noise, that when it should seem for your interest to change sides, you might undo and subvert all again with the more disgrace and infamy to yourself? It is notoriously known, that when both houses of parliament, being extremely desirous to reform the church of England by the pattern of our reformed churches, had resolved to abolish episcopacy, the king first interposed, and afterwards waged war against them chiefly for that very cause; which proved fatal to him. Go now and boast of your having defended the king; who, that you might the better defend him, do now openly betray and impugn the cause of the church, whose defence you yourself had formerly undertaken; and whose severest censures ought to be inflicted upon you.

As for the present form of our government, since such a foreign insignificant professor as you, having laid aside your boxes and desks stuffed with nothing but trifles, which you might have spent your time better in putting into order, will needs turn busybody, and be troublesome in other men’s matters, I shall return you this answer, or rather not to you, but to them that are wiser than yourself, viz. That the form of it is such as our present distractions will admit of; not such as were to be wished, but such as the obstinate divisions, that are amongst us, will bear. What state soever is pestered with factions, and defends itself by force of arms, is very just in having regard to those only that are sound and untainted, and in overlooking or secluding the rest, be they of the nobility or the common people; nay, though profiting by experience, they should refuse to be governed any longer either by a king or a house of lords.

But in railing at that supreme council, as you call it, and at the chairman there, you make yourself very ridiculous; for that council is not the supreme council, as you dream it is, but appointed by authority of parliament, for a certain time only; and consisting of forty persons, for the most part members of parliament, any one of whom may be president if the rest vote him into the chair. And there is nothing more common, than for our parliaments to appoint committees of their own members; who, when so appointed, have power to meet where they please, and hold a kind of a little parliament amongst themselves. And the most weighty affairs are often referred to them, for expedition and secrecy; the care of the navy, the army, the treasury; in short, all things whatsoever relating either to war or peace. Whether this be called a council, or any thing else, the thing is ancient, though the name may be new; and it is such an institution, as no government can be duly administered without it. As for our putting the king to death, and changing the government, forbear your bawling, don’t spit your venom, till, going along with you through every chapter, I show, whether you will or no, “by what law, by what right and justice,” all that was done. But if you insist to know, “by what right, by what law;” by that law, I tell you, which God and nature have enacted, viz. that whatever things are for the universal good of the whole state, are for that reason lawful and just. So wise men of old used to answer such as you. You find fault with us for “repealing laws, that had obtained for so many years;” but you do not tell us whether those laws were good or bad, nor, if you did, should we heed what you said; for you, busy puppy, what have you to do with our laws? I wish our magistrates had repealed more than they have, both laws and lawyers; if they had, they would have consulted the interest of the Christian religion, and that of the people better than they have done. It frets you, that “hobgoblins, sons of the earth, scarce gentlemen at home, scarce known to their own countrymen, should presume to do such things.” But you ought to have remembered, what not only the Scriptures, but Horace would have taught you, viz.

• ——Valet ima summis
• Mutare, et insignem attenuat Deus,
• Obscura promens, &c.

• The power that did create, can change the scene
• Of things; make mean of great, and great of mean;
• The brightest glory can eclipse with night;
• And place the most obscure in dazzling light.

But take this into the bargain. Some of those who, you say, be scarce gentlemen, are not at all inferior in birth to any of your party. Others, whose ancestors were not noble, have taken a course to attain to true nobility by their own industry and virtue, and are not inferior to men of the noblest descent. They had rather be called “sons of the earth,” provided it be their own earth, (their own native country,) and act like men at home, than, being destitute of house or land, to relieve the necessities of nature in a foreign country by selling of smoke, as thou dost, an inconsiderable fellow and a jack-straw, and who dependest upon the good-will of thy masters for a poor stipend; for whom it were better to dispense with thy labours, and return to thy own kindred and countrymen, if thou hadst not this one piece of cunning, to babble out some silly prelections and fooleries at so good a rate amongst foreigners. You find fault with our magistrates for admitting such “a common sewer of all sorts of sects.” Why should they not? It belongs to the church to cast them out of the communion of the faithful; not to the magistrate to banish them the country, provided they do not offend against the civil laws of the state. Men at first united into civil societies, that they might live safely, and enjoy their liberty, without being wronged or oppressed; and that they might live religiously, and according to the doctrine of Christianity, they united themselves into churches. Civil societies have laws, and churches have a discipline peculiar to themselves, and far differing from each other. And this has been the occasion of so many wars in Christendom; to wit, because the civil magistrate and the church confounded their jurisdictions. Therefore we do not admit of the popish sect, so as to tolerate papists at all; for we do not look upon that as a religion, but rather as a hierarchical tyranny, under a cloak of religion, clothed with the spoils of the civil power, which it has usurped to itself, contrary to our Saviour’s own doctrine. As for the independents, we never had any such amongst us, as you describe; they that we call independents, are only such as hold, that no classis or synods have a superiority over any particular church, and that therefore they ought all to be plucked up by the roots, as branches, or rather as the very trunk, of hierarchy itself; which is your own opinion too. And from hence it was that the name of independents prevailed amongst the vulgar. The rest of your preface is spent in endeavouring not only to stir up the hatred of all kings and monarchs against us, but to persuade them to make a general war upon us. Mithridates of old, though in a different cause, endeavoured to stir up all princes to make war upon the Romans, by laying to their charge almost just the same things that you do to ours: viz. that the Romans aimed at nothing but the subversion of all kingdoms, that they had no regard to any thing, whether sacred or civil, that from their very first rise, they never enjoyed any thing but what they had acquired by force, that they were robbers, and the greatest enemies in the world to monarchy. Thus Mithridates expressed himself in a letter to Arsaces, king of the Parthians.

But how came you, whose business it is to make silly speeches from your desk, to have the confidence to imagine, that by your persuasions to take up arms, and sounding an alarm as it were, you should be able so much as to influence a king amongst boys at play; especially, with so shrill a voice, and unsavoury breath, that I believe, if you were to have been the trumpeter, not so much as Homer’s mice would have waged war against the frogs? So little do we fear, you slug you, any war or danger from foreign princes through your silly rhetoric, who accusest us to them, just as if you were at play, “that we toss kings’ heads like balls; play at bowls with crowns; and regard sceptres no more than if they were fools’ staves with heads on:” but you in the mean time, you silly loggerhead, deserve to have your bones well thrashed with a fool’s staff, for thinking to stir up kings and princes to war by such childish arguments. Then you cry aloud to all nations, who, I know full well, will never heed what you say. You call upon that wretched and barbarous crew of Irish rebels too, to assert the king’s party. Which one thing is sufficient evidence how much you are both a fool and a knave, and how you outdo almost all mankind in villainy, impudence, and madness; who scruple not to implore the loyalty and aid of an execrable people devoted to the slaughter, whom the king himself always abhorred, or so pretended, to have any thing to do with, by reason of the guilt of so much innocent blood, which they had contracted. And that very perfidiousness and cruelty which he endeavoured as much as he could to conceal, and to clear himself from any suspicion of, you, the most villainous of mortals, as fearing neither God nor man, voluntarily and openly take upon yourself. Go on then, undertake the king’s defence at the encouragement and by the assistance of the Irish. You take care, and so you might well, lest any should imagine, that you were about to bereave Cicero or Demosthenes of the praise due to their eloquence, by telling us beforehand, that “you conceive you ought not to speak like an orator.” It is wisely said of a fool; you conceive you ought not to do what is not in your power to do: and who, that knows you never so little, ever expects any thing like an orator from you? Who neither uses, nor is able to publish, any thing that is elaborate, distinct, or has so much as sense in it; but like a second Crispin, or that little Grecian Tzetzes, you do but write a great deal, take no pains to write well; nor could write any thing well, though you took never so much pains. “This cause shall be argued (say you) in the hearing, and as it were before the tribunal, of all mankind.” That is what we like so well, that we could now wish we had a discreet and intelligent adversary, and not such a hairbrained blunderbuss as you, to deal with. You conclude very tragically, like Ajax in his raving; “I will proclaim to heaven and earth the injustice, the villainy, the perfidiousness and cruelty of these men, and will deliver them over convicted to all posterity.” O flowers! that such a witless, senseless bawler, one that was born but to spoil or transcribe good authors, should think himself able to write any thing of his own, that will reach posterity, whom together with his frivolous scribbles, the very next age will bury in oblivion; unless this defence of the king perhaps may be beholden to the answer I give to it, for being looked into now and then. And I would entreat the illustrious states of Holland, to take off their prohibition, and suffer the book to be publicly sold. For when I have detected the vanity, ignorance, and falsehood, that it is full of, the farther it spreads the more effectually it will be suppressed. Now let us hear how he convicts us.

