those who have hurried your Convention into such Extremities as Rebels insensible of Religion or Law and that as excusable as many honest dissenting Men among the Commons may be the rest will not be reckoned among the true Children of the Church of England nor of her Communion I am thinking to write of this matter to a Bishop a Learned and an Honest Man tho I believe I know his mind by my own before hand If the Yeas among you alleadged reasons of weight enough to silence all the scruples which the Case must needs raise you will much oblige me to acquaint me with them For I declare to you that as little as I pretend to Learning I fancy I am Schollar enough to be pretty well assured there was none to be alleadged able to satisfy a Man who has never so little smack of the Duty of Christianity but strangely persuade my self there Votes were grounded upon the detestable maximes of Doleman and Buchanan Knox Goodwin Milton and such Presbyterian Saints whose Books as often as they have been forbidden and condemned by the Parliaments and Church of England I expect should now be Re-printed by order of the Convention not that I believe the leading Gentlemen troubled themselves at this time much with scruples There is no better remedy against the Disease than that Fanatical spirit which was predominant in your Assembly chiefly in the House of Commons made up for the most part of Non-Conformist Presbyterians who by the Laws of Q. Elizabeth and later Statutes ought to have been excluded But let your new King alone for that matter let him once be but steady in his Throne he will quickly bring in more Christian Principles among you Tho my Lords the Bishops I am persuaded will be the first Reformed according to the primitive Apostolick Pattern and being eased of the heavy load of useless Riches and worldly Honours reduced according to my Lord Shaftsbury's wish to a Pension of bare 100 l. per Annum some of them to my grief deserve it but too well and if I should resolve to make one amongst you I will not answer I shall Vote against it But I declare to you I shall concur in nothing else and it shall be no fault of mine if those Lords with whom I have any credit joyn not to undoe all you have done as soon as the Nation which I hope it quickly will shall open its Eyes and become sensible of the infamy which your Convention has thrown upon it The truth is there need no meeting for the matter For that were to suppose some Authority in what you have done whereas it has none and is every way extravagant You must needs have lost your Wits if you imagine we shall ever take the Votes of your Houses for Laws You will know that England acknowledges no other Law but those which are made by Lawful Authority that is by the King in Parliament Search all Parliaments search all Court-Rolls there are no other to be found I appeal to the very Lawyers who after they had been of Councel to all the Seditious Men and Conspirators of late times were chosen to be yours These Famous Lawyers and you your selves know that no Authority but the King 's alone can call the Peers and Commons together and you acknowledg'd it by not daring at first to take the Name of Parliament upon you You are therefore Convened by the bare Authority of the Prince of Orange and that Authority you gave him tho' you had none to give him Put case you had he was incapable either to receive or exercise it For having enter'd the Kingdom in Arms Declared against the King and attempted upon His Sacred Person and Liberty he incurred the Crime of High Treason and forfeited all his Rights Honours and Prerogatives in case he be a Subject If he be not he is a publick Enemy and against whom the Nation is bound to stand by the King and not to obey him under pain of High Treason And yet this is the Authority by which you sit and which by your own confession cannot make an Assembly such as our Laws call a Parliament And yet this notwithstanding your Convention which stretch its Power to the utmost cannot pretend to more than Parliament Power has done what no Lawful Parliament ever durst do Judge their King Declar'd His forc'd Retreat to be an Abdication of the Government and the Throne Vacant and finally dispos'd of it to the use of P. of Orange I beseech you send me word what Presidents your Learned Councel brought for these Resolves Those of the Spencers and other Traytors of those times or those of Cromwel I know none else who maintained that as often as a King Governs not according to Law his Subjects may take Arms and compel him to it But you know all Parliaments have placed this case amongst Crimes of High Treason The truth is you have bethought your selves of a subtile expedient which I expect should be clapt for a colour upon your Proceedings viz. that you did not vacate the Throne but only fill'd it when it was vacant But in good faith this is to top upon a whole Nation with your false distinctions In virtue of what Law I beseech you could you declare the Throne vacant can a parcel of Seditious Men met at the tumultuous call of an Usurper give sentence in such a cause Is the Kingdom of England Elective and is there any uncontested President to be found which Authorizes the People to dispose of the Crown or declare it Vacant can an Heriditary Kingdom become Vacant otherwise than by the Death of the Lawful Occupant This way perhaps your new King might have made it Vacant but tho' it were is there no Heir The Prince of Wales for whose Birth all England and the Prince of Orange himself so solemnly Congratulated with his Father is