no sense to be counted the People of England any more than Scabs or Plague-sores or Leprosie or putid Ulcers and noysome Excrements are to be repured any part of the Body whose grief burthen and annoyance they are So that unless you can flatter your selves to have done well and worthily in all you have cruelly insolently and trayterously acted against King Lords Commons Gentry Clergy and all honest men Unless you can propound something to recompence the inestimable Injuries you have done to all Estates in these three Kingdoms as in other acts of your Tyranny and Treason so chiefly in that unparallel'd Villany of Murthering such a King and depriving us of so Incomparable a Prince for Wisdom Piety Gravity Patience Magnanimity Courage Constancy Charity and all other Vertues most adorning a Man a King and a Christian the loss of whom all the lives of you and your Approvers cannot countervail or expiate being but as so many Dogs heads to such a Boon Unless you can stop the Mouths of all men or cut their Throats or sear their Consences or perswade them to damn their Souls for your sakes to gratifie a few Cauterised Consciences bloody and ambitious Spirits among you You cannot but hear the sound of much Vengeance coming upon you to which your own black Souls summon you and which your own Consciences will in the first place silently but yet severely execute upon you Nor will your Seeming Smiles and forced confidences nor yet the Applauses of your sordid Flatterers and desperate Confederates nor yet the assistance of your numerous and deluded Souldiers be able to exempt you from that storm of Fire and Brimstone that Pit Snare Curse and Hell which pursues you and is ready to overtake you How can such Zimri's who have so trayterously slain such a King their Lord and Master ever hope to have peace or impunity in this or the other World Since the Justice of Divine Providence in a Case where his Name was not blasphemed and so his Glory not so concerned as in this of your murthering so lawful and so Christian a King suffered not any of the Murtherers of Julius Caesar who was but an Usurper to dye other than a violent and immature death Nor will we hope our Solomon by Gods blessing and his Subjects assistance suffer the hairy Scalps of those who were the chief Counsellors and Actors in destroying his dear Father and our Dread Soveraign to go down to the Grave in peace or to dye a dry death who have shed the blood of War in a time when all Differences were by a Treaty drawn to a Peace and Union We can never think that a Babel of so confused a fashion of such a headlong height as yours is such a Toads-stool suddenly grown out of the Earth of Beggary and Ignorance by Fraud and Cruelty lately watered with the blood of the King and his Subjects can long thrive or stand having no foundation in the World or any shew of reason equity honour peace liberty or piety to support it Not any seeming Authority for due and legall you could have none upon Earth Not any general desire delight consent or Agreement in what you have done or propound further to do but rather a general detestation an utter abhorrence and a perfect hatred of you and your deeds which honest men will then agree to and subscribe when they can be content to love Death and Hell or to hate God and their Souls Nor doubt we but many of those Souldiers whose valour and simplicity you have thus far grossely abused by ingaging them in such desperate assistances whose profit will redound to but few or none of them when their Christian penitent and smiteing hearts shall come to see as no doubt many of them already do who are not throughly poisoned with your desperate Principles to what horrid Villanies they they are made Gossips and accessary by your Fraud and Hipocrisie they will speedily reâ—â—rn from you dead Dogs desperate Sheba's and cursing Shimei's â—hose mouths and hearts are full of the gall of bitterness whose hands and feet are swift to shed blood who know not the way of Peace nor have any fear of God before your eyes whose Curse is to boâ—st your selves in your iniquity to fall from one wickedness to another till eterual vengeance upon you Penitently smiting their breasts as those that came from crucififying Christ Jesus a work proportionate to the malice and crueltie of you our Kings Murtherers our barabasses whose barbarity hath at once deprived the King of what is wont to be dearest to men his Life and his Kingdoms robbing his Subjects the Christian World and all Mankind of the greatest glory and most Illustrious Example of Vertue and Pietie that ever sate upon a Christian Throne The most unspotted Persoâ— the wisest Prince the most Charitable Christian the most imitable Pattern for Moderation in Prosperity for Patience in Adversity for devout humility toward God for judicious zeal to true Religion for constant love to the Church for winning Majesty upon all men that ever swayed the Scepter of this or any other Kingdom Accessible in his brightest splendor Magnanimous in his Diminutions Of a thâ—iving and victorious Vertue under the heaviest Pressures and Crosses Whose excellent Skill was never so much discovered as in the late Storms Whose Darknings rendeâ—ed him not less formidable to his Enemies or less venerable to his Friends Nor was he ever more terrible to those that are perfect haters of God of Him and of all Goodness than when they saw that the Eminency of his Vertues was not to be smothered by their Calumnious Expressions but the beams and lustre of Divine Majestie in him daily conquered all Ecclipsings that either his own misfortunes or your malice cast upon him This was the Man this the Christian this the King this the Saint this the Martyr whom â—hese Judas's have betrayed these Jews destroyed these Caniballs devoured A Sin questionless exceeding in many respects that of Christs Crucifiers not as to the dignity of the person wherein Christ infinitely surpassed the Majestie as well as Merit of all Earthly Kings but as to that Eminency of Civil Dignity and Soveraignty wherewith the King from God was invested which Christ Jesus never assumed contenting himself with the form of a servant and subjecting himself to Civil Magistracy Also in regard of that malice hypocrsie and pretenceless Crueltie which thesâ— Monsters shewed against the King destitute of any shew of Due Authority which the Crucifiers of our Saviour wanted not urging also a Law they had by which they said though falsely he ought to die What Law the Kings Murtherers either produced or pretended to justifie their Authoritie their Accusations or their Sentence against and Execution upon the King we and they are yet to learn nor is it possible they ever should since all our Laws do most fully and clearly declare the person of the King as Supream Sacred Unaccountable Inviolable by
