If I be as copious in words and empty of matter in my Defence of the People of England as most men think Salmasius has been in his Defence of the King, I fear that I shall apparently have deserved to be called a defender at once wordy and silly. Yet no man thinks he must make such haste, even in handling any ordinary subject, as not to employ an opening worthy of its importance. In handling well-nigh the greatest of all subjects, then, if I neither omit an introduction, nor overdo it, I hope to achieve two things, both of which I earnestly desire: the one, that I may in no way fail this cause, as far as in me lies, a cause most renowned and most worth the remembrance of all the generations of men; the other, that I myself be yet deemed to have avoided the silliness and verbosity which I blame in my antagonist.

For I shall here relate nothing common or mean; but how a most puissant king, when he had trampled upon the laws, and stricken down religion, and was ruling according to his own lust and wantonness, was at last subdued in the field by his own people, who had served a long term of slavery; how he was thereupon put under guard, and when he gave no ground whatever, by either word or action, to hope better things of him, was finally by the highest council of the realm condemned to die, and beheaded before his very palace gate. I shall also relate (which will much conduce to the easing men's minds of a great superstition) under what system of laws, especially what laws of England, this judgment was rendered and executed; and shall easily defend my valiant and worthy countrymen, who have deserved so well of all subjects and nations in the world, from the most wicked calumnies of both domestic and foreign railers, and chiefly from the reproaches of this utterly empty sophister, who sets up to be captain and ringleader of all the rest. For what king's majesty high enthroned ever shone so bright as did the people's majesty of England, when, shaking off that age-old superstition which had long prevailed, they overwhelmed with judgement their very king (or rather him who had once been their king but had become their enemy), ensared in his own laws him who alone among men claimed by divine right to go unpunished, and feared not to inflict upon this very culprit the same capital punishment he would have inflicted upon any other.

Yet why do I proclaim these actions as done by the people, which themselves almost utter a voice, and witness everywhere the presence of God? Who, as often as it has seemed good to his infinite wisdom, has cast down proud unbridled kings, puffed up above the measure of mankind, and often uproots them with their whole house. As for us, it was by His clear command we were on a sudden resolved upon the safety and liberty that we had almost lost; it was He we followed as our Leader, and revered His divine footsteps imprinted everywhere; and thus we entered upon a path not dark but bright, and by His guidance shown and opened to us. I should be much in error if I hope that by my diligence alone, such as it is, I might set forth all these matters as worthily as they deserve, and might make such records of them as, perhaps, all nations and all ages would read. But what eloquence can be august and magnificent enough, what man has parts sufficient, to undertake so great a task? Yea, since in so many ages as are gone over the world there has been but here and there a man found able to recount worthily the actions of great heroes and potent states, can any man have so good an opinion of himself as to think that by any style or language of his own he can compass these glorious and wonderful works — not of men, but, evidently, of almighty God?

Yet such is the office which the most eminent men of our commonwealth have by their influence prevailed upon me to undertake, and have wished this next best task assigned to me of defending their deeds from envy and calumny, against which steel and the furniture of war avail not — of defending, I say, with far other arms and other weapons, the works which under God's guidance they had gloriously wrought. Their decision, certainly, I count a great honor to myself — that they voted me, before all others, the one to render this never-to-be-regretted assistance to the valiant liberators of my country; and indeed from my youth upward I had been fired with a zeal which kept urging me, if not to do great deeds myself, at least to celebrate them. Yet, mistrusting these advantages, I have recourse to the divine assistance, and pray the great and holy God, dispenser of all gifts: Even as successfully and piously as those our glorious guides to freedom crushed in battle the royal insolence and tyranny uncontrolled, and then at last by a memorable punishment utterly ended them; even as easily as I, singlehanded, lately refuted and set aside the king himself when he, as it were, rose from the grave, and in that book published after his death tried to cry himself up before the people with new verbal sleights and harlotries; so, I pray, may I now as auspiciously and as truly refute and demolish this outlandish rhetorician's wanton lies.

Foreign born as he is, and (though he deny it a thousand times) a mere grammarian, yet, not satisfied with the grammarian's wages, he has chosen to mind everybody's business, and has presumed to meddle in an affair of state, a foreign state at that, though he brings to the task neither moderation nor understanding nor anything else that so grand a judge would surely need, save his presumption and his grammar. Indeed if he had published here, and in English, the same things as he now has written in Latin (such as it is) I think scarce any man would have thought it worth while to return an answer to them, but would partly despise them as common, and exploded over and over already, and partly (even one who sided with the king) abhor them as foul despotic maxims, hardly to be endured by the most worthless of slaves. But as he undertakes to puff up his portentous pages among outsiders, who are quite ignorant of our affairs, they, who thus get an utterly false notion of them, certainly ought to be fully informed; and he, who is very forward to speak ill of others, should be treated in his own kind.

If perhaps anyone wonders why, then, we all have suffered him so long to strut about unchallenged, swollen in triumph at our silence, I know not what others may say, but for myself I can boldly declare that I had neither words nor arguments long to seek for the defence of so good a cause, had I but found leisure, and such health as could bear the toil of writing. Yet as I still possess but slender strength, I am forced to write by piece-meal, and break off almost every hour, though the subject be such as requires unremitted study and attention. If for this reason I have been unable to celebrate with right heraldry, befitting their praises, those glorious fellow-citizens of mine, their country's saviors, whose deathless deeds, already ring round the world, yet I hope it will not be difficult for me to defend, at least, and justify them, against the impertinence of this bore of a pedant, and the squallings of his professorial tongue. Nature and laws would be in ill case if slavery were eloquent, and liberty mute; if tyrants should find defenders, and they that are potent to master and vanquish tyrants should find none. And it were deplorable indeed, if the reason mankind is endued withal, which is God's gift, should not furnish more arguments for men's preservation, for their deliverance, and, much as the nature of the thing will bear, for their equality, than for their oppression and utter ruin under one man's dominion. Let me therefore enter upon this noble cause with cheerfulness grounded upon the assurance that on the other side are cheating, and trickery, and ignorance and outlandishness, and on my side the light of truth and reason, and the practice and theory of the best ages of mankind.

So much by way of introduction. And now, since our affair is with critics, let us consider first the title of this choice volume. What does it say? "A Royal Defence for Charles the First, to Charles the Second." You undertake a wonderful piece of work, whoever you are — to plead the father's case before his own son: a hundred to one but you carry it! But, Salmasius, though you hide from legal process as you formerly did under an assumed name, and do now under no name at all — I yet summon you to appear before another tribunal and before other judges, where perhaps you shall not get those "Bravos" and "Hear Hears" which you are wont to hanker after so desperately in your classroom. But why this royal defence dedicated to the king's own son? We need not put him to the torture; he confesses: "At the king's expense," says he. Mercenary and costly advocate! So you would not write a defence for Charles the father, whom you pretend to have been the best of kings, to Charles the son, the most indigent of kings, but it must be at the king's own expense? You old rogue, in calling it the "King's Defence" you certainly contrived not to have yourself laughed at; for as you have sold it, 'tis no longer yours, but lawfully the King's indeed, — yea, bought for one hundred Jacobuses, a great sum to get from a needy King. I speak not of things unknown: I know who took those gold-pieces to your house in that beaded purse; I know who saw you reach out your greedy hands under pretense of embracing the king's chaplain who brought the gift, but in fact to hug the gift itself, and by taking this single fee almost emptied the king's treasury.

But here comes the man himself; the door creaks; enter the actor.

In silence now, and with attention wait,
That ye may learn what the Eunuch has to prate.

Far more heinous is it, that what was decreed by our supreme magistracy to be done to the king may be said by you to have been done "by an execrable conspiracy of sacrilegious men." Rogue, is this how you characterize the acts and decrees of our late most potent realm and present yet more potent commonwealth, concerning whose deeds no king, even, could hitherto be brought to utter or publish anything more abusive?

Rightly, then, have the High and Mighty States of Holland, true offspring of the ancient liberators of their country, by their edict damned to darkness this defence of tyranny, most noxious to the liberty of all peoples. As for the author, every free state ought to keep him out of its bounds, or cast him out; especially the state which supports and subsidizes so ungrateful and so foul an enemy of the republic. That republic's foundations and causes he attacks precisely as he attacks ours; by one and the same effort, in fact, he strives to undermine them both, and make them totter to their fall; and under our names foully maligns the most eminent champions of liberty there. Consider with yourselves, most illustrious States General of the United Netherlands, and take note of who it was that lately began to king it among you; what counsels were taken, what attempts made, what tumults at length ensued throughout Holland; to what a pass things might have been brought by this time — how slavery and a new master were made ready for you, and that liberty of yours, vindicated by so many years' war and toil — how near spent it had now been among you, had it not lately recovered breath again by the exceedingly timely death of a rash young man.

But that fellow of ours goes on with his bombast, play-acting strange tragedies: "Whomsoever this dreadful news reached" — the news, doubtless, of Salmasius's parricidal barbarism — "suddenly, as if they had been scorched by lightning's flash, 'Up on end stood their hair in horror, and their voices stuck in their throats.'" Something hitherto unheard of for natural philosophers to learn — that to be struck by lightning makes one's hair stand on end! But who knows not that base and coward minds do get thunderstruck even at the mere sound of any great deed, and then most unmistakenly show themselves for the blockheads they have been all along? Some, he says "could not but weep" — some petites femmes, I suppose and court-ladies, or others yet more effeminate — among whom, indeed, Salmasius himself has by a modern metamorphosis turned into Salmacis and in this his counterfeit fountain of night-lubricated tears, attempts to emasculate manly courages. I give warning therefore and bid beware

Lest ill-reputed Salmacis with a wave,
Of evil power some victim shall unman;
Who, though a man he came, yet thence shall go
Hermaphrodite, and at the water's touch —
Swift grow effeminate.

"In fact, the more bravely courageous," he says (for I suppose he cannot even name the brave and courageous without nauseous affectation), "burned with such a flame of indignation that they could hardly control themselves." For such madmen we care not a rush, but have a way of driving off your blustering bullies, and routing them with that true courage which does control itself. "Surely everyone invoked curses upon the authors of so horrible a villainy." Yet, you were just saying, their voices stuck in their throats. And as far as our exiles are concerned — if you mean them — would that it had stuck there even unto this day; for we have learned to a certainty that nothing is oftener upon their lips than curses and imprecations, to be by all good men abhorred certainly, yet not feared. For the rest, it can scarce be believed that when news of the king's execution arrived, there was found, especially among a free people, anyone so much a slave by nature as to calumniate us or count our deed a crime; but rather that all righteous men said all was righteous — nay even thanked God for having published so high and shining an example of justice for so wholesome a lesson to other kings.

And so, to those "savage, sternly steeled and stony-hearted" persons who (he says) bewail the "miserable and amazing marvellous murder" (whose, pray?), to them and their jingling spokesman, the dullest, surely, "since ever in the world the kingly name was native and known," I say: "Let them wail again! Let them wail again!" But meanwhile what boy just out of school, or what dear little brother from any friary you like, could not have made a rhetorical exercise out of this royal fall more eloquently — yea, more Latinly — than this royal speechmaker?

It would surely be uncalled for were I carefully to follow up the man's babblings and ravings on the present scale throughout his volume; yet I would do it willingly (for he swells, they say, with measureless pride and conceit) did he not shield himself behind the enormous ill-composed disordered bulk of his book, like Terence's soldier skulking behind the front ranks — and a clever plan too — that even the most energetic might weary of marking all the details, and die of boredom before he could refute them. Yet I did wish to give at least a sample by way, so to speak, of the present curtain-raiser, and offer on the spot to let my thoughtful readers taste the man at the beginning, that by trying these hors d'oeuvres and antipasti from a single page we may learn how splendidly he will entertain us with the rest of his gorgeous dishes: how many silly puerilities he will prove to have heaped together in his whole work, who has put them so thick — where least seemly — at its very head and front.

Thenceforward I gladly disregard his much-twaddling harangues, predestined as they are to wrap up mackerels; moreover, as far as concerns our affairs, we doubt not that what has been published and proclaimed by authority of Parliament shall have more weight with all right-minded and judicious foreigners than the lies and slanders of one brazen petit-monsieur who has been hired at a price by our exiles, their country's enemies, and has unhesitatingly scraped together and written down utter lies, whenever anyone to whom he has leased his pen spreads a bit of malicious gossip, and gives him orders.

That all may see clearly how it matters nothing to his conscience what he writes — true or false, holy or unholy — I shall have to call no other witness than Salmasius himself. In his Apparatus contra Primatum Papæ he writes: "The reasons why the church ought to return from Episcopacy to the Apostolic institution" of Elders "are very strong: in Episcopacy there was brought into the church an evil much greater than those schisms which used to be feared before: the plague which came out of it into the church struck down the whole body of the church beneath a vile despotism: nay, put even kings and princes under the yoke: the church would profit more by the abolition of the whole hierarchy than by the abolition of its head only, the Pope" (p.196). "That episcopacy and papacy together might be removed with the greatest benefit to the church: that, episcopacy once removed, papacy itself, as founded thereon, would fall" (p. 171). He considers that "there are special reasons why it should be done away in those kingdoms which have already renounced papacy, and sees no reason why it should be retained there. That a reformation this part of which has been left unaccomplished seems incomplete: that no jot of reason or probable cause can be adduced why, when Papal supremacy is got rid of, episcopacy ought to be kept, or can be" (p. 197).

But though he wrote all this and much more four years ago, yet now he is so false and so shameless that he dares in this passage violently to reproach the Parliament of England for voting that bishops were to be "not only turned out of the House of Lords, but cast off utterly." He even recommends and defends episcopacy itself by means of the same reasons and proofs which in that earlier volume of his he had forcibly confuted — namely that "the bishops are necessary and by all means to be kept, lest a thousand pestilent sects and heresies should burgeon out in England." Sly turncoat, are you not ashamed even in matters of religion to play fast and loose, and — I had almost said — to betray the church, whose most holy ordinances you seem to have defended with so much noise for the very purpose of ridiculing and overturning them with even greater scandal whenever you thought convenient? Everyone knows that when the Houses of Parliament, ardently desiring to reform our church after the pattern of other reformed churches, had resolved to abolish episcopacy, first the king vetoed the measure, and next, chiefly for that reason, made war upon us — which at last proved his own undoing. Go now and brag that you defend a king, you, who, to do it to the hilt, now openly betray and attack what you were the very one to support — the cause of the church — and should undergo her heaviest reprimand.

To come back, however, to the constitution of the English Commonwealth. Forasmuch as you, a tuppenny-thrupenny outlandish pedant, neglect those desks and portfolios of yours, stuffed as they are with trumpery, that you would do better to put in order — since you, I say, choose instead to play the hateful busybody in the public affairs of a nation not your own — I give you, then, or, preferably some wiser man than you, this short answer. Our constitution is what the dissensions of our time will permit: not such as were to be desired, but such as the persistent strife of wicked citizens will suffer it to be. But any state which in the throes of partisan strife takes up arms for safety, surely does full justice if it maintains relations with its sound and uncontaminated part alone, and expels or removes the rest, whether populace or patrician — even though, taught by its own sufferings, it thenceforth utterly refuses a King and a House of Lords.

How absurd of you to rail at our "Supreme Council" and even at a supposed "President of the Council"! For that Council — figment of your dreams — is not supreme, but appointed by authority of Parliament, for a definite time only, of about forty of its members, any of whom may by vote of the rest be president. It has always been, moreover, a well-established practice for Parliament, which is our Senate, to fix a comparatively small number of its members, choose and appoint them, and delegate to them authority to meet anywhere, and to hold, as it were, a kind of smaller Senate. To these, often, weightiest matters were turned over and entrusted, to be despatched the more quickly and quietly: the management or administration of the navy, the army, the treasury — in fine, any and all business of peace and war. This body, call it "council" or anything else, may be new in name, but is ancient in substance; without it no commonwealth can be managed properly.

Moreover — about the king's execution and about our revolution, — stop your howling, stop that celebrated act of vomiting up the venom of your bitterness, till I fight you hand to hand, and despite your struggles show, chapter by chapter, "in accordance with what law, under what system of right, by virtue of what judgment" (as you put it) these things were done. If you yet insist upon your "What right? What law?" — under that law, I say, which God himself and nature has appointed, that all things for the safety of the commonwealth should be deemed lawful and righteous. Thus did wise men of old answer such as you.

You charge us with "having abolished laws that had been settled so many years," but you do not say whether they were good or bad; nor, if you did, would you be entitled to a hearing; for our laws, Olus, what business are they of yours? Would that they had abolished more of the laws as well as more of the pettifogging lawyers: they would have had more regard for the people, and for the cause of Christianity. You gnash your teeth because "the Manii, sons of the soil, persons scarce of the nobility at home, scarce known to their own countrymen, should have believed themselves entitled to do such things." You should have remembered what not only Scripture but even the poet teaches you:

God can highest with lowest interchange —
Such is his might;
Degradeth men of mark,
But hidden fortunes dark
Bringeth to light.

Take this, too: of those whom you call "scarce noble," some are second to none of your land or kind in nobility; others, being as it were self-made men, tread the path to true nobility by way of industry and personal worth, and are comparable with any of the noblest born. They had rather be called "sons of the soil," too (it being their own soil!), and to work hard at home, than be, like you, selling smoke to stave off starvation in a strange land at the beck and call, and in the pay, of masters. Take my word for it, you would soon be sent packing from your foreign tour back to the guardianship of your relatives, but for your one accomplishment: you do know how to blab out trumpery pamphlets among strangers — and what price to get for them.

You blame our magistrates because they "admit the off-scourings of all the sects." Why should they not admit them? It is for the church to expel them from the company of the faithful, not for the magistrates to banish them the country, provided they break no civil law. To live safe and free, without suffering violence or wrong, to this end it was that men first entered into a polity; to live piously and religiously, into a church; the former has its laws, the latter its doctrine and discipline, quite distinct; and it is because the Magistracy and the Church confuse their jurisdictions that for so many years war has sown a harvest of more war throughout all Christendom. This, too, is why we cannot endure Popery; for we perceive it to be not so much a religion as a pontifical despotism decked out, under pretence of religion, with the spoils of civil power, which it has seized unto itself contrary to Christ's own precept.

As for "Independents," none such as are assumed by you (and you alone) have ever been seen among us; except in so far as they recognize no assemblies or synods above each individual congregation, and feel, with you, that such should be uprooted as branches of the Hierarchy, or in fact its very trunk. From this the name of Independents has got popular currency.

Your course is such, I see, as would in the future stir up against us, on the part of all kings and monarchs, not hatred merely, but cruelest war. King Mithridates of old tried to rouse all kings against the Romans — for a different reason, to be sure, but by using almost the same slanders: that the Romans were planning to overturn all thrones; that they would allow nothing human or divine to stand in their way; that from the beginning they had never got anything but by violence; that they were a gang of robbers, enemies above all to royal authority. So wrote King Mithridates to King Arsaces. But you, mouthing your unspeakable baby-rhetoric there in your classroom, what overweening self-assurance carried your mind to the point of supposing that you could rouse a king (even one still a boy) to war by your urging, and (though you dislike being caught at it) by your "trumpeting the signal to join battle" especially with so foul a scrannel mouth that Homer's mice, had you been their bugler, would never, I do believe, have made war upon tadpoles.

I am far from fearing any war or danger to us which you, arrant coward, can blow up among foreign kings with your windy rush of raving yet insipid language. You tell tales of us — you must be joking — that we "toss kings' heads like balls, play hoop with crowns, and make no more of imperial sceptres than of fools' bauble-sticks with heads atop." You, most foolish head, are yourself fit to top a fool's bauble, when you fancy that kings and princes can by such childish reasonings be persuaded to war. Then you will cry aloud to all nations, but they, I know full well, will never heed what you say. Even those depraved and barbarous offscourings of Irish you call to the aid of the King's party; and this one thing may be taken as a measure of your wickedness and folly — how you surpass almost all men in irreligion, impudence, and madness; for you scruple not to beg the loyalty and aid of a nation accursed, and set apart for destruction, from whose godless fellowship, stained with the blood of so many harmless citizens, even the King himself always shrank in horror — or pretended to shrink. That treachery he did all he could to cover up, and strove with all his might to clear his skirts of that cruelty, which you, most worthless of two-legged creatures, have not respect enough for God or man to keep you from willfully and publicly adopting. Come on, then, gird up your loins to defend the King — with your Irish for hired cheerleaders and patrons.

At the beginning you take care (by Jove, a necessary caution!) not to be suspected of a possible design to snatch away all of Tully's or Demosthenes's oratorical laurels; you say in your preface that you think it "not proper for you to behave like an orator." Good thinking! You correctly perceive that what you cannot do is not proper for you to attempt! Who indeed that knows you well ever expected you to fill the role of orator? — you who never have, and never could, produce anything rightly developed, anything clean-cut, anything that has gusto or savor, but, like a second Crispinus, or Tzetzes that decadent Greek — just so you write a lot, you do not care how well you write, nor if you did care, would that help.

