ment: neither did it argue, that he meant peace; knowing that what he granted for the present out of fear, he might as soon repeal by force, watching his time; and deprive them the fruit of those acts, if his own designs, wherein he put his trust, took effect.

Yet he complains, "that the tumults threatened to abuse all acts of grace, and turn them into wantonness." I would they had turned his wantonness into the grace of not abusing Scripture. Was this becoming such a saint as they would make him, to adulterate those sacred words from the grace of God to the acts of his own grace? Herod was eaten up of worms for suffering others to compare his voice to the voice of God; but the borrower of this phrase gives much more cause of jealousy, that he likened his own acts of grace to the acts of God's grace.

From profaneness he scarce comes off with perfect sense. "I was not then in a capacity to make war," therefore "I intended not." "I was not in a capacity," therefore "I could not have given my enemies greater advantage, than by so unprincely inconstancy to have scattered them by arms, whom but lately I had settled by parliament." What place could there be for his inconstancy in that thing whereto he was in no capacity? Otherwise his inconstancy was not so unwonted, or so nice, but that it would have easily found pretences to scatter those in revenge, whom he settled in fear. "It had been a course full of sin, as well as of hazard and dishonour." True; but if those considerations withheld him not from other actions of like nature, how can we believe they were of strength sufficient, to withhold him from this? And that they withheld him not, the event soon taught us. "His letting some men go up to the pinnacle of the temple, was a temptation to them to cast him down headlong." In this simile we have himself compared to Christ, the parliament to the devil, and his giving them that act of settling, to his letting them go up to "the pinnacle of the temple." A tottering and giddy act rather than a settling. This was goodly use made of Scripture in his solitudes: but it was no pinnacle of the temple, it was a pinnacle of Nebuchadnezzar's palace, from whence he and monarchy fell headlong together.

He would have others see that "all the kingdoms of the world are not worth gaining by ways of sin which hazard the soul;" and hath himself left nothing unhazarded to keep three. He concludes with sentences, that, rightly scanned, make not so much for him as against him, and confesses, that "the act of settling was no sin of his will;" and we easily believe him, for it hath been clearly proved a sin of his unwillingness.

With his orisons I meddle not, for he appeals to a high audit. This yet may be noted, that at his prayers he had before him the sad presage of his ill success, "as of a dark and dangerous storm, which never admitted his return to the port from whence he set out." Yet his prayer-book no sooner shut, but other hopes flattered him; and their flattering was his destruction.

VI. Upon his Retirement from Westminster.

THE simile wherewith he begins I was about to have found fault with, as in a garb somewhat more poetical than for a statist: but meeting with many strains of like dress in other of his essays, and hearing him reported a more diligent reader of poets than politicians, I begun to think that the whole book might perhaps be intended a piece of poetry. The words

are good, the fiction smooth and cleanly; there wanted only rhyme, and that, they say, is bestowed upon it lately. But to the argument.

"I staid at Whitehall, till I was driven away by shame more than fear." I retract not what I thought of the fiction, yet here, I must confess, it lies too open. In his messages and declarations, nay in the whole chapter next but one before this, he affirms, that "the danger wherein his wife, his children, and his own person" were by those tumults, was the main cause that drove him from Whitehall, and appeals to God as witness: he affirms here that it was "shame more than fear." And Digby, who knew his mind as well as any, tells his new-listed guard, "that the principal cause of his najesty's going thence was to save them from being trod in the dirt." From whence we may discern what false and frivolous excuses are avowed for truth, either in those declarations, or in this penitential book. Our forefathers were of that courage and severity of zeal to justice and their native liberty, against the proud contempt and misrule of their kings, that when Richard the Second departed but from a committee of lords, who sat preparing matter for the parliament not yet assembled, to the removal of his evil counsellors, they first vanquished and put to flight Robert de Vere his chief favourite; and then, coming up to London with a huge army, required the king, then withdrawn for fear, but no further off than the Tower, to come to Westminster, which he refusing, they told him flatly, that unless he came they would choose another. So high a crime it was accounted then for kings to absent themselves, not from a parliament, which none ever durst, but from any meeting of his peers and counsellors, which did but tend towards a parliament. Much less would they have suffered, that a king, for such trivial and various pretences, one while for fear of tumults, another while "for shame to see them," should leave his regal station, and the whole kingdom bleeding to death of those wounds, which his own unskilful and perverse government had inflicted.