We call Heaven and Earth and your selves who are to us as Hell and Devils to witness against you What can the most carnal loose and prophane Atheists do more abominable than you have done What have the falsest Jews the fiercest Turks the most bruitish Heathens the Renegado Christians the subtilest Jesuites or the most Phanatique Anabaptists and Schismaticks or any other that are wholly without God in this world ever done comparable to your immense Villanies Yea what could Devils do more if they had their wills but by such Instruments as you are extend their malice to the utmost latitude of their power Have you not by Treachery and Tyranny usurped upon all just power and exalted your selves such despicable worms above all that is called God Neither King nor Parliament nor Laws nor your own Engagements to all nor your many Proposals Promises and Declaratioins have any reverence with you or weight upon you but like riotous and enraged Beasts you have overborn and trampled under your feet all that is either Sacred or Civil in the Laws of God Nature Nations or this Kingdom of which you are Members though the most ulcerous and pestilent that ever the Earth can bring forth or bear Hapily your stupid pride and brutish insolency will not suffer you to consider how odious abominable and accursed you now are to all men but such as are Cockatrices of the same Egg and Brood with your selves that is seared Saints hardned Hypocrites and enraged Satans We assure you you are now looked upon by all sober and honest minds as the heaviest and filthiest Incubuses that ever oppressed Church or State as the Legions of unclean Spirits which by Diabolical Arts and Magick of Hypocrisie have got possession of this Church and Kingdom till Christ by his power cast you out of and suffer you like the Demoniack Swine through the just judgement of God to be hurried headlong by your own terrours and despairs into the Lake that burns with fire and brimstone You are like cursed Cams not mockers only but murtherers of the Father of your Country impudent Ravishers both of Church and State to satisfie your most abominable lusts of Tyranny Coveâ—uosness and all licentious Prophaneness Monsters of men putid Apostates excreable Saints shameless Sinners traytorous Tyrants what have you to plead for or palliate with your late horrid outrages and unparallel'd villanies by which you have obstructed the Fountain of Justice altered the Chanel broken the Cistern turned the clear and wholesome Waters of our Laws into Blood Wormwood and deadly Poyson while you have with unheard-of tyranny and treachery set up your private wills by that publick power wherewith you were intrusted only for some limited uses above the Majesty and Lives of our King and his Children above the Dignity of our Parliaments the Honour of our Laws the Reverence of your Country and the Regard due to your fellow Subjects and confederate Nations And all this without the least colour of any Call or Authority from God or Man Reason or Religion against all Obligations both Sacred and Civil that might possibly lye on mens Souls to God or Man against many your particular pretensions and former promises of such due observance as became you both as Men Subjects Souldiers and Christians You who are not the thousand part of His Majesties Subjects how durst you knowingly act as in the name of all and yet indeed against the Duty Desires and Consciences of all but such Children of Belial as your selves You that are for the most part such Sons of the Earth of so base Extraction of meaner Education Strangers to all good Literature Honour or Civility Heirs of beggery and contempt whom most of the Subjects in England might for your rudeness and barbarity justly have disdained to have set with the Dogs of their Flocks how are you become the Creators of a new Heaven and a new Earth who are such Sons of Tohu and Bohu of Chaos Obscurity and Confusion You that at best are but Gods Butchers the unjust Executioners of his just vengeance as the evil and destroying Angels sent among us for a time though your exorbitant malice and lusts disdain to be limited by your Military Commission yet God we hope will restrain your fury who hath manifested your impious folly With what forehead could you thus lift up your hand against and set your selves above all those who are confessed your Betters Masters and Superiours As if in a Gyantly impudence and Cyclopick cruelty you could never be famous enough but by Infamy nor fierce and wicked enough unless you fought against Heaven against the express Word of God and his Vice-garents on Earth Thus heaping up Mountains of Lyes Perjuries Hypocrisies and Cruelties upon those vast and enormous Lusts of Rapine Sacrilege Covetousness Revenge and Tyranny in your hearts which nothing nath ever equalled or can exceed You have indeed finished the Master-piece of your Father the Devil whom as his first-born he hath filled with a double portion of malice subtilty and cruelty beyond any whose hearts like Elymas the Sorcerer or Simon Magus he hath possessed You have nothing left you but Impenitence and Hell which you neither believe nor fear