pel his error. But how often shall it be answered him, that no force was used to dispel the error out of his head, but to drive it from off our necks? for his error was imperious, and would command all other men to renounce their own reason and understanding, till they perished under the injunction of his all-ruling error. He alleges the uprightness of his intentions to excuse his possible failings, a position false both in law and divinity: yea, contrary to his own better principles, who affirms in the twelfth chapter, that "the goodness of a man's intention will not excuse the scandal and contagion of his example." His not knowing, through the corruption of flattery and court-principles, what he ought to have known, will not excuse his not doing what he ought to have done; no more than the small skill of him, who undertakes to be a pilot, will excuse him to be misled by any wandering star mistaken for the pole. But let his intentions be never so upright, what is that to us? What answer for the reason and the national rights, which God hath given us, if, having parliaments, and laws, and the power of making more, to avoid mischief, we suffer one man's blind intentions to lead us all with our eyes open to manifest destruction?

And if arguments prevail not with such a one, force is well used; not "to carry on the weakness of our counsels, or to convince his error," as he surmises, but to acquit and rescue our own reason, our own consciences, from the force and prohibition laid by his usurping error upon our liberties and understandings. "Never anything pleased him more, than when his judgment concurred with theirs." That was to the applause of his own judgment, and would as well have pleased any self-conceited man.

"Yea, in many things he chose rather to deny himself than them." That is to say, in trifles. For" of his own interests" and personal rights he conceives himself" master." To part with, if he please; not to contest for, against the kingdom, which is greater than he, whose rights are all subordinate to the kingdom's good. And "in what concerns truth, justice, the right of church, or his crown, no man shall gain his consent against his mind." What can be left then for a parliament, but to sit like images, while he still thus, either with incomparable arrogance assumes to himself the best ability of judging for other men what is truth, justice, good

ness, what his own and the church's right, or with insufferable tyranny restrains all men from the enjoyment of any good which his judgment, though erroneous, thinks not fit to grant them; notwithstanding that the law and his coronal oath require his undeniable assent to what laws the parlia ment agree upon ?

"He had rather wear a crown of thorns with our Saviour." Many would be all one with our Saviour, whom our Saviour will not know. They who govern ill those kingdoms which they had a right to, have to our Saviour's crown of thorns no right at all. Thorns they may find enow of their own gathering, and their own twisting; for thorns and snares, saith Solomon, are in the way of the froward: but to wear them as our Saviour wore them, is not given to them that suffer by their own demerits. Nor is a crown of gold his due, who cannot first wear a crown of lead; not only for the weight of that great office, but for the compliance which it ought to have with them who are to counsel him, which here he terms in scorn, "an imbased flexibleness to the various and oft contrary dictates of any factions," meaning his parliament for the question hath been all this while between them two. And to his parliament, though a numerous and choice assembly of whom the land thought wisest, he imputes, rather than to himself, "want of reason, neglect of the public, interest of parties, and particularity of private will and passion;" but with what modesty or likelihood of truth, it will be wearisome to repeat so often.

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He concludes with a sentence fair in seeming, but fallacious. For if the conscience be ill edified, the resolution may more befit a foolish than a Christian king, to prefer a selfwilled conscience before a kingdom's good; especially in the denial of that, which law and his regal office by oath bids him grant to his parliament and whole kingdom rightfully demanding For we may observe him throughout the discourse to assert his negative power against the whole kingdom; now under the specious plea of his conscience and his reason, but heretofore in a louder note: "Without us, or against our consent, the votes of either or of both houses together, must not, cannot, shall not." (Declar. May 4, 1642.) With these and the like deceivable doctrines he leavens also his prayer.

CHAPTER VII,

Upon the Queen's Departure.

To this argument we shall soon have said; for what concerns it us to hear a husband divulge his household privacies, extolling to others the virtues of his wife? an infirmity not seldom incident to those who have least cause." * But how good she was a wife, was to himself, and be it left to his own fancy; how bad a subject, is not much disputed. And being such, it need be made no wonder, though she left a protestant kingdom with as little honour as her mother left a popish.

That this "is the first example of any protestant subjects, that have taken up arms against their king, a protestant,' can be to protestants no dishonour, when it shall be heard,