Shame then it was that drove him from the parliament, but the shame of what? Was it the shame of his manifold errors and misdeeds, and to see how weakly he had played the king? No; "but to see the barbarous rudeness of those tumults to demand any thing." We have started here another, and I believe the truest cause of his deserting the parliament. The worst and strangest of that "Any thing," which the people then demanded, was but the unlording of bishops, and expelling them the house, and the reducing of church-discipline to a conformity with other protestant churches; this was the barbarism of those tumults: and that he might avoid the granting of those honest and pious demands, as well demanded by the parliament as the people, for this very cause more than for fear, by his own confession here, he left the city; and in a most tempestuous season forsook the helm and steerage of the commonwealth. This was that terrible "Any thing," from which his Conscience and his Reason chose to run, rather than not deny. To be importuned the removing of evil counsellors, and other grievances in church and state, was to him "an intolerable oppression." If the people's demanding were so burdensome to him, what was his denial and delay of justice to them?

But as the demands of his people were to him a burden and oppression, so was the advice of his parliament esteemed a bondage; "Whose agreeing votes," as he affirms, "were not by any law or reason conclusive to his judgment." For the law, it ordains a parliament to advise him in his great affairs; but if it ordain also, that the single judgment of a king shall outbalance all the wisdom of his parliament, it ordains that which frustrates the end of its own ordaining. For where the king's judgment may dissent,

to the destruction, as it may happen, both of himself and the kingdom, their advice, and no further, is a most insufficient and frustraneous means to be provided by law in cases of so high concernment. And where the main and principal law of common preservation against tyranny is left so fruitless and infirm, there it must needs follow, that all lesser laws are to their several ends and purposes much more weak and ineffectual. For that nation would deserve to be renowned and chronicled for folly and stupidity, that should by law provide force against private and petty wrongs, advice only against tyranny and public ruin. It being therefore most unlike a law, to ordain a remedy so slender and unlawlike, to be the utmost means of all public safety or prevention,* as advice is, which may at any time be rejected by the sole judgment of one man, the king, and so unlike the law of England, which lawyers say is the quintessence of reason and mature wisdom; we may conclude, that the king's negative voice was never any law, but an absurd and reasonless custom, begotten and grown up either from the flattery of basest times, or the usurpation of immoderate princes. Thus much to the law of it by a better evidence than rolls and records, reason.

But is it possible he should pretend also to reason, that the judgment of one man, not as a wise or good man, but as a king, and ofttimes a wilful, proud, and wicked king, should outweigh the prudence and all the virtue of an elected parliament? What an abusive thing were it then to summon parliaments, that by the major part of voices greatest matters may be there debated and resolved, whenas one single voice after that shall dash all their resolutions?

He attempts to give a reason why it should, "Because the whole parliaments represent not him in any kind." But mark how little he advances; for if the parliament represent the whole kingdom, as is sure enough they do, then doth the king represent only himself; and if a king without his kingdom be in a civil sense nothing, then without or against the representative of his whole kingdom, he himself represents nothing; and by consequence his judgment and his negative is as good as nothing: and though we should allow him to be something, yet not equalf or comparable to the whole kingdom, and so neither to them who represent it: much less that one syllable of his breath put into the scales should be more ponderous than the joint voice and efficacy of a whole parliament, assembled by election, and endued with the plenipotence of a free nation, to make laws, not to be denied laws; and with no more but no, a sleeveless reason, in the most pressing times of danger and disturbance to be sent home frustrate and remediless.

Yet here he maintains, "to be no further bound to agree with the votes of both houses, than he sees them to agree with the will of God, with his just rights as a king, and the general good of his people." As to the freedom of his agreeing or not agreeing, limited with due bounds, no man reprehends it; this is the question here, or the miracle rather, why his only not agreeing should lay a negative bar and inhibition upon that which is agreed to by a whole parliament, though never so conducing to the public good or safety? To know the will of God better than his whole kingdom, whence should he have it? Certainly court-breeding and his perpetual conversation with flatterers was but a bad school. To judge of his own rights could not belong to him, who had no right by law in any court to judge of so much as felony or treason, being held a party in both these cases, much more in this; and his rights however should give place to the Second edition has it "of all our safety or prevention."

† Second edition has "equivalent."

general good, for which end all his rights were given him. Lastly, to suppose a clearer insight and discerning of the general good, allotted to his own singular judgment, than to the parliament and all the people, and from that self-opinion of discerning, to deny them that good which they, being all freemen, seek earnestly and call for, is an arrogance and iniquity be yond imagination rude and unreasonable; they undoubtedly having most authority to judge of the public good, who for that purpose are chosen out and sent by the people to advise him. And if it may be in him to see oft "the major part of them not in the right," had it not been more his modesty, to have doubted their seeing him more often in the wrong?

He passes to another reason of his denials, " because of some men's hydropic unsatiableness, and thirst of asking, the more they drank, whom no fountain of regal bounty was able to overcome." A comparison more properly bestowed on those that came to guzzle in his wine-cellar, than on a freeborn people that came to claim in parliament their rights and liberties, which a king ought therefore to grant, because of right demanded; not to deny them for fear his bounty should be exhausted, which in these demands (to continue the same metaphor) was not so much as broached; it being his duty, not his bounty, to grant these things. He who thus refuses to give us law, in that refusal gives us another law, which is his will; another name also, and another condition-of freemen to become his vassals.