"This cause," you say, "will be tried with the whole world hearing, as it were, sitting in judgment." That pleases me so well that I could wish an adversary not, like you, hot-headed and unskilled, but full of understanding and sagacity. In your peroration, you appear quite the tragic hero — quite the Ajax-with-the-Whip, when you write: "These men's injustice, impiety, perfidy, cruelty, I will cry out unto heaven and earth; themselves the perpetrators I will turn over to posterity convicted, and transfix the culprits." What Little Flowers of Rhetoric! And so, you senseless witless bawling pettifogger, born only to pick good writers to pieces or transcribe them, do you really think yourself capable of writing anything that will live? Posterity — take my word for it — will damn to oblivion all your scribbled trumpery. Except perhaps your Royal Defence shall turn out to be something beholden to my answer to it, and after long slumbering unread be once more handled. I would petition the most Illustrious States of Holland, that they would allow it to be straightway cast out of their vaults — it is no treasure! — and allow it to wander whither it will. For if I shall have made clear to all what idle talk and ignorance and deceit it is stuffed with, then the more widely it circulates, the more straitly, methinks, it is suppressed. And now let us see how he will "transfix" us "culprits."

INFLATED windbag that you are, Salmasius, you were even more puffed up that the King of Great Britain is styled Defender of the Faith, and you style yourself Defender of the King. For my part, I think you deserve your titles both alike; for the king so defended the faith, and you have so defended him, that each of you seems rather to have ruined his case, as I shall make plain throughout the ensuing discourse, and particularly in this first chapter. You told us on the twelfth page of your preface that "so good and so just a cause needed no rhetorical coloring, for simply to tell the thing as it occurred was to defend the king." Yet in your first chapter, in which you had promised us that your tale would be plain, you neither tell the thing simply as it occurred, nor abstain from adorning it with such rhetorical colors as you can manage; so that — to take your own view of it — the king's cause will be neither good or just. Nevertheless, be careful not to attribute to yourself (what nobody grants you) the ability to state the facts of a case as a right orator ought; for you can play the part neither of an orator nor of an historian, nor even of a hired partisan advocate. Like some itinerant hawker, instead, traipsing from fair to fair, you in your preface kept raising great expectations of the next day's performance — not that you might at last relate the facts you promised, but that you might peddle out to as many readers as possible your wretched bottlesfull of rhetoric-paint and faded dyes. For "being now about to give us an account of the matter of fact," you find yourself "encompassed and frightened with so many monsters of novelty" that you "know not what to say first, what next, and what last." Is this your plain tale? I will tell you what is the matter with you. First of all you find yourself frightened by your own monstrous lies, and next you find that empty head of yours not only "encompassed" but set awhirl with so many trifles and follies that what was fit to be said first, what next, what last, you not only do not know, but never did know.

"Amid the difficulties of expressing the wickedness of so incredible a piece of impiety, this expression alone offers itself," you say, "which is easily said and must be oft repeated," to wit, "that the sun itself never beheld a more atrocious iniquity." My good schoolmaster, the sun has beheld many things that Bernard never saw. Yet we are content you should bring in the sun over and over, and you shall act wisely so to do, for it will be insistently required — not by our wickedness but by the frigidity of your defence.

"The origin of kings," you say, "arose with the new-created sun." May the gods and goddesses, Damasippus, bless you with a solstice to warm yourself with, because you haven't enough inspiration to warm yourself and cannot stir a foot without "the sun." Perhaps you would avoid being called a shady sort of teacher. Alas, your shade is utter darkness! You make no difference between a paternal power and a regal; and, once you have called kings fathers of their country, fancy this metaphor so persuasive that whatever I would admit concerning a father I would at once grant true of a king. A king and a father are very different things. Our fathers begot and made us; our king did not make us; we made him. Nature gave the people fathers, but the people gave itself a king; so that the people is not for the king, but the king for the people. We bear with a father, as we do with a king, though he be harsh and severe; but we do not bear with even a father, if he be a tyrant. If a father murder his child, he shall suffer capital punishment; and why should not a king likewise be subject to the same most just law if he have destroyed the people his children? Especially as a father can never cease to be such, but a king can easily bring it to pass that he shall be neither father nor king. If this "action" of ours is to be considered "next" according to its "quality," as you call it, I who am an eye-witness and a native, tell you, who are a foreigner and an utter stranger to our affairs, that "we removed from among us" a king neither "good," nor "just," nor "merciful," nor "devout," nor "godly," nor "peaceable," as you style him, but one who was an enemy to us for almost ten years, and no father, but a destroyer of his country.

You confess, for you dare not deny it, that "such things have been practised, but not by Protestants upon a Protestant king." As if he deserved the name of Protestant, who in a letter to the Pope hailed him with the title "Most Holy Father," and who was always more favorable to the papists than to those of the reformed faith. And being such, he is not the first, even of his own family, that has been removed "from among us" by Protestants. What! Was not his grandmother Mary deposed and banished and at last beheaded by Protestants, while not even the Scottish Protestants took it ill? Nay, if I should say they were parties to it, I should not lie. There being so few Protestant kings, no wonder it never happened that one of them was put to death. But that it is lawful to depose a wicked king or a tyrant, and to punish him according to his deserts, nay, that this is the opinion of eminent divines who have been the very leaders in the late reformation, deny it if you dare. You admit that great numbers of kings have met a violent death, some "by the sword," some "by poison," some in a filthy "dungeon," some "in a noose"; but for a king to be brought to trial, "to be put to plead for his life, to be condemned, and brought to the block" — this you think a more lamentable instance than all the rest, and consider it a prodigious piece of impiety. Tell me, you superlative fool, whether it be not more humane, more just, more agreeable to the laws of all civilized states, to bring a criminal, be his offence what it may, before a court of justice, to give him the opportunity of defending himself, and if the law condemn him, then to put him to death as he has deserved, so as he may have time to repent or to compose himself; than presently, as soon as ever he is taken, to butcher him like a sheep, without trial or hearing? Is there a malefactor in the world who if he might have his choice would not choose to be punished that way rather than this? And if that proceeding be accounted the fairer of the two when used by king against subjects, why should it not be so counted when used by subjects against a tyrant king? Nay, why should we not think that he himself liked it better? You would have had him killed in secret, without witnesses, either that all history might lose the advantage of so good an example, or that this glorious action might in supposed guilt seem to have shunned the light, as having no law or even justice on its side.

Next you aggravate the matter by tellings us that it was not done in the uproar of party strife amongst our nobles, or in a raging rebellion either of the people or of the army, or through hatred or fear or ambition or blind precipitate rashness, but was long designed and thought upon, and accomplished deliberately. You did well from advocate to turn grammarian! For from the accidents of a case, so to speak, which in themselves sway neither one way or another, you inveigh against it before you have proved the deed itself either good or bad. See how easily I refute you: if the deed was well and seemly, they that did it deserve the greater praise in that they were prepossessed with no passions, but did what they did for virtue's sake; if it was difficult and grievous, the greater praise for doing it not upon blind impulse but upon deliberation and design. Though for my own part, when I call to mind with how unexpected an importunity and fervency of mind, and with how unanimous a consent, the whole army and a great part of the people from almost every county in the kingdom cried out with one voice for justice against the king as the very author of all their calamities, I cannot but think that these things were brought about rather by a divine impulse. However that may be, whether we consider the magistrates or the body of the people, no men ever undertook with a loftier courage, and, as our adversaries themselves confess, with a more tranquil mind, an action so distinguished, so worthy of heroic ages — an action whereby they ennobled not only law and its enforcement, which thenceforth is restored to all men equitably, but Justice's very self, and rendered her after so signal a judgment more glorious, more august, than ever she had been before.

We have now toiled to the end of the third page of his first chapter, and have not yet the plain tale he promised us. He complains of our doctrine "that a king ruling burdensomely and odiously may lawfully be deposed: according to this," he says, "if they had had a king better in a thousand respects than the one they had, they would not have spared his life." Keen reasoner! I long to have you tell me how this follows, unless you allow that a king a thousand ways better than our king may rule burdensomely and odiously. So now you have brought yourself to a pass where you make out the king that you defend a thousand ways worse than kings whose government is burdensome and odious, that is, the most monstrous perhaps of all tyrants. Kings, I wish you joy of so brisk a defender!

Now his narrative begins. "They put him to several sorts of torments." Give instances. "They removed him from prison to prison"; and so they might lawfully, for from a tyrant he was become a public enemy taken in war. "Often changing his guards," — lest his guards should change their fidelity. "sometimes they gave him hopes of liberty — sometimes even of restoring him to his crown upon articles of agreement." It seems then the taking away his life was not done upon so long a premeditation as he talked of before, and that we did not so long before lay hold upon all "opportunities and means" to renounce our king. Those things that we demanded of him in the beginning of the war, when he had almost brought us under — things the denial of which would cut our people off from all hope of liberty and safety — those very things we petitioned of him when he was our prisoner, petitioned humbly and submissively, not once or twice, but thrice and oftener, and were as often denied. When we had now lost all hopes of the king's complying with us, then was made that noble order of Parliament that from that time forward there should no articles be sent to the king; so that we ceased negotiations, not from the time he began to be a tyrant, but from the time he proved to be incurable. Still, afterward some Parliament men set upon a new project, and meeting with a convenient opportunity to put it in practice, passed a vote to send proposals once more to the king. Their wickedness and folly nearest resembles that of the Roman Senate, who, against the opinion of Marcus Tullius and all honest men, voted to send ambassadors to Antony; and the event had been the same, but that it pleased God Almighty to order it otherwise — to deliver them into slavery, but to assert our liberty. For though the king did not agree to anything that might conduce to a firm peace and settlement more than he had done before, they go and vote themselves satisfied. Then the sounder part of the house, finding themselves and the commonwealth betrayed, implore the aid of the army, valiant and ever faithful to the commonwealth. Whereon I can observe only this, which yet I am loath to utter: that our soldiers showed better judgment than our senators, and saved the commonwealth by their arms, when the other by their votes had almost ruined it.

Then he tells a long tale of woe in a lamentable strain, but so senselessly that he seems to be begging his readers please to be sorrowful rather than moving them to sorrow. It grieves him "to think that the king should undergo capital punishment after such a manner as no other king had ever done" — though he had often told us before that there never was a king that underwent capital punishment at all. Fool, are you wont to compare manner with manner when you have not fact to compare with fact? "He suffered death," says he, "as a robber, as a murderer, as a parricide, as a traitor, as a tyrant." Is this defending the king, or is it not rather giving a more severe judgment upon him than the one we gave? Who has so suddenly drawn you round to give sentence with us? He complains "that masked executioners cut off the king's head." What shall we do with this fellow? He complained before of "a murder done in the mask of a king"; now he complains that it was done in the mask of an executioner.

It serves no purpose to take particular notice of every false or silly thing he says. He tells stories of "buffetings and kicks that were given by common soldiers, and how it cost fourpence to see the dead body." These and such-like stories betray the ignorance and small-mindedness of our poor scholar, but are far from making any reader the least bit sadder. To bewail his father's misfortunes the younger Charles had done better, in good faith, to have hired one of the mountebanks that chant their doleful ballads to the crowd at a street corner, than this lamentable — shall I call him? — or rather most laughable — declaimer, so flat and tasteless that his very tears lack salt.

Now his narrative is done; and it is hard to say what he does next, his discourse runs so muddy and irregular. Now he rages, then he yawns, and keeps no method in his chatter but to repeat the same things ten times over, things that were repulsive enough the first time. Really I know not but that the trumpery stuff of any babbling improvisatore, rhymed extempore while he stands on one foot, were better worth daubing paper withal; so far am I from thinking anything he says worthy of a serious answer.

I pass by his praising as "protector of religion" a king who chose to make war upon the church rather than part with those church tyrants and enemies of religion, the bishops. How is it possible, moreover, for one to "maintain religion in its purity" who was himself a slave to those impure traditions and ceremonies of theirs? And pray tell what errors you ascribe to those our "sects, whose sacrilegious meetings," you say, "have a public license" which even Holland grants not. Meanwhile no one is more sacrilegious than you, who take unto yourself — worst license of all — the license of incessant slander. "They could not wound the commonwealth more dangerously than by taking off its master." You menial slave, learn, while you await the lash, that unless you take away the master, you destroy the commonwealth, for it is a private wealth, not a common wealth, that owns a master. "They persecute most unjustly those pastors that abhor this deed of theirs." Just to be clear what pastors he means, I shall say briefly: they were those very men who by their writings and sermons justified taking up arms against the king; who cursed without ceasing, as Deborah did Meroz, all such as would not help this war with arms or men or money; who kept preaching to their congregations that they were fighting not against a king but against a greater tyrant than any Saul or Ahab, nay, one that out-Nero'd Nero. As soon as the bishops and the priests whom they used to rail at with the names of pluralists and absentees, were taken out of their way, instantly they jump, some into two, some into three, of the best newly-available benefices; so that everybody knows how foully these shameless shepherds, once deservedly raised above the common herd, now neglect their flocks. Their unbounded covetousness shattered all restraints of modesty and religion, till they were branded before the church (ill notoriety!) with the same infamy with which they had branded but a little before the priests. Their covetousness yet unsatisfied, and their restless ambition grown accustomed to raise tumults and hate peace, they cease not to preach up sedition against the government now established, as they had formerly done against the king. He was a kindly king cruelly murdered, they say — this king upon whom but just now they themselves had heaped all their curses, and delivered up as by God's will to the Parliament, to be despoiled of his royalty and pursued with a holy war. They now complain that the sects are not extirpated: a most absurd thing to ask of the magistrates, who never yet by any means or method have been able to extirpate avarice and ambition — the two heresies that are most calamitous to the church — out of the very order and estate of the ministers themselves. For the sects which they inveigh against, these are obscure ones, I know; but their own sects are notorious, and much more dangerous to the church of God: their heresiarchs were Simon Magus and Diotrephes. Yet we are so far from persecuting these men, though they are pestilent enough, that, though we know them to be ill-affected to the government, and plotting change, we allow them but too much liberty.

You, vagabond Frenchman, seem displeased that "the English, more fierce and cruel than their own mastiffs," as your barking eloquence has it, "have no regard to the lawful successor and heir to the crown, and take no care of the king's youngest son, or of the Queen of Bohemia." You, not I, shall answer yourself. "When the frame of a government is changed from a monarchy to any other, the succession is not granted among those of the new regime." (Apparatus de Primatu Papae). "The great change throughout three kingdoms," you say, "was brought about by a small minority in one of them." If so, that small minority is worthy to have dominion over the rest, as men over women. "These are the men who presumptuously took it upon themselves to change the ancient government of the realm into one held by many tyrants" — and well and auspiciously too! You cannot find fault with them without being a filthy foreigner and a solecist, in morals as as well as in syntax — you shame of all grammarians. "The English will never be able to wash out this stain." Nay, you, though a blot and stain on all learned men, were never yet able to stain that renown and everlasting glory of the English nation, that with so great a resolution as we hardly find the like recorded in any history. They struggled with, and overcame, not only their enemies in the field, but the hostile — that is superstitious — persuasions of the common people, and won for themselves amongst all posterity the name of Liberator: the body of the people having undertaken and performed an enterprise which in other nations is thought to proceed only from the magnanimity peculiar to heroes.

What "the Protestants and primitive Christians" did or would do upon such an occasion, I will tell you hereafter, when we come to debate the merits of the cause; not to be guilty of your fault, who outdo in all prolixity all the babbling Battuses. You wonder how you shall be able to answer all the Jesuits in our behalf. Mind your own business, renegade, and be ashamed of your own actions, for the church is ashamed of you, who, though but of late you so boastfully and fiercely attacked the Pope's supremacy and the bishops, are now yourself become the bishops' sycophant. You confess that "some Protestants have asserted it lawful to depose a tyrant," and you do not name them; but I will, because you say "they are far worse than the Jesuits." They are no other than Luther, and Zwingli, and Calvin, and Bucer, and Pareus, and many besides. "The question, though, who shall be accounted a tyrant," you say, "they have referred to the judgment of learned men and wise. Were they anywise remarkable for either virtue or nobility?" A people that has felt the yoke of slavery heavy on its neck may well be allowed to be wise and learned and noble enough to know what should be done to its oppressor, though it send not to ask either foreigners or grammarians. But that this man was a tyrant not only the Parliaments of England and Scotland have declared by the clearest actions and words, but almost all the people of both nations have assented to it — till by the tricks and artifices of the bishops they were divided into two factions. For the execution of His decrees upon the most potent kings of this world, what if it has pleased God to choose such men as He chooses to be made partakers of the light of the Gospel? "Not many wise or learned, not many mighty, not many noble; that by those that are not He might bring to naught those that are; that no flesh glory in His presence."

And who are you to scold at this? A learned man? Even in your old age you seem to have turned over phrase-books and lexicons and glossaries rather than to have actually read good authors with judgment or profit; so that you prate of nothing but manuscripts and various readings and dislocated passages and scribal errors, but show that you have never tasted the least drop of more substantial learning. A wise man? You who used to carry on your beggarly disputes about the meanest trifles? You who being altogether ignorant in astronomy and medicine, yet are always reviling astronomers and physicians who should be trusted in their own faculties? You who if anyone should offer to deprive you of the vain glory of having corrected or supplied the least word or letter in any copy you have criticized, would ban him, if you could, with the ban of fire and water? And yet you snarl in anger because everybody calls you a grammarian! In some trumpery book of yours you call Dr. Hammond, who was lately this king's best beloved chaplain, knave, for no other reason than because he had called you a grammarian. And you would have been as ready to throw the same reproach upon the king himself, I do believe, and to withdraw this whole Defence, if you had heard that he had approved his chaplain's judgment of you.

Take notice how much I, a single one of those Englishmen you have the impudence to call "madmen, unlearned, ignoble, wicked," mock and despise you; that the English nation in general should take any public notice of such a worm as you would be an infinite undervaluing of themselves. For whichever way you turn and twist yourself roundabout and upside down and inside out, you are a grammarian and nothing but a grammarian; as though you had made to some god or other a wish more foolish than Midas's, whatever you touch — except when you make blunders — is pedantry. Whosoever he be, though from among "those dregs of the common people" that you are so hard upon (as for those men of eminence amongst us whose great actions evidence their wisdom and nobility and virtue, I will not disgrace them so much as to compare you with them or them with you), — whoever, I say, among those dregs of the common people has but made this principle his own, that he was not born for kings, but for God and his country, should be deemed far more learned and honest and wise than you, and every way of greater use in the world. For he is learned without letters, while you are lettered without learning — you that understand so many languages, turn over so many volumes, write so many screeds, and yet are but a sheep when all is done.

IN winding up his first chapter Salmasius urged as "irrefragable" the argument that "a thing really is as it is believed to be, when all men unanimously agree in thinking it so." This argument, when applied, as he was then applying it, "to matter of fact," is an utter fallacy; nevertheless I, who am now about to discourse on matters of law — the right of kings — shall be able to turn it upon himself with full truth. He defines a king (if that may be said to be defined which he makes infinite) to be "a person in whom resides the supreme power of the kingdom; who is answerable to God alone; who is permitted to do whatever he desires; who is above the law." I will undertake to demonstrate, not by my own reasons and authorities alone, but even by his, that there never was a nation or people of any account (for to ransack all the uncivilized parts of the world were to no purpose) that ever allowed it to be their king's right or power "that he should be loosed from the law, do whatever he pleased, and judge all, but be judged of none." Nor can I think that, save Salmasius alone, there ever was any one of any nation so slavish in spirit as to assert the outrageous enormities of tyrants to be the rights of kings. Even the greatest royalists among us always abhorred this base opinion; indeed, even Salamasius himself in some earlier writings of his — before he was bribed — was evidently of quite another mind. Insomuch that these doctrines, so slavish in nature and spirit, seem to have been penned not by a free man in a free State, much less in the most excellent Dutch Republic and its University of most renown, but at some prison-house or slave auction.

If a king by his royal right may do whatever he desires (a doctrine that even the hideous tyrant Antoninus Caracalla did not dare to claim, though his stepmother Julia taught it him through incest with herself) then there neither is nor ever was anyone who deserved the name of tyrant. For though he has broken all the laws of God and man, yet the king shall be innocent nonetheless by the law of kings. Excellent man — what wrong has he done? He has but used his own right upon his own subjects. No king can perpetrate upon his subjects an outrage so frightfully, so madly cruel, that anyone may remonstrate or complain that it exceeds the king's right.

Dare you assert that this "law of kings arises from the law of nations, or rather from that of nature," you beast? Why should I call you a man, you who are so unjust to the human race, so inhuman? You who endeavors so to bring down and vilify all mankind (made after the image of God) as to assert and maintain that those fierce merciless masters whom the fanaticism of some, or crime, or cowardly indifference, or even treachery, have inflicted upon nations, are provided and appointed by Nature herself, that mild and gentle mother of us all. By which pestilent doctrine of yours having rendered them far more fierce and fell, you not only incite them to tread down all poor mortals, and to trample the wretches under foot into the bargain, but endeavor with the law of nature, the law of kings, nay the very laws of the people, to arm them against the people: the extreme at once of folly and of wickedness. As Dionysius of old turned from a tyrant into a schoolmaster, so you from a grammarian may as well become a tyrant; that you may have — not that royal right to live an evil life, but that other — to die an evil death; whereby, like Tiberius shut up in Capri — yourself the author of your own ruin — you shall feel yourself perish daily.