CHAPTER I.

I persuade myself, Salmasius, that you, being a vain flashy man, are not a little proud of being the king of Great Britain’s defender, who himself was styled the “Defender of the Faith.” For my part, I think you deserve your titles both alike; for the king defended the faith, and you have defended him, so, that betwixt you, you have spoiled both your causes: which I shall make appear throughout the whole ensuing discourse, and particularly in this very chapter. You told us in the 12th page of your preface, that “so good and so just a cause ought not to be embellished with any flourishes of rhetoric; that the king needed no other defence, than by a bare narrative of his story:” and yet in your first chapter, in which you had promised us that bare narrative, you neither tell the story right, nor do you abstain from making use of all the skill you have in rhetoric to set it off. So that if we must take your own judgment, we must believe the king’s cause to be neither good nor just. But by the way I would advise you not to have so good an opinion of yourself (for nobody else has so of you) as to imagine that you are able to speak well upon any subject, who can neither play the part of an orator, nor an historian, nor express yourself in a style that would not be ridiculous even in a lawyer; but like a mountebank’s juggler, with big swelling words in your preface, you raised our expectation, as if some mighty matter were to ensue; in which your design was not so much to introduce a true narrative of the king’s story, as to make your own empty intended flourishes go off the better. For “being now about to give us an account of the matter of fact, you find yourself encompassed and affrighted with so many monsters of novelty, that you are at a loss what to say first, what next, and what last of all.” I will tell you what the matter is with you. In the first place, you find yourself affrighted and astonished at your own monstrous lies, and then you find that empty head of yours not encompassed, but carried round, with so many trifles and fooleries, that you not only now do not, but never did, know what was fit to be spoken, and in what method. “Among the many difficulties, that you find in expressing the heinousness of so incredible a piece of impiety, this one offers itself, you say, which is easily said, and must often be repeated; to wit, that the sun itself never beheld a more outrageous action.” But by your good leave, sir, the sun has beheld many things, that blind Bernard never saw. But we are content you should mention the sun over and over. And it will be a piece of prudence in you so to do. For though our wickedness does not require it, the coldness of the defence that you are making does. “The original of kings, you say, is as ancient as that of the sun.” May the gods and goddesses, Damasippus, bless thee with an everlasting solstice; that thou mayest always be warm, thou that canst not stir a foot without the sun. Perhaps you would avoid the imputation of being called a doctor Umbraticus. But alas! you are in perfect darkness, that make no difference betwixt a paternal power, and a regal: and that when you had called kings fathers of their country, could fancy that with that metaphor you had persuaded us, that whatever is applicable to a father, is so to a king. Alas! there is a great difference betwixt them. Our fathers begot us. Our king made not us, but we him. Nature has given fathers to us all, but we ourselves appointed our own king. So that the people is not for the king but the king for them. “We bear with a father, though he be harsh and severe;” and so we do with a king. But we do not bear with a father, if he be a tyrant. If a father murder his son, he himself must die for it; and why should not a king be subject to the same law, which certainly is a most just one? Especially considering that a father cannot by any possibility divest himself of that relation, but a king may easily make himself neither king nor father of his people. If this action of ours be considered according to its quality, as you call it, I, who am both an Englishman born, and was an eyewitness of the transactions of these times, tell you, who are both a foreigner and an utter stranger to our affairs, that we have put to death neither a good, nor a just, nor a merciful, nor a devout, nor a godly, nor a peaceable king, as you style him; but an enemy, that has been so to us almost ten years to an end; nor one that was a father, but a destroyer of his country. You confess, that such things have been practised; for yourself have not the impudence to deny it: but not by protestants upon a protestant king. As if he deserved the name of a protestant, that, in a letter to the pope, could give him the title of most holy father; that was always more favourable to the papists than to those of his own profession. And being such, he is not the first of his own family, that has been put to death by protestants. Was not his grandmother deposed and banished, and at last beheaded by protestants? And were not her own countrymen, that were protestants too, well enough pleased with it? Nay, if I should say they were parties to it, I should not lie. But there being so few protestant kings, it is no great wonder, if it never happened that one of them has been put to death. But that it is lawful to depose a tyrant, and to punish him according to his deserts; nay, that this is the opinion of very eminent divines, and of such as have been most instrumental in the late reformation, do you deny it if you dare.

You confess, that many kings have come to an unnatural death; some by the sword, some poisoned, some strangled, and some in a dungeon; but for a king to be arraigned in a court of judicature, to be put to plead for his life, to have sentence of death pronounced against him, and that sentence executed; this you think a more lamentable instance than all the rest, and make it a prodigious piece of impiety. Tell me, thou superlative fool, whether it be not more just, more agreeable to the rules of humanity, and the laws of all human societies, to bring a criminal, be his offence what it will, before a court of justice, to give him leave to speak for himself; and, if the law condemn him, then to put him to death as he has deserved, so as he may have time to repent or to recollect himself; than presently, as soon as ever he is taken, to butcher him without more ado? Do you think there is a malefactor in the world, that if he might have his choice, would not choose to be thus dealt withal? And if this sort of proceeding against a private person be accounted the fairer of the two, why should it not be counted so against a prince? Nay, why should we not think, that himself liked it better? You would have had him killed privately, and none to have seen it, either that future ages might have lost the advantage of so good an example; or that they that did this glorious action, might seem to have avoided the light, and to have acted contrary to law and justice. You aggravate the matter by telling us, that it was not done in an uproar, or brought about by any faction amongst great men, or in the heat of a rebellion, either of the people, or the soldiers: that there was no hatred, no fear, no ambition, no blind precipitate rashness in the case; but that it was long consulted on, and done with deliberation. You did well in leaving off being an* advocate, and turn grammarian, who from the accidents and circumstances of a thing, which in themselves considered sway neither one way nor other, argue in dispraise of it before you have proved the thing itself to be either good or bad. See how open you lie: if the action you are discoursing of be commendable and praiseworthy, they that did it deserve the greater honour, in that they were prepossessed with no passions, but did what they did for virtue’s sake. If there were great difficulty in the enterprise, they did well in not going about it rashly but upon advice and consideration. Though for my own part, when I call to mind with how unexpected an importunity and fervency of mind, and with how unanimous a consent, the whole army, and a great part of the people from almost every county in the kingdom, cried out with one voice for justice against the king, as being the sole author of all their calamities: I cannot but think, that these things were brought about by a divine impulse. Whatever the matter was, whether we consider the magistrates, or the body of the people, no men ever undertook with more courage, and, which our adversaries themselves confess, in a more sedate temper of mind, so brave an action, an action that might have become those famous heroes, of whom we read in former ages; an action, by which they ennobled not only laws, and their execution, which seem for the future equally restored to high and low against one another; but even justice, and to have rendered it, after so signal a judgment, more illustrious and greater than in its own self.