He no longer in the World And is He not considerable enough to be thought of His age is not capable of breaking the Original Contract which you have fancy'd between King and People and therefore the Throne if it be Vacant must belong to Him. I know the Prince of Orange would make a Counterfeit of Him and this becomes his Conscience But tell me in yours whether all these impotently malicious surmises which are spread by his Emissaâ—ys be not palpably shameful So shameful that he has not yet ventur'd to press you as great an Influence as he has among you to come to a Declaration in that point It is reserved it seems to your Parliament in which Oates and his Brethren of the Post will swear some mishappen Oath for Burnet to lick over and you upon their credit enact him suppositions in virtue of some new Law which shall reach backwards as That the Queens of England to purpose shall be no where validly Delivered but in the Banquetting-House both Houses of Parliament present I will say nothing of your Grievances as much more cry than
wool as there is in them But I will stop a little at the New Oathes which you substitute in place of those which are appointed by Law. You my Lord have taken the Oaths of Allegiance Supreamacy and the Test as well as your Neighbours Do you believe those Oaths oblig'd you to perform what you swore and ty'd you to the King to whom you swore or do you not In likelyhood you do not since those Oaths notwithstanding you thought your self free to take up Arms against your King and to joyn with His Enemies of necessity then you must either be Perjur'd or believe there is no regard to be had to Oaths as indeed you were no Slaves to yours We must be confident Men to reproach the Papists longer with their Lyes and their Equivocations to which abundance of them are no greater Friends than we when your Convention not only teaches but orders us to make such May-Games of our Oaths Besides they were Enacted by Parliament the bare dispensing with which in favour of Papists is a principal part of your Out-cry against His Majesty with what face can you take them quite away and pop in others in their room you who by changing your Convention into a Parliament acknowledge you have not the Authority of a Parliament How could you do what you make a Crime in the King who at worst has an Authority which you have not Zeal I suppose for Protestant Religion will be pleaded for your Proceeding and your strange Votes against the King. And yet it would puzzle the most Religious Man of quirk among you to cite the Article of Protestant Religion or Act concerning it which justifie your Zeal There is none which enables Subjects to dispose of the Crown in case their King profess not the Protestant Religion On the contrary the last Act of Vniformity formally detests the Doctrine of those who teach that Subjects may take up Arms against their King. And tho' some Law had made the Profession of the Protestant Religion necessary to be King of England it were to be understood of the Protestant Religion Established by Law yet you take the boldness to declare the Throne Vacant whatever you pretend to in reality because the King is of the Romish Religion and at the same time set up a Man who has always been of a Religion contrary to Law as well as the King since the Prince of Orange is a Protestant Dissenter for the Law is against Protestant Dissenters as will as Papists But I see you take upon you to do what the Fanaticks have so often demanded and no Legal Parliament yet would ever grant to take away the Penal Laws from Protestant Dissenters and leave them still in force against Papists Where I ask again what Authority you have to alter the Laws and what pretence to Dispense with them when you fall out with the King for Dispensing Turn it which way you will these Proceedings are unmaintainable and as you are no Stranger to our Laws you will I make no doubt acknowledge that there is no speaking of them and your Votes the same day And then the King is traduced with designing Arbitrary Power when the Arbitrary Power of the Convention has subverted more in a week than our Kings in a hundred years It has subverted the Fundamental Law of Succession all that have been made for the security of Kings and the State those of Supreamacy of Uniformity in Religion and so many other that there will hardly remain more than just to keep Nisi prius es going For in what concerns Criminal matters all Laws have been laid aside by the illegal Proceedings against divers Papists and others Peers as well as Commons Imprison'd against Law and this at the very time in which complaint was made of bringing one into the Kings-Bench who ought to have been Try'd in Parliament Peers are priviledg'd Persons how then can you take upon you to Arrest even Popish Peers you who neither had the Authority nor Name of a Parliament The Law allows the meanest Man in the Nation his Habeas Corpus and by it his Liberty upon Bail and yet you refused it to Peers The Chancellor is the Third Man in the Kingdom and has the priviledge not only of his Peerage but of his Office which makes the usage he has received Treason And yet you have put and kept him in Prison notwithstanding that even tho' you had been a Lawful Parliament all you could do is to Address to the King to punish him for Male-administration if he be guilty But I will enlarge no farther upon your irregular doings whereof I do not think it possible to pack a greater number into one Vote I will only tell you that to my thinking your Convention has outdone the