But let us look a little more narrowly into this right of kings that you talk of. "This," you say, "was the sense of the eastern and of the western part of the world." I shall not answer you with what Aristotle in the Politics and Cicero in the oration De Provinciis (both as trustworthy authorities as any we have) have written, that the people of Asia easily submit to slavery, but the Syrians and Jews are actually born to it. I confess there are but few, and those men of great wisdom and courage, that are either desirous of liberty or capable of using it. By far the greatest part of the world prefers just masters — masters, observe, but just ones. As for masters unjust and unbearable, neither was God ever so much an enemy to mankind as to constrain our submission to them, nor was there ever any people so destitute of all sense and sunk into such depth of despair as of its own accord to impose so cruel a law upon itself and its posterity.

You produce first "the words, in Ecclesiastes, of the king illustrious for his wisdom." So we too appeal to God's law; of the kings we will consider hereafter, whose opinion we shall then better understand. Let God himself be heard, Deuteronomy 17. "When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me." Which passage I could wish all men would consider again and again, for here it appears by God's own witness that all nations and peoples have always possessed free choice to erect what form of government they will, and also to change it into what they will. This God affirms expressly concerning the Hebrews, and of other nations denies it not. A commonwealth, moreover, in the opinion of God, was, under human conditions, a more perfect form of government than a monarchy, and more useful for His own people; for He himself set up this government, and could hardly be prevailed upon a great while after, and at their own importunate desire, to let them change it into a monarchy. But when they insisted upon having a king, then God, to show that He had left the people their choice to be governed by a single person or by more, so they were justly governed, prescribed laws for the king, even before granting them a king, whereby he was forbidden "to multiply to himself horses and wives, or to heap up riches." This was to make him understand that outside the law no power over others was his, who concerning his very self could take no action outside the law. He was commanded therefore to transcribe with his own hand "all the precepts of the law," and, having writ them out, to "observe and keep them, that his mind might not be lifted up above his brethren." Whence it is evident that as well the prince, as well as the people, was bound by those laws.

To this effect writes Josephus, a qualified interpreter of the laws of his nation, excellently versed in the Jewish polity, and preferable to a thousand obscure rabbis, Antiquities, Book 4: Ἀριστοκρατία μὲν οὖν κράτιστον, etc. "An aristocracy is the best form of government; wherefore seek ye not any other; it is enough to have God for your ruler. But if you are possessed by so strong a desire for a king, let him yield to the laws and to God more than to his own wisdom; and let him be restrained if he aims at more power than suits your best interests." Thus, in part, Josephus upon this passage in Deuteronomy.

Another solid authority, Josephus's contemporary Philo Judaeus, one very studious in the law of Moses, upon the whole of which he wrote an extensive commentary, when in his book concerning the creation of the king he interprets this chapter of Deuteronomy, releases the king from the law no more than as an enemy may be said to be so released: τοὺς [δ᾿] ἐπὶ λύμη καὶ ζημία τῶν ὑπηκόων, etc. "They," says he, "that acquire great power to the prejudice and destruction of their subjects should be named not kings but enemies, for their actions are those of an irreconcilable enemy. Indeed they that under a show of government commit usurpation are worse than open enemies. The latter we easily ward off, but the wicked craft of the former is not always easy to discover." Once discovered, then, why should they not be dealt with as enemies? In the second book of the Allegories of the Law, he writes, "A king and a tyrant are contraries." And a little after, "A king not only commands, but also obeys."

All this is very true, some will say; a king ought to observe the laws most exactly, but if he will not, what law is there to punish him? The same law, I answer, that authorizes punishment of all others; I find no exception. There is no express law to punish the priests or even the least important magistrates, who might all, no matter what their guilt, with equal right and reason claim impunity because there is no positive law for their punishment; and yet none of them ever made such a claim, nor would it ever, I suppose, be allowed them on that ground.

Hitherto we have learned from the very law of God that a king ought to obey the laws, and not lift himself above the rest, who are also his brethren. Let us now consider whether the Ecclesiastes teaches any other doctrine: Chapter 8, verse 1, etc. "I counsel thee to keep the king's commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God. Be not hasty to go out of his sight; stand not in an evil thing; for he doeth whatsoever pleaseth him. Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say unto him, What dost thou?" It is well enough known that here the Preacher of Ecclesiastes directs his precepts not to the Sanhedrin or to a parliament, but to private persons. He bids "keep the king's commandment, and that in regard of the oath of God"; but who makes oath to the king unless the king for his part has made oath to the laws of God and his country? So the Reubenites and Gadites promise obedience to Joshua, Joshua 1: "According as we hearkened unto Moses in all things, so we will hearken unto thee; so but God be with thee as he was with Moses." Here is an express condition. Hear the Preacher elsewhere, Ecclesiastes Chapter 9: "The quiet words of wise men ought to be heard rather than the shouting of him that ruleth among fools." Next he cautions us, "Stand not in an evil thing; for he doeth whatsoever pleaseth him." He does, certainly, to malefactors who persist in evil; for he is armed with the law's authority, and may proceed with mercy or severity as he will. Nothing here sounds tyrannical; nothing here that a good man need dread. "Where the word of a king is, there is power; and who may say to him, What doest thou?" And yet we read of one that did say to a king not only "what hast thou done?" but "Thou hast done foolishly." 1 Samuel 13. But Samuel, you may say, was an extraordinary person. I answer you with your own words, further on, from your forty-ninth page. "What was there extraordinary," say you, "in Saul or David?" And so say I, What was there in Samuel extraordinary? He was a prophet, you will say. So are they today that follow his example, for they act according to the will of God, either as "outspoken," or as "implanted in them"; which yourself grant farther on, in your fiftieth page.

Prudently, then, does the Preacher in Ecclesiastes advise private persons not to contend with princes; for it is quite dangerous even to contend with any rich or powerful man. But what then? Shall the nobility, shall all the other magistrates, shall the whole body of the people — when a king chooses to rave, shall they not dare open their mouths? Shall they not oppose a foolish, wicked, raging plotter of all good men's ruin? Shall they not oppose his attempt to overthrow all things divine and human — lest with plunderings and burnings and murders he riot through the realm — being so "loosed from the law that whatever he desires is lawful to him?" O Cappadocian Knight from the slave-blocks! You whom every free people, if hereafter you shall dare set foot among a people that is free, ought to cast out and transport to the world's end as a monstrosity of dire forboding, or set aside — fit candidate for slavery — to replace an ass in the mill; solemnly obliging themselves, if ever they let you go, to grind in your stead under some tyrant — and him a fool. For what words could be said or borrowed so expressive of cruelty or folly may not justly be applied to you?

But go on. "When the Israelites asked God for a king, they said they would fain be governed by him under the same rule as all the other nations which had a monarchy. But the kings of the East had supreme rule and unlimited power, as Virgil testifies:

Not Egypt and huge Lydia, nor the hordes
Of Parthians, and Hydaspes, Median stream,
Do so revere a king."

First, what is it to us what sort of king the Israelites desired? Especially since God was angry with them not only for desiring a king after the manner of the nations and not of his own law, but for desiring a king at all. Nor is it credible that they should have desired a king unjust or loosed from the law, they who could not bear the government of Samuel's sons, though bound by the law, and only from their covetousness sought refuge in a king. Lastly, what you quote out of Virgil does not prove that the kings of the East reigned "with absolute power"; for those bees in Virgil who more revere their kings, he says, than do the Egyptians or the Medes, those bees, even by the witness of the same poet,

Pass their lives under mighty laws —

But now I will let you see how little ill-will I bear you. Though most people think you a knave, I will show that you have only put on the borrowed mask of a knave. In your Apparatus ad Primatum Papae you say that some divines of the Council of Trent made use of the example of the bees to prove the Pope's supremacy. This, with equal wickedness, you have borrowed from them. That very answer, therefore, which you gave them while you were an honest man, you shall yourself, now you are grown a knave, give yourself, and with your own hand pull off the knave's mask. "The bees," you wrote, "have a commonwealth, as scientists name it; they have a king, but a harmless one; he is a leader rather than a despot; he beats not, pulls not, kills not his subject bees." No wonder therefore that they revere him so. Indeed, it was an unlucky day for you when you brought in those Tridentine bees; three-toothed as they are, they show you up as a toothless drone.

Aristotle, a most exact writer on politics, affirms that the Asiatic monarchy, which even he calls barbarous, was κατὰ νόμον, that is, according to law, Politics 3. Moreover he lists five sorts of monarchies, and four he calls governments according to laws, and with the people's approval, yet he calls them tyrannical, because though with popular consent, so much power had been lodged in them. But the kingdom of the Lacedemonians, he says, is most properly deemed a kingdom, because there not all power is lodged in the king. The fifth sort he calls παμβασιλεία; to this alone he attributes what you call the right of all kings, the right to rule as they please; but where in the world, or when in the whole course of time, it ever existed, he does not say. Nor seems he to have mentioned it for any other purpose than to show that it is unjust, absurd, and thoroughly tyrannical.

You say that when Samuel would deter the people from choosing a king, he explained "to them the right of kings." But where did he get this from — from the written law of God? No, that law, as we have seen, has shown a very different right of kings. Was it from God Himself speaking through Samuel? But God disapproved it, blamed it, deemed it a fault; so that the prophet expounded not any divinely appointed law for kings, but a mode of government most corrupt, seized by the pride of kings and lust to rule. He tells not what kings ought to do, but what they were liable to do; for he showed the people the manner of a king, as before he had shown the manner of the priests, the sons of Eli — using the same word (which you in your thirty-third page, by a solecism even in Hebrew, call מִשְׁפָּחָ ). Chapter 2. verse 13. "those priests' manner with the people was this" — surely an impious manner, and a hateful and tyrannical. The manner then was nowise a right but a wrong.

The fathers too have explained this passage in the same way: one will serve me as the measure of many — Sulpitius Severus, a contemporary and friend of St. Jerome, and in St. Augustine's opinion, a man of great wisdom and learning. He tells us in his sacred history that Samuel explains to the people the monarchical despotism and pride of power typical among kings. Now despotism and pride, to be sure, are not the right of kings; according to Sallust, however, the lawful power and authority granted to kings for the preservation of liberty and the promotion of the common weal degenerates into pride and despotism. This is the sense of all orthodox divines and of all legal scholars upon the interpretation of this passage, and as you might have learned from Sichardus, that of most of the rabbis as well; not a single rabbi ever asserted that what this passage handled was the king's absolute right. And even you, farther on, in your fifth chapter, page 106, complain that "not only Clement of Alexandria but all others are in error here," and that you alone have hit the mark. Now what a piece of impudence is this — or is it folly? — in opposition to all the expositors, especially the orthodox, to turn these customs of kings which God Himself so much condemns, into a royal right, and to defend them with a specious pretext of law, though you yourself confess that this so-called right is too often exercised in committing robberies, injustices, insults, and outrages.

Was any man ever so much "his own master" that he might lawfully prey upon mankind, drive and bear down all that stood in his way, and overturn all things? Did the Romans ever maintain, as you say they did, that anybody committed such crimes by some inherent right? In Sallust, Gaius Memmius, a tribune of the people, inveighing against the pride and unpunished crimes of the nobility, did say: "To do whatever one has a mind to, without fear of punishment, is to be a king." This looked good to you; and instantly you put it to your credit — in vain, surely, had you but kept your eyes open. Did he here assert the right of kings? or did he not rather chide the common people's pusillanimous laziness in suffering the nobility to lord it over them unchecked, and in submitting again to those kinglike ways which, together with the king himself, their ancestors, in the exercise of a rightful independence, had driven into exile? You ought to have consulted Tully; he would have taught you to expound Sallust more correctly, and Samuel too. In his oration Pro C. Rabirio, "None of us," says he, "is ignorant of the way of kings; these are their lordly dictates: 'mark my words and obey them.'" There he quotes from the poets other passages to this effect, which speak not of the right, but of the "way of kings"; and he says we ought to read and observe them carefully, not only "for our pleasure, but that we may learn what to guard against and to avoid." You perceive what a dead loss you have made of Sallust, whom, utter enemy of tyrants though he is, you thought you had brought into court to advocate for your so-called right of tyrants. Take my word for it, the right of kings seems to be tottering, and even hastening its own downfall, when like a sinking man it snatches all the straws about, and strives to maintain itself by examples and authorities which hasten the ruin which might have been delayed.

"The extreme exercise of a legal right," you say, "is the height of injury; this saying is verified most properly in kings, who, when they go to the utmost of their right, fall into those courses in which Samuel says the right of kings consists." Wretched right, which, now that you are brought to bay, you can defend no further than by confessing that it is the height of injury! This is what is called the extreme exercise of a legal right: when a man hunts after legal formulas, dwells almost upon the letters of the law, and regards not its justice; or too cunningly and maliciously interprets a statute; whence, says Cicero, the proverb arose. But since it is certain that all right flows from the fountain of justice, it follows inevitably that you are most wicked in affirming that "for a king to be unjust, rapacious, tyrannical, and such as they were who were worst," is the king's right, and that it was this "the prophet intimated to the people." For what right, whether extreme or relaxed, whether written or unwritten, can there be to wrongdoing? Lest you take it into your head to admit this of other men, yet to keep on denying it of kings, I bring one to object to you, himself a king, who maintains that your sort of right of kings is odious both to God and to himself: "Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, that frameth mischief by law"? Psalm 94. Put not then so black an insult upon God as to ascribe to him the doctrine that the perversities and impious wickednesses of kings are the right of kings. Nay, God Himself tells us that he abhors all fellowship with wicked princes for the very reason that under pretense of royal right they create misery and vexation for their subjects. Neither bring a false accusation against a prophet of God; for by supposing that in this passage he expounds the right of kings, you bring not before us the true Samuel, but call up an empty shade, as did the witch. Though for my part I verily believe that even that Samuel from Hell would not have been such a liar as to call your right of kings anything other than the extravagance of tyranny.

We read of impiety countenanced by law, and you yourself say "it was the worst kings that routinely made use of the license they called their right." Now I have proved that this right, which you have introduced for the destruction of mankind, proceeds not from God; later we shall show that it comes from the devil. "This license," say you, "grants one the power of his own will"; and for this you pretend to have Cicero's authority. I am never unwilling to mention your authorities, for it generally happens that you spoil your case by means of your own witnesses. Hear then what Cicero says in his Fourth Phillipic: "Is there any more justifiable reason for waging war than to ward off slavery? In slavery, even if the master is not oppressive, the sorry thing still is that he can be if he wishes." Can by force that is; for if Cicero were speaking of a right, he would contradict himself, and of a just cause of war make an unjust cause. What you describe, then, is not the right of a king, but the wrongfulness of kings, their force and their fury.

From a king's leave and license you turn to a private man's. "A private man," you say, "may lie, may be ungrateful." And so may kings, but what then? Shall they therefore have leave to plunder, murder, ravish, with impunity? How does it affect the seriousness of the wrong done to a people whether it be the king, or a robber, or an enemy from some other quarter, that slays, plunders, and enslaves them? And without question, being both alike enemies and plagues to human society, the one as well as the other ought by the same law to be driven off and punished — a king indeed with even more justice, because, though raised to that dignity by the honors that his people have conferred upon him, and though under his oath entrusted with the public safety, he yet betrays it.

At last you grant that "Moses prescribes laws according to which the king eventually to be chosen ought to govern, though different from that right which Samuel promulgated" — a double contradiction to what you have said before. For whereas you had affirmed that a king is quite unbound by law, you here confess he is bound. And you set up two contrary systems of law or right, one according to Moses, the other according to Samuel; which is absurd.

"But," says the prophet, "ye shall be servants to the king." Suppose I did not deny that they were so; yet it was not by royal right, but by the usurpation and injustice of most of their kings. For the prophet had forewarned them that that importunate petition of theirs would turn to their punishment, not through a royal right, but through their own deserts. Indeed if a king, as unbound by the law, has leave to do whatever he wants, he shall be far more than lord and master, and his people shall sink down lower than the lowest of slaves. For even a slave foreign-born had the law of God for his defense against a cruel master; and shall a whole people, indeed a free nation, find no protector upon earth, no law in which to take refuge when hurt and stripped and stricken? Were they set free from their bondage under the Egyptian kings only that they might be delivered to one of their own brethren to be crushed, should he choose, under a bondage even stricter? All which is agreeable neither to the law of God nor to common sense; nobody can doubt that what the prophet declared to the people is not the right of kings, but their manner, nor yet the manner of all kings, but of most.

Then you come down to the rabbis, and quote two of them, but with the same bad luck as you had before; for it is obvious that the chapter about a king, which, as Rabbi Joses repeatedly said, contains the right of kings, clearly is the one in Deuteronomy, not the one in Samuel. And Rabbi Judas has declared quite correctly, contradicting you, that Samuel's discourse was intended only to put fear into the people. It is most pernicious that a thing should be named a right, and so inculcated, which in itself is utter wrong — unless perhaps it be called a right ironically. Upon this argument verse 18 is to the point: "And you shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you: and the Lord will not hear you in that day." Yea, that punishment awaited them for obstinately persisting to desire a king against God's will.

Yet these words do not forbid them to try prayers or anything else, for if the people might lawfully cry out to God against their king, doubtless they might use all other honorable means to rid themselves of tyranny. For who that is hard-pressed by misfortune merely cries out to God, and does nothing but fall to his lazy prayers, so as to neglect all other duties?

But whatever the truth may be, what is all this to do with the rights of kings or of our English people? We neither asked for a king against the will of God, nor had one at his hands, rather we exercised the rights of peoples, and appointed a king by laws of our own. And this being the case, I see no reason why it should not be a tribute to our courage and increase our fame to have deposed our king, since it was reckoned a reproach to the Israelites to have asked for theirs. And this the event has confirmed; for we, when we had a king, prayed to God against him, and were heard, and at last delivered; but the Israelites, who having no king kept importunately asking God for one, he bade be slaves, till, after their return from Babylon, they reverted to their former means of government.

Next you throw open your Talmud School, but this too is an unlucky undertaking. In your desire to prove that kings are not to be judged, you quote from the Codex of the Sanhedrin "that the king neither judges nor is judged." But this runs counter to that people's own petition, who kept begging for a king for the very purpose that he might judge them. You try in vain to patch this up to fit your purpose by telling us that it is to be understood of those kings who reigned after the Babylonish captivity, but here against you is Maimonides, who defines this difference between the kings of Israel and those of Judah: that "the kings of the posterity of David judge and are judged," but the kings of Israel do neither. You work against yourself; for you contradict yourself or your rabbis, and plead my cause. This, you say, "applied not to the first kings of Israel," for in the 17th verse it is said "Ye shall be his servants." That is to say by his actual practice, not by any right; or if by right, then as a penalty for asking for a king; a penalty which they kept on paying under most of their kings, though not perhaps under this or that particular king. So your point has nothing to do with the case. But you need no antagonist, you are such a reliable antagonist to yourself. For you tell us, as if arguing on my side, how first Aristobulus, and after him Jannaeus, surnamed Alexander, did not receive that kingly right of theirs from the Sanhedrin, guardian and interpreter of rights, but usurped it by degrees against the will of the council. To please these usurpers, you say, that pretty story of the principal men of the Sanhedrin being "struck dead by Gabriel" was made up for the occasion. And thus you confess that this magnificent prerogative, upon which you seem mainly to rely, "that a king is not to be judged," which was forged out of this rabbinical fable, worse than an old wives' tale.

But that the Hebrew kings "were liable to be judged, and even to be punished with stripes," Sichardus shows at large out of the writings of the rabbis; to which author you are indebted for all this erudition, and yet you blush not to clamor against him. Nay, we read that even Saul thought himself bound by the decree of his own making, and in obedience thereunto cast lots with his son Jonathan which of them two should die. Uzziah likewise, when the priests thrust him out of the temple as a leper, submitted as though he had been a subject, and ceased to be king. Suppose he had refused to go out from the temple, to lay down the government, and to dwell in quarantine, and had asserted that royal right unbound by law, think you the Israelites and their priests would have suffered the temple to be defiled, the laws violated, and the whole people endangered by infection? Shall laws then be enforced against a leprous king, but not against a tyrant? Can any man possibly be so mad and foolish as to fancy that while the law has carefully provided against a diseased king hurting his people, yet, should a wicked unjust cruel king tear and torture and slay them, and quite overturn the state, but no legal relief had been devised against these far greater mischiefs?

"But," you say, "no precedent can be shown of any king that has been arraigned in a court of justice, and condemned to die." Whereto Sichardus answers pat, that it is as if one should argue thus: The Emperor never has been summoned before an Elector; therefore, if the Elector Palatine should set a day for his appeareance, the Emperor is not bound to appear or plead; though from the Golden Bull it is clear that Charles IV submitted himself and his successors to those election proceedings.