We are now come to an end of the 3d page of the first book, and have not the bare narrative he promised us yet. He complains that our principles are, that a king, whose government is burdensome and odious, may lawfully be deposed: and “by this doctrine,” says he, “if they had had a king a thousand times better than they had, they would not have spared his life.” Observe the man’s subtle way of arguing. For I would willingly be informed what consequence there is in this, unless he allows, that a king’s government may be burdensome and odious, who is a thousand times better than our king was. So that now he has brought things to this pass, to make the king that he defends a thousand times worse than some whose government notwithstanding is burdensome and odious, that is, it may be, the most monstrous tyrant that ever reigned. I wish ye joy, O ye kings, of so able a defender! Now the narrative begins. “They put him to several sorts of torments.” Give an instance. “They removed him from prison to prison;” and so they might lawfully do; for having been a tyrant, he became an open enemy, and was taken in war. “Often changing his keepers.” Lest they themselves should change. “Sometimes they gave him hopes of liberty; nay, and sometimes even of restoring him to his crown, upon articles of agreement.” It seems then the taking away his life was not done upon so much premeditation, as he talked of before; and that we did not lay hold on all opportunities and means, that offered themselves, to renounce our king. Those things that in the beginning of the war we demanded of him, when he had almost brought us under, which things if they were denied us, we could enjoy no liberty, nor live in any safety; those very things we petitioned him for when he was our prisoner, in a humble, submissive way, not once, nor twice, but thrice, and oftener, and were as often denied. When we had now lost all hopes of the king’s complying with us, then was that noble order of parliament made, that from that time forward, there should no articles be sent to the king; so that we left off applying ourselves to him, not from the time that he began to be a tyrant, but from the time that we found him incurable. But afterward some parliament-men set upon a new project, and meeting with a convenient opportunity to put it in practice, pass a vote to send further proposals once more to the king. Whose wickedness and folly nearest resembles that of the Roman senate, who contrary to the opinion of M. Tullius, and all honest men, voted to send embassadors to M. Antony; and the event had been the same, but that it pleased God Almighty, in his providence, to order it otherwise, and to assert our liberty, though he suffered them to be enslaved: for though the king did not agree to any thing that might conduce to a firm peace, and settlement of things, more than he had before, they go and vote themselves satisfied. Then the sounder part of the house finding themselves and the commonwealth betrayed, implore the aid of that valiant and always faithful army to the commonwealth. Upon which occasion I can observe only this, which yet I am loth to utter; to wit, that our soldiers understood themselves better than our senators, and that they saved the commonwealth by their arms, when the other by their votes had almost ruined it. Then he relates a great many things in a doleful, lamentable strain; but he does it so senselessly, that he seems rather to beg of his readers, that they would be sorrowful, than to stir up any such passion in them. It grieves him “to think that the king should undergo a capital punishment, after such a manner as no other king ever had done.” Though he had often told us before, that there never was a king that underwent a capital punishment at all. Do you use to compare ways and manners, ye coxcomb, when you have no things nor actions to compare with one another? “He suffered death,” says he, “as a robber, as a murderer, as a parricide, as a traitor, as a tyrant.” Is this defending the king? Or is it not rather giving a more severe sentence against him, than that that we gave? How came you so all on a sudden to be of our mind? He complains “that executioners in vizards [personati carnifices] cut off the king’s head.” What shall we do with this fellow? He told us before, of “a murder committed on one in the disguise of a king [in personâ regis]:” now he says, it was done in the disguise of an executioner. It were to no purpose, to take particular notice of every silly thing he says. He tells stories of “boxes on the ear, and kicks, that,” he says, “were given the king by common soldiers, and that it was four shillings apiece to see his dead body.” These, and such like stories, which partly are false, and partly impertinent, betray the ignorance and childishness of our poor scholar; but are far from making any reader ever a whit the sadder. In good faith his son Charles had done better to have hired some ballad-singer, to have bewailed his father’s misfortunes, than this doleful, shall I call him, or rather most ridiculous orator, who is so dry and insipid, that there is not the least spirit in any thing he says.

Now the narrative is done, and it is hard to say what he does next, he runs on so sordidly and irregular. Now he is angry, then he wonders; he neither cares what he talks, nor how; repeats the same things ten times over, that could not but look ill, though he had said them but once. And I persuade myself, the extemporary rhymes of some antic juck-pudding may deserve printing better; so far am I from thinking aught he says worthy of a serious answer. I pass by his styling the king a “protector of religion.” who chose to make war upon the church, rather than part with those church-tyrants, and enemies of all religion, the bishops; and how is it possible, that he should “maintain religion in its purity,” that was himself a slave to those impure traditions and ceremonies of theirs? And for our “sectaries, whose sacrilegious meetings,” you say, “have public allowance;” instance in any of their principles, the profession of which is not openly allowed of, and countenanced in Holland. But in the mean time, there is not a more sacrilegious wretch in nature than yourself, that always took liberty to speak ill of all sorts of people. “They could not wound the commonwealth more dangerously, than by taking off its master.” Learn, ye abject, homeborn slave; unless ye take away the master, ye destroy the commonwealth. That that has a master, is one man’s property. The word master denotes a private, not a public relation. “They persecute most unjustly those ministers, that abhorred this action of theirs.” Lest you should not know what ministers he means, I will tell you in a few words what manner of men they were; they were those very men, that by their writings and sermons justified taking up arms against the king, and stirred the people up to it: that daily cursed, as Deborah did Meroz, all such as would not furnish the parliament either with arms, or men, or money. That taught the people out of their pulpits, that they were not about to fight against a king, but a greater tyrant than either Saul or Ahab ever were; nay, more a Nero than Nero himself. As soon as the bishops, and those clergymen whom they daily inveighed against, and branded with the odious names of pluralists and nonresidents, were taken out of their way, they presently jump, some into two, some into three of their best benefices; being now warm themselves, they soon unworthily neglected their charge. Their covetousness brake through all restraints of modesty and religion, and themselves now labour under the same infamy, that they had loaded their predecessors with; and because their covetousness is not yet satisfied, and their ambition has accustomed them to raise tumults, and be enemies to peace, they cannot rest at quiet yet, but preach up sedition against the magistracy, as it is now established, as they had formerly done against the king. They now tell the people, that he was cruelly murdered; upon whom themselves having heaped all their curses, had devoted him to destruction, whom they had delivered up as it were to the parliament, to be despoiled of his royalty, and pursued with a holy war. They now complain, that the sectaries are not extirpated; which is a most absurd thing to expect the magistrates should be able to do, who never yet were able, do what they could, to extirpate avarice and ambition, those two most pernicious heresies, and more destructive to the church than all the rest, out of the very order and tribe of the ministers themselves.