by which to make farther progress in your most flagitious and ever accursed Villanies What step have you more to advance to the blaspheming of the Majesty of the most high God both in himself and his Deputies lawful Kings and Soveraign Magistrates What more can you do or invent to the scandal of the Gospel to the exposing the Name of Christ to open shame to the trampling his Blood under feet through the hatred and detestation of all Nations that are without the Church How could you devise more to adorn the Triumphs of Pope and Papists to whose tayls you are tied though your faces seem contrary and whose business you have done while you pretend to abhorr their Names as much as Devils do potent Charms What Sea could ever wash away from the face of the Christian Reformed Religion the stain of that blood of our King which you have in a Pageant of Justice most unjustly inhumanely and barbarously shed to colour your Malice to satiate your Revenge and to make way for your Tyranny If we the People of England should by our silence adopt and by our assistance nourish those prodigies of Rebellion Treason and Confusion which your libidinous Mars by the help of your prostitute and officious Venus your Un-parliamentary Junto hath lately brought forth and astonished the world withall Was it ever so done since the Name of Christ was planted on the earth save only by the spawn of those furies from whom you are descended who made such havock first in Africa after in other Western Churches and lately in Germany whose principles and practices you have as much surpassed in Hypocrisie Anarchy Cruelty and Blasphemy as Belzebub your Prince may be thought to exceed the lesser fry of damned Spirits Those impure Catharists
exercised indeed their Donatistical and Anabaptistical frauds and fucies chiefly upon the vulgar to the ruine of many thousands of the Country people and Citizens But you like so many Ravilliacks are not content to have spoilâ—d so many Noble and flourishing Families to have exhausted so many plentifull Estates to have made so many mourning Widows and Fatherless Children to have destroyed the lives and sucked the blood of so many Christians your fellow-Subjects but you must in one day swallow up the two Houses of Parliament in another murther the King in a third cut off the right and inheritance of the Crown from the Undoubted Heir and all the Kings Children At last you conspire to tempt us all by your simple and foolish Paper falsly called The Agreement of the People to joyn with you in the utter overthrowing of our Laws Liberties and the whole frame of this antient and renowned Kingdom whose weight you will find too heavy for such weak Atlases as you will shortly appear both in Counsel and in Power who are only wise to doe wickedly and strong to shed or drink the bloud of your King and Country-men Your Cruelty hath fulfilled the wish of Caligula at one blow to cut off the head of three Kingdoms and with him all Monarchy to make way for your Polemocracy a Military Tyranny or Schismatical Anarchy Thus have you been profound to deceive skilfull to destroy our Souls faint within us because of such treacherous dealers such hideous Murtherers into whose snares the breath of our nostrils is fallen and in whose deep dissembling pits the Annoynted of the Lord our meek patient and most Christian King is swallowed up under the shadow of whose just Authority Princely wisdom and judicious piety we hoped to have been safe How doth this sometime famous and flourishing Kingdom now sit as a Widow oppressed desolate despised full of unexpressible lamentations The bitterness and gall of your cruel Hypocrisie hath entred into filled and overwhelmed our Souls How is she that was the Joy Crown and Queen of all Nations the Envy or Emulation of all Christian Churches now become the horror and astonishment of her Neighbours round about the pity and calamity of all her friends the scorn reproach hissing and triumph of all her Enemies Nor is there any helper comforter or Deliverer left till God take the matter into his own hands and plead the cause of the King and Kingdom against those proud Goliahs whose uncircumcised hearts and lips out of a riot and superfluity of wickedness have blasphemed our God destroyed our King laid waste and exhausted the Kingdom and turned this Church into a Den of Thieves O Lord arise O Lord consider O Lord hear the voice of our sighs tears and prayers let the cry of the blood of our King and our people come up to Heaven have mercy on us for we are brought very low Our gracious King the Husband of the Kingdom the Father of his Subjects the Prâ—â—erver of our Laws the Patron of Religion the Protector of the Church you have treacherously and barbarously murthered the two Houses of Parliament whose weakness perverseness unevenness inconstancy and cowardise God hath seen disliked judged and punished you have forcibly invaded scattered and oppressed notwithstanding all your special Engagements to them both of duty and promise commission and trust The loyalty and love of the people you every where either with terror and cruelty seek to suppress and smother so that they shall not dare to petition for redress or complain of those endless calamities which they suffer under your tyranny or else making lyes your hope and refuge with forged semblances of complyant Petitions and counterfeit Gratulations you falsly and impudently pretend the concurrent Votes of the Countreys and the Communities approbation to your most abominated practices When God knows and even your selves in your bloody dissimulation cannot be ignorant that the generality of all men in all places of all degrees doe from their Souls utterly abhor deprecate and detest your execrable Counsels and accursed Actions which have thus brought upon us the abomination of desolation through the damnable deceivableness of your unrighteousness Nor doe we believe that your pride and tyrannous hypocrisie either finds any comfort in them