No wonder if kings have been indulged so far when the people are depraved, and when so many private persons with either money or interest escape the law, though guilty of crimes most heinous. That ἀνυπεύθυνον, that is, "to be wholly independent upon any other, and accountable to none upon earth," which you say is peculiar to royal majesty, Aristotle in his Politics, Book 4, Chapter 10, calls most tyrannical, and never to be endured by a free people. In proof that a king cannot rightfully be required to give an account of his actions, you cite as authority — proper authority so you claim! — that monstrous tyrant Mark Antony, destroyer of the Roman commonwealth; yet Antony, when marching against the Parthians, summoned Herod before him to answer a charge of murder, and it is thought that he would have punished even a king, had not the king bribed him with gold. So that your Royal Defence and Antony's assertion of the royal prerogative flow from one and the same spring. Not without reason, you say, "for kings hold their authority from no other than God, and are indebted and obliged for it to Him alone." What kings do you mean? For I deny that there ever were such kings. Saul, the first king of Israel, had never reigned but that the people desired a king even against the will of God, and though he was proclaimed king at Mizpah, yet he lived almost a private life, and tended the herd of his father, till he was created king a second time by the people at Gilgal. And what of David? Though anointed by God, was he not anointed a second time in Hebron by the tribe of Judah, and then by all the Hebrews — yet even so only after a mutual covenant between him and the people? 2 Samuel 5:1 and 1 Chronicles 11. But a covenant binds kings and restrains them within bounds. Solomon, you say, "sat on the throne of the Lord, and was acceptable to all men," 1 Chronicles 29. So that it used to be important to be well-pleasing in the eyes of the people! Jehoiadah, the preist, made Joash king, but first he made him and the people enter into a covenant to one another, 2 Kings 11. I acknowledge that these kings and the rest of David's posterity were appointed both by God and by the people, but all other kings of what country soever were appointed, I affirm, by the people only. I challenge you to show that they were appointed by God, except in the sense that all things, great and small, are said to be made and appointed by him. The throne of David, then, was in a peculiar manner called "the throne of Jehovah," whereas the thrones of other princes are Jehovah's no otherwise than are all things else; which you should have learnt out of the same chapter, verses 11, 12. "All that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord. Both riches and honor come of thee, and power and might." This is so often repeated, not that kings may be puffed up, but to warn them that though they think themselves gods yet there is a God above them to whom they owe all. Thus we easily understand what the poets and the Essenes mean when they tell us that "it is by God that kings reign, and they are from Jove"; for Solomon, himself a king, considers that even lesser officers, also, namely judges, are from the same God, Proverbs 8:15, 16; and from the same Jove Homer, in the first Iliad: "judges who guard the laws from God." Surely all we are of God likewise, and God's offspring. Therefore this universal right of God's takes not away the people's right; so all other kings not named to their office by God are indebted and obliged for their authority to the people only, and consequently are accountable to them for it.

This, though the common people are apt to flatter their kings, yet kings themselves acknowledge, whether good ones, as Sarpedon in Homer, or bad ones, as those tyrants in the Lyrist.

Glaucus, wherefore have we twain the chiefest honor
In Lycia, and all men look on us as gods?

He answers himself: "Because we outshine the rest in valor; wherefore let us fight manfully," says he, "lest the Lycians tax us with cowardice." In which words he intimates both that kings derive their royalty from the people, and that for their conduct of war they are accountable to them. Bad kings indeed, to strike terror into their people, declare publicly that God is the author of their royal power, yet in their secret prayers reverence no other divinity but Fortune. The well-known passage in Horace is apt:

Wild Dacians fear thee, thee nomad Scythian fear,
Barbarian tyrants' mothers dread thee,
Purple-robed tyrants tremble,

Lest with thy cruel heel you crush
Their stately palaces, while the mob pouring in
To arms arouse the slow to arms and
Instantly shatter the tyrant's power.

If it is by God alone, therefore, that kings today reign, it is by God too that people assert their liberty, since all things are of him and by him. Scripture bears witness to both these points — that by him kings reign and that by him they are cast down from their thrones, though yet we perceive that the one and the other are brought about far oftener by the people than by God. The rights of the people then are as much from God as is the right of the king — whatever that is. And whenever any people, without some visible designation of God Himself, have appointed a king, they can by the same right put him down. To depose a tyrant certainly is a more godlike action than to set one up; and there appears much more of God in the people whenever they depose an unjust king than in the king that oppresses an innocent people. Indeed, the people have a warrant from God to judge wicked kings, for God has conferred this very honor upon his saints when, in Psalm 149, he says that while they celebrate the praises of Christ their own king, yet as for the kings of the heathen, (and such, according to the Gospel, are all tyrants), "they shall bind them with chains . . . to execute upon them the judgment written" — even upon them that boast themselves unbound by any laws or judgment written! Let none be so stupid and wicked as to think that kings, commonly the worst of men, are so high in God's account that the whole world is to hang upon their nod and governance, and that for their sakes and on their account the human race divine, if I may so call it, should be reckoned and treated as abject brute beasts.

After all this, rather than say nothing, you publish your discovery that Marcus Aurelieus countenanced tyranny; but you had better have let him alone. I cannot say whether he ever affirmed that God is the sole judge of princes. Xiphilinus, to be sure, whom you quote on an αὐταρχία, says: "Concerning an αὐταρχία God alone has the power to judge." But that an αὐταρχία is there synonymous with monarchy I cannot agree; and the less the oftener I read what goes before. Indeed any reader would wonder how that outlandish opinion, abruptly engrafted upon the context, hangs together with it, or what is its own meaning; especially since Marcus Aurelius, best of emperors, conducted himself towards the people, Capitolinus tells us, just as if Rome had still been a free republic. And we all know that when it was so, the supreme power was in the people. The same emperor, in the first book of his autobiography, openly professes that he revered Thraseas, and Helvidius, and Cato, and Dion, and Brutus, who were all tyrant-slayers, or affected that reputation, and that he proposed to himself a form of government under which all men might equally enjoy the benefit of the law, and right and justice be equally administered to all. And in his fourth book he says the law is master, and not he. He acknowledged that all power and property belong to the Senate and the people: we are so far, says he, from having anything of our own, that we live in your house, according to Xiphilinus. So little did he arrogate aught to himself by virtue of a royal right. When he was dying he offered the Romans his son for his successor, to rule upon condition he should prove worthy. He exhibited not, then, that absolute and imaginary right of sovereignty supposed to be delivered by God's hand — made, in short, no pretence to that αὐταρχία of yours.

Still you say that "the annals of Greece and Rome are full" of examples. But nobody has seen them anywhere. "So are the annals of the Jews." And yet, you add, "the Jews in most respects were unfavorable to royal power." Nay, you have found and you will find that both the Greeks and the Latins were exceedingly unfavorable to tyrants; the Jews too — if that book that Samuel wrote of "the manner of the kingdom," 1 Samuel 10, were extant; which book, the Hebrew doctors tell us, the kings tore in pieces or burnt that they might tyrannize over their subjects with greater impunity.

Now look about and see whether you can catch hold of somewhat or other. Finally you come to wrest David's words in Psalm 17: "Let my sentence come forth from thy presence": therefore, says Barnachmoni, "None but God judges the king." And yet it seems rather likely that David penned these words when he was persecuted by Saul, and when, though already God's anointed, he did not decline being judged even by Jonathan. "If there be iniquity in me, slay me thyself," he says, 1 Samuel 20. Thereupon, like anyone else that is falsely accused by men, he appeals to the judgment of God, as appears in the sequel: "Thine eyes behold the thing that is right, for thou hast searched my heart," etc. What has this to do with a judgment passed by a king or a court of law? Certainly they do most to shake and pull down the right of kings who expose how it is built and rests upon so shifty a foundation.

Then you come with that threadbare argument, the prize argument of our courtiers: "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned," Psalm 51:6. As if King David, when doing penance with tears and grief, when in sackcloth and ashes as he lay upon the ground imploring God's mercy, said this with any thought of a king's right, at a moment when he deemed himself scarcely worthy of the right of a slave! And can we think that he despised all God's people, his own brethren, to that degree, as to believe that he might perpetrate upon them murder, and adultery, and robbery, and yet not be sinning against them? Far be it from so holy a king ever to have been guilty of such pride, or such abominable ignorance of himself and his neighbor! Unquestionably, then, "against thee only have I sinned" means 'against thee chiefly.' But however this may be, the words and thoughts of the psalmist, rhapsodical and passionate, are ill suited to expound law, and should not be dragged into such use.

"But David was never summoned, or made to plead for his life before the Sanhedrin." Of course he was not. How could his sin have been found out, which was committed so secretly that perhaps for some years after (such are secrets at court) not above one or two seem to have been privy to it? 2 Samuel 12. "Thou didst it secretly." Moreover, if the Sanhedrin should neglect to punish private persons, would anyone allege this as proof that these are not punishable? But the reason why David was not proceeded against as a malefactor is not much in the dark. Though he had condemned himself in the fifth verse, "The man that hath done this thing shall surely die," and though the prophet at once replies, "Thou art the man," so that in the prophet's judgment also he deserved death, yet God by his sovereignty and his singular mercy to David absolves him both from the guilt of his sin and from the sentence of death as well which he had pronounced against himself: verse 13, "Thou shalt not die."

Next you rage against some "bloodthirsty" advocate or other, and go at it body and soul to refute his peroration. Let him look to that; I will endeavor to be as short as I can in what I have undertaken to perform. Yet some things I cannot pass by. First your extraordinary contradictions. On your thirtieth page you say: "The Israelites are not begging for an unjust, violent, rapacious king, such as kings are at their worst." And yet, on page 42, you rail at the advocate for maintaining that the Israelites asked for a tyrant. "Would they have chosen," say you, "to leap headlong out of the frying pan into the fire, and risk the cruelty of the worst tyrants, rather than suffer the bad judges to whom they were by now grown accustomed?" First you said the Hebrews preferred tyrants to judges; here you say they preferred judges to tyrants, and "a tyrant was the thing they least desire." So that the advocate will answer you out of your own book, for according to your principle every king is by royal right a tyrant.

What you say next is very true: "The supreme power was then in the people, as appears by their rejecting judges and choosing a king." Remember this when I shall ask you for it again! It is not true, you say, that "God in his anger gave the Israelites a king as a tyrant or a punishment, but as a thing good and profitable." But that is easily refuted; for why should they cry to God because of the king that they had chosen, were it not that royal government was an evil — not in itself, but because most commonly, even as the prophet here warns, it does degenerate into pride and tyranny? If you are not yet satisfied, acknowledge your own words, acknowledge your own signature, and blush. In your Apparatus ad Primatum, "God gave them a king in his anger," you say, "being offended at their sin in refusing to have God for their king. So the Church, as if in punishment for its crime of forsaking the pure worship of God, has been delivered up to the more than kingly government of one mortal head." Therefore if your own comparison holds, either God gave the children of Israel a king to their loss and as an evil, or he gave the Church a Pope for its profit and as a good. Was there ever anything more lightheaded and silly than this man? Who would trust him in the least thing, that in things of so great concern says and presently unsays without attaching the slightest weight to the matter? You tell us in your twenty-ninth page that "among all nations, kings are loosed from law; this was the judgment both of the Eastern and of the Western world." And yet, page 43, you say "that all the kings of the East were legal and lawful, nay, that the very kings of Egypt in all matters great or small were tied to laws"; though in the beginning of this chapter you had undertaken to demonstrate "that kings are bound by no laws, they give laws but receive none." For my part I am not angry with you, for either you are mad or you are on our side. Surely this is attacking, not defending, the king; this is making game of him; or if you are in earnest, that phrase of Catullus's fits you squarely, but contrariwise, for by as much as anyone was ever the best of poets, by so much are you the worst of all defenders. Unless that stupidity in which, you complain, the advocate you mention is "sunk," has blinded you instead, you shall now feel that you are yourself "become a very brute."

Now you confess that "the kings of all the nations too have laws prescribed to them, yet not so as to be held to them by fear of judgment and capital punishment." You have yet to prove either claim from Scripture or from any authority worthy of credit. Observe then in few: to prescribe civil laws to such as are not bound by them is silly and ridiculous; to punish all others, but leave some one man at liberty to commit all sorts of wickedness without fear of punishment, is most unjust, for law makes no exception. These two errors are not made by wise lawgivers, much less by God. But in order to show that you utterly fail to prove out of the Hebrew Scriptures what you had undertaken in this chapter to prove by them, you freely admit that there are some rabbis "who affirm that any king other than God ought not to have been acknowledged by their forefathers, yet was given them for their punishment." With their opinion I agree.

He is not fit or worthy to be king who does not far excel all the rest. But where many are equal, as in all governments the majority are, they ought, I think, to have an equal interest in the government, and hold it by turns. But that all men should be slaves to one who is their equal, or, as generally happens, their inferior, and most often a fool, who would not think this a thing most unworthy? Nor does it "recommend royal government," to say that Christ had kings for ancestors, any more than it recommends some very bad kings, that they had Christ for a descendant. "The Messiah is a king." We acknowledge him, we rejoice, and we pray that he will come as soon as may be; for he is worthy, nor is there any who is like unto him or can succeed him. Meanwhile the royal power, entrusted to unworthy and undeserving persons, as most commonly it is, may well be thought to have done mankind more harm than good. Nor does it follow for all this that all kings are tyrants. But suppose it did; I grant you this lest you think me obstinate; now make the best of it. "These two conclusions follow," you say, "God himself would properly be called king of tyrants, and indeed himself the greatest tyrant." If the first of these is a non-sequitur, at least there does follow the thing that almost always follows from your whole book, namely that you perpetually contradict not only the Scriptures but your own self. For in the very next sentence above, you have affirmed that "there is one God, the king of all things, having himself created them." Now he created as well tyrants and devils, and consequently by your own reasoning is their king too. The second of your conclusions we detest, and wish that blasphemous mouth of yours stopped, with which you affirm God to be the worst of tyrants, if he is to be called, as you so often say he is, their king and lord.

Nor do you much advantage the royal cause by telling us that Moses "was a king, with supreme power." He might indeed have been, or any other for that matter, who could, like Moses, "bring causes unto God," Exodus 18:19. But even Moses, though, so to speak, God's confidant, was not permitted to do whatever he pleased to God's people. For, what says he? "The people come unto me to inquire of God" — not, then, to receive Moses's own commands. Then Jethro takes up the point: "Be thou for the people to God-ward, . . . and thou shalt teach them God's ordinances and laws." And Moses again, Deuteronomy 4:5: "I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me." Hence it is that he is said to have been "faithful in all God's house," Numbers 12. So that the people's king was then Jehovah, and Moses as it were an interpreter only of Jehovah the king. Impious and sacrilegious you must needs be who without warrant have dared shift this supreme power from God to man — a power which, as held by Moses himself, was not supreme, but only deputed or intermediate under God's present deity. To heap up your wickedness to its summit, you here say Moses was a king with absolute power, yet in your Apparatus ad Primatum, page 230, you say: "Together with the seventy elders he ruled the people, and was their foremost, but not their master." If Moses therefore was a king, as certainly he was, and the best of kings, and had, as you say he had, "sovereign royal power," and yet, again as you say, was neither the people's master nor their sole ruler, then it necessarily follows that kings, though endued with the supreme power, yet ought not by virtue of that sovereign royal right of theirs be lords over the people, or sole rulers, much less rulers according to their own will and pleasure.

With what shamelessness you counterfeit a supposed command of God "to set up a king over them as soon as they should be possessed of the Holy Land," Deuteronomy 17! For you craftily leave out the preceding word, "When thou . . . shalt say, I will set a king over me." And pray call to mind also what you said before, page 42, and what I shall now ask you to recite, namely "The people were then possessed of quite unlimited power."

Now once more you shall decide whether you are sacrilegious or crazed. "God," you say, "having so long before appointed a kingly government as best and most proper for that people, what shall we say to the Prophet's opposing it, and God's own dealing with the Prophet as if himself were rather against it? How do these things agree?" He sees himself enmeshed, he sees himself entangled; observe now with how great malice against the Prophet, and impiety against God, he seeks to disentangle himself! "We must consider," says he, "that it was Samuel's own sons who then judged the people, and that the people rejected them because of their corruption; now Samuel was loth his sons should be laid aside, and God, to gratify his prophet, intimated that what the people desired did not much please him." Speak out, wretch, and never mince the matter: you mean, Samuel deceived the people, and God Samuel. It is not that advocate of yours, therefore, but yourself, that are the "frantic" and "raving" one; who, so you may but honor a king, cast off all reverence to God. Does Samuel seem to you one who would have preferred his sons' ambition and covetousness before his people's grace or safety; one who, when the people sought what was right and beneficial, would have imposed upon them with such sly crafty advice, and made them believe things that were not? Does God himself seem to you one that in so disgraceful an affair would stoop to oblige a friend? Would God act a part before the people? So, then, either what Samuel taught the people was not the right of kings, or else that right, by the testimony of God and of the Prophet, was an evil thing, burdensome, injurious, unprofitable, and costly to the commonwealth; or lastly (which, as sacrilege, is inadmissible), both God and the Prophet wished to deceive the people.

God frequently protests that he was extremely displeased with them for requesting a king, verse 7: "They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done . . . wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods." As if it were considered a kind of idolatry to ask for a king, who requires adoration and worship almost divine. Surely, whoever subjects himself to an earthly master that is above all law comes but little short of setting up a strange god, a god that at least is seldom rational, but too often abjectly brutish and beastly. So Samuel 10:19: "and ye have this day rejected your God, who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your tribulation, and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us"; and chapter 12, verse 12: Ye asked for a king "when the Lord your God was your king"; and verse 17: "See that your wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the Lord, in asking you a king." And Hosea speaks contemptuously of the king, chapter 13:10-11: "Where is thy king? Let him now save thee in thy cities. Where are thy judges? For that thou saidst, give me a king and princes, I gave thee a king in mine anger." Hence it is that heroic Gideon, greater than a king, "I will not rule over you," says he, "neither shall my son rule over you; the Lord shall rule over you," Judges 8; intimating thereby that it belongs not to a man, but to God only, to exercise dominion over men. And hence Josephus in his book against Apion, an Egyptian grammarian and a foulmouthed fellow like you, calls the commonwealth of the Hebrews, in which God was sole ruler, a Theocracy. In Isaiah 26:13 the people, in their right minds at last, complain that it had been mischievous to them to have had rulers other than God. All which passages go to prove that the king was given the Israelites in God's anger.

Who can forbear laughing at the use you make of the story of the usurper Abimelech? Of whom it is said when he was killed, partly by a woman that hurled a piece of millstone upon him, and partly by the sword of his own armor-bearer, that "God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech." "This history," say you, "proves strongly that God alone is the judge and punisher of kings." Yea, if this argument hold, he is the only judge and punisher of tyrants, rascals, and bastard usurpers. Whoever by hook or crook can seize a throne shall have got a sovereign kingly right over the people, and is out of all danger of punishment; instantly the weapons shall fall from the magistrates' hands, and the people thenceforth not dare to mutter. What if some strong thief had perished in like manner by violence, would any man infer that God alone is the judge and punisher of thieves? Or what if he had been legally convicted, and had died by the executioner's hand — would it have been any the less God that rendered his wickedness? You have never read that the judges of the children of Israel were ever proceeded against according to law, and yet you admit of your own accord (p. 47) that "in an aristocracy even the prince may and ought to undergo judgment if he break the law." And in a kingdom why may not a tyrant likewise undergo judgment? Because God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech! So did the woman, and so did his own armor-bearer, over both of whom he pretended to a right of sovereignty. And what if a magistrate had rendered his wickedness? Does not a magistrate bear God's sword for that very purpose, to repay evil with evil?

Having done with this "most powerful" argument from the death of Abimelech, he betakes himself, as is his way, to slanders and calumnies; his discourse does nothing but sling "mud and dirt"; but as for those things that he promised to prove, he has proved not one, either from the Scripture or from the rabbinical writings. In no sense does he show that a king is unbound by law, or why a king, alone of all mortal men, if he commit a crime should not be punished. Instead, he gets entangled in those very authorities that he makes use of, and by his own discourse shows the opinion that he argues against to be the truer. And perceiving that he is like to do but little good with his arguments, he endeavors to bring odium upon us by loading us with abominable accusations, as if we had cruelly put to death the most virtuous innocent prince that ever reigned. "Was Solomon," says he, "a better king than Charles I?" I confess some have ventured to compare his father King James with Solomon, nay, to prefer King James for his illustrious descent. Solomon was David's son, and David used to be Saul's musician; but King James was the son of the Earl of Darnley, who, Buchanan tells us, caught David the musician in his wife the Queen's bedchamber at night with the door bolted, and killed him not long after. So that King James was of more distinguished origin, and was frequently called a second Solomon, though whether he was the son of David the musician the tale has left uncertain, for readers to guess. But how could it ever come into your head to make a comparison between Charles and Solomon, I cannot see. For that very Charles whom you praise thus to the sky, that very man's obstinacy, and covetousness, and cruelty, his hard mastership to all good and honest men, his wars, and arsons, and plunderings, and slaughters innumerable of his wretched subjects, all this, even while I am writing, does his son Charles himself publicly confess and bewail on the stool of repentance in Scotland, nay, renounces there that kingly right of yours.

Still, if you take such pleasure in parallels, let us compare King Charles and King Solomon. Solomon began his reign with the execution of his brother, who had justly deserved it. Charles began his with his father's funeral — I do not say his father's murder, though all the evidences of poison appeared on the dead body, for that suspicion rested upon Buckingham; whom yet, though murderer of the king and Charles's father, Charles not only cleared of guilt in the highest Council of the realm, but dissolved Parliament to keep the affair by hook or crook from Parliamentary investigation. Solomon oppressed the people with heavy taxes, but he spent that money upon the temple of God and other public buildings; King Charles spent his in extravagances. Solomon was enticed to idolatry by many wives, Charles by one. Though Solomon were himself seduced, we read not that he seduced others; but Charles, as well by the richest benefices of a corrupt Church seduced and enticed others, as by his edicts and ecclesiastical decrees he compelled them to set up altars, which all Protestants abhor, and to bow down to crucifixes painted over them on the wall. But yet not for all this "was Solomon by his people condemned to die." Nor does it follow because he was not, say I, that therefore he ought not to have been; for perhaps there were many circumstances that made it then inexpedient. But not long after, the people by both words and actions made clear what was their right, when ten tribes revolted from Solomon's son; and if he had not made speed to flee, very likely they would have stoned to death even a king who had but threatened them.