For the sects which they inveigh against, I confess there are such amongst us, but they are obscure, and make no noise in the world: the sects that they are of, are public and notorious, and much more dangerous to the church of God. Simon Magus and Diotrephes were the ringleaders of them. Yet are we so far from persecuting these men, though they are pestilent enough, that though we know them to be ill-affected to the government, and desirous of and endeavouring to work a change, we allow them but too much liberty. You, that are both a Frenchman and a vagabond, seem displeased that “the English, more fierce and cruel than their own mastiffs,” as your barking eloquence has it, “have no regard to the lawful successor and heir of the crown: take no care of the king’s youngest son, nor of the queen of Bohemia.” I will make ye no answer; you shall answer yourself. “When the frame of a government is changed from a monarchy to any other, the new modellers have no regard to succession:” the application is easy; it is in your book De primatu Papæ. “The great change throughout three kingdoms,” you say, “was brought about by a small number of men in one of them.” If this were true, that small number of men would have deserved to have dominion over the rest; valiant men over fainthearted cowards. “These are they that presumptuously took upon them to change,” antiquum regni regimen, in alium qui a pluribus tyrannis teneatur. It is well for them that you cannot find fault with them, without committing a barbarous solecism; you shame all grammarians. “The English will never be able to wash out this stain.” Nay, you, though a blot and a stain to all learned men, were never yet able to stain the renown and everlasting glory of the English nation, that with so great a resolution, as we hardly find the like recorded in any history, having struggled with, and overcome, not only their enemies in the field, but the superstitious persuasions of the common people, have purchased to themselves in general amongst all posterity the name of deliverers: the body of the people having undertook and performed an enterprise, which in other nations is thought to proceed only from a magnanimity that is peculiar to heroes. What “the protestants and primitive Christians” have done, or would do upon such an occasion, I will tell ye hereafter, when we come to debate the merits of the cause: in discoursing it before, I should be guilty of your fault, who outdo the most impertinent talkers in nature.

You wonder how we shall be able to answer the Jesuits. Meddle with your own matters, you runagate, and be ashamed of your actions, since the church is ashamed of you; who, though but of late you set yourself so fiercely and with so much ostentation against the pope’s supremacy and episcopal government, are now become yourself a very creature of the bishops.

You confess, that “some protestants, whom you do not name, have asserted it lawful to depose a tyrant:” but though you do not think fit to name them, I will, because you say “they are far worse than the very Jesuits themselves;” they are no other than Luther, and Zuinglius, and Calvin, and Bucer, and Pareus, and many others. “But then,” you say, “they refer it to the judgment of learned and wise men, who shall be accounted a tyrant. But what for men were these? Were they wise men, were they men of learning? Were they anywise remarkable, either for virtue or nobility?” You may well allow a people, that has felt the heavy yoke of slavery to be wise, and learned, and noble enough, to know what is fit to be done to the tyrant that has oppressed them; though they neither consult with foreigners nor grammarians. But that this man was a tyrant, not only the parliaments of England and Scotland have declared by their actions and express words; but almost all the people of both nations assented to it, till such time as by the tricks and artifices of the bishops they were divided into two factions: and what if it has pleased God to choose such men, to execute his vengeance upon the greatest potentates on earth, as he chose to be made partakers of the benefit of the gospel? “Not many wise, not many learned, not many powerful, not many noble: that by those that are not, he might bring to nought those that are; and that no flesh might glory in his sight.” And who are you, that babble to the contrary? dare you affect the reputation of a learned man? I confess you are pretty well versed in phrase-books, and lexicons, and glossaries; insomuch that you seem to have spent your time in nothing else. But you do not make appear, that you have read any good authors with so much judgment as to have benefited by them. Other copies, and various lections, and words omitted, and corruptions of texts, and the like, these you are full of; but no footstep of any solid learning appears in all you have writ: or do ye think yourself a wise man, that quarrel and contend about the meanest trifles that may be? That being altogether ignorant in astronomy and physic, yet are always railing at the professors of both, whom all men credit in what things belong to their own sciences, that would be ready to curse them to the pit of hell, that should offer to deprive you of the vain glory of having corrected or supplied the least word or letter in any copy you have criticised upon. And yet you are mad to hear yourself called a grammarian. In certain trifling discourses of yours, you call Dr. Hammond knave in plain terms, who was one of this king’s chaplains, and one that he valued above all the rest, for no other reason but because he had called you a grammarian. And I do not question, but you would have been as ready to have thrown the same reproach upon the king himself, if you had heard that he had approved his chaplain’s judgment of you. Take notice now, how much I (who am but one of those many English, that you have the impudence to call madmen, and unlearned, and ignoble, and wicked) slight and despise you, (for that the English nation in general should take any notice in public of such a worm as you are, would be an infinite undervaluing of themselves,) who, though one should turn you topsyturvy, and inside out, are but a grammarian: nay, as if you had made a foolisher wish than Midas did, whatever you meddle with, except when you make solecisms, is grammar still. Whosoever therefore he be, though from among the dregs of that common people that you are so keen upon, (for as for those men of eminency amongst us, whose great actions evidenced to all men their nobility, and virtue, and conduct, I will not disgrace them so much, as to compare you to them, or them to you,) but whosoever, I say, among the dregs of that common people, has but sucked in this principle, that he was not born for his prince, but for God and his country; he deserves the reputation of a learned, and an honest, and a wise man more, and is of greater use in the world, than yourself. For such a one is learned without letters; you have letters, but no learning, that understand so many languages, turn over so many volumes, and yet are but asleep when all is done.

CHAPTER II.

