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A44222 The death of King Charles I proved a down-right murder, with the aggravations of it in a sermon at St. Botolph Aldgate, London, January 30, 1692/3 : to which are added, some just reflections upon some late papers, concerning that King's book / by Rich. Hollingworth. Hollingworth, Richard, 1639?-1701. 1693 (1693) Wing H2501; ESTC R13678 16,735 43

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through Perjury and Perfidiousness through Breaches upon Promises reiterated and repeated again and again And therefore upon this account I recommend to you weeping and wailing because Perjury and Murder are great and crying sins II. Another Aggravation of this Murder is the Person that suffered and that was King Charles I. and here let us see whether he deserved such a barbarous death I am very far from thinking him a man in a state of Perfection and I do acknowledge there were Errors and Failures in his Government he came early to the Crown and therefore might be imposed upon but I hope every Man does not deserve to be knock'd o' th' Head for every particular slip of his life if so the best Kings that have Reigned would not have died natural deaths neither David nor Solomon neither Hezekiah nor Josiah nor any other Prince recorded for vertuous and very good men But however whatsoever his imperfections were in the beginning of his Reign I am sure before the Quarrel began with him he rectifyed them all and consented to remove all those things that were accounted grievous and indeed filled the Statute-Book with more Privileges than it does afford now for a succeeding Parliament took away some things then established which they in their great Wisdom thought neither fit for a King to grant nor People to enjoy The truth of it is this Great Person take him in all considerations deserved a far better Lot than he met withal and many of those that at first entertained hard thoughts of him and engaged against him upon Conversation and Acquaintance with him repented of what they had done and as they ever after bore a great esteem for him so in all their discourses afterwards represented him as one of the best of men they ever met withal particularly the Learned and Pious Mr. Vines who said to some Friends of mine That if ever there was a Solomon since Solomon it was Charles the I. And truly no wonder for certainly he was a Man endowed with as many Vertues and Graces as most Princes that ever sate upon a Throne His Devotions in the way of the Church of England were constant and regular his Discourses pithy and profitable for he was a man of great Parts and admirable Improvements his Behaviour was affable and courteous and so long as he was able possessed of his own Inheritance he was greatly Charitable and ready to lend his helping hand in promoting any publick Good which I could make out by many Instances further his Chastity considering the Temptations he as a King might be supposed to be under is scarce to be parallel'd and his Temperance acknowledged by all that were about him his Patience was in some sort like that of his great Master 's the Holy Jesus and tho he met with as great affronts and indignities as ever Man did that wore a Crown yet his very Enemies confessed that they could not throw him into a Passion nor ruffle him so far as to break out into undecent and angry Reflections how he behaved himself at his Tryal and immediately before his Death and at the hour of Death it self pray search the History and you will be satisfied that he was acted by a more than ordinary Divine Spirit one instance I cannot omit and that is when he was going through the Park towards the Scaffold with a Guard about him he spoke to Two Persons that did more immediately attend him that they would go faster saying That he now went before them to strive for an Heavenly Crown with less sollicitude than he had oftentimes bid his Souldiers to fight for an Earthly Diadem and how he went out of the World with a clear Soul without the least revenge but praving forgiveness for his Enemies you may find in the True Account of the passages at his Death And pray my Beloved what Cause was there now for this Great and Good Man's Murder Yes say some wicked Men he was a Tyrant and a Papist A Tyrant that is strange that gave to his People all they could reasonably ask and frankly offered to consent to any thing that did not strip him of his Kingship and that was consistent with his Honour and Conscience If such a Man be a Tyrant then You and I must all of us change our Notions of things and call Good Evil and Evil Good And as for the Imputation of Popery there is no Man that reads his History with an unprejudiced Mind can believe the least inclination to it if Living and Dying in perfect Communion with the most excellent Church in the World if offering to do any thing that might preserve and support the Protestant Religion be arguments of a Papist then I must confess the Imputation is just but what Man of the Church of England is not a Papist at this rate But thanks be to God as he refuted this Reflection by the whole Series of his Life and by his solemn Protestation at his Death when he was just going to give an account to God so I think the Members of this Church have Preach'd Printed and said enough in the late Reign for ever to silence and shame this Reflection and Imputation out of the World So that hitherto we find no cause of Death in him at all even if by the Laws of the Land he had been rightly tryed by a just Power that had as just an Authority to bring him to an Hearing and Tryal and therefore this is a great aggravation of his Death that a Man of Innocence and Goodness a Man of Virtue and Piety a Man indeed of a most Exemplary Life should be thus Butcher'd and that by those who had no more Authority to do it than you have to fall a cutting one anothers Throats as soon as this Sermon is ended And therefore upon this score This Death ought to be bewailed and there is great reason for the observing This Day in order to prevent the Judgments that may come upon us for shedding and for the vindicating the shedding of this Innocent Bloud III. Another Aggravation of this Murder is the Consequences of it Alas after the Sacrifice of this great Person Nobles fell by their bloudy hands and the best Families were either Banished or Imprisoned and their Estates Confiscated a bloudy War with Scotland was commenc'd and that free Nation brought into a perfect slavery and that which was a thing of deplorable consequence this Good Man's Children were Banished to seek their Bread in strange Countreys from whence proceeded the Miseries especially of the last Reign and therefore those Men that flye in the face of the Two last Kings should do well to consider where they were forcibly bred and how they came to be bred there who sent them out of their own Countrey and exposed them to live upon the Bounty of Popish Princes if King Charles the First had lived out his time they no doubt had been bred up in the strictest way in the Protestant