IT HAS now been sufficiently argued and proved that the kings of the Jews were by God's ordinance bound to all the laws even as were the people, and that no exemptions from the law are found in Scripture; so that it is quite unauthorized, quite unreasonable, and quite untrue, to say that kings "may do what they list with impunity," or that "they may not be punished by the people," and accordingly that "god has reserved their punishment to his own tribunal." Let us now consider whether the Gospel recommends what the Law not only did not command but discommended; let us consider whether the Gospel, the heavenly proclamation of liberty, gives us over into slavery to kings and tyrants, from whose outrageous rule the old law, though it taught slavery of some sort, did set God's people free.

Your first argument you take from the person of Christ. But who does not know that he put himself into the condition not only of a subject, but even of a servant, that we might be free? Nor is this to be understood of inward liberty only, to the exclusion of civil liberty. How out of place are the words that Mary mother of Christ spoke in the prophecy of his coming — "He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree" — if his coming rather established tyrants on their thrones, and cast all Christians down beneath their cruel sway! He himself, by being born, and serving, and dying, under tyrants, has purchased all rightful liberty for us. And he has not withheld from us the resignation to submit patiently, if we must, to slavery, so he has not forbidden us to strive nobly for our liberty — indeed has granted this in fuller measure. Hence it is that Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:21, has resolved thus, not only of evangelical but also of civil liberty: "Art thou called, being a servant? care not for it; but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather. Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men." Vainly then do you endeavor to argue us into slavery by the example of Christ, who at the price of servitude for himself established liberty for us, even civil liberty. He took upon him indeed in our stead the shape of a servant, but he never did doff the soul and purpose of our deliverer; whereby he taught, as I shall show, a quite other notion of the right of kings than this you teach. For you preach not the right of kings, but the right of tyrants (a novel thing in a commonwealth!) and assert that whatever nation has in fate's lottery drawn a tyrant, whether by inheritance or by conquest or by chance, is enslaved not merely under compulsion, but under religious obligation.

Now, as usual, I will turn your own authorities against you. When certain Galilean collectors of the tribute money demanded tribute of Peter, Christ asked him, Matthew 17, of whom the kings of the earth took custom or tribute, of their own children or of strangers. Peter answers him, Of strangers. Jesus responded "Then are the children free. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, . . . give unto them for me and thee." This passage troubles the commentators, who disagree about to whom the tribute was paid. Some say it was paid to the priests for the use of the sanctuary; others that it was paid to the emperor; I am of opinion that it was paid to Herod, who converted to his own use the revenue of the sanctuary; for Josephus mentions several sorts of tribute which Herod and his sons exacted, and which Agrippa finally remitted. Now the tribute in question, though small in itself, yet being accompanied with many more, was a heavy burden; indeed that of which Christ speaks here must needs have been oppressive. Under other conditions, even during the commonwealth, poor persons were counted only, not taxed. Hence therefore Christ took occasion to censure the injustice of Herod, under whose government he then was, in that, whereas the rest of the kings of the earth, if indeed they desire to be called fathers of their country, use not to impose excessively heavy taxes upon their children, that is, their subjects, but upon foreigners, especially when subdued in war; he, quite to the contrary, oppressed not strangers but his children. However it be, whether you agree that children here is to be understood as the king's own subjects, or as the children of God, that is, the faithful, and, in general, Christians, as Augustine understands, this is certain, that if Peter were a child, and therefore free, then we are free as well on Christ's own authority, either as citizens or as Christians, and that it therefore is not the right of kings to exact excessive tribute from their own children and freeborn subjects. Christ himself bears witness that he paid this tribute not because he ought, but in order that as an individual he might not bring trouble upon himself by offending those that demanded it; for he knew in his own mind that he had a far different duty and service to perform — a far other race to run. In denying, then, that it is the right of kings to burden their freeborn subjects with grievous exactions, Christ yet more plainly denies that it is their right to spoil and plunder, to massacre and torture their own citizens, especially Christians. On other occasions he spoke in a similar manner about the right of kings, and people began to suspect that he did not consider the license of tyrants to be the right of kings. It was not for nothing that the Pharisees put such questions to him, tempting him, and that when they were about to press their inquiries concerning the right of kings they told him that he cared not for any man and regarded not any man's position. Nor was it for nothing that he was angry when such an inquiry was propounded to him, Matthew 22. What if someone should endeavor slyly to approach you, and entangle you in your own principles concerning the right of kings, in order to bring you to some harm — would you be angry at him? Oh, no! Hence then pray observe that his opinions upon the right of kings were not agreeable to kings.

The same may be gathered very clearly from his answer, by which he seems rather to send away his questioners than to instruct them. He asks to be shown the tribute money. "Whose image is that?" he says. "Caesar's," they say. "Render therefore unto Caesar," says he, "the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." And is there anyone who knows not as well that unto the people should be rendered the things that are the people's? "Render to all men their dues," says Paul, Romans 13. So that not all things are unto Caesar. Our liberty is not Caesar's, but God's own gift to us at birth; and to render unto any Caesar you like this which we got not from him were an action most foul, most unworthy of the origin of man. If one should look upon the countenance of a man, and inquire whose image was that, would not any one answer at once that it was God's? Being then God's own, that is, free in very truth, and consequently to be rendered to none but God, surely we cannot without the greatest sin and sacrilege deliver ourselves over in slavery to Caesar, a man, that is, and, what is more, to an unjust man, a wicked man, a tyrant.

Christ leaves undecided, however, what things are God's, and what Caesar's. If that piece of money was the same as the didrachm that was customarily paid to God, as it certainly was later, under Vespasian, then Christ, instead of settling the controversy, has complicated it further; for it is impossible to give the same thing at the same time to God and to Caesar. But, you say, he intimated to them what things were Caesar's, that is, that piece of money stamped with Caesar's portrait. But does this profit either you or Caesar more than a pennyworth? Either Christ gave Caesar nothing but that penny, and declared everything else ours, or else, if he assigned to Caesar all money that has Caesar's name upon it, he gives Caesar nearly all our property, and contradicts himself; for when he was paying kings only two didrachms of tribute, he protested that it was more than either Peter or he was bound to do.

In short, he argument you rely on is weak, for coins bear the prince's portrait not as a token of its being his property, but of its being good metal, and that none may presume to counterfeit it. If indeed stamping or writing availed so much to establish royal right, kings could instantly turn all our property over to themselves by merely writing their names upon it. Or if all our possessions already are theirs, which is your doctrine, then that piece of money was to be rendered unto Caesar not because it bore his name or image, but because of right it belonged to him before, though unstamped with any image. Thus it is clear that Christ in this passage meant not so much to teach us our duty to kings and Caesars — so involved and dubious is its doctrine — as he meant to expose the malice and wickedness of the hypocritical Pharisees. When the Pharisees upon another occasion told him that Herod had laid wait to kill him, did they hear from him a humble submissive answer to render unto the tyrant? "Go ye, and tell that fox," says he, intimating that when kings plot their subjects' destruction, it is by a right not kingly but foxy.

You say "he allowed himself to suffer death under a tyrant." How else was that possible, except under a tyrant? "Under a tyrant he suffered death" — thus authorizing and championing the wickedest consequences of the royal right! You make an excellent moralist. Christ, moreover, underwent servitude not to put us under the yoke but to set us free. He so measured his conduct as not to yield to royal right a jot beyond its just and proper due.

Now it is time for us to come to his teaching upon this subject. The sons of Zebedee were ambitious of the highest places in the kingdom of Christ, which they imagined would shortly be set up upon earth. Christ reproved them so as to let all Christians know at once what manner of law concerning officials and the civil power he desired should be set up among them, "Ye know," says he, "that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." Unless you had been distracted, could you ever have imagined that this passage supports your position, and that by such reasonings you win us to regard our kings as masters over us and ours? May enemies like you fall to our lot in war — enemies who, though we know well enough we can beat them even when they are armed, blunder blindly unarmed, as you have a way of doing, into the hostile camp instead of their own; for whatever makes most against your case, that very thing you usually are foolish enough to allege as the strongest support for your cause. The Israelites kept asking God for a king "like as all the nations that are about" had; God dissuaded them by many arguments, whereof Christ here gives an epitome: "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them"; yet, because the Israelites persisted in asking, God gave them one, though in his wrath. Christ, lest a Christian people should anywise desire one who would exercise dominion over them as did the kings of the Gentiles, prevents them with the caution "but it shall not be so among you." What could be said plainer than this? There shall not be among you that haughty sway of kings, though by a plausible title they be called Euergetes and benefactors. But he that wishes to be great amongst you — and who is greater than the prince? — "let him be your minister"; and he that will be "foremost," or "prince" (Luke 22), "let him be your servant." So that the lawyer you inveigh against was not wrong, but had Christ's authority if he said that a Christian king is the people's servant, as every good magistrate certainly is. Insomuch that a king is either no Christian at all, or is the people's servant: if he would be lord and master out and out, he cannot at the same time be a Christian.

Moses himself, ordainer of a law that to a certain degree legalized slavery, yet did not lord it haughtily over his people, but bore himself the burden of the people, and carried them in his bosom, as a nursing father does a suckling child, Numbers 11; moreover a nursing father is a servant. Plato would have the magistrates not called lords, but servants and helpers of the people, nor the people called servants, but maintainers of their magistrates, because even when these are kings, the people give them food and wages. Aristotle called the magistrates the keepers and ministers of the laws; Plato, both ministers and servants. The Apostle, to be sure, calles them ministers of God; but that does not prevent their being ministers of the laws and of the people; for the laws and the magistrates as well are for the people's sake.

Yet this, you keep howling, is merely "the opinion of the ravings mastiffs of England." Of course I had not thought the people of England mastiffs, did not you, mongrel, bark at them so currishly. The Lord and Seigneur de St. Loup, God save you, the Sainted Wolf himself, complains that the mastiffs rave! There was a time when St. Germain, whose colleague was the famous St. Loup of Troyes, deposed our unchaste king Vortigern by his own authority. So St. Loup despise you, the master of no saintly wolf, but of some thievish starveling of a wolf, and more contemptible than that master of vipers of whom Martial makes mention. Yes, and at home you even have a barking Lycisca too, though you be Lord of the Wolf, this She-wolf lords it pitifully over you, and loudly rails at your rank, and unlords your lordship. No wonder, then, that you endeavor to obtrude absolute royal tyranny upon others, who are yourself grown accustomed to bear female rule so slavishly at home. Go on then, be Master of the Wolf: be what you will, you are bound to be the English mastiff's plaything. But I have no time now to hunt wolves; so having got out of the woods, let us go back to the King's highway.

You who lately wrote against all primacy in the church, now call "Peter the prince of the apostolic fellowship." Who can trust you, little man, when your own principles are so unstable? What says Peter? "Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of them that do well: for so is the will of God." This epistle Peter wrote to persons who were not only private individuals, but actually strangers scattered throughout most of Asia Minor, and who in those places where they sojourned had no other right than what the laws of hospitality entitled them to. Do you think that what befits scattered strangers in strange lands befits likewise inhabitants freeborn and noble, or meetings, assemblies, and parliaments of native citizens in their own country? Or that, in their own land, what befits private persons equally befits members of Parliament and officers of state, without whom kings themselves cannot subsist? But suppose the epistle were addressed to natural-born subjects, suppose them not private persons but the very Senate of Rome; what then? When a command has some express reason attached to it, nobody, generally speaking, is or can be bound by it beyond the extent of the reason. Now the command is: "Submit," ὑποτάγητε, which is, according to the essential force of the word, "be subordinate, or legally subject": ἡ γὰρ τάξις νόμος, as Aristotle says: For order is law. "Submit for the Lord's sake." Because the king as as well as the governor is appointed by God "for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of them that do well." "For so is the will of God," to wit, that we should submit and yield obedience to such as are here writ down; of others there is not a word here. You see how firmly grounded is the reason for this command; and in the 16th verse he adds: "as free," not as slaves. What then if princes reverse their office, and rule to the torture and destruction of good men, and the license and praise and reward of evildoers, shall we all still submit forevermore, not private persons only, but our nobility, all our officers of state, our very Parliament itself? Is not this called a government "of men"? Why then is man competent to establish what is right and sound for men, but not competent to rid themselves of what is mischievous and destructive to them?

But that king, you say, to whom they were bidden to submit, was Nero, in those days tyrant at Rome: therefore we must submit even to tyrants. But I say that it is uncertain whether it was Nero or Claudius who then held sway; moreover they that are bidden to submit were scattered foreign private persons, not consuls or high officers of the law, nor the Roman Senate.

Now let us come to Paul (for with the Apostles you allow yourself liberties that you will not allow us to take with princes; now you give Peter the primacy, now you snatch it away). Paul, Romans 13, says, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." This he writes to the Romans, not to strangers dispersed, as Peter did, but rather to private persons and those of the meaner rank. He writes it, also, so as to set forth brilliantly the whole reason, origin, and end of government. Whereby also it is clear as day that the true and proper ground of our obedience has no connection whatsoever with slavery. "Let every soul," says he, that is, every man, "be subject." What the Apostle purposes in this chapter Chrysostom has sufficiently explained. "Saint Paul writes thus," says he, "to make it plain that Christ introduced his principles with no intent to overthrow civil government, but rather to establish it upon truer foundations." He never intended, then, by placing Nero or any other tyrant beyond all laws and penalties, to set up cruelest despotism over all mankind. "He intended too," says the same author, "to dissuade from unnecessary and fruitless wars." He does not, therefore, condemn a war taken up against a tyrant, a bosom enemy of his own country, and consequently the most dangerous enemy possible. "It was common slander in those days that the Apostles were seditious revolutionaries who did and said everything to overturn the general laws. The Apostle in this chapter stops the mouths of such traducers." The Apostles did not write defences of tyrants as you do, but did such things and preached such things as made them suspected of all tyrants — things that in the eyes of such needed to be defended and interpreted.

What the Apostle's design was we have just seen in Chrysostom; let us now examine the words: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers." These, however, he defined not, for he never intended to do away with the laws and constitutions of all nations, and turn all things over to one man's will and pleasure. Certainly every good emperor acknowledged his authority to be far below that of the laws and the Senate; so among all but barbarous nations it is the law that has been holy and above all else. Therefore it is that Pindar, as cited by Herodotus, declared the law king over all. Orpheus in his hymns calls it king not of mortals only but even of immortals:

Ἀθανάτων καλέω καὶ θνητῶν ἁγνὸν ἄνακτα
Οὐράνιον ὐράνιον νόμον.

The Apostle Paul, then, charges this subjection not only upon the people, but upon kings themselves, who are in no way above the laws. "For there is no power but of God," that is, no way of constituting a state, no lawful ground for rule over men. Nay, the most ancient laws that are known to us were formerly ascribed to God as their author; the law, as Cicero says in his twelfth Philippic, "is no other than right reason, derived from the command of the gods, enjoining whatever is virtuous, and forbidding the contrary." So that the establishment of magistrates is from God, and its purpose is that by their governance mankind may live under law. But the liberty to choose this form of government or that, and these officers or those, indubitably always belonged to the free nations of men. Hence St. Peter calls kings and governors a human institution or ordinance; and Hosea 8, "They have set up kings, but not by me; they have made princes, and I knew it not." For in the commonwealth of the Hebrews (and there only) where in divers ways they could consult with God, the appointment of a king must by law be referred to him; all we other nations have received no such command.

Sometimes either the very form of government, if it be faulty, or those persons who have the power in their hands, are not of God, but of men, yes and of the devil too, Luke 4: "All this power I will give thee, . . . for that is delivered unto me; and to whomever I will give it." Hence he is called the prince of this world; and in Revelation 13 the Dragon gave to the Beast his power, and his seat, and great authority. Therefore St. Paul must be understood to mean, not all sorts of powers, but lawful ones, of the sort described in what follows; and to mean powers themselves, not the men, always, in whose hands they are lodged. Upon this passage Chrysostom speaks plainly. "What!" says he, "is every prince then appointed by God? No such thing. The Apostle speaks not of the person of the prince, but of the thing. He does not say, there is no prince but of God; he says there is no power but of God." Thus far Chrysostom. The Apostle, then, when he says "The powers that be are ordained, or ordered, of God" would have it understood of lawful powers, for it is impossible that a thing evil and faulty, being disordered, can be ordered: to say so asserts two contraries at once — order and disorder.

The words "that be" you interpret as "that now be," the easier to prove that the Romans ought to obey Nero, who, you suppose, was then emperor. Fine! For then, think as ill as you like of our English Commonwealth, you must needs grant that Englishmen ought to yield obedience to it, for "it now is," and is "ordained of God," like Nero's power of old. And lest you should answer that Nero had got his by lawful succession, I say that he no less than Tiberius had seized "by means of his mother's intrigues a power which in no way belonged to him." So that you are all the more unprincipled, and retract your own assertions, in affirming that the Romans owed subjection to the power that then existed, and yet denying that Englishmen owe subjection to the power that now exists. But, you worthless thing, there are no two things in this world more directly opposite to one another than you nearly always are to your worthless self. What then will become of you, wretch? With this keen wit of yours you have quite ruined the young king, for upon your own theory I will force you to confess that the power that now exists in England is ordained of God, and that all Englishmen within the confines of that Commonwealth are bound to submit to it. Therefore give ear all you critics! Hands off from this new emendation of Salmasius upon the Epistle to the Romans! He has discovered for the occasion, that the words ought to be rendered not "the powers that be," but "the powers that now be"; and all to prove that everybody owed submission to the tyrant Nero, the emperor supposedly then in power.

But, my good man, your pitcher has gone once too often to the well. As you ruined the king but a moment ago, even thus you now ruin this charming emendation. The epistle which you say was written in Nero's time was composed in Claudius's reign, a guileless ruler and no villain. Scholars hold this for a certainty upon surest evidence. Besides, there were five years even of Nero's reign that were excellent. So that this oft-repeated argument, which many have at their tongues' ends, and which has cheated many, namely, that a tyrant is to be obeyed because Paul urged the Romans to submit to Nero, is found to be the sly invention of some dunce.

"Whosoever . . . resisteth the power," the lawful power, that is, "resisteth the ordinace of God." This principle makes kings liable when they resist the laws and the Senate. But he that resists an unlawful power, or resists a person who goes about to overthrow and destroy a lawful one — does he resist the ordinance of God? In your right wits you would not say so, I believe. The next verse removes any uncertainty that the Apostle speaks here of a lawful power only; for lest anyone mistake, and so go chasing stupid notions, it explains, by defining the bounds and limitations, who are the officers that are the ministers of this power, and why he urges us to submit. "Rulers," says he, "are not a terror to good works, but to evil. . . . Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good . . . He beareth not the sword in vain: for he is . . . a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil." Who but the wicked denies, who but the wicked refuses, willingly to submit to such a power or its minister? And that not only to avoid "the wrath" and the stumbling block, and for fear of punishment, but even "for conscience sake."

Without magistrates and civil government there can be no commonwealth, no human society, no living in the world. But whatever power or whatever magistrate acts contrary to these precepts — neither the one nor the other is in any proper sense ordained of God. Neither to such a power nor to such a magistrate, therefore, is submission owed or commanded, nor are we forbidden to resist them with discretion, for we shall be resisting not the power or the magistrate here excellently described, but a robber, a tyrant, a public enemy. If he is notwithstanding to be called a magistrate just because he holds power, just because he may appear to be ordained by God for our punishment — in this sense the devil too shall be a magistrate!

Certain it is that there can be but one true definition of one and the same thing. So that if Paul here defines a magistrate, which he certainly does, and with careful precision, he could not possibly in the very words of this definition define a tyrant, the exact opposite. "For this cause pay ye tribute also": he adds a reason to his command. Hence Chrysostom: "why pay we revenue to the king? Is it not as we pay hire for protection and care to one who watches out for us> We should have paid him nothing had we not originally come to know that such supervision was good for us." Wherefore I shall repeat what I have said already, that since this subjection is demanded not absolutely but upon an express reason added, that reason will be the true rule of our subjection. Where that reason holds, we are rebels if we submit not; where it holds not, we are cowards and slaves if we submit.

"But," say you, "the English are far from being free men, for they are infamous villains." For my part I will not recount the vices of the French, though they live under a monarchy; neither will I too much excuse those of the English; yet this I say, that the acts which disgrace them are those they learned under their Pharaohs in Egypt, as it wer; nor have they been able to unlearn them at once while yet in the wilderness, though under God's immediate government. But there is good hope of many amongst us — not now to begin an eulogy of those most excellent saintly men and lovers of the truth; whose number among us I think not less than where you think there are most such. But "a heavy yoke is laid upon the English nation." What if it be laid upon those that endeavored to lay the yoke upon all their fellow citizens? What if it be laid upon those that were deservedly subdued? As for the rest, I question not but they are very well content, now the public treasury is exhausted by the civil wars, to bear the burden of maintaining their own liberty at their own expense.

Now he betakes himself again to his hair-splitting rabbis. He asserts that a king is bound by no laws, and yet on their authority proves that "a king may be guilty of lese-majesty if he suffer the rights of his crown to be diminished." So kings are bound by laws, and not bound by laws; they may be criminals and yet not criminals. The man contradicts himself so perpetually that Contradiction herself seems his twin-born sister.