The argument that Salmasius, toward the conclusion of his first chapter, urged as irrefragable, to wit, that it was really so, because all men unanimously agreed in it; that very argument, than which, as he applied it, there is nothing more false, I, that am now about to discourse of the right of kings, may turn upon himself with a great deal of truth. For, whereas he defines “a king” (if that may be said to be defined which he makes infinite) “to be a person in whom the supreme power of the kingdom resides, who is answerable to God alone, who may do whatsoever pleases him, who is bound by no law:” I will undertake to demonstrate, not by mine, but by his own reasons and authorities, that there never was a nation or people of any account (for to ransack all the uncivilized parts of the world were to no purpose) that ever allowed this to be their king’s right, or put such exorbitant power into his hand, as “that he should not be bound by any law that he might do what he would, that he should judge all, but be judged of none.” Nor can I persuade myself, that there ever was any one person besides Salmasius of so slavish a spirit, as to assert the outrageous enormities of tyrants to be the rights of kings. Those amongst us that were the greatest royalists, always abhorred this sordid opinion: and Salmasius himself, as appears by some other writings of his before he was bribed, was quite of another mind. Insomuch, that what he here gives out, does not look like the dictates of a free subject under a free government, much less in so famous a commonwealth as that of Holland, and the most eminent university there: but seems to have been penned by some despicable slave, that lay rotting in a prison, or a dungeon. If whatever a king has a mind to do, the right of kings will bear him out in, (which was a lesson that the bloody tyrant Antoninus Caracalla, though his step-mother Julia preached it to him, and endeavoured to inure him to the practice of it, by making him commit incest with herself, yet could hardly suck in,) then there neither is, nor ever was, that king, that deserved the name of a tyrant. They may safely violate all the laws of God and man: their very being kings keeps them innocent. What crime was ever any of them guilty of? They did but make use of their own right upon their own vassals. No king can commit such horrible cruelties and outrages, as will not be within this right of kings. So that there is no pretence left for any complaints or expostulations with any of them. And dare you assert, that “this right of kings,” as you call it, “is grounded upon the law of nations, or rather upon that of nature,” you brute beast? for you deserve not the name of a man, that are so cruel and unjust towards all those of your own kind; that endeavour, as much as in your lies, so to bear down and vilify the whole race of mankind, that were made after the image of God, as to assert and maintain, that those cruel and unmerciful taskmasters, that through the superstitious whimsies, or sloth, or treachery of some persons, get into the chair, are provided and appointed by nature herself, that mild and gentle mother of us all, to be the governors of those nations they enslave. By which pestilent doctrine of yours, having rendered them more fierce and untractable, you not only enable them to make havoc of, and trample under foot, their miserable subjects; but endeavour to arm them for that very purpose with the law of nature, the right of kings, and the very constitutions of government, than which nothing can be more impious or ridiculous. By my consent, as Dionysius formerly of a tyrant became a schoolmaster, so you of a grammarian should become a tyrant; not that you may have that regal license of doing other people harm, but a fair opportunity of perishing miserably yourself: that, as Tiberius complained, when he had confined himself to the island Capreæ, you may be reduced into such a condition, as to be sensible that you perish daily. But let us look a little more narrowly into this right of kings that you talk of. “This was the sense of the eastern, and of the western part of the world.” I shall not answer you with what Aristotle and Cicero (who are both as credible authors as any we have) tell us, viz. That the people of Asia easily submit to slavery, but the Syrians and the Jews are even born to it from the womb. I confess there are but few, and those men of great wisdom and courage, that are either desirous of liberty, or capable of using it. The greatest part of the world choose to live under masters; but yet they would have them just ones. As for such as are unjust and tyrannical, neither was God ever so much an enemy to mankind, as to enjoin a necessity of submitting to them; nor was there ever any people so destitute of all sense, and sunk into such a depth of despair, as to impose so cruel a law upon themselves and their posterity. First, you produce “the words of King Solomon in his Ecclesiastes.” And we are as willing to appeal to the Scripture as you. As for Solomon’s authority, we will consider that hereafter, when perhaps we shall be better able to understand it. First, let us hear God himself speak, Deut. xvii. 14. “When thou art come into the land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as the nations that are round about me.” Which passage I could wish all men would seriously consider: for hence it appears by the testimony of God himself; first, that all nations are at liberty to erect what form of government they will amongst themselves, and to change it when and into what they will. This God affirms in express terms concerning the Hebrew nation; and it does not appear but that other nations are, as to this respect, in the same condition. Another remark that this place yields us, is, that a commonwealth is a more perfect form of government than a monarchy, and more suitable to the condition of mankind, and in the opinion of God himself better for his own people; for himself appointed it, and could hardly be prevailed withal a great while after, and at their own importunate desire, to let them change it into a monarchy. But to make it appear, that he gave them their choice to be governed by a single person, or by more, so they were justly governed, in case they should in time to come resolve upon a king, he prescribes laws for this king of theirs to observe, whereby he was forbidden to multiply to himself horses and wives, or to heap up riches: whence he might easily infer, that no power was put into his hands over others, but according to law, since even those actions of his life, which related only to himself, were under a law. He was commanded therefore to transcribe with his own hand all the precepts of the law, and having writ them out, to observe and keep them, that his mind might not be lifted up above his brethren. It is evident from hence, that as well the prince as the people was bound by the law of Moses. To this purpose Josephus writes, a proper and able interpreter of the laws of his own country, who was admirably well versed in the Jewish policy, and infinitely preferable to a thousand obscure ignorant rabbins: he has it thus in the fourth book of his Antiquities, Ἁριςοϰρατία μὲν οὖν ϰράτιςον, &c. “An Aristocracy is the best form of government; wherefore do not you endeavour to settle any other; it is enough for you, that God presides over ye, but if you will have a king, let him guide himself by the law of God, rather than by his own wisdom; and lay a restraint upon him, if he offer at more power than the state of your affairs will allow of.” Thus he expresses himself upon this place in Deuteronomy. Another Jewish author, Philo Judæus, who was Josephus’s contemporary, a very studious man in the law of Moses, upon which he wrote a large commentary: when in his book concerning the creation of the king, he interprets this chapter of Deuteronomy, he sets a king loose from the law no otherwise than as an enemy may be said to be so: “They,” says he, “that to the prejudice and destruction of the people acquire great power to themselves, deserve not the name of kings, but that of enemies: for their actions are the same with those of an irreconcilable enemy. Nay, they, that under a pretence of government are injurious, are worse than open enemies. We may fence ourselves against the latter; but the malice of the former is so much the more pestilent, because it is not always easy to be discovered.” But when it is discovered, why should they not be dealt with as enemies? The same author in his second book, Allegoriar. Legis, “A king,” says he, “and a tyrant, are contraries.” And a little after, “A king ought not only to command, but also to obey.” All this is very true, you will say, a king ought to observe the laws, as well as any other man. But what if he will not, what law is there to punish him? I answer, the same law that there is to punish other men; for I find no exceptions. There is no express law to punish the priests, or any other inferior magistrates, who all of them, if this opinion of the exemption of kings from the penalties of the law would hold, might, by the same reason claim impunity, what guilt soever they contract, because there is no positive law for their punishment; and yet I suppose none of them ever challenged such a prerogative, nor would it ever be allowed them, if they should.

Hitherto we have learned from the very text of God’s own law, that a king ought to obey the laws, and not lift himself up above his brethren. Let us now consider whether Solomon preached up any other doctrine, chap. viii. ver. 2, “I counsel thee to keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God. Be not hasty to go out of his sight; stand not in an evil thing; for he doth whatsoever pleaseth him. Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say unto him, what dost thou?” It is well enough known, that here the preacher directs not his precepts to the Sanhedrim, or to a parliament, but to private persons; and such he commands to “keep the king’s commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God.” But as they swear allegiance to kings, do not kings likewise swear to obey and maintain the laws of God, and those of their own country? So the Reubenites and Gadites promise obedience to Joshua, Josh. i. 17, “According as we hearkened unto Moses in all things, so will we hearken unto thee; only the Lord thy God be with thee, as he was with Moses.” Here is an express condition. Hear the preacher else, ch. ix. ver. 17, “The words of wise men are heard in quiet, more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools.” The next caution that Solomon gives us, is, “Be not hasty to go out of his sight; stand not in an evil thing; for he doth whatsoever pleaseth him.” That is, he does what he will to malefactors, whom the law authorizes him to punish, and against whom he may proceed with mercy or severity, as he sees occasion. Here is nothing like tyranny; nothing that a good man needs be afraid of. “Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say to him, What dost thou?” And yet we read of one, that not only said to a king, “What dost thou?” but told him, “Thou hast done foolishly.” But Samuel, you may say, was an extraordinary person. I answer you with your own words, which follow in the forty-ninth page of your book, “What was there extraordinary,” say you, “in Saul or David?” And so say I, what was there in Samuel extraordinary? He was a prophet, you will say; so are they that now follow his example; for they act according to the will of God, either his revealed or his sacred will, which yourself grant in your 50th page. The preacher therefore in this place prudently advises private persons not to contend with princes; for it is even dangerous to contend with any man, that is either rich or powerful. But what then? must therefore the nobility of a nation, and all the inferior magistrates, and the whole body of the people, not dare to mutter when a king raves and acts like a madman? Must they not oppose a foolish, wicked, and outrageous tyrant, that perhaps seeks the destruction of all good men? Must they not endeavour to prevent his turning all divine and human things upside down? Must they suffer him to massacre his people, burn their cities, and commit such outrages upon them daily; and finally, to have perfect liberty to do what he lists without control?