Had the Eikon Basilikè been the work of Charles I., no man could have read the seventh chapter, in which a character of his wife is pretended to be given, without a mixture of pity and contempt. To be united by marriage to such a creature was calamity enough; but to be so far blinded by his uxoriousness as to think her a noble, affectionate, and loyal mate, argued a degree of stupidity scarcely credible. But that Dr. Gauden, who must have known her character, should have heightened the wickedness of his imposture by talking rf the "noble and peaceful soul" of Henrietta Maria, can excite nothing ess than indignation and disgust. The following are among the words which he puts into the king's mouth. ""Tis pity so noble and peaceful a soul should see, much more suffer, the rudeness of those who must make up their want of justice with inhumanity and impudence. Her sympathy with me in my afflictions will make her virtues shine with greater lustre, as stars in the darkest nights, and assure the envious world that she loves me, not my fortunes." (p. 40. edit. of 1681.) And again, in the next page, he says, his enemies had driven her from the kingdom, "lest by the influence of her example, eminent for love as a wife, and loyalty as a subject, she should have converted to, or retained in, their love and loyalty, all those whom they had a purpose to pervert.' Alas! this affectionate wife is known to have dissuaded him from attempting his escape from Carisbrooke castle, lest by coming into France, he should interrupt her adulterous intrigue with Jermyn. (Clarendon, vi. 80, 192.) The circumstance is darkly hinted at by the historian, who assigns another motive; but Warburton explains. "The queen dreaded his coming to Paris. She was unwilling the king should interrupt her commerce with Jermyn." (Clarendon's History, vii. 624, 627.) Reresby, who followed the fortunes of the queen and prince into France, (the name in Clarendon is misspelt Hereby,) and "who wrote the Memoirs of his own Times, not long since published, acknowledges, that he was very certain that the queen had a child by Jermyn." (Warburton, Notes to Clarendon, vii. 622.)-ED.

that he first levied war on them, and to the interest of papists more than of protestants. He might have given yet the precedence of making war upon him to the subjects of his own nation, who had twice opposed him in the open field long ere the English found it necessary to do the like. And how groundless, how dissembled is that fear, lest she, who for so many years had been averse from the religion of her husband, and every year more and more, before these disturbances broke out, should for them be now the more alienated from that, to which we never heard she was inclined? But if the fear of her delinquency, and that justice which the protestants demanded on her, was any cause of her alienating the more, to have gained her by indirect means had been no advantage to religion, much less then was the detriment to lose her further off. It had been happy if his own actions had not given cause of more scandal to the protestants, than what they did against her could justly scandalize any papist.

Them who accused her, well enough known to be the parliament, he censures for " men yet to seek their religion, whether doctrine, discipline, or good manners;" the rest he soothes with the name of true English protestants, a mere schismatical name, yet he so great an enemy of schism. He ascribes "rudeness and barbarity, worse than Indian," to the English parliament; and "all virtue" to his wife, in strains that come almost to sonnetting: how fit to govern men, undervaluing and aspersing the great council of his kingdom, in comparison of one woman! Examples are not far to seek, how great mischief and dishonour hath befallen nations under the government of effeminate and uxorious magistrates; who being themselves governed and overswayed at home under a feminine usurpation, cannot but be far short of spirit and authority without doors, to govern a whole nation.

"Her tarrying here he could not think safe among them, who were shaking hands with allegiance, to lay faster hold on religion;" and taxes them of a duty rather than a crime, it being just to obey God rather than man, and impossible to serve two masters: I would they had quite shaken off what they stood shaking hands with; the fault was in their courage, not in their cause. In his prayer he prays that the dis

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loyalty of his protestant subjects may not be a hinderance to her love of the true religion; and never prays, that the dissoluteness of his court, the scandals of his clergy, the unsoundness of his own judgment, the lukewarmness of his life, his letter of compliance to the pope, his permitting agents at Rome, the pope's nuncio, and her jesuited mother here, may not be found in the sight of God far greater hinderances to her conversion.

But this had been a subtle prayer indeed, and well prayed, though as duly as a Paternoster, if it could have charmed us to sit still, and have religion and our liberties one by one snatched from us, for lest rising to defend ourselves we should fright the queen, a stiff papist, from turning protestant! As if the way to make his queen a protestant, had been to make his subjects more than halfway papists. He prays next, "that his constancy may be an antidote against the poison of other men's example." His constancy in what? Not in religion, for it is openly known, that her religion wrought more upon him, than his religion upon her; and his open favouring of papists, and his hatred of them called puritans, (the ministers also that prayed in churches for her conversion, being checked from court,) made most men suspect she had quite perverted him. But what is it, that the blindness of hypocrisy dares not do? It dares pray, and thinks to hide that from the of God, which it cannot hide from the open view of man.

CHAPTER VIII.

eyes

Upon his Repulse at Hull, and the Fate of the Hothams.

HULL, a town of great strength and opportunity both to sea and land affairs, was at that time the magazine of all those arms which the king had bought with money most illegally extorted from his subjects of England, to use in a causeless and most unjust civil war against his subjects of Scotland. The king in hgh discontent and anger had left the parliament, and was gone towards the north, the queen into Holland, where she pawned and set to sale the crown jewels; (a crime heretofore counted treasonable in kings;) and to what intent these sums were raised, the parliament was not ignoraut. His going northward in so high a chafe they doubted