You may say that God gave many kingdoms over in slavery to Nebuchadnezzar. I confess that he did so for a time, Jeremiah 27.7; but please make appear if you can that he gave the English nation over for a single minute in slavery to Charles Stuart. That God allowed them I would not deny, but I have never heard that he gave them. Or if God be said to give a people into slavery whenever a tyrant prevails over the people, why ought he not as well be said to set them free whenever the people prevail over a tyrant? Shall the tyrant credit and owe his tyranny to God, and not we our liberty? There is no evil in the state that the Lord has not let in, Amos 3. Famine, plague, sedition, a public enemy — is there a single one of these that the state will not strive with all its might to shake off? Shake them off it surely will if it can, though it know them to be sent by God, unless He himself from heaven should command the contrary.

Upon the same reasoning why may not the state rid itself of a tyrant if it be stronger than he? Why should we suppose the uncontrolled passions of this one man to be appointed by God for the common ill, rather than the self-controlled power of the whole state for the common weal? Far be it from all states and all societies of freeborn men to maintain principles so senseless, plague-spots of such ignominy, which wipe out the whole life of the state, and to gratify a tyrant or two, thrust mankind down to the level of four-footed brutes; for tyrants, once lifted up above the law, will wield the same law and sway over men as over cattle.

I pass by those foolish dilemmas of yours, to indulge in which you invent someone's authority for the assertion that "that sovereign power means the people's power"; though for my part I hesitate not to assert that such is the source of all the power that any magistrate has. Hence Cicero in his Oration for Flaccus says: "Our wise and reverend ancestors appointed those things to be bidden and forbidden which the multitude resolved and the sovereign people ordained." Hence too Lucius Crassus, a distinguished orator, and then president of the Senate, whose cause he was pleading with the people says: "I beseech you, suffer not us to be subject to any but your own entire body, to whom we can and must submit." For though the Senate governed the People, yet it was the People that had given over unto the Senate that very power to regulate and govern themselves. Hence, in our reading we find majesty in those days more frequently ascribed to the Roman people than to kings. Marcus Tullius again in his Oration for Plancius: "It is the condition of free peoples, and especially of this people, chief and lord of all nations, by vote to give or take away, to or from any, what it will. It is for us patiently to submit to the people's wishes. Those that care not much for office have the less obligation upon them to court the people; those that seek office must not grow weary of entreating them." Should I scruple to call a king the servant of his people, when I hear the Roman Senate, which was the master of so many kings, profess itself to be but the people's servant? You will object perhaps that all this is very true under democratic conditions, for that the Lex Regia had not yet transferred the people's power unto Augustus and his successors. But pray look at Tiberius, "a tyrant several times over," you say, as he certainly was — who yet, as Suetonius says, when someone called him Lord or Master, though after the enacting of that Lex Regia, gave notice that this person must name him so no more, for that it was an insult. Do you hear? That tyrant deemed it an insult to be called Lord. The same emperor addressing the Senate, "I have said," says he, "frequently heretofore, and now I say agin, that a good prince and serviceable, whom you have invested with so great and unrestricted power, ought to submit to the Senate and often to the body of the people, and sometimes even to particular persons; nor do I repent of having said so. I confess that you have been both good and just masters to me, as well as indulgent ones, and that you are yet so." It will not help you to say that, proficient in the art of hypocrisy as he was, he feigned all this; for does any man desire to seem other than he ought to be? Hence it was the custom not only for Nero, as Tacitus tells us, but for the rest of the emperors, to do homage to the people at the Circus. Claudianus, in his Panegyric upon the Sixth Consulate of Honorius, says of this:

With what unutterable majesty
The king doth clothe his subjects when to all
He openly appears, to render them
Homage in turn, and royal purple stoops
To honor the array in Circus sitting,
While heaven above re-echoes with the cheers
The honored throng sends up from serried seats.

I find, as I suspected at first, that you have spent more time and pains in turning over glossaries and pompously publishing laborious trifles than in the careful and diligent reading of sound authors. It is because you have not the slightest tincture of the wisdom of the ancients that you account as new, and as the dream of mere "enthusiasts' delirium," a matter which has been perfectly well known through the opinions of the most eminent philosophers and the words of the most far-sighted statesmen. Your Martin Cobbler and William Tanner, whom you so despise, you had better take unto yourself as your partners and guides in ignorance; though indeed they will be able to instruct you, and to solve those stupid riddles of yours, as thus: "Since in a Monarchy the king is supposed to be a servant, is the People supposed to be a servant in a Democracy? All the People, or a part?" And when they have played Oedipus to you, you have my permission to be Sphinx unto them, and go headlong to the devil, else I see no end to your conundrums and follies.

You ask, "when the Apostle says kings, does he mean the people?" St. Paul does indeed tell us to pray for kings, I Timothy 2.2, but he had already told us, verse 1, to pray for the people. Yet there are some for all that, both among kings and common people, for whom we are forbidden to pray; and if a man may not so much as be prayed for, may he not be lawfully punished? What is to hinder? But, you say, "when Paul wrote this epistle, the rulers were the most profligate persons in the world." That is false too, for Ludovicus Capellus proves by the most trustworthy evidence that this epistle likewise was writ in Claudius's time. When St. Paul has occasion to speak of Nero, he calls him not a king but a lion, that is, a savage beast, out of whose mouth he is glad he was delivered, 2 Timothy 4. So that it is for kings, not for beasts, we are to pray, that under them "we may live a quiet and peaceable life," but, observe, "in all godliness and honesty." What are we here to take account of, clearly, is not so much kings as peace and quiet, godliness and honesty. Yet what nation would not choose, in defense of themselves and their children — against tyrant or enemy is all one — to live a life perturbed and restless, warlike and honorable, rather than under the power of a tyrant or enemy to lead a life just as perturbed and restless, but vile into the bargain, in slavery and ignominy? Listen while the Samnites, who had tried both conditions, testify, according to Livy, that they had gone to war again because war, with freedom, was less intolerable than peace with slavery. Nay, listen to your own words; for I often put you on the witness-stand, not to do you honor, but that all men may observe how double-tongued you are, and self-contradictory, and a king's hireling slave. "Who would not rather," say you, "bear with the dissensions that through the rivalries of great men often occur under an Aristocracy, than with the misery and ruin that are sure to come of a monarch accustomed to absolute rule? The people of Rome preferred that condition of their Republic, no matter how much vexed with civil broils, to the unbearable yoke of the Caesars. When a people which to avoid sedition has preferred a monarchy finds by experience that what it wished to avoid is the lesser evil, often it desires to return to its former government." These are your own words, and more you have to this purpose, at page 412 of that discourse concerning bishops, which under the fictitious name of Walo Messalinus you wrote against Petavius the Jesuit — though yourself are more a Jesuit, indeed the worst of that crew.

We have already heard the sense of Holy Scripture upon this subject, and are not sorry to have searched it out with all possible care. Therefore perhaps it will not be worth our while to seek after the judgment of the Fathers through all their huge volumes. For if they assert anything which has not been allowed by Scripture, we rightly reject their authority, great though it be. That passage which you cite from Irenaeus, that "kings are by God's command appointed suitable to the people they then govern" is clear against Scripture. For though God himself declared openly that for the government of his own people judges were more suitable than kings, yet he left it wholly to the people's will and decision to exchange, if they would have an aristocratic government by judges, which was suitable to them, for one by kings, which was less suitable. And we read that frequently a bad king was given to a good people, and contrariwise, a good king to a bad people. What is most suitable and profitable to a people, then, is something for the wisest men to ascertain; for certain it is that the same form of government is not equally fitting for all nations, or for the same nation at all times; but sometimes one, sometimes another, may be more proper, according as the diligence and valor of the people wax or wane. Yet whoever takes from a people their power to choose what government they wish takes that indeed in which all civil liberty is rooted.

Next you tell us of Justin Martyr's humble and submissive behavior to the Antonines, those best of emperors; as if anybody would not pay deference to princes so excellent, princes so measured in the exercise of their power! "How much worse Christians," you say, "are we in these days than they were! They submitted to a prince of a different religion." Of course they did, being private persons, and far inferior in strength. "But now Papists will not endure a Protestant king," or "Protestants a Papist." As for you, you show yourself to be neither Papist nor Protestant: how discreet of you, and generous too; for you concede of your own accord what we have not asked of you, that all Christians today agree in that very thing that you alone with so much impudence and wickedness oppose, in a manner too, most unlike those Fathers that you praise. They unto pagan kings kept writing defences for Christians; you write your Defence for a wicked Popish king against Christians and Protestants.

Next you fetch out of Athenagoras and Tertullian — quite ineffectually — quantities of things that had already been said much more plainly and intelligibly by the Apostles themselves. Tertullian, moreover, is far from agreeing with you that a king is lord and master; as you either know not, or wickedly pretended you knew not. For he, a Christian, dared in his Apologeticum to write to a heathen Emperor that an Emperor ought not to be called Lord. "Augustus himself," says he, "who founded the empire, would not be called 'Lord,' for this is God's title. I will, of course, call the Emperor 'Lord,' but only when I am not forced to call him so in God's place. For the rest, as regards the Emperor I am a free man; my Lord is God alone, etc." And in the same discourse: "He who is Father of his Country, how should he be its Master?" Now take joy to yourself of Tertullian, whom you done better to let alone. But, you say, "the slayers of Domitian he calls parricides." And rightly so, for it was through a conspiracy of Domitian's wife and servants that he was killed, by Parthenius and by Stephanus, a person accused of stealing moneys. If the Senate and the people of Rome had adjudged him a public enemy as once they adjudged Nero, whom then they searched out and put to death, — had they, I say, thus punished Domitian according to the custom of their ancestors, think you Tertullian woud have called them parricides? If he had, he would have deserved to be hanged, as you do now.

The reply to Irenaeus fits Origen as well. Athanasius says that it is an abomination to summon the kings of the earth before human tribunals. Who told him so? For in this I hear more of God's Word. And rather than Athanasius I will believe kings and emperors who admit that they have no such exemption. Then you bring in Ambrose, who after he had been a proconsul and then a catechumen at last commenced bishop; you cite, I say, his interpretation of those words of David, "Against the only have I sinned," — an interpretation which is ignorant, not to say adulatory. Ambrose was willing all others should be enthralled to the emperor, that he might enthrall the emperor to himself. Everybody knows with what a more than high-priestly popish pride and arrogance he treated the Emperor Theodosius at Milan, how he took upon himself to declare him guilty of the massacre at Thessalonica, and forbade him to enter the church; and what a raw beginner in Gospel lore he next showed himself to be. When the emperor fell down at his feet, he commanded him to remove himself from the church porch; at length when he was received again into the communion of the church, and had made the offering, and remained standing at the altar, Ambrose with these word ordered him outside the rails: "Emperor, these inner places are for priests only; it is not lawful for others to come within them." Was this a preacher of the Gospel, or was it a pontifical high priest of the Jewish rite? Yet this man urged the emperor to lord it over everyone else, that he himself might lord it over the emperor — not an unusual trick of churchmen. With these words to this purpose he put Theodosius back as inferior to himself: "You are ruler over men that are your like and fellow-servants with yourself, for there is only one lord and king and Creator over all." Excellent indeed! This truth, which the craft and flattery of bishops kept hid, was then brought to light by the irascibility, or to speak more mildly, by the ignorant zeal of one of them.

To Ambrose's incompetence you now join your own ignorance or heresy by denying point blank on page 68 that "under the old covenant there was forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ at the time when David confessed to God that he had sinned against him only." It is the orthodox belief that any remission of sins there ever was, was only by the blood of the lamb that was offered up from the beginning of the world. I know not whose disciple you are that set up for a preacher of new heresies, but certain I am that the great Divine's disciple whom you so censure was not in error when he said that anyone of David's subjects might have cried upon God, "Against thee only have I sinned," with as much right as David himself.

Next you show off your Augustine, and trot out an obscure company of Hipponensian divines. What you bring in from Augustine makes not at all against us; why should we not acknowledge with the prophet Daniel that God changes times, sets up one kingdom, and pulls down another, yet always it is by means of men. If it was God alone who gave a kingdom to Charles, God alone took it away, and gave it to the Lords and Commons. If you say it was for that reason our allegiance was due to King Charles, then you must needs say that for the same reason it is due now to our present rulers. For you yourself grant that God has given even our rulers such power as he gives wicked kings as punishment for the people's sins, being likewise appointed by God, cannot lawfully be removed from office but by God. Thus, as usual, you turn your point against yourself, and are your own assassin. Serves you right too; for you have reached such a pitch of wickedness and shamelessness, of stupidity and madness, that those very persons who, as you prove with so many arguments, we ought not to lift a finger against, you yourself assert should be hunted down in war by all their subjects.

You tell us that St. Jerome calls Ishmael, who slew Gedaliah the Deputy-Governor, a parricide; and rightly, for it was without cause that Ishmael slew that ruler over Judea, who was a good man. Jerome also in his comment upon Ecclesiastes says that Solomon's counsel "Keep the king's commandment" agrees with St Paul's doctrine upon the same subject; and he deserves commendation for having made a more moderate construction of that text than did the rest of his contemporaries.

You say you will not "come down to times later than Augustine to search out the opinions of the doctors." Yet, for all men (supposing you still had any adherents) to learn that you can more easily lie than say nothing, you do not refrain, after but one sentence more, from coming down at once to Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, and Otto of Freising — even into the midst of medieval barbarism. Had you but known how worthless we consider their authority, you had not told a lie to quote their unintelligible evidence.

Readers, would you know why he dares not come down to the present time, why he hides away and on a sudden disappears? I will tell you: it is because he knows full well that he shall encounter as many keen adversaries as there are eminent divines of the Protestant Church. Let him but put it to the test, and though he strive with all his might, he shall find how easily I will rout and overwhelm him, once I get the Luthers, Zwinglis, Calvins, Bucers, Peter Martyrs, and Pareuses marshaled out in battle array. I will set against you even your Leyden colleagues, whose University, whose thriving republic, where freedom dwelt of old — yea not even those fountains and streams of polite learning — could wash away that slavish rust and native barbarism of yours. With not one orthodox divine to take your part (name any you please) stripped, I say, of all Protestant support, you blush not to take refuge in the Sorbonne, a College you know to be utterly given over to the teachings of popery, and of no authority among the orthodox. We surrender so wicked a champion of tyranny: Sorbonne, absorb him!

We will not own a slave so despicable as to maintain that "the whole body of a nation is not the equal of a king the most slothful and cowardly." You labor in vain to unload and lay upon the Pope a doctrine which all free nations and religions and all the Orthodox take unto themselves for their very own. True, the Pope, when he and his bishops were low and of but small account in the world, was the first author of this foul doctrine of yours; it was precisely by preaching such doctrine that little by little he got great riches and power into his own hands, and himself turned out to be the worst of tyrants. Yet these tyrants he bound to himself by the closest tie, for he persuaded the nations, whose minds he had long held crushed beneath their superstitions, that it was unlawful to depose a king, though never so bad, unless the Pope absolved them from their oath of allegiance. But you avoid Orthodox writers, and endeavor to bring odium upon the truth by making out the Pope to be the originator of what is known and common received opinion among them. If you did not do it cunningly you would expose yourself for what you are, neither Papist nor Protestant, but some sort of half-barbarous Edomite Herodian, who worships and adores a monstrous tyrant as if he were a Messiah sent down from heaven.

Your opinions you say you "have proved your claims by the teaching of the fathers that flourished in the first four centuries — teaching which alone should be deemed evangelical and Christian." This fellow is past all shame. How many things did they say and write which Christ and his Apostles would neither have taught nor have approved? How many things in which all Protestants disagree with them? But what have you proved out of the fathers? Why, "that even evil kings are appointed by God." Allow that they, like all other evils, are, in some sense, by God appointed. What then? why, "therefore they have no judge but God alone; they are above the laws; by no law written or unwritten, law of nature or law of God, can they be indicted by or before their own subjects." But why? Certainly no law forbids it; no law excepts kings; and all reason and right both human and divine requires that all offenders be punished without distinction. Nor have you produced any law whatever, written or unwritten, of God or of nature which forbids. Then why may not kings be proceeded against? "Because they, even the bad ones, are appointed by God." Had I best call you knave, or fool and blockhead? A vile wretch you must be to dare propagate a doctrine so destructive and pernicious, and a dunce to lean upon such silly arguments. God says, Isaiah 54, "I have created the slayer to destroy." Then a slayer is above the laws. Weigh and turn it round as much as you will, you will find this conclusion to be as valid as yours.

The Pope too is appointed by God just as much as tyrants are, and set up for the punishment of the church, as I already have demonstrated out of your own writings, And yet you say, Walo Messalinus, page 412: "Because he has raised his primacy to an insufferable pinnacle of power, so that it is nowise different from a tyranny, both he and his bishops may be more lawfully removed than they were appointed." You tell us that the Pope, and the bishops, though God in his wrath appointed them, ought to be removed from the church because they are tyrants; and yet you deny that tyrants ought to be removed from the commonwealth, because God in his wrath appointed them! How utterly irrelevant and self-contradictory! On the one hand, though the Pope cannot without a man's consent harm even the conscience, which alone is his realm, yet you cry out that he — who in point of fact has not the power to tyrannize — would be removed as a tyrant intolerable; on the other hand you urge that a tyrant indeed, a tyrant that holds all our lives and estates in his grip, and without whose support the Pope himself cannot lord it in the church, must in the commonwealth by all means be tolerated. These assertions compared with one another expose you as so ignorant and childish a chatterer — whether the thing you say is true or false — that your fickleness and ignorance, your rashness and heedlessness, can be hidden no longer from anybody.

But you allege another reason: "Human affairs would seem turned upside down." They would, and for the better. It would be all over with human affairs if being once at their worst they must be always so. I say they would be changed for the better, for the king's power would revert to the people, by whose will and vote if first proceeded and was conferred upon one of themselves. And most rightfully would the power transferred from the doer of the wrong to the sufferer; since among all mankind there can be no third party qualified to wield it; for who would submit to the judgment of a foreigner? All men would equally be subject to the laws — nothing can be more just. There would be then no God of flesh and blood; whoever sets up such among men is an offender no less heinous against the State than against the Church.

Now I mean to turn your own weapons upon you again. To believe that one man sits in Christ's seat, "this," you say, "is the greatest heresy. These are the two signs that mark the Antichrist — infallibility in spiritual matters, and omnipotence in temporal matters." Apparatus ad Primatum, page 171. Surely kings are not infallible? Why then should they be omnipotent? And if they are, why are they not as destructive to temporalities as is the Pope to spiritualities? Does God really not concern himself with civil affairs? If he does not, surely he does not forbid us to take care of them. If he does, he would have the same reformation made in the commonwealth as in the church, especially if it has been put to the proof that the assigning of infallibility and omnipotency to man is the identical cause of all the evils in both. In civil affairs God has not enjoined such patience that the state must submit to the cruelties of tyrants, but not the church; no, rather he has enjoined the contrary; indeed he has left to the church no arms but patience and innocence, prayer and the teaching of the gospel; but into the hands of the state and its officers altogether he has entrusted not only patience, but the sword of the law, avenger of wrong and violence. So this man's upside-down back-foremost mind exposes itself either to astonishment or laughter: in the church he is Helvidius and Thraseas, tyrant-queller out and out; in the state the common slave and lackey of all tyrants. If his doctrine holds, not we only who have cast off our king, but Protestants in general, who against the wishes of their kings have cast off the Pope's supremacy, are rebels all alike.

But long it is ere now that he lies felled by his own shafts. For, let but his enemy's hand not fail, and Salmasius, such is his nature, himself furnishes an overplus of weapons against himself. Nor does any man offer you a handle more easy to refute and ridicule himself withal. You will sooner give over in actual weariness of flogging him, than he of offering his back to the lash.

PERHAPS you think, Salmasius, that by this Royal Defence you have much ingratiated yourself with kings, and deserved well of all princes and lords of the earth; but if they would reckon their interest and advantage according to truth, not according to your flatteries, they ought to hate nobody more than you, and banish and keep away nobody farther from their presence. For in the very act of exalting the power of kings above the law and beyond measure, you remind most nations that they are under a slavery they had not guessed before, and the more violently drive them to shake off upon a sudden that lethargy in which they kept vainly dreaming they were freemen; for you admonish them concerning what they have ignored, that they are slaves to their kings. And they will count royal government all the less endurable the more you persuade them that it is not by their sufferance and submission that this exorbitant power swelled up, but that from the beginning, even such and so great as it is, it sprang full-grown from the royal right itself. So that whether you convince the nations or not, you and this Defence of yours must needs be to all kings hereafter calamitous and ruinous and accursed. For if you shall persuade a nation that royal right is power without limit, they will no longer endure a monarchy; if your persuade them not, then they will not endure kings who assume so unlawful a power as if it were lawfully theirs.