• O de Cappadocis eques catastris!
• Thou slavish knight of Cappadocia!

Whom all free people, if you can have the confidence hereafter to set your foot within a free country, ought to cast out from amongst them, and send to some remote parts of the world, as a prodigy of dire portent; or to condemn to some perpetual drudgery, as one devoted to slavery, solemnly obliging themselves, if they ever let you go, to undergo a worse slavery under some cruel, silly tyrant: no man living can either devise himself, or borrow from any other, expressions so full of cruelty and contempt, as may not justly be applied to you. But go on. “When the Israelites asked a king of God, they said, they would set up a king that should have the same rule and dominion over them, that the kings of their neighbour countries exercised over their subjects. But the kings of the East we know had an unlimited power,” as Virgil testifies,

• “———Regem non sic Ægyptus et ingens
• Lydia, nec populi Parthorum, et Medus Hydaspes
• Observant.”———

• “No Eastern nation ever did adore
• The majesty of sovereign princes more.”

First, what is that to us, what sort of kings the Israelites desired? Especially since God was angry with them, not only for desiring such a king as other nations had, and not such a king as his own law describes, but barely for desiring a king at all? Nor is it credible, that they should desire an unjust king, and one that should be out of the reach of all laws, who could not bear the government of Samuel’s sons, though under the power of laws; but from their covetousness sought refuge in a king. And lastly, the verse that you quote out of Virgil does not prove, that the kings of the East had an absolute unlimited power; for those bees, that he there speaks of, and who reverence their kings, he says, more than the Egyptians or Medes do theirs, by the authority of the same poet:

• “——Magnis agitant sub legibus ævum.”
• “Live under certain fundamental laws.”

They do not live under a king then, that is tied to no law. But now I will let you see how little reason you have to think I bear you an ill-will. Most people think you a knave; but I will make it appear, that you have only put on a knave’s vizor for the present. In your introduction to your discourse of the pope’s supremacy, you say, that some divines in the council of Trent made use of the government, that is said to be amongst bees, to prove the pope’s supremacy. This fancy you borrow from them, and urge it here with the same malice that they did there. Now that very same answer that you gave them, whilst you were an honest man, now that you are become a knave, you shall give yourself and pull off with your own hand that vizor you have now put on: “The bees,” say you, “are a state, and so natural philosophers call them; they have a king, but a harmless one; he is a leader, or captain, rather than a king; he never beats, nor pulls, nor kills his subject bees.” No wonder they are so observant of him then: but in good faith, you had but ill luck to meddle with these bees; for though they are bees of Trent, they show you to be a drone. Aristotle, a most exact writer of politics, affirms that the Asiatic monarchy, which yet himself calls barbarous, was according to law, Politic. 3. And whereas he reckons up five several sorts of monarchies, four of those five he makes governments according to laws, and with the consent of the people; and yet he calls them tyrannical forms of government, because they lodge so much power in one man’s hand. But the kingdom of the Lacedemonians, he says, is most properly a kingdom, because there all power is not in the king.

The fifth sort of monarchy, which he calls παμβασιλεία that is, where the king is all in all: and to which he refers that that you call the right of kings, which is a liberty to do what they list; he neither tells us when nor where any such form of government ever obtained. Nor seems he to have mentioned it for any other purpose, than to show how unjust, absurd, and tyrannical a government it is. You say, that when Samuel would deter the people from choosing a king, he propounded to them this right of kings. But whence had Samuel it? Had he it from the written law of God? That cannot be. We have observed already, that the Scriptures afford us a quite other scheme of sovereignty. Had Samuel it then immediately from God himself by revelation? That is not likely neither; for God dislikes it, discommends it, finds fault with it: so that Samuel does not expound to the people any right of kings appointed by God; but a corrupt and depraved manner of governing, taken up by the pride and ambition of princes. He tells not the people what their kings ought to do, but what they would do. He told them the manner of their king, as before he told us the manner of the priests, the sons of Eli; for he uses the same word in both places (which you in the thirty-third page of your book, by a Hebrew solecism too, call םׁשפח.) That manner of theirs was wicked, and odious, and tyrannical: it was no right, but great wrong. The fathers have commented upon this place too: I will instance in one, that may stand for a great many; and that is Sulpitius Severus, a contemporary and intimate friend of St. Jerome, and, in St. Augustin’s opinion, a man of great wisdom and learning. He tells us in his sacred history, that Samuel in that place acquaints the people with the imperious rule of kings, and how they used to lord it over their subjects. Certainly it cannot be the right of kings to domineer and be imperious. But according to Sallust, that lawful power and authority that kings were entrusted with, for the preservation of the public liberty, and the good of the commonwealth, quickly degenerated into pride and tyranny: and this is the sense of all orthodox divines, and of all lawyers, upon that place of Samuel. And you might have learned from Sichardus, that most of the rabbins too were of the same mind; at least, not any one of them ever asserted, that the absolute inherent right of kings is there discoursed of. Yourself in your fifth chapter, page 106, complain, that “not only Clemens Alexandrinus, but all other expositors mistake themselves upon this text:” and you, I will warrant ye, are the only man that have had the good luck to hit the mark. Now, what a peice of folly and impudence is this in you to maintain, in opposition to all orthodox expositors, that those very actions, which God so much condemns, are the right of kings, and to pretend law for them! Though yourself confess, that that right is very often exercised in committing outrages, being injurious, contumelious, and the like. Was any man ever to that degree sui juris, so much his own master, as that he might lawfully prey upon mankind, bear down all that stood in his way, and turn all things upside down? Did the Romans ever maintain, as you say they did, that any man might do these things suo jure, by virtue of some inherent right in himself? Sallust indeed makes C. Memmius, a tribune of the people, in an invective speech of his against the pride of the nobility, and their escaping unpunished, howsoever they misbehaved themselves, to use these words, viz., “To do whatever one has a mind to, without fear of punishment, is to be a king.” This saying you catched hold of, thinking it would make for your purpose; but consider it a little better, and you will find yourself deceived. Does he in that place assert the right of kings? or does he not blame the common people, and chide them for their sloth, in suffering their nobility to lord it over them, as if they were out of the reach of all law, and in submitting again to that kingly tyranny, which, together with their kings themselves, their ancestors had lawfully and justly rejected and banished from amongst them? If you had consulted Tully, you would have understood both Sallust and Samuel better. In his oration pro C. Rabirio, “There is none of us ignorant,” says he, “of the manner of kings. These are their lordly dictates: mind what I say, and do accordingly.” Many passages to this purpose he quotes out of poets, and calls them not the right, but the custom or manner of kings; and he says, we ought to read and consider them, not only for curiosity’s sake, but that we may learn to beware of them, and avoid them. You perceive how miserably you are come off with Sallust, who though he be as much an enemy to tyranny as any other author whatsoever, you thought would have patronized this tyrannical right that you are establishing. Take my word for it, the right of kings seems to be tottering, and even to further its own ruin, by relying upon such weak props for its support; and by endeavouring to maintain itself by such examples and authorities, as would hasten its downfall, if it were further off than it is.