or much considers those papers which seem to own you or applaud your wicked deeds further than they may carry on your strong delusions with the vulgar whom you know to be neither very wary of evil nor very steady in what is good If you had the general Consent of the Vulgar which you know you have in no sort yet neither is their judgement any good rule to measure the Morality of your actions nor their inconstant pleasure any rest of honour vertue or piety But indeed you as well as we are sadly conscious that all those clamorous Petitions for Justice by which you would seem as by Oracles of your own inspiring to be fatally directed and divinely incouraged in your Cruelties and Treasons were nothing else but the strokes of the Lions own tayl the more to enrage himself the very froth and scum which arose only from the zealous activity and boylings of your own bloody Faction who restl 〈…〉 Devils continually go about seeking whom they may deâ—â—iâ—e and destroy we are well assured that your Schismatical crew of Regicides are no more to be compared to the people of England than the Gleanings may be to the Harvest or Canters Thieves Beggars and Juglers to the sober and setled Dwellers in this Kingdom No every honest man who hath any sense of piety loyalty modesty pitty or humanity left in his Soul as you have none takes up Jacobs words against you Cursed beyour wrath for it is fierce and your anger for it is cruel Into the secrets of these men let not our Souls enter Lord lay not the guilt of the sins of these men to the Charge of the People of this Kingdom No let the blood of our pious patient and most Christian King be upon you and your Abettors for ever who as without any sense of Loyalty Pity or Charity so without any shadow as well as substance of Justice having neither Law Rule nor any due Authority first by Fraud and unheard of Insolency seized upon his Majesties person afterward by Flatteries Lies and Terrours sought to deceive him At last by meer Force and beast-like Crueltie have massacred and as so many horrid Assassinates utterly destroyed him And all this after many fawnings and shews of loyal and tender regard toward his Majesty and his Royal Family as both your first Proposals and your after Agitations honestly and very providentially discovered by Major Huntington do declare In which all men now plainly see that you did but make way by the Fox to let in the Wolf and by your Dalilah to bring the Philistims upon our Sampson Yea after his Majestie was not only entred into and advanced in a Treaty with the two Houses agreeable to their
in at the window will open the door to greatest Rebellions and Regicides Subjects cutting off the lap of their Kings garment or lesning the Robe of royal Majesty that is their just reputation honour and authority will imbolden them to venture at their heads and throats yea to take away their lives and Kingdoms which David a man after Gods own heart so much abhorred that his heart presently smote him for that cautious essay as petty Treason upon Sauls Vesture which carried with it something of injury and indignity to the King the Lords anointed nor did his justice spare those King-killers who having slain Saul and Ishbosheth Davids enemies thought he had done a meritorious service A mans greatest flatterers enemies and traytors are those in his own breast where proud discontents inordinate lusts and extravagant passions as the populacy rabble and vulgarity of people are prone daily to conspire and mutiny against that Reason and Religion which ought to have a constant rule and soveraignty in the soul I believe many men never intended in their first Schismatical motions so sinfull a conclusion many no doubt are now ready to alter their opinion at the scene and success of affairs yea to think those counsels actions very wicked which they find are become so unprosperous but he sees sins too late who doth it as Adam Cain Judas by retrospection only in the glass of punishment It is best discerned by a forward and direct view in the first access by that prospect which the Word of God and the Laws of the Land give us Had this been done by those blood thirsty and deceitfull men this Piece might have been spared now it will serve on the Anniversary of Englands Lamentation Jan. 30. to excite that just passion of a penitent grief and utter detestation which are due to the memory of so foul a Fact and of those sins which brought us under the stroke of so sore a judgement The grief and horror of which did so perfectly possess my soul when I wrote this Steliteutick in an extasie of sighs tears and indignation that the Reader may easily perceive the deluge of sorrow by the streams of it which run as a torrent with much trouble and unevenness not with that order and smoothness that becomes a quiet and calm temper which had been a sin in me at that time when every soul not stupid or seared in England was filled with extreme grief and horror either for the sin they had done or for the punishment they had deserved or for the duty they had omitted or for the desperate estate of the malicious doers of it whose repentance was scarce to be hoped or prayed for having spoken and acted so many lyes perjuries and sacrileges in hypocrisie seared their consciences caused the enemies of God to blaspheme and prophaned the spotless sanctity of Christian Religion and done despight to the Spirit of grace which they dared to pretend to be the patron of their bloody policy a promoter and approver of their so execrable and accursed practices I shall be glad if any faithfull corrasive here may bring any of them yet living to some sense of their most crying and transcendent sins that if possible they may repent be pardoned by the mercies of God and merits of the Son of God whose precious blood only can cry louder than that of the Kings if this end be not attained of which God knows as yet there have been very few signs yet I have great hope to reach the other end of keeping all