If kings who are yet uncommitted as to this will heed me, and will suffer themselves to be limited by the laws, then instead of the uncertain, weak, and violent government, full of cares and fears, which now they have, they will secure unto themselves a government perfectly steadfast, peaceable, and lasting. If they slight this counsel, so wholesome to them and their kingdoms, because of its author, then let them know that it belongs less to me than to a very wise king of old. Lycurgus king of the Spartans, who was sprung of an ancient royal stock, observed that his kinsmen in power at Argos and Messene had each turned his rule into a tyranny, and had been the ruin of themselves and their states; thereupon, that he might at once benefit his country and secure the kingly office to his own family as long as possible, he made the senate a partner in his power, and subjected himself, even the king, to the almost censorial office of the Ephors — all this to prop up his throne. By this means he handed down royal power unshaken to his posterity for many generations. Others think it was Theopompus, who ruled over Lacedaemon more than a hundred years after Lycurgus, that adopted this polity, so self-restrained as to set up the popular power of the Ephors above his own, and who thereupon boasted that he had settled the royal power on a sure foundation, and had left it to his posterity much augmented and much more durable. However this may be, surely the kings of today would have here a wonderful pattern to copy, and distinguished authority too, for unimpeachable advice.

That all men should submit to any one man as superior to law, no law ever did enact, or ever could, for whatever law overthrows all law cannot itself be law. Now, seeing that law spurns you off as an underminer and murderer of law, you try in this chapter to renew the fight by means of examples. Let us make trial, then, of examples, for often they make plain what the laws are silent about, yet hint at.

We will begin with the Jews, whom we suppose to have known best the will of God, and then, according to your own method, we will "come down to the Christians." But we will make an earlier start, at the time when the Israelites, however they had been subjected to kings, cast that slavish yoke from off their necks. Eglon the king of Moab had made a conquest of them, and had set up his throne at Jericho in the midst of them; he was no despiser of the true God, for at mention of His name he rose from his seat: the Israelites had served him eighteen years, and had sent a present to him, not as to an enemy, but as to their own king. Yet in the very act of publicly making a present to him as their king, they killed him by stratagem as an enemy to their country. To be sure, Ehud, who slew him, is believed to have had a warrant from God for so doing. What greater argument of its being a warrantable and praiseworthy action? God uses not to put men upon deeds that are unjust, treacherous, and cruel, but upon deeds honorable and praiseworthy. But we read nowhere that he had an express command from God. "The children of Israel cried unto the Lord;" so did we. The Lord raised them up a savior; so did he for us. Eglon, their neighbor, eneterd their household, and their enemy became their king. Our gentleman from our king became our enemy, and so no king, for no man can in any way be at once a member of the state and an enemy to it. Antony was never held a consul, Nero an emperor, after the Senate had voted them both enemies. This Cicero tells us unmistakably in his fourth Philippic: "If Antony be a consul, Brutus is an enemy; if Brutus is a savior and preserver of the commonwealth, Antony is an enemy. Who but robbers count him a consul?" By the same reason, say I, who but enemies to their country count a tyrant a king? So that whether or not Eglon was a foreigner, and Charles a countryman of ours, makes no difference, since each was an enemy and a tyrant. If Ehud killed him justly, we too have done justly in putting Charles to death.

Samson, that renowned champion, though his countrymen blamed him (Judges 15, "Knowest thou not that the Philistines are rulers over us?"), yet made war singlehanded against his rulers; and whether instigated by God or by his own valor only, slew not one, but many at once of his country's tyrants. And as he had first duly prayed to God to be his help, it follows that he counted it no wickedness, but a duty, to kill his masters, his country's tyrants, even though the greater part of his countrymen did not refuse slavery. Yet, you urge, David, who was both a king and a prophet, refused to take away Saul's life, because he was "the Lord's anointed." David's refusal to do a thing does not necessarily bind us to the same refusal. It was as a private person that David refused; is that a precedent binding at once upon a Council of State, upon a Parliament, upon the whole nation? David would not kill his private enemy by stealth; shall a public officer therefore not punish a criminal according to law? He would not kill a king; will a Senate therefore be afraid to strike a tyrant? He scrupled to kill the Lord's anointed; must the people therefore scruple to condemn to death their own anointed? Especially one who by so long acting the public enemy was all besmeared with his own subjects' blood, and thus had done away his royal unction, whether sacred or civil. Those kings indeed whom God by his prophets anointed, or by name appointed to some special service, as of old he did Cyrus, Isaiah 44, I acknowledge as the Lord's anointed; the rest are in my opinion the people's anointed, or the army's, or the anointed of their own faction only. But that all kings are the Lord's anointed, yet that therefore they are above all laws, and not to be punished no matter what villainies they perpetrate — this you will never force me to grant you. What if David forbade himself and some private persons to stretch forth their hands against the Lord's anointed? God himself forbade kings to touch his anointed — that is his people, Psalm 105. He preferred the anointing by which his people were anointed before that of kings, if any such there were. Yet shall it not be lawful to punish even God's own believers if they have transgressed against the laws? King Solomon was about to put to death Abiathar the priest, though he was the Lord's anointed too; and did not spare him because he was the Lord's anointed, but because he had been his father's friend. If therefore the Lord's sacred and civil unction could not exempt from death the high priest, the same being in many cases the highest officer of state, how comes a merely civil unction to exempt a tyrant? But you say, "Saul too was a tyrant, and deserved death." What then? It does not then follow that David, wherever he happened to be, was qualified or empowered to kill King Saul without the people's authority, or the command of the magistracy. But really and truly was Saul a tyrant? I wish you would say so; indeed you do say so, though you had said before in your second chapter, page 32, that "he was no tyrant, but a good king, and chosen of God."

Now is there any reason why base informers and perjurers should be publicly branded, and you escape without the same mark of ignominy? For they are wont to practice their falsifications with less treachery and deceit than you are wont to write and to treat even matters of the greatest moment. So Saul was a good king, if that serves your turn; if it suits you not, he shall be, of a sudden, no good king but a tyrant. No wonder; for in so shamelessly pandering to tyrannic power, what do you else than turn good kings into tyrants all? But David, though he would not put to death the king his father-in-law for a number of reasons that do not concern us, yet in his own defence did not hesitate to raise an army, and to take or besiege Saul's cities, and would have defended the town of Keilah against the king's forces, had he not understood that the citizens were ill disposed toward him. Suppose Saul had besieged the city, and set up ladders against the walls, and himself resolved to be the first to scale them; do you think David would straightaway have thrown down his arms, and have betrayed all his followers to his anointed enemy? I believe not! Why should he not have done what we did? When his interests so required, he freely proffered aid to the Philistines, the enemies of his country, thus doing against Saul what I am sure we should never have done against our tyrant.

I am ashamed, and have long been weary, of your lies. Falsely you declare it to be English policy "That enemies are rather to be spared than friends, and that because their king was their friend they ought not to spare him." You impudent liar, what mortal ever heard this whimsy before you invented it? Yet we overlook it, for this chpater did not as yet present the most egregious worn-out rhetorical cosmetic of yours, which you now for the fifth time fetch out from the cabinets of your perfumery shop, and which before the end of the book is to be fetched from thence ten times — that stuff about the English being "fiercer than their mastiffs!" The English are not so much fiercer than their own mastiffs as you are hungrier than any mad dog whatsoever, who with your tough guts can bear to return again and again to the cabbage you so often have vomited.

Then you tell us that David commanded the Amalekite to be put to death, who pretended to have killed Saul. But here is no likeness either in the deed or in the persons. There was, in my opinion at least, no motive for David's severe treatment of that man — who professed to have given the king a coup de grace when the king was already at the point of death, and dying in anguish — unless David, because to all appearance he had gone over to the Philistines and joined their army, did the more zealously endeavor to clear himself from all suspicion of plotting the king's murder. The same action all men blame in Domitian, who put to death Epaphroditus likewise for helping Nero to kill himself. Next — another instance of your impudence — you call him not only the "anointed of the Lord," but "the Lord's Christ," whom you had just called a tyrant, and one "driven and actuated by an evil spirit." Such base thought you have of the name of Christ that you fear not to give that so holy name to a tyrant possessed by a devil.

Now I come to that instance in which whoever fails to see that the right of the people is superior to that of kings must indeed be blind. When Solomon was dead, the people assembled at Sichem to make his son Reheboam king. Thither himself went Reheboam, as one who stood for the office, that he might not seem to claim the kingdom for his inheritance, or to hold a freeborn people as if they were his father's sheep and oxen. The people proposed conditions upon which his royal power would rest. He desired three days' time to advise; he consulted with the old men; their advice mentions nothing about a royal right, but to comply with the people, and speak them fair, it being in their power to make him king or pass him by. Then he consulted with those men his own age, those brought up with him; they, as if stung mad by Salmasius's gadfly, kept dinning in his ears naught but royal right, and urging him to threaten whips and scorpions. Reheboam answered the people as these had advised him. So when all Israel saw that the king "hearkened not unto them," at once with bold words they openly protest their own liberty and the right of the people. "What portion have we in David? To your tents, O Israel! now see to thine own house, David!" When the king sent Adoram to them, they stoned him with stones, and perhaps were ready to make an example of the king himself had he not made speed to flee. He raised a great army to reduce the Israelites to their allegiance. God forbade him, saying: "You shall not go up," says he, "nor fight against your brethren the children of Israel; for this thing is from me." Now consider: heretofore the people had desired a king; God was displeased with them for it, but yet would not interpose against their right. Presently the people reject Reheboam from ruling them; and God not only leaves the matter in their hands, but forbids Reheboam to make war against them for it, and stops him; and teaches him also that those who had revolted from him were not on that account to be called rebels, but no less than brethren. Now look to your defences! You say that all kings are of God, and that therefore the people ought not to resist even tyrants. I answer you that the meetings and assemblies of the people, their votes, their acts, endeavors, and decrees, are likewise of God, by the testimony of God himself in this place; and consequently, by the authority of God himself, a king likewise, according to your argument, ought not to resist the people. For as certain as it is that at present kings are of God, and whatever argument thence follows to enforce a people's obedience, so certain is it, that at present free assemblies of the people are also of God, and this affords the same argument for their right of keeping their kings in order, or for casting them off; nor will kings on this account be any more justified than was Reheboam, in making war on their subjects.

Why, then, you ask, did the Israelites not revolt from Solomon? Who but you would ask a question so impertinent in view of the certainty that they did not revolt from a tyrant, and with impunity? It is true, Solomon fell into some vices, but he was not therefore a tyrant; he made amends for his vices by many excellent virtues and by deserving greatly of the commonwealth. But admit that he had been a tyrant; yet circumstances are often such that the people will not, and often such that they cannot, depose a tyrant. It is enough that they did it when it was in their power. "But," you say, "Jereboam's act was ever had in detestation, and his defection abominated; his successors were ever accounted rebels." Rather I find plenty of passages that blame his defection not from Reheboam but from the true worship of God; and I remember that his successors are frequently called wicked, certainly, but nowhere rebels.

"From an act that is contrary to law and right," you say, "no right can arise." Pray what then becomes of your right of kings? Thus do you perpetually confute yourself. You say, "Adulteries, murders, thefts are daily committed with impunity." Are you not aware that here you answer your own question how tyrants so often escape unpunished? You say: "Those kings were rebels, and yet the prophets made no attempts to seduce the people from their allegiance." And why do you, you rascally false prophet, endeavor to seduce the people of England from their present magistrates, even supposing these to be rebels as you think? "This English faction of robbers," you say, "allege that they were put upon their wicked impious undertaking by some immediate voice from Heaven." That the English pretend any such warrant as a justification of their actions is one of those many lies and fictions of yours.

But I proceed to treat you with examples. Libnah, a powerful city, revolted from King Joram, because he had forsaken God: it was the king therefore that revolted, not the city, nor is the city blamed for that revolt, but rather, if the added reason be considered, seems to be approved. "Revolts of this sort are not to be taken as examples," you say. But why did you then so vauntingly promise that throughout this chapter you would contend with me by examples, whereas you can produce no examples but mere denials, which have no validity as proofs, and when we have produced examples that are sure and substantial, you say they are no precedents? For arguing like this who would not hiss you from the platform? You challenged us at precedents; we provided them; and what do your do? You turn tail, and look for byways of escape.

I proceed: Jehu, at the command of the prophet, slew a king; nay, he ordered the death of Ahaziah, his own liege prince. If God would not have tyrants put to death by their own subjects, if it were a wicked thing, a thing of bad example, why did God himself command it? If he commanded it, it was lawful, commendable, and glorious. It was not because God commanded it that it was right and lawful to kill a tyrant, but it waas because it was right and lawful that God commanded it. Again Jehoiada the high priest did not scruple to depose Athaliah, and kill her, though she had been seven years in actual possession of the crown. "But," you say, "she had taken the government when she had no right to it." And did not Tiberius long after assume, as you say, "a sovereignty nowise belonging to him"? And yet you then kept affirming that, according to Christ's teaching, he and other such tyrants ought to be obeyed. It were a most ridiculous thing to imagine, that a king who gets in by usurpation may lawfully be deposed, but one that rules tyrannically may not. But, you say, according to the law, she could not possibly reign, being a woman. "Thou shalt set over thee a king," not a queen. If we follow this out, I put it thus: "Thou shalt set over thee a king," not a tyrant. For there is a far greater unlikeness between a king and a tyrant than between a male and a female.

Amaziah, a cowardly idolatrous king, was put to death, not by a few conspirators, but rather, it would seem, by the nobility and the people. For he fled from Jerusalem, and had none to stand by him, and they pursued him even to Lachish. This counsel against him, says the history, they took "after the time that Amaziah did turn away from following the Lord"; and we do not find that his son Azariah made any public investigation into his father's death.

And now once more you quote much silly stuff out of the rabbis to prove that the king of the Jews was superior to the Sanhedrin, but you do not consider king Zedekiah's own words, Jeremiah 38: "The king is not he that can do anything against you." This is how he addresses the princes, clearly confessing himself inferior to the great council of the realm. "Perhaps," you say, "he durst not deny them anything for fear of sedition." But what does your "perhaps" signify, when your most positive assertion is not worth even the estimation of a hair? For what can be more fickle and shifty and inconsistent than you? How often have I caught you changing sides and colors, disagreeing with yourself, unsaying with one breath what you have said with another?

You make comparisons again betwixt King Charles and some of the good kings of Judah. First you mention David as one to be despised. "Take David," you say, "guilty at once of adultery and murder; no such thing for Charles. Solomon, his son, commonly called the wise." Who would not grow indignant at this filthy rascally fool bandying about the names of worthies, indeed of kings eminent in greatness and piety? Dare you compare King David with King Charles; a most religious king and prophet with a superstitious prince and a mere novice in the Christian religion; a most prudent wise prince with a stupid one; a valiant prince with a coward; a most just prince with a most unjust? Can you, we know to be covered with every act of infamy? It were to no purpose to inquire into the private actions of his life, who in public at the theatre would wantonly embrace and kiss women, and handle virgins' and matrons' breasts, not to mention the rest. I advise you in your turn, you counterfeit Plutarch, henceforth to abstain from such absurd parallels, lest I be forced to publish concerning King Charles what otherwise I would fain passover in silence.

So far it is clear what the People acted or attempted against tyrants, and by what right, in those times when God himself did immediately, as it were, by his word of command, govern the Hebrew commonwealth. The ages that succeed do not guide us by their own authority, but, in governing all according to the rule and reason of their forefathers, they only confirm us in our opinion. For after the Babylonian captivity, when God gave no new command concerning the state, though the royal line was not extinct, the people returned to the old mosaical form of government. They remained unified while tributaries to Antiochus, king of Syria; yet when he enjoined them things that were unlawful, it was under the conduct of their high priests, the Maccabees, that they resisted him and his governors, and by force regained their former liberty. After that, whoever was accounted most worthy of it had the principality conferred upon him, till at last Hyrcanus the son of Simon, the brother of Judas Maccabaeus, plundered David's sepulcher, and began to keep foreign soldiers, and to invest the priesthood with a kind of regal power; whereupon his son Aristibolus was the first that assumed the crown. Though he was a tyrant, the people stirred not against him, which is no great wonder, for he reigned but one year. And he himself being overtaken with a grievous disease, and repenting of his crimes, ceased not to wish for death, till amid his wishes he breathed his last. His brother Alexander succeeded him; "and nobody rose against him," you say, tyrant though he were. Ah, you might have lied quite fearless of discovery had but Josephus been lost, and only your "Josippus" left extant, from whom you fetch out some ineffectual utterances of the Pharisees. The facts are these: Alexander governed ill, both in war and in peace; and though he kept a great troop of Pisidian and Cilician mercenaries for a bodyguard, yet could he not restrain the people; but even while he was sacrificing they fell upon him as unworthy of that function, and had almost smothered him with boughs of palm and citron trees. Afterward, for six years, almost the whole nation made war upon him; and when he had slain many thousands of the Jews in this war, and at length desired peace, and asked what they would have him do, they answered with one voice that he should die, indeed, that they should hardly forgive him even after his death. To get rid by hook or crook of this history, so inconvenient to you, you hid it behind a few trifling sententious Pharisaical speeches — to your own deep disgrace and damage — for you ought either to have let this example quite alone, or to have told the facts. Like the old daylight-shunning trickster that you are, you give far more weight to your lies than to your cause. Even those eight hundred Pharisees whom Alexander commanded to be crucified, were among the number that had taken up arms against him; and they and the rest of the people had unanimously protested that they would put him to death if they could defeat him and lay hands upon him. After the death of Alexander, his wife Alexandra seized the crown, like Athaliah of old, not according to law, for (as you have just remarked) the laws of the Jews admitted not a woman to the throne, but partly by force, for she maintained an army of foreigners, and partly by favor, for she had got the support of the Pharisees, who had the greatest influence over the people, upon the understanding that she was to have the royal name, but they the power. Just so in my country the Scottish Presbyterians lately granted Charles the name of king, but for a consideration — namely that they might keep the ruling authority in their own hands. After the death of Alexandra, Hyrcanus and Aristibolus her sons were at strife for the sovereignty. Aristibolus, who was more active, and had stronger support, forced his elder brother out of the kingdom. A while after, when Pompey turned aside into Syria from the Mithriditic war, the Jews, thinking that in him they had now found a wholly disinterested arbiter of their liberty, dispatch an embassy to him in their own name. They renounce the rule of both the brothers, and complain that they had been enslaved by them. Pompey deposed Aristibolus, and left to Hyrcanus the priesthood and the royal rank to which ancestral law entitled him. Thenceforward he was called High Priest and Ethnarch. Once more, in the reign of Archelaus the son of Herod, the Jews sent fifty ambassadors to Augustus Caesar; made serious charges against Herod that was dead and Archelaus; deposed the latter as much as in them lay, and petitioned the emperor to let the people of the Jews be without a king. Caesar, somewhat moved at their entreaty, made the appointee not a king but only an Ethnarch. Yet again, in the tenth year of this governorship, the People by their ambassadors to Caesar accused the Ethnarch of tyranny. Caesar heard them graciously, sent for him, and upon his conviction banished him to Vienne.

Answer me now: a people that accused their kings, that desired their condemnation, that desired their punishment, would not they themselves rather, if it had been in their power, and that they might have had their choice, would not they themselves, I say, have convicted them, and put them to death? You do not deny that the people and the nobles often took up arms against Roman governors who ruled provinces avariciously or cruelly; but you give a ridiculous reason for this, as usual: "They were not yet accustomed to the yoke." Very likely, under Alexander, Herod, and his son! But, you say, they would not "make war against" Gaius Caesar and Petronius. And very wise of them, too, for they were not able. Will you hear their own words? "Not wishing to make war because we cannot." What they themselves acknowledge to be due to weakness, do you, you hypocrite, attribute to religion?

Next with much ado you do nothing; for you endeavor to prove out of the fathers what you had proved as superficially before, that kings are to be prayed for. That good kings are to be prayed for, no man denies; nay, and bad ones too, as long as there is any hope of their reform, indeed and highwaymen, and our enemies. But how? not that they may lay waste to our territory, or slay us with slaughter, but that they may come to their right minds. We pray for both thieves and enemies, and yet who would forbid us to punish the one by law and the other by arms? I value not your "Egyptian liturgies"; but that priest who prayed, you say, "that Commodus might succeed his father," was not praying at all, in my opinion, but invoking the worst curses imaginable upon the Roman state.

You say "that we English have broken our word, which we pledged more than once in solemn assemblies, to preserve the authority and majesty of the king." I shall wait to comment later on, where you speak more fully on this subject, and shall meet you there again. Then you return to the comments of the church fathers, concerning whom please understand this in short: whatever they say which is not warranted by the authority of the scriptures, or by good and sufficient reason, shall be of no more regard with me, than if any other ordinary man had said it. The first that you quote is Tertullian, who is no orthodox writer, and is notorious for many errors; so that his authority, even if he shared your opinion would count for nothing. But what says he? He condemns riots and rebellions. So do we. But in saying so, we would not have a premature decision rendered upon all the people's rights and privileges, all the acts and resolutions of senates, and the power of all magistrates, the king alone excepted. The fathers condemn seditions rashly kindled by the heat of a mad multitude; they say nothing of magistrates, of senates, of Parliaments, summoning the people to lawful arms against tyrants. Hence Ambrose, whom you quote: "Not to resist," says he, "but to weep and groan, these are the Priest's protection and defence. Who is there that, whether alone or among a little number, dare say to the Emperor, 'I do not like your laws'? This is not allowed the priests, and shall laymen pretend to it?" Of whom he speaks is evident, that is, of priests, and of private laymen, not of the magistrates; you see nevertheless by how weak and perverse an argument he carried his torch in the van of the dissensions that were afterwards to arise betwixt the laity and the clergy concerning even civil laws.