“The extremity of right or law,” you say, “is the height of injury, Summum jus summa injuria; this saying is verified most properly in kings, who, when they go to the utmost of their right, fall into these courses, in which Samuel makes the rights of kings to consist.” And it is a miserable right, which, when you have said all you can for, you can no otherwise defend, than by confessing, that it is the greatest injury that may be. The extremity of right or law is said to be, when a man ties himself up to niceties, dwells upon letters and syllables, and in the mean time neglects the intent and equity of the law; or when a written law is cunningly and maliciously interpreted; this Cicero makes to have been the rise of that common saying. But since it is certain that all right flows from the fountain of justice, so that nothing can possibly be any man’s right that is not just; it is a most wicked thing in you to affirm, that for a king to be unjust, rapacious, tyrannical, and as ill as the worst of them ever was, is according to the right of kings; and to tell us that a holy prophet would have persuaded the people to such a senseless thing. For whether written or unwritten, whether extreme or remiss, what right can any man have to be injurious? Which, lest you should confess to be true of other men, but not of kings, I have one man’s authority to object to you, who, I think, was a king likewise, and professes that that right of kings, that you speak of, is odious both to God and himself: it is in the 94th psalm, “Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, that frameth mischief by a law?” Be not therefore so injurious to God, as to ascribe this doctrine to him, viz. that all manner of wicked and flagitious actions are but the right of kings; since himself tells us, that he abhors all fellowship with wicked princes for this very reason, because, under pretence of sovereignty, they create misery and vexation to their subjects. Neither bring up a false accusation against a prophet of God; for by making him to teach us in this place what the right of kings is, you do not produce the right Samuel, but such another empty shadow as was raised by the witch of Endor. Though for my own part, I verily believe that that infernal Samuel would not have been so great a liar, but that he would have confessed, that what you call the right of kings, is tyranny. We read indeed of impieties countenanced by law, Jus datum sceleri: you yourself confess, that they are bad kings that have made use of this boundless license of theirs to do every thing. Now, this right that you have introduced for the destruction of mankind, not proceeding from God, as I have proved it does not, must needs come from the devil; and that it does really so, will appear more clearly hereafter. “By virtue of this liberty, say you, princes may if they will.” And for this, you pretend to have Cicero’s authority. I am always willing to mention your authorities, for it generally happens, that the very authors you quote them out of, give you an answer themselves. Hear else what Cicero says in his 4th Philippic, “What cause of war can be more just and warrantable than to avoid slavery? For though a people may have the good fortune to live under a gentle master, yet those are in a miserable condition, whose prince may tyrannize over them if he will.” May, that is, can; has power enough so to do. If he meant it of his right, he would contradict himself, and make that an unjust cause of war, which himself had affirmed with the same breath to be a most just one. It is not therefore the right of all kings that you describe, but the injuriousness, and force, and violence of some. Then you tell us what private men may do. “A private man,” say you, “may lie, may be ungrateful:” and so may kings, but what then? May they therefore plunder, murder, ravish, without control? It is equally prejudicial and destructive to the commonwealth, whether it be their own prince, or a robber, or a foreign enemy, that spoils, massacres, and enslaves them. And questionless, being both alike enemies of human society, the one, as well as the other, may lawfully be opposed and punished; and their own prince the rather, because he, though raised to that dignity by the honours that his people have conferred upon him, and being bound by his oath to defend the public safety, betrays it notwithstanding all. At last you grant, that “Moses prescribes laws, according to which the king that the people of Israel should choose, ought to govern, though different from this right that Samuel proposes;” which words contain a double contradiction to what you have said before. For whereas you had affirmed, that a king was bound by no law, here you confess he is. And you set up two contrary rights, one described by Moses, and another by Samuel, which is absurd. “But,” says the prophet, “you shall be servants to your king.” Though I should grant that the Israelites were really so, it would not presently follow, that it was the right of their kings to have them so; but that by the usurpation and injustice of most of them, they were reduced to that condition. For the prophet had foretold them, that that importunate petition of theirs would bring a punishment from God upon them; not because it would be their king’s right so to harass them, but because they themselves had deserved it should be so. If kings are out of the reach of the law, so as that they may do what they list, they are more absolute than any masters, and their subjects in a more despical condition than the worst of slaves The law of God provided some redress from them, though of another nation, if their masters were cruel and unreasonable towards them. And can we imagine, that the whole body of the people of a free nation, though oppressed and tyrannized over, and preyed upon, should be left remediless? That they had no law to protect them, no sanctuary to betake themselves to? Can we think, that they were delivered from the bondage they were under to the Egyptian kings, to be reduced into a worse to one of their own brethren? All which being neither agreeable to the law of God, nor to common sense, nothing can be more evident, than that the prophet declares to the people the manner, and not the right of kings; nor the manner of all kings, but of most. Then you come to the rabbins, and quote two of them, but you have as bad luck with them here, as you had before. For it is plain, that that other chapter that rabbi Joses speaks of, and which contains, he says, the right of kings, is that in Deuteronomy, and not in Samuel. For rabbi Judas says very truly, and against you, that that discourse of Samuel’s was intended only to frighten the people. It is a most pernicious doctrine, to maintain that to be any one’s right, which in itself is flat injustice, unless you have a mind to speak by contraries. And that Samuel intended to affrighten them, appears by the 18th verse, “And ye shall cry out in that day, because of your king, which ye shall have chosen you, and I will not hear you in that day, saith the Lord.” That was to be their punishment for their obstinacy in persisting to desire a king, against the mind and will of God; and yet they are not forbidden here either to pray against him, or to endeavour to rid themselves of him. For if they might lawfully pray to God against him, without doubt they might use all lawful means for their own deliverance. For what man living, when he finds himself in any calamity, betakes himself to God, so as to neglect his own duty, in order to a redress, and rely upon his lazy prayers only? But be it how it will, what is all this to the right of kings, or of the English people? who neither asked a king against the will of God, nor had one appointed us by God, but by the right that all nations have to appoint their own governors, appointed a king over us by laws of our own, neither in obedience to, nor against, any command of God? And this being the case, for aught I see, we have done well in deposing our king, and are to be commended for it, since the Israelites sinned in asking one. And this the event has made appear; for we, when we had a king, prayed to God against him, and he heard us, and delivered us: but the Jews (who not being under a kingly government, desired a king) he suffered to live in slavery under one, till, at last, after their return from the Babylonish captivity, they betook themselves to their former government again. Then you come to give us a display of your talmudical learning; but you have as ill success with that as you have had with all the rest. For, whilst you are endeavouring to prove that kings are not liable to any temporal judicature, you quote an authority out of the treatise of the Sanhedrim, “that the king neither is judged of others, nor does himself judge any.” Which is against the people’s own petition in Samuel; for they desired a king that might judge them. You labour in vain to salve this, by telling us, that it is to be understood of those kings that reigned after the Babylonish captivity. For then, what say ye to Maimonides? He makes this difference betwixt the kings of Israel and those of Juda; that the kings of the posterity of David judge, and are judged; but the kings of Israel do neither. You contradict and quarrel with yourself or your rabbins, and still do my work for me. This, say you, is not to be understood of the kings of Israel in their first institution; for in the 17th verse it is said, “you shall be his servants;” that is, he shall use you to it, not that he shall have any right to make you so. Or if you understand it of their king’s right, it is but a judgment of God upon them for asking a king; the effects of which they were sensible of under most of their kings, though not perhaps under all. But you need no antagonists, you are such a perpetual adversary to yourself. For you tell us now a story, as if you were arguing on my side, how that first Aristobulus, and after him Jannæus surnamed Alexander, did not receive that kingly right that they pretended to, from the Sanhedrim, that great treasury and oracle of the laws of that nation, but usurped it by degrees against the will of the senate. For whose sake, you say, that childish fable of the principal men of that assembly being struck dead by the angel Gabriel was first invented. And thus you confess, that this magnificent prerogative, upon which you seem mainly to rely, viz. “that kings are not to be judged by any upon earth, was grounded upon this worse than an old wife’s tale, that is, upon a rabbinical fable.” But that the Hebrew kings were liable to be called in question for their actions, and to be punished with stripes, if they were found faulty, Sichardus shows at large out of the writings of the rabbins, to which author you are indebted for all that you employ of that sort of learning, and yet you have the impudence to be thwarting with him. Nay, we read in Scripture, that Saul thought himself bound by a decree of his own making; and in obedience thereunto, that he cast lots with his son Jonathan which of them two should die. Uzzias likewise, when he was thrust out of the temple by the priests as a leper, submitted as every private person in such a case ought to do, and ceased to be a king. Suppose he should have refused to go out of the temple, and lay down the government, and live alone, and had resolved to assert that kingly right of not being subject to any law, do you think the priests, and the people of the Jews, would have suffered the temple to be defiled, the laws violated, and live themselves in danger of the infection? It seems there are laws against a leprous king, but none against a tyrant. Can any man possibly be so mad and foolish as to fancy, that the laws should so far provide for the people’s health, as though some noisome distemper should seize upon the king himself, yet to prevent the infection’s reaching them, and make no provision for the security of their lives and estates, and the very being of the whole state, against the tyranny of a cruel, unjust prince, which is incomparably the greater mischief of the two? “But,” say you, “there can be no precedent shown of any one king that has been arraigned in a court of justice, and condemned to die.” Sichardus answers that well enough. It is all one, says he, as if one should argue on this manner: The emperor of Germany never was summoned to appear before one of the prince electors: therefore, if the prince elector Palatine should impeach the emperor, he were not bound to plead to it; though it appears by the golden bull, that Charles the Fourth subjected himself and his successors to that cognizance and jurisdiction.