good Christians and loyal Subjects for the future from the like degeneration as much as they would avoid Hell and eternal damnation Obedience to Superiours in all things lawfull for the Lords sake is a Christians greatest honourâ— and patience with prâ—yers and tears under unjust pressures is his surest defence all other wayes are but the wanton temptations of the devil and the petulant transports of mens wicked hearts most unworthy of good Christians as all primitive examples teach us whose actions flowing from faith and guided by love must never vary from the paths of piety and loyalty humility and charity which are the way to true peace and eternal happiness And thus I have given thee O Christian Reader an account of my first writing and now publiâ—hing or rather owning this Steliteutick or pious Satyre writ against so 〈…〉 nstrous a sin as that was of Murthering the King Farewel JOH EXON 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 〈◊〉 A just INVECTIVE Against the MVRTHERERS OF King Charls the First HAve you killed our King and also taken possession of his Goods Lands and Kingdoms O ye blood-thirsty and deceitful men Is this your Sion that must be built with Royal blood and your Jerusalem that must be raised with such detestable iniquiry O ye painted Sepulchers will no bones serve to fill you but those of your King You ravening Wolves whom God hath suffered to uncase your selves of your Sheeps Cloathing can nothing satiate your cruel Appetites and Hydropick Thirst but only the flesh and blood of our King whom with merciless hands and hearts in an impudent Triumph you have murdered before the Face of God and his Subjects whose Royal Posterities and peoples Lives and Estates you now hope to devour without any opposition or gainsaying So cruelly heavy and barbarous is that Iron Scepter with which you think to rule this Nation nor allowing any fair and legal plea for either Kings or Peoples Lives Liberties Estates or Religion but beyond all Papal and Mahumetane Tyranny you usurp over our Souls no less than our Bodies and seek now by slavish fears and sinful Agreements to make to make us all as much the Children of the Devil as your selves whose Consciences no doubt like Cain's tell you your desperate and damnable Estate having sinned against the light of God and his holy Spirit some of you so impudently and maliciously as justly excludes all hope of pity or pardon from God and Man having first treacherously betraied then barbarously murthered both your and our King Go on you Apollyons you Abaddons in the Spirit of Antichrist to fill up the measure of your Abominations till you are drunk with blood and stumble and fall together O you Locusts the blackest smoak and noisomest vapour that ever the breath of the bottomless pit exhaled or sent forth into the Christian world your Maiden faces in your first seemingly modest and fair pretensions to the King and Kingdom have now brought on the poisonous Scorpions of you Tails after many cunning windings of flattery perjury and hypocrisie Behold the fruits of your Oaths Prayers Fastings your Illuminations Raptures and the Sacred madnesses of your Prophets are they not as the Grapes of Sodom sour and unsavoury seting on edge the teeth of all men that have any taste or relish of true piety Are these the practices of Saints of spiritual and seraphick minds of men living in God and in Christ by the Spirit
Votes and the general desires of all his Subjects under the most solemn National security and Publick Faith which could be given or pass between a King and his Subjects or indeed any honest men But even when his Majesties great wisdom and goodness had so far brought all things to a fair closure and happy Agreement that the two Houses were satisfied and resolved to proceed upon his Majesties Concessions as a firm ground of Peace to the Kingdom Yet after all these publique Civil and Sacred Obligations which lay upon the two Houses and the Kingdom on your selves as well as any and all of us for you to seize again upon his Majesties person without any pretended Authority and with your Iron hands and Adamantine hearts to ravish and pull him out of the arms and embraces of his Subjects violently to hale and tear him from the reviving love and loyalty of the two Houses and his People thence to hurry and toss him to and fro to what inhospitable places and desolate Prisons you listed there to deprive him not only of all things proportionable to his quality as a King but even of those civil accommodations which ought to be allowed to any Gentleman though an Enemy and a Captive of War which the King never was not being taken by force but rendring himself to the professed love and sworn loyalty of his Subjects After this with a sacrilegious mockery of Justice in the highest affronting of God the King the Parliament and the three Kingdoms by an unheard of and most horrid Outrage and riorous force to oppress and utterly destroy the remaining honour freedom and power of the two houses and in despite of them to erect a new Court of Justice as you most unjustly term it for which you have no colour of Law from God or Man no precedent in this or any other Christian Kingdom no ground or pretence of Parliamentary consent or Authority of either Houses whose Members three parts of four at least you forcibly detained and deterred from fitting in the House of Commons the Lords being unanimously against you by all which methods of cunning and violence you seek like Absalom the contradiction between whose name and actions very well fits your affected but undeserved title of Saints to intrude your selves into a Judicative as well as a Military power as if Hangmen and Executioners should usurp the sears of Judges who are not fit to be of a Jury since their interest and advantage like yours lying in the destruction of others will easily tempt them to condemn any man At length you make a shift to pack not a high Court of Justice as you shamelessely style it but