But because you think you confute us and press hardest upon us with the examples of the primitive Christians, who, though they were harassed every way, yet "never took up arms against the emperor," I will show in the first place that for the most part they could not; secondly, that whenever they could, they did; and thirdly, that even if they did not when they could, they were in this respect men whose lives and customs do not deserve our imitation in such important matters.

First, as everybody knows, when the republic of Rome ceased, the whole and sovereign power in the empire settled in the Emperor alone; all the soldiers were under the pay of the Emperor alone; insomuch that if the whole body of the senate, the equestrian order, and all the common people had endeavored a revolution, they might indeed have exposed themselves to massacre, but could accomplish absolutely nothing towards retrieving their lost liberty; for though they might perhaps have killed the emperor, the empire would still have continued. This being so, what could the Christians do? It is true there were a great many of them, but they were scattered and unarmed, and were of the common people, generally of the lowest class. How many of them might not one legion easily have kept in subjection? That which many great generals, at the price of their own deaths and the wiping out of armies of tried and seasoned troops attempted in vain, could those rabble manikins expect to accomplish? About A.D. 300, more or less twenty years before Constantine, when Diocletian was emperor, only the Theban legion was Christian; and for no other reason it was slain by the rest of the army at Octodurum in Gaul.

The Christians, you say, did not conspire "with Cassius, with Albinus, with Niger"; and does not Tertullian count it to their credit that they poured not out their blood for infidels? It is evident therefore that the Christians could not free themselves from the sway of the Emperors; and it could be no ways advantageous to their interest to conspire with infidels as long as heathen emperors reigned.

Afterwards, however, the Christians did make war upon tyrants, and defend themselves by force of arms, and many times punish tyrants' abominations. First of them all, Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity, made war upon Licinius his co-emperor, who oppressed the Eastern Christians, and destroyed him. By this act of his he made it clear that one magistrate might punish another, for he for his subjects' sake put to death Licinius, who was as absolute in the empire as himself, and did not leave the vengeance to God alone; and Licinius might likewise have put to death Constantine if Constantine had likewise crushed the people committed to his government. So then, since the matter is referred by God to men, why did not Parliament stand to King Charles as Constantine to Licinius? The soldiers made Constantine what he was; but our laws have made our Parliament equal, nay, superior to our kings.

The inhabitants of Constantinople resisted Constantius, an Arian emperor, by force of arms, as long as they were able, and when he sent Hermogenes with troops to depose Paul the orthodox bishop, they charged him and repulsed him, fired the house where he had fled, mangled and half-burned him, and at last killed him outright. Constans threatened to make war upon his brother Constantius unless he would restore Paul and Athanasius to their bishoprics. You see how these holy fathers, when their bishoprics were at stake, were not ashamed to stir up their king's own brother to make war upon him. Not long after, the Christian soldiers, who then made whom they would emperors, put to death Constans the son of Constantine because he behaved himself dissolutely and proudly in the government, and turned the empire over to Magnentius. When Julian was not yet apostate, but virtuous and valiant, certain persons saluted him as Emperor, against the will of Constantius their actual emperor. How now? Are they not amongst the number of those primitive Christians whom you place as a pattern for us? When Constantius, by letter openly read to the people, sharply forbade this action of theirs, they all cried out that they had but done what their Provincial and the army and the authority of the commonwealth had decided. The same persons declared war against Constantius, and, as much as in them lay, deprived him of his empire and his life.

What of the inhabitants of Antioch, who were most certainly Christians? After Julian apostatized, I suppose they prayed for him, when they used to brave him to his face, and defame and revile, and scoff at his long beard and bid him make ropes of it! Do you think they used to pray for the health and long life of one upon the news of whose death they offered thanksgivings, made feasts, and gave public demonstrations of joy? No, is it not reported that he was killed by a Christian soldier in his own army? Sozomen, a writer of ecclesiastical history, does not deny it, but commends him that did it, if the fact were so: "For it is no wonder," says he, "that some of his own soldiers might think within himself that not only the Greeks but all mankind hitherto had been wont to procure the liberty of all: so that the soldier ought not rashly to be condemned who in the cause of God and of religion was so zealous and valiant." These are the words of Sozomen, a contemporary author, and a good and religious man; by which we may easily apprehend what the general opinion of good men in those days was on this point. Ambrose himself being commanded by the emperor Valentinian the younger to depart from Milan, refused to obey him, but, hedged about by his own people in arms, defended himself and his basilica against the emperor's officers, and, contrary to his own doctrine, dared to resist the higher powers. At Constantinople more than once there was great insurrection against the emperor Arcadius, by reason of Chrysostom's exile. I have now briefly shown how the primitive Christians behaved themselves towards tyrants; how not soldiers only, but the people, even the very fathers of the church, resisted them, and made or incited war upon them, till Augustine's time, for it suits you yourself to go no further forward in time. Therefore I make no mention of Valentinian the son of Placidia, who was slain by Maximus a nobleman, for committing adultery with his wife; nor do I mention Avitus the emperor, whom, because he disbanded the soldiers, and gave himself wholly to his lusts, the Roman senate immediately deposed; because these things came to pass some years after Augustine's death.

But I will make you a present of all this: let us pretend that I have not set forth any of these precedents. Suppose I concede that the primitive Christians obeyed their kings through thick and thin, and never took or wished to take any action against tyrants. Nevertheless I will now show that they were not men whose authority we ought to rely upon. Nor can we safely follow their example. Long before Constantine's time Christians in general had lost much of the primitive sanctity and integrity both of their religion and of their conduct. Afterwards, the church, which he had vastly enriched, began to fall in love with offices, absolute rule, and secular power, and then the Christian religion went to wrack. First luxury and sloth, and then a crew of all the heresies and vices, as if their dungeons had been set open from behind, and discord overflowed everywhere, and at last they that were linked together into one brotherhood by that dear and gracious bond of religion were as much at variance and strife as the bitterest enemies. No reverence, no consideration of their duty was left: the soldiers and commanders of the army, as often as they pleased themselves, now created new emperors, now killed good ones and bad ones alike. I need not mention such as Vetrannio, Maximus, Eugenius, who the soldiers all of a sudden lifted up to the imperial throne, or Gratian, and excellent prince, or Valentinian the younger, none of the worst, whom they pu to death. True, these were the deeds of soldiers and camp-followers, but nevertheless of Christians of that age which you call most evangelical and most to be imitated!

Therefore you shall now hear a few words about the clergy. Pastors and Bishops, and sometimes those Fathers whom we admire, each a leader of his flock — those very men, I say, would fight for a bishopric as if for a tyrant's throne. Priests and laymen would clash swords throughout the city, and in the very church at the very altar, and keep up their carnage sometimes with great slaughter on both sides. You may remember Damasus and Urcisinus, who were Ambrose's contemporaries. It would take forever to relate the notorious insurrections of the inhabitants of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, especially those instigated and conducted by Cyril, whom you extol as a preacher of obedience; when the monks in that city battle had almost slain Orestes, Theodosius's deputy.

Now who would not be stunned at your impudence or your negligence? "Till Augustine," you say, "and later than his time, there is no mention extant in history, of any private person, of any commander, or of any number of conspirators, that have put their king to death, or taken up arms against him." Out of well-known histories I have named to you both private persons and officials who with their own hands slew not only bad but very good kings: whole armies of Christians, many bishops among them, that fought against their own emperors. You produce some of the fathers who with a great multitude of words persuade or boast of obedience to kings, and I on the other side produce both these same fathers and others besides, that by no less a multitude of actions refused obedience, even in lawful matters, and defended themselves in arms against the emperor; others that, being competitors for bishoprics, maintained civil wars against one another. So of course it was lawful for Christians to wage war with Christians, and citizens with citizens, for a bishopric, but unlawful to fight against a tyrant, for our liberty, our wives and children, and our lives! Who would not be out of all patience with such fathers?

You bring in Augustine, who, you say, asserts that "the power of a master over his slaves, and of a king over his subjects," is one and the same. But I answer: if Augustine has asserted any such thing, he has said what neither Christ nor his Apostles ever said. However, since he apparently recommends upon their authority alone something otherwise manifestly untrue, then even if he said so, yet it hurts not my cause. For concerning a master's power over his slaves he has said, City of God, book 19, chapter 14: "In the house of a righteous man who lives by the faith, even those who command serve them whom they seem to command." So that if he said the very thing you quote him as saying about "the power of a king over his subjects," and did not contradict himself, then he asserted that even kings, good kings especially, do actually serve those whom they seem to command. Meanwhile he has assuredly asserted that the power of an ill king over his subjects, and the power of a highway robber over everyone he meets, is one and the same (City of God, book 4, chapter 4): "If righteousness be put away, what are the kingdoms but great robbers' dens — for what are robbers' dens themselves but little kingdoms?" You see how far you have succeeded in deriving out of Augustine that grand and glorious right of yours, that royal right to dare to do anything they please: so far indeed that the power of kings is found equal and identical not with that of painters or poets, but with that of highway robbers!

That the three or four remaining pages of this fourth chapter are either mere lies or sleepy negligences oft repeated, everyone will perceive from my previous refutations. For what concerns the Pope, against whom you declaim so much without relevance. I am content you should bawl at him till you are hoarse. But as for your attempt to catch the ignorant with the long additional argument that "every Christian yielded entire obedience to kings, whether good or bad, till the papal power began to be acknowledged superior to the royal, and absolved subjects from their oath of allegiance." I have sufficiently proved by many examples, both before and since the age of Augustine, that nothing can be more false.

Neither does that seem to have much more truth in it, which you say in the last place; that is, that "Pope Zachary absolved the Frenchmen from their oath of allegiance to their king." Francis Hotman, both a Frenchman and a lawyer and a very learned man, in the 13th chapter of his Franco-gallia, says that it was not by the Pope's authority that Chilperic was deposed, or the kingdom translated to Pepin; and he proves out of very ancient chronicles of the Franks that the whole affair was transacted in the great national council pursuant to its original authority. That thereafter there was any necessity of absolving the French from their allegiance is contradicted by the French historical documents, and by Pope Zachary himself. The records of the Franks relate, according not only to Hotman, but to Gerard, a very eminent historian of that nation, that the ancient Franks had reserved to themselves from of old an unimpaired right both to choose their kings, and to depose them if they thought fit; and that by custom they swore to the king whom they were putting in office no other oath than that they would perform their word and duty upon condition that the kings for their part would perform what they too, by oath at the same time sworn, did pledge and promise. So that if kings, by misgoverning the state entrusted to their charge, have first broke their own oath, there needs no Pope; the kings themselves by their own breach of faith have absolved their subjects. Finally Pope Zachary himself, in that very letter of his to the Franks, which you yourself quote, disclaimed for himself and ascribed to the people the authority which you say he assumed to himself. For "if a king be liable to punishment by the people through whose favor he holds his royalty; if the people have set up the king and have power to put him down" (the words of that very Pope), it is not likely that the Franks would afterwards by any oath impair that ancient right, or ever tie their own hands so as not to have the same right that their ancestors always had to depose bad kings, as well as to honor and obey good ones; nor would they yield to tyrants that obedience which they thought they were yielding only to good kings. When people are bound by such an oath, a king turned tyrant or rotted with cowardice releases them by breaking his oath; justice herself releases them; the very law of nature releases them; wherefore even by the Pope's own opinion there simply was nothing for the Pope to release.

I AM of the opinion Salmasius, and always have been, that the law of God agrees exactly with the law of nature, and that therefore, if I have shown what by God's law is established with respect to kings, and what has been the practice of the people of God, both Jews and Christians, I have at the same time and by the same means shown what is most agreeable to the law of nature. Yet because you think that we "can now be most effectually confuted by the law of nature," I will be content to admit to be necessary, what before I had thought superfluous. Therefore in this chapter I shall prove against you that nothing is more suitable to the law of nature than that tyrants be punished. Which if I do not demonstrate, I will then not decline to grant you on the spot, that likewise by the law of God they are exempt. I do not propose to frame a long discourse on nature and the beginnings of man's political life; that subject has been handled at large by many learned men, both Greek and Latin. But I shall endeavor to be as brief as possible, and since I would gladly have avoided this task, I shall allow you to confute yourself and destroy your own position.

I will begin therefore with what you yourself lay down, and shall make it the basis of the following discussion. "The law of nature," you say, "is a principle implanted in all men's minds, to regard the good of all mankind in so far as men are united together in societies. But it cannot procure that common good unless, as there are people that must be governed, it also ascertain who shall govern them." This is to prevent the stronger from oppressing the weaker, and thus those whom their mutual safety and protection had brought together be disunited and divided by injury and violence, and reduced to a savage life again. This I suppose is what you intended, though you take more words to say it. "Out of the number of those that united into one body," you say,

there must needs have been some chosen, superior to the rest in wisdom or courage, who either by force or by persuasion were to hold to their duty those that were refractory. Often it would so fall out that one single person whose valor and discretion was extraordinary might be able to do this, and sometimes several, who would accomplish it together by interchange of advice and counsel. Indeed since any one man cannot order and manage all things himself, he must consult with more, and let others into the governing company. So that whether the supreme power be confined to one person or reside in the body of the people, in either case, since it is impossible that all should administer the affairs of the commonwealth, or that one man should do all, therefore the government does always actually lie upon the shoulders of many.

The form of government itself, whether placed in the hands of many, or few, or a single person, is equally natural, for it is derived from the grounds of nature itself, which suffers not one man's single self so to rule that he have no sharers in the government.

Though I might have gathered all this out of the third book of Aristotle's Politics, I chose rather to transcribe it out of your own book, for you stole it from him, as Prometheus did fire from Jupiter, to the overthrow of monarchs and destruction of yourself. For search all you will into the law of nature, as just now exhibited by you, you will not find a place in nature for the royal right as you expound it—not so much as a trace of it. "The law of nature," you say, "in ordering who should govern others, regarded the good of all mankind." Not then of any one person—of a monarch. Hence the king exists for the people, and consequently the people are above him and to be preferred to him; which being allowed, there can be no right of the king whereby he, the inferior, may oppress or enslave the people, the superior. Since the king has no right to do wrong, the right of the people remains by nature supreme; and therefore, by that right whereby, before kings were instituted, men first united their strength and counsels for their mutual defence, by that right whereby for the preservation of all men's liberty, peace, and safety, they appointed one or more to govern the rest, by the same right they may punish or depose, for cowardice or folly or dishonor or treachery, those very persons whom for their valor or wisdom they had advanced to the government, or any others that rule disorderly; since nature has regarded and still regards the good not of one, or of a few, but of all in general, whatever become of one man's or of a few men's power.

Now as to the sort of persons whom the people chose. You say they were "superior to the rest in wisdom or courage," to wit, such as by nature seemed mos fit for government, "whose extraordinary valor and discretion was adequate" to such an office. Hence there is no right of succession by the law of nature, no king by the law of nature except him who excels all the rest in wisdom and courage, and all kings else are such by force or faction, contrary to nature, being fit rather to be slaves. For unto the wisest man nature gives command over men less wise, not unto a wicked man over good men, a fool over wise men. Consequently they that take the government out of such men's hands, act quite according to the law of nature. To what end nature appoints the wisest man king, you shall hear in your own words; namely, "that he may hold to their duty those that are refractory" against either nature or the laws. But how should he hold others to their duty, that neglects, or knows not, or turns against his own?

Tell us now now, if you can, any dictate of nature by which we are enjoined to disregard and neglect and hold of no account in matters of human state and polity the wise institutions of the law of nature, when nature herself, rather than lose her end, continually produces great and admirable results in her own province of matters inanimate and non-human. Produce any rule of nature or natural justice by which inferior criminals ought to be punished, but kings and princes to go unpunished for all their evil deeds—nay but, amid their monstrous crimes, be worshiped and revered and held in honor next to God. You grant that "the form of government itself, whether placed in the hands of many, or few, or a single person,is equally natural." So that a king is not by the law of nature more sacred than nobles, or than magistrates chosen from amongst the common people, and as you have granted heretofore that those may be punished, and ought to be if they offend, consequently you must admit the same of kings, who are appointed to rule for the very same end and purpose. For, say you, "Nature suffers not one man's single self so to rule that he have no sharers in the government." It does not therefore suffer a monarch; it does not suffer one single person to rule as to hold all others in slavery to his single power. In giving the king such partners in his power "that the government does always lie upon their shoulders," you give him colleagues and equals; more, you give them the power to punish, you give them the power to depose him.

So while you go about, not indeed to magnify royal power, but just merely to establish it in nature, you destroy it, as you always do. No greater misfortune, consequently I think, could befall sovereign princes, than to have you to defend them. Poor unhappy wretch! What fog in your wits has driven you to such a pass of self-deception that you should unwittingly take all these pains to lay bare and open to all men your knavery and ignorance, which until now was long concealed and almost masked; that you should set your labor to hire at the price of your own ignominy, and devote yourself so assiduously to making yourself a laughing-stock? What offence does the wrath of heaven punish you for, in making you appear in public, and with such a parade undertake the defence of a hateful cause in the height of impudence and stupidity at once, and, by thus defending it, against your intent and through your ignorance betray it? Who could wish you more forlorn and wretched than you are, when you can be saved from the depth of misery only by an act of short-sighted folly? Since by your unskillful and fatuous defence you have rendered the tyrants whose cause you undertook just so much more odious and detestable (the opposite of what you were expecting) and have unintentionally roused up just so many more enemies against them, as you have unintentionally ascribed to them the greater liberty of doing mischief and tyrannizing with impunity.

But I return to your self-contradictions. Having resolved to be so wicked as to endeavor to found tyranny in nature, you saw yourself compelled to begin by extolling monarchy above other forms of government; which, as is your way, you cannot manage without contradicting yourself. For having said but a little before, "that the form of government itself, whether by more, or by fewer, or by a single person, is equally natural," now you tell us that "of these three, that which is wielded by one person is most natural." This, even though you had said in express terms not long before: "Nature suffers not one man's single self to govern." Now upbraid whom you will with the putting of tyrants to death, since you yourself by your own folly have cut the throats of all monarchs, nay even of monarchy itself. But this is not the place to dispute which form of government is best, by one single person or by many. Many eminent men have indeed extolled monarchy, yet only if the monarch be very excellent and best deserve to reign; without such supposition, no other form of government so easily slips into the worst sort of tyranny.

As for your saying that "it is modeled upon the pattern of the One God," ask you who is worthy to hold on earth a power that shall resemble the divine power, save one who, as he far excels other men, is even in wisdom and goodness likest unto God? And such a person, in my opinion, none can be none other than the Son of God we wait for. As for your forced comparison of a kingdom to a family, that you may liken a king to a paterfamilias: a father of course deserves to exercise dominion over his household, all of which he either begot or supports; nothing of the sort with a king, but obviously quite the opposite. Next you set before us for our imitation those animals that live in communities, first birds, and among them bees, since these are birds, on your authority as Physiologus! "The bees have a king." The bees of Trent, that is; do not you remember? All other bees, on your own admission, "have republics." But leave off playing the fool with bees; they belong to the Muses, and hate and confute such a beetle as you are. "The quails are under a 'Quail mother'." Lay such snares for your own bitterns; we are not caught by so foolish a fowler.

Your next point, however, is not our affair, but yours. "Gallus gallinaceus, the cock," you say, "wields imperial power over both males and females." How can that be, since you yourself are Gallic, and (they say) but too cocky, wield not imperial power over your hen, but she over you? So that if the gallinaceous cock be king over many females, you that are slave to your hen must needs be not Gallus gallinaceus, but some sort of Gallus stercorarius, or dunghill-cock. For in the matter of books, in fact, nobody publishes huger dunghills, and you deafen us all with your crowing over them; that is the only point in which you resemble a true cock. I promise to give you many barley-corns if in ransacking this dunghill-book of yours you can show me but one jewel. But why should I give barley to you, who, quite unlike the honest plain cock in Aesop, scratched not for barley, but like the good-for-nothing cock in Plautus, scratched eagerly for gold? The outcome, to be sure, was different to this extent, that by scratching you found a hundred gold Jacobuses though you more deserved to be struck dead with Euclio's club, like that wretched bird in Plautus.

But let us go on: "Those same motives — expediency and the safety of all mankind — requires that whoever is once appointed to the sovereignty, be preserved in the possession of it." Who ever questioned this, as long as his preservation is consistent with the safety of all the rest? But can anyone fail to see that the preservation of any one man to the destruction of all others is utterly contrary to nature? But you would at any cost have "even a bad king kept, even the worst king possible, because the harm that his bad government does to the state is less than the disasters produced by the revolts that are raised to get rid of him." But what bearing has this upon the natural right of kings? If nature teaches me to suffer myself to be robbed by highwaymen, or, should I be taken captive, to purchase my liberty with all my estate, rather than fight with them for my life, will you say that this underwrites a natural right of robbers? Nature teaches subjects to give way now to the outrages of tyrants, now to times and circumstances, will you upon this forced patience of a nation, upon this compulsory submission, found a natural right even of tyrants? The very right which nature gave to the people for their own preservation, will you affirm that she gave to tyrants for the people's destruction? Nature teaches us of two evils to choose the lesser; and to bear with it as long as necessary, and will you affirm that this introduces a natural right for a tyrant, who for the moment may be the lesser evil, to commit his crimes unpunished? Remember what you yourself formerly wrote against the Jesuits