But no wonder if kings were indulged in their ambition, and their exorbitances passed by, when the times were so corrupt and depraved, that even private men, if they had either money or interest, might escape the law, though guilty of crimes of never so high a nature. That ἀνυπεύθυνον, that you speak of, that is to be wholly independent upon any other, and accountable to none upon earth, which you say is peculiar to the majesty of sovereign princes, Aristotle in the 4th book of his Pol. Ch. 10, calls a most tyrannical form of government, and not in the least to be endured by a free people. And that kings are not liable to be questioned for their actions, you prove by the testimony of a very worthy author, that barbarous tyrant Mark Antony; one of those that subverted the commonwealth of Rome: and yet he himself, when he undertook an expedition against the Parthians, summoned Herod before him, to answer to a charge of murder, and would have punished him, but that Herod bribed him. So that Antony’s asserting this prerogative royal, and your defence of King Charles, come both out of one and the same spring. “And it is very reasonable,” say you, “that it should be so; for kings derive their authority from God alone.” What kings are those, I pray that do so? For I deny, that there ever were any such kings in the world, that derived their authority from God alone. Saul, the first king of Israel, had never reigned, but that the people desired a king, even against the will of God; and though he was proclaimed king once at Mizpah, yet after that he lived a private life, and looked to his father’s cattle, till he was created so the second time by the people at Gilgal. And what think ye of David? Though he had been anointed once by God, he was not anointed a second time in Hebron by the tribe of Judah, and after that by all the people of Israel, and that after a mutual covenant betwixt him and them? 2 Sam. v. 1 Chron. xi. Now, a covenant lays an obligation upon kings, and restrains them within bounds. Solomon, you say, “succeeded him in the throne of the Lord, and was acceptable to all men:” 1 Chron. xxix. So that it is something to be well-pleasing in the eyes of the people. Jehoiadah the priest made Joash king, but first he made him and the people enter into a covenant to one another, 2 Kings xi. I confess that these kings, and all that reigned of David’s posterity, were appointed to the kingdom both by God and the people; but of all other kings, of what country soever, I affirm, that they are made so by the people only: nor can you make it appear, that they are appointed by God, any otherwise than as all other things, great and small, are said to be appointed by him, because nothing comes to pass without his providence. So that I allow the throne of David was in a peculiar manner called “the throne of the Lord:” whereas the thrones of other princes are no otherwise God’s than all other things in the world are his; which if you would, you might have learnt out of the same chapter, ver. 11, 12. “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, &c. for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine. Both riches and honour come of thee, and thou reignest over all.” And this is so often repeated, not to puff up kings, but to put them in mind, though they think themselves gods, that yet there is a God above them, to whom they owe whatever they are and have. And thus we easily understand what the poets, and the Essenes among the Jews, mean, when they tell us, that it is by God that kings reign, and that they are of Jupiter; for so all of us are of God, we are all his offspring. So that this universal right of Almighty God’s and the interest that he has in princes, and their thrones, and all that belongs to them, does not at all derogate from the people’s right; but that notwithstanding all this, all other kings, not particularly and by name appointed by God, owe their sovereignty to the people only, and consequently are accountable to them for the management of it. The truth of which doctrine, though the common people are apt to flatter their kings, yet they themselves acknowledge, whether good ones, as Sarpedon in Homer is described to have been; or bad ones as those tyrants in the lyrick poet:

• Γλαῦϰε, τίη δὴ νῶι τετιμήμισθα, μαλίςα, &c

• Glaucus, in Lycia we’re ador’d like gods:
• What makes ’twixt us and others so great odds?

He resolves the question himself: “Because, says he, we excel others in heroical virtues: Let us fight manfully then, says he, lest our countrymen tax us with sloth and cowardice.” In which words he intimates to us, both that kings derive their grandeur from the people, and that for their conduct and behaviour in war they are accountable to them. Bad kings indeed, though to cast some terror into people’s minds, and beget a reverence of themselves, they declare to the world, that God only is the author of kingly government; in their hearts and minds they reverence no other deity but that of fortune, according to that passage in Horace:

• Te Dacus asper, te profugi Scythæ,
• Regumque matres barbarorum, et
• Purpurei metuunt tyranni.

• Injurioso ne pede proruas
• Stantem columnam, neu populus frequens
• Ad arms oessantes, ad arma
• Concitet, imperiumque frangat.

• “All barb’rous people, and their princes too,
• All purple tyrants honour you;
• The very wand’ring Seythians do.

• “Support the pillar of the Roman state,
• Lest all men be involv’d in one man’s fate,
• Continue us in wealth and peace:
• Let wars and tumults ever cease.”

So that if it is by God that kings now-a-days reign, it is by God too that the people assert their own liberty; since all things are of him, and by him. I am sure the Scripture bears witness to both; that by him kings reign, and that by him they are cast down from their throne. And yet experience teaches us, that both these things are brought about by the people, oftener than by God. Be this right of kings, therefore, what it will, the right of the people is as much from God as it. And whenever any people, without some visible designation o