Nation This Day to bewail is not according to that Notion of Murder a real Act of Murder and not a piece of Justice as many wicked Men at this Day call it and consequently does not deserve to be abhorred and grieved for by all Men that wish well to the Kingdom and in order to it do endeavour to atone that displeasure which the Shedding and the Vindicating the shedding of Innocent Bloud may justly raise in the Divine Breast and which may provoke God still to pour down his Judgments upon us for so doing And certainly there is no good Man in the Nation but will conclude considering the Circumstances and Dangers we are in threatned by a powerful Enemy abroad and weakned so much by so great destructive Divisions at home I say there is no good Man but will conclude that we ought to do all that lyes in us to procure the Blessings and the kind and seasonable interposals of Divine Providence to secure our Armies by Land and our Forces by Sea and so to prosper them that we may be delivered from the hands of our Enemies and all that hate us our Nation and Religion And he that by Vindicating the crying Sin of Murder does contribute towards Divine Provocation he is so far from being a Friend to the Laws and Liberties of his Countrey that he is the greatest Enemy they have and ought by all Men trusted with Publick Offices either Spiritual or Secular to be both publickly instructed and with all good Temper to be reproved too that so he may be reclaimed from a Sin that hath so poysonous an influence upon the Good of the Community of which he is a Member First therefore As for the True Notion of Murder the thing forbidden in the Text In short it is nothing else but the taking away another Man's Life without a Warrant from God or Man deputed and entrusted by God in a Judicial way to bring Men to such a piece of Justice as deprives them of their Lives For it is plain from Scripture that many Mens Lives have been taken away by an immediate Command from God which justified the Act and took away the Notion and consequently the Guilt of Murder And it is as plain that there are many Acts of Wickedness that God ordered the Lawful Magistrate for the appeasing of Divine Wrath and the Good of Humane Societies to put Men to Death which Laws have had their force in all Nations and Countries whatsoever and indeed without which Humane Societies would quickly be dissolved and the World would be like nothing but a Wilderness or Desart full of Men turned into the nature of wild Bears and Tygers and where you have one violent destruction of a Fellow-Creature you would have a thousand So that the Murder of my Text is nothing else but a pretending and undertaking to be Master of another Man's Life without any Commission from God or any Legal Tryal by Men according to the Laws of the Country in which they live and to which they are bound to subject themselves So that this brings me to the work and business of this day namely to consider Whether the Death of King Charles the First was a Murder yea or no or an Act of Justice as some wicked men do still pretend to call-it Now here let us consider whether they had a Commission from God to do it Now a Commission from God must either be by a Voice from Heaven or else by the Ministry of an Angel sent by God or some other way by which God did convey His Mind and Purpose to His People of old none of which were ever pretended to as the ground and reason of this great Man's Death by any that had a hand in it And therefore let us see what Warrant they had from the Laws of the Land The Laws of the Land What are they or upon what Authority are they founded Why according to our Constitution all Laws flow from the Power of King Lords and Commons the Lords and Commons framing and preparing Bills such as they conceive for the Good of the Countrey and the King by his Royal Fiat giving Life and Being to those Bills upon which they immediately become obligatory to the People of the Land to violate or transgress which is attended with such Pains and Penalties as those Law-makers who make up the Legislative Power of the Nation think good and meet to enact and whatsoever is offered as a Law made without the concurrence of these Three Estates together is an Invasion and Encroachment upon the True and Essential Constitution of the Kingdom For neither the King without the Lords and Commons nor the Lords and Commons without the King can bind the Subject to any thing under the Notion of a Law of this Kingdom This my Beloved is our happy Frame of Government which certainly is the best the World can shew and under which we ought to sit with great delight and pleasure And they that go about to set any of these Three Powers contrary to the Law above their places are great Enemies to this excellent Constitution and their Projects and Contrivances their Arguments and Proposals have always been of very unhappy consequence to the Kingdom in general And for my own part I do here profess my self so great an Admirer of this happy Constitution that by the Grace of God my little Finger shall never be employed to make any jar in the Harmony and Concurrence of King Lords and Commons and I will always submit by doing or by suffering to whatsoever they shall Enact And though they should pass into a Law what I in Conscience could not comply withal yet I think it my duty not to Resist but to be passively Obedient which I account the true Notion of Non-Resistance and Passive-Obedience two Doctrines which if not maintained and practised in this sense I have named all Government is precarious and will be in danger of being unhinged whenever a number of discontented and ambitious Persons get together with Force and Strength in order to carry on their wicked and base designs and to answer and gratifie their unreasonable dissatisfactions Well this being the true Notion of the English Laws pray let us see whether King Lords and Commons ever consented to a Law that enabled one part to destroy the other the King to destroy and null the Being and Authority of Lords and Commons or the Lords and Commons to sit upon judge and take away the Life of their King And here I challenge the boldest Assertor of the Justice of the Murder of this Day to show me any one word from the beginning of the Statute-Book to the end thereof that looks this way or gives such a Power into any of the three parts of the Legislative Powers Hands And if there be no Commission from the Law of the Land then certainly this Death must be called and is a true and real Murder the Thing forbidden in my Text. A Law