the basest Conventicle of Injustice that ever was in the World In which all Cards of honour being shuffled out you turn up such Knaves only for Trumps as will best play your game A very Medly and Rapsody of the most ignorant shallow cowardly cruel weak debauch'd and insolent Fools or Athiests Hypocrites Traytors and Tyrants that ever usurped power over any honest and innocent man Your President Bradshaw and your Solicitor Cook are commonly known and branded to be men of as corrupt Souls as any lived in their profession Their most trayterous and covetous villanies not allowing the least pretence of ignorance â—n the Laws which are in no Case more clearly expresly and severely contrary than in this of taking away the Kings life wherein they against all Law Duty and Conscience were as Judas's chiefly employed At last upon the wicked most unjust and cruel Sentence of these Mercenary Un-authorized and Tyrannous Sycophants and Hucksters of Justice who must needs have their Commission from him that is the Father of Lyes the false Accuser the Old Murtherer the deceiving Serpent the Roaring Lyon the Red Dragon the Dead Sea of Cruelty and the sink of all Confusion the Damned and Damning Devil and not from God the Fountain of Justice the Father of Mercy the Institutor of Order the Author of Peace and the Commander of subjection to lawfull Kings in any notion imaginable further than the Divel may have Commission from God permitting and limiting the activity but not approving the iniquity of his rage and malice to compell such a King so Great a Monarch of three Kingdoms their Undoubted Soveraign Lord to submit to their arraignment Accusations and Sentence who were most of them his declared and desperate Enemies without allowing him the liberty of protesting against their confessed Usurpation and non-Non-authority or of pleading for his own both Innocency and well known Privilege Soveraignty and unquestionable Immunity according to the Laws of God and of this Kingdom which are expresly against their trayterous and tyrannous proceedings as well as the nulliâ—y of their Authority After this without any remorse or pity to their and our King to force a person of so excellent worth wisdom vertue honour and Majesty to how down at the feet of so vile persons and then to Chop off his Head which was Sacred Crowned and Anoynted as rightfull King over them and all his Subjects in his Dominions A Butchery so barberous that the common Headsmran abhorted to do it nor may we think those bloody Zealots were willing he should deprive them of the pleasure of cutting the throat of such a Sacrifice to inaugurate them in their Royal Priesthood by which their Schismatical fury pretends a title against or above all Lawfull Kings and Governours What Words what Tears what Sighs what oppressive Thoughts what secret and un-utterable Reflections of most stupified and astonished Souls are sufficient to measure the Immensity to weigh the burden to express or conceive the horror of this outragioussin and most flagitious villany Poor Prince after so many delusions so many lying Addresses made by the chief Engines and movers of the Army after so much patience so great demonstrations of excellent wisdom meekness calmness and Christian gentleness to his very Enemies and Jaylours under infinite reproaches injuries and indignities even to the very spitting in his face after all those gracious condescendings by which he had reduced himself almost to the very shadow and bare name of a King saving that he had gained the highest and most absolute Empire in the renewed love loyalty of the most and best of his Subjects that he might please all secure and satisfie all purchase Peace for all at any rate but the price of his Conscience Yet after all these infinite demonstrations of goodness capable to have softned even Devils themselves to be thus butchered by a Souldiery and Schismatical cruelty to be brought to publique execution without any help or redemption from Parliament or people who generally abominated so horrid inhumane unseen and unheard of a Spectacle whose Publique Faith besides their Personal Allegiance was engaged for his Majesties honour and safety what heart can be large enough to equal the sorrow what Eyes can be Fountains sufficient to deplore so unmerited a Fate befalling so
spirit you break all ties and bonds casting Church and State into fire or water as the rash motions of your Frantick humors carry you c. Conscience you can have none since your lights are so Lunatick and your principles varie every moneth Credit you have none who have made bankrupt of the Publick Faith and forfeited so many solemn and Sacred Obligations to God and Man Sense of Honour or Duty you can have none since you have neither fear of God nor reverence of Man Estates you have little or none to hazard or lose upon any forfeiture of your Faith or Agreement And for your Heads and Lives they are now so vile and cheap that although you are not fit to live yet they are scarce worth the taking Sure you cannot but appear to your selves as well as to all men the most outlawed notorious and stigmatized Rebels the most perfidious Traytors that ever any King or Senate State or People imployed or trusted Having utterly blotted out all your former promeritings and good service so much boasted of Since the Event proclaims you served not King Parliament or Countrey but your own lusts and villanous designs which by the advantages of mutinous power you now seek to accomplish under the void and forfeited Commission of that stupid Saint that dumb shew of your silent extatick and seduced General who in so great a concern forgat his pristine valour and honour So that the darkning of your most wicked designs by this tiâ—le of The Agreement of the People amounts to no more in the true and last sense of it but this That you would have the People of England and the other two united Kingdoms willingly to bow down to your Hoddy doddy your all Breech-Idol as a Prophet