Selected quad for the lemma: power_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
power_n	king_n	people_n	tyranny_n	2,786	5	9.5807	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A96999	The remonstrance of the Commons of England, to the House of Commons assembled in Parliament Preferred to them by the hands of the speaker.	Walker, Henry, fl. 1643.	1643 (1643)	Wing W382E; ESTC R225914	7,953	8

Ye have shewed your se ves so averse from peace that ye have voted there shall be no cessarion of Arms lest by a free treatie a peace might ensue This is your carriage towards the King himself And lest ye might be accused to be juster to the subject then ye are towards your Soveraign these things ye have done to the subject also 1. Ye have made an Ordinance that the twentieth part of mens estates must be payed towards the maintainance of this Rebellion and ye appoint those who shall value that twentieth part and why by the same reason ye take not the tenth part or the one half we see not and for the levying of it ye ordain your Collectors shall distrein for the sum assessed and sell the distresse and if no distresse can be found the persons of these notable offendors are to be imprisoned and they and their families banished from their habitations 2 But lest this should not have the colour of Law sufficient to blind the world ye have lately made an ordinance for the Inhabitants of the Counties of Northampton Rutland Derby c. to pay and be assessed by Assessors named in your Act in imitation of the Statute lately made for the 40000l. and this as is probable shall in convenient time be extended to the whole Kingdom so ye first cast your selves into a necessity to get mony by making an impious war upon your Soveraign and then out of that necessity ye compell your fellow-Subjects who abominate the war to maintain it 3. And ye have yet a shorter and a surer way where ye understand there is any money plate or goods to be had ye send a party of Horse or Dragooners to fetch it out of an enemies Country because the owners are good Subjects to the King or you suspect them to be so and that alone is crime sufficient to apprehend them to judge them and to take execution upon them and all this without the Ceremony of Law by your absolute and omnipotent power which cannot erre 4. You discharge Apprentices and Servants from their Masters services without consent of their Masters and Dames and either perswade them or compell them to serve in your Army against the King This is indeed the Liberty of the Subject 5. Ye have imprisoned many for petitioning unto you as if that alone were a crime if the matter of the perition do not flatter you in your present courses 6. And others ye have imprisoned some for petitioning and some for intending to petition to the King as those Gentlemen of Hertfordshire and Westminster And yet God be praised the way is open to petition to him in Heaven and he will hear us in his good time Lastly for your priviledges of Parliaments 1. Ye forbid us to dispute them ye alone are as ye say the Judges of them but in former ages those also might be and have been judged by the lawes of the Kingdom onely of offences committed by your own Members against your House of these you are the proper Judges and of the elections of your Members 2. Yet these we conceive under your good favours are to be thus confined that every member of your House hath and ought to have as free liberty as any of them to deliver his opinion upon every emergent occasion and not to be committed as some have been or put out of the House as others have been for speaking freely against the sense of the House or rather of some members thereof 3 The Priviledges of your House were never challenged til now to extend to any Member which shall comit Treason or Felony bur ye have now declared that no Member of the House nor any others imployed by you in this horrid Rebellion should be questioned for Treason but in Parl. or at the least by leave of the House 4. Ye have made a close Committee as you call it wherein a very few Members of your House onely are privy to your Councels and what those few consult upon is summarily reported to the House and that taken upon trust by an implicite faith of all the rest 5 Many of the present Members of your House have had their elections questioned but if they incline to those propositions which ye lay downe to your selves to uphold your Tyrannicall and usurped Goverment you are so busied in the great affaires of State that in two yeares space for so long longer ye have continued this Parl. already ye have no leisure to determine those questions lest you should loose such a one from your party 6. Sometimes when a matter of importance hath beene in debate they have put it to the question and upon the question it hath beene determined and the same question againe resumed at another time better prepared for the purpose and determined quite contrary this we are well assured was not the Priviledge of former Parliaments when many of us were Members thereof We do beleeve ye have many just priviledges for the freedome of your persons for freedome of speech but we never did beleeve that ye had a Priviledge to take the Scepter into your hands to levy a Warre against your King and to compell others to joyne with you in so execrable an act We wish from our hearts that all these Observations were but fables and fictions as we have met with many from you to amuse us but they are all undeniably true our conditions therefore are most miserable when thus instead of of maintaining the true protestant Religion the Lawes of the Land the just Liberty and propriety of the Subject and just priviledges of Parliament they are all of them radically and fundamentally destroyed and that by you whose duties and professions are daily to the contrary And if any thing can be added to our misery it is this that we cannot see through the time when this intolerable yoke of slavery which ye put upon your fellow subjects shall have an end seeing by the art of a few yee have contrived an Act whereby ye have perfidiously over-reached both the King and people to make this Parliament to be perpetuall at your pleasurses that so your arbitrary power and tyranny over the Kingdome might be perpetuated Yet one thing more may be added to our unhappinesse Fuisse foelices We were lately a happy people and are now on a sudden reduced to such a depth of unhappinesse that we are made a spectacle to the whole world and the very object of their scorne For We are before we were aware of it cast in a Warre a Civill Warre an irreligious and barbarous Warre against our Soveraigne our naturall Liege Lord. VVe are put into an inevitable way of poverty By being wasted in all quarters and corners of the Kingdome one by another By loosing our commerce at home it being intercepted by the Armies and almost no debts paid occasioned specially by the priviledges of your Members and such as ye priviledg By loosing our trade abroade it being cast into the hands of strangers VVe loose our season for tillage and husbandry which must of necessity introduce a Famine and Famine doth but usher in a Pestilence And Warre Famine and Pestilence are the three great and fearefull Judgements of God upon a Nation Nothing can redeeme us out of these calamities but a speedy Peace and to prepare it a Cessation of Armes And then by good Lawes as ye have already happily begun to amend what is or hath beene amisse without plucking up the foundations of Goverment We beseech you therefore at the last to lay aside your affections and in your judgments to provide for us and for your selves and for the honour of our Religion the peace of our consciences the preservation of our lives estates and for the salvation of our poore soules to have pity upon us bind up our bleeding wounds cure the distractions of the the time and make up the breaches betweene the King aad people occasioned onely by a mis-understanding And if these our Petitions or Complaints or Remonstrances call them what you will may prevaile with you we doubt not but that the King of His grace and goodnesse will be intreated to bury all your by-past-actions in an act of oblivion that neither the presentage nor the ages to come may to the shame of this Nation have cause to remember what have happened here in this last and worst age of the world But if all this and all which in your great iudgments yee can adde unto it shall not move you We doe and shall protest to all the world that wirh the hazard of our lives and fortunes and all we can call our own we shall endeavor to vindicate our selves from these inhumane courses Sed meliora speramus VVe hope for better things And we shall incessantly pray to God to perfect our hopes by blessing your Counsels FINIS