Putting off the courtier, he now puts on the philosopher, and sententiously disputes to this effect, "That reason ought to be used to men, force and terror to beasts; that he deserves to be a slave, who captivates the rational sovereignty of his soul and liberty of his will to compulsion; that he would not forfeit that freedom, which cannot be denied him as a king, because it belongs to him as a man and a Christian, though to preserve his kingdom; but rather die enjoying the empire of his soul, than live in such a vassalage, as not to use his reason and conscience, to like or dislike as a king." Which words, of themselves, as far as they are sense, good and philosophical, yet in the mouth of him, who, to engross this common liberty to himself, would tread down all other men into the condition of slaves and beasts, they quite lose their commendation. He confesses a rational sovereignty of soul and freedom of will in every man, and yet with an implicit repugnancy would have his reason the sovereign of that sovereignty, and would captivate and make useless that natural freedom of will in all other men but himself. But them that yield him this obedience he so well rewards, as to pronounce them worthy to be slaves. They who have lost all to be his subjects, may stoop and take up the reward. What that freedom is, which cannot be denied him as a king, because it belongs to him as a man and a Christian," I understand not. If it be his negative voice, it concludes all men, who have not such a negative as his against a whole parliament, to be neither men nor Christians: and what was he himself then, all this while that we denied it him as a king? Will he say, that he enjoyed within himself the less freedom for that? Might not he, both as a man and as a Christian, have reigned within himself in full sovereignty of soul, no man repining, but that his outward and imperious will must invade the civil liberties of a nation? Did we therefore not permit him to use his reason or his conscience, not permitting him to bereave us the use of ours? And might not he have enjoyed both as a king, governing us as freemen by what laws we ourselves would be governed? It was not the inward use of his reason and of his conscience, that would content him, but to use them both as a law over all his subjects, "in whatever he declared as a king to like or dislike." Which use of reason, most reasonless and un

conscionable, is the utmost that any tyrant ever pretended over his vassals.

In all wise nations the legislative power, and the judicial execution of that power, have been most commonly distinct, and in several hands; but yet the former supreme, the other subordinate. If then the king be only set up to execute the law, which is indeed the highest of his office, he ought no more to make or forbid the making of any law agreed upon in parliament than other inferior judges, who are his deputies. Neither can he more reject a law offered him by the commons, than he can new make a law which they reject. And yet the more to credit and uphold his cause, he would seem to have philosophy on his side; straining her wise dictates to unphilosophical purposes. But when kings come so low, as to fawn upon philosophy, which before they neither valued nor understood, it is a sign that fails not, they are then put to their last trump. And philosophy as well requites them, by not suffering her golden sayings either to become their lips, or to be used as masks and colours of injurious and violent deeds. So that what they presume to borrow from her sage and virtuous rules, like the riddle of Sphinx not understood, breaks the neck of their own

cause.

But now again to politics: "He cannot think the Majesty of the crown of England to be bound by any coronation oath in a blind and brutish formality, to consent to whatever its subjects in parliament shall require." What tyrant could presume to say more, when he meant to kick down all law, government, and bond of oath? But why he so desires to absolve himself the oath of his coronation would be worth the knowing. It cannot but be yielded, that the oath, which binds him to performance of his trust, ought in reason to contain the sum of what his chief trust and office is. But if it neither do enjoin, nor mention to him, as a part of his duty, the making or the marring of any law, or scrap of law, but requires only his assent to those laws which the people have already chosen, or shall choose; (for so both the Latin of that oath, and the old English; and all reason admits, that the people should not lose under a new king what freedom they had before;) then that negative voice so contended for, to deny the passing of any law, which the commons choose, is both against the oath of his coronation, and his kingly office. And if the king may deny to pass what the parliament hath chosen to be a law, then doth the king make himself superior to his whole kingdom; which not only the general maxims of policy gainsay, but even our own standing laws, as hath been cited to him in remonstrances heretofore, that "the king hath two superiors, the law, and his court of parliament." But this he counts to be a blind and brutish formality, whether it be law, or oath, or his duty, and thinks to turn it off with wholesome words and phrases, which he then first learnt of the honest people, when they were so often compelled to use them against those more truly blind and brutish formalities thrust upon us by his own command, not in civil matters only, but in spiritual. And if his oath to perform what the people require, when they crown him, be in his esteem a brutish formality, then doubtless those other oaths of allegiance and supremacy, taken absolute on our part, may most justly appear to us in all respects as brutish and as formal; and so by his own sentence no more binding to us, than his oath to him.

As for his instance, in case "he and the house of peers attempted to enjoin the house of commons," it bears no equality; for he and the peers represent but themselves, the commons are the whole kingdom.

Thus he concludes "his oath to be fully discharged in governing by laws