of your own so variously and falsly inspired justly calls your unlick'd and monstruous projects not of Goverment but of Anarchy and Tyranny who may live indeed to see a day of judgement come upon you You would have us all to pledge you in that horrible draught of the Kings blood which you have greedily drank to appove and abet your execrable villanies and to submit for ever to the intollerable Tyranny of such Goths Vandalls and Saracens as you are Who are but the Devils Leieutenants Factors for the God of this impure World signal Anti-christs accurate fullfillers of all the characters foretold and brands set upon you in the last and perilous time in which true glass you and all men may clearly see the ugly lineaments of your most deformed faces and manners It is hoped that God hath yet so much mercy left in store for these sinful and by you most miserable Kingdoms as he gives us grace utterly to abhor your desperate sins So that we trust he will never suffer us by a Devillish Apostasie to fall from all Vows and Oaths by which we and our posterity are bound to God the Crown and our Countries only to have yours and the Devils absolution to make a Covenant and Agreement with Hell and Death with your most irreligious and damnable designs and practices No the sin and horrour of your waves are now like Absaloms incestuous and noon-day Rapes discovered in the sight of the Sun and all the World Nor will the subtilty of your soft and faigned voyces like Syrens any more charm and enchant the honest people of England into such Beasts and Monsters as your selves are to whose hellish deformities you would have all others to conform They have seen and felt too much already of your cruel Hypocrisies your devillish and strong Delusions Have not your words been alwayes Soloecisms to your purposes and your practices contradictions to your pretences Have you not as much as lies in your power and malice cast us into the dead Sea of disloyalty perjury cruelty barbarity irreligion and confusion that is possible for any Nation suddenly to relapse and fall into after so many Sacred and Solemn Professions of Loyalty and Reformation to God and the World whom we called to witness upon our Souls Agreeable to all which and to fill up the measure of our sins as if our Rebellion against God and the King were hitherto but a light and small matter by which we have most unhappily occasioned his death by the hands of cruel Edomites and cursed Amalekites as you are which most deplorable calamity to us and this Nation we penitently look upon as the severest temporal stroke which the wrath of God gone our against us can inflict upon us Yet your impudent Hypocrisie now seeks to obtrude upon us your wretched and abhorred Agreement The Sum of which is to leave the Kingdom without a King Government without Authority Magistrates without Power a People without Laws a Body without an Head Sheep without a Shephere Christians without Christ Churches without Ministers Ministers without Maintenance a Nation without Faith In a word you would have us live as men without Souls without God willfully degeneraring to Beasts without sense of Vertue or Vice shame or honour without fear of Hell hopes of Heaven or thoughts of Eternity and all this to maintain a few Tyrannous Hypocrites and Sodomitick Saints the cry of whose sins like Sodom is gone up to Heaven and are a burden too heavy for the Earth to bear Have you not already made the Name of these Protestant and Reformed Churches to stink among all Nations both Christian and Heathen through the dead flies and rottenness of your principles and manners Have you not surpassed the cunning and cruelty of the most Jesuitick heads and hands as much as you come short of their learning and pretensions which are to advance the Popes Authority above that of Kings But you upon baser Principles seek to subject the Regal Soveraignty to that of the People as you call it nor that you mean so in good earnest further than to delude the people and to raise the heads of your desperate Faction above all both King Prince Peers and People We appeal to all sober Christians whether your Treasons have not far surpassed the Powder Conspiracy Inasmuch as they plotted secretly but you have peracted openly the murther of the King the ruine of all the Royal Issue the overthrow of all our Laws the blowing up of all Parliaments the subverting of the whole State and Government the devastation of your Country the abolition of all true Religion the extirpation of all Liberty Peace Order and Humanity Your Elder Brother Faux himself might seem a Saint compared to you whose New Light and Dark Lanthorn you have so long made use of to hide and disguise your desperate intentions Nor were the rest of those Powder Traytors so criminal as you if they had effected what they designed since they neither pretended to that Saintship or that smooth preciseness which you have done nor had they upon them such signal ties of Publique and special Trust besides your many voluntary Obligations The total violation of all which renders your Sins out
with good cause that ever their Liberties and Properties can be either advanced or defended by you who have been so insolent usurpers over King Parliament and all our Laws and Liberties which our fore-fathers indeed enjoyed many years through Gods blessing and the Fatherly care of their Princes to a greater measure of Peace Plentie and Pietie than ever can be hoped for under such bloody Leeches such numerous and unsatiable Caterpillars as we have felt you to be Nay we tell you we so far disdain your Hipocrisie Treacherie and Tyrannie that we had rather be under the Tyrannie of our rightful King of whose justice and clemencie we nothing doubt than owe our Libertie as you call it to such vile Mushrooms and detested Traitors as you are who boast of Libertie yet are indeed slaves to your damned and desperate lusts studying nothing but how to delude the people with the name and fancy of Liberty