long Parliament it self in bare fac'd contempt of the Laws Those Seditious Paricides stumbled not as you do at the Threshold They demanded and tho' by very bad means obtained a Parliament They acknowledged the Kings Power when they met they sought and to his and the whole Nations misfortune got his consent to an Act for not Disolving or Proroging them without their own consent They then kept at least some measures you keep none and they were a Parliament you are not I know you ill if you will always be content the World should think something better of the most execrable Paracides that ever were and take you for the less modestly wicked of the two For what concerns your new King he has nothing but Force to trust to the only thing which can silence the Laws and preserve him But I am persuaded that you who are his Favourites will be the first to repent the trusting your Liberty in such bad hands Those Brutes of Hollanders are far from the Free-men which he found them He persuaded them to rid themselves of their best Patriots as he has persuaded you to rid your selves of your King and is like to make you sensible one day that your great Liberty which you found it seems uneasy will bid fair to enslave you If persuasions will not do there are other expedients in the World which may and if we will believe malicious Tongues have been thought of I for my part am resolved to stay at home till I see which way matters are like to go Whatever you Write I cannot but think them wondrous tottering still tho' he has appeared in his Robes perhaps suspecting that if he had stay'd his Coronation day he might never have worn them Between you and me the Description you make puts me in mind of Kings in old Tapestry with their Crowns and their Mantles always on even in Bed. 'T is like that day he went to Bed with his to expose the Raree-Show a while longer But let him Reign over those who find him and his ways to their mind happen what will I will not taint my Family and my Credit no not with Treason if sure to be pardoned and the Infamy
of acknowledging a Foreign Usurper whose double Alliance to the Royal Family is the only pretence he has to the honour of commanding us When I take a fancy to choose a Master I will pitch upon one of a higher rank As my humour is I should rather if I had been a Hollander have obey'd the King of Spain than a Gentleman of Germany and being an English-man will never submit to a man whose Nobility is no higher rais'd above mine And this is my Resolve upon the Question to which I believe I shall always adhear let what will be offered to the contraty As for the dismal consequences with which you threaten me I hope they will pass one way or other For we live in the Land of Revolutions where Changes happen in a moment and always without knowing why If they will not let me stay quietly at home Ireland is not so far off but that I may slip thither where as I have a Title I declare to you before hand that if the King call a Parliament you are like to hear news of Dametas I do not mean to be Deaf and Dumb there as I have been to your Convention Only I am troubled for my Countrey-men whom their Titles or other considerations make answerable before a Parliament of Ireland If the rigour of the Law should fall upon them they can the less complain because the English having set the Irish so many examples of severity and that too in the case of men who had done and suffered much for the King they cannot well expect to be spared by the Irish These thoughts grieve a man who loves his Nation But since all the Calamities still fresh in memory which the last long Rebellion power'd upon the Kingdom cannot extingvish that violent Animosity which some men have against Lawful Princes who can complain or wonder if Providence permit it those which are not so I shall have at least the satisfaction to have had no hand in them and will never with your distinction of de facto and de jure Kings distinguish my self into the Politick Idolatry of falling down before the Idol of the Commons Perhaps we may one day see the Golden Calf bruised to pieces You may dance about it in the mean time and your Aaron the Bishop of London and such Levites cry out These are thy Gods O Israel which have brought thee out of the Bondage of Aegypt This is the MESSIAS of the Presbyterians who has broken in pieces the CHAINS of POPERY and delivered you from the Slavery of Arbitrary Power They may amuse and they may lull you asleep till you wake much I fear in Blood. God in his Mercy will I hope take pity on honest Men. And as to the Gentlemen of the House of Commons we may possibly live to see some of them led to Tyburn Many to my knowledge did deserve it long before the Convention and without that Dispensing Power against which they are now so eager bid much fairer for the Halterlative than the Legislative Power for Hanging than for Parliament Speeches The worst is that nothing they have or can do can keep them clear of the guilt of High Treason into which they have run you All and the best I can wish you is that our Lawful King may speedily return and bury all Faults in an Act of Oblivion the only thing which can secure your Estates your Honours and your Lives It was the Advice of Honest Judge Jenkins to the Round-heads who came to him for Councel in the time of Charles the I. They Laught at him as you perhaps will at me But he was found to be in the right at last and so I hope shall I. In the mean time I intreat you that these matters may not slacken our old Friendship I am c. At 20th April 1689