as if you would perswade us rather to be the Devils Free-men as you are led Captive by his will than to be Loyal Subjects to our lawful and most hopeful King or humble servants to God whose sacred ties are many wayes upon our souls binding us to fear God and to honour the King and no less to abhorre you and have no fellowship with such as are given to seditious or perjurious changes forbidding us to use our Libertie as men and Christians for a cloak of maliciousness perjury tyranny hypocrisie and all licentious villanies as you have done The next pretence wherewith you bait the Mousetrap and temper the Ratsbane of your Agreement is that of Liberty in Religion Your meaning is That men may be free to profess no Religion or any which they call such so it be not the true one which you know is most opposite to your seditious traiterous merciless uncharitable and bloody Superstitions The very truth is you aim at such an Intolerable tolleration in Religion as you think is most agreeable to the profane hearts and licentious manners of the most debauched lives and Atheistical Spirits with which you have already pestered this English world In order to this Truth-darkening and Soul-damning design we know you follow your Leader the Devil and his Lieutenant General to the utter dissolving of all Government Order and Discipline in the Church to discourage all learned godly and painful Ministers to rob and spoil them of all setled Maintenance to reduce them and the work of the Ministry to that contempt which in the pride and luxurie of these times follows poverty and beggery That they depending on the peoples good will and charity which in many you have made bad and cold enough toward the best and ablest Preachers or upon your insolent and niggardly stipends they and their families may either eat their own dung and drink their own piss or be forced by necessities of life to desert their Function and places so as to leave their Congregations destitute of all holy publique duties or expose them to those Military Wolves and Mechanick Foxes which you have in great store provided for the supply of all places in Church as well as State Thus doth your rage reach as high as Heaven and as low as Hell But we hope the God of Heaven will look down upon us and our children in mercy and by some speedie rebuke of such Satans not suffer your follie and furie to proceed any further it being manifest to all moral and sober men that you are Factors not only for your selves to devour our Estates Houses Lands Liberties Peace and Lives but like the great Dragon yoâ— pour forâ—h a Sea of blood and poison ignorance and profaneness such as may for ever drown both our and our childrens souls it Heathenish Barbarism Superstition Atheism and Eternal destruction But know O you neither Milstones you poisonous Asps you King-killing Basilisks you desperate Deceivers and damnably deceived That although you have against all Faith of Turks Jews or any Heathens by fraud and force usurped upon our secular and civil Liberties so that at present we have not any formed power to oppose you and call your Ring-leaders to a severe account for your unheard of crimes and injuries against our King and our Country Yet shall our constancy in and our suffering for our Religion and our incouragement of godly learned and faithful Ministers to our best abilities make the world to see that there is no Agreement between Christ in us and Belial in you our God and your Mammon We hope the Triumphing of such Hypocrites as you are is but short nor shall you long insult over the dead and divided Corps of our late Lord and Soveraign King whose Wisdom Piety Faith and Patience God we doubt not hath crowned with Glorie and Immortalitie having perfected those many Princely gifts and Divine graces in him as God often doth in his dearest Saints and Martyrs after the example of his crucified Son Jesus Christ by his sufferings and your cruelties whose Memory and Posterity will be ever dear precious and honoured to us and our succeeding generations as a King who now appears beyond the Errours and Jealousies of former surmises chiefly raised and fomented by your false and envious Faction to have been the most constant Pillar the Noblest Patron the resolutest Protector and the most patient Martyr for our Laws Liberties Lives and Religion Yea and of our Parliaments true Priviledges which his Majesty best saw and fullest declared at first to have been shamefully invaded and out-raged by your Tumults afterby your Armies next by your new modellings at last by actual mutinings impudent menaces violent and warlike expressions upon their safety libertie faith loyaltie and honour with which purposes you sometime falsely aspersed and afterward accused the King and for which calumnies you most unjustly condemned and traiterously muthered him your selves being most truly and notoriously guiltie of that for which you wickedly cruelly and unjustly destroyed your and our King Shall you escape the righteous judgement of God Will not God visit you for these things Shall he not be avenged of such cruel Hypocrites Nor is it without a special Providence that you should be left wholly naked and destitute of all pretended due Authority in the fulfilling your execrable villanies to which you would now fain invite the people of England not having any shew or colour of any Parliamentary Votes Authority or Commands to countenance your mischiefs murthers and tyrannies not any concurrence of either Lords or Commons whom now under force and without all freedom becoming either Gentlemen or Christians we must tell you we look upon as no House and their enforced or enslaved Votes as null Their after sittings and complyings with you being nothing but infamous and base prostitutings of the Honour of that House and Vassallatings of the Dignity and Liberty both of the Parliament and People of England to the tyranny of a few Mutinous Cut-throats Trayterous Rebels and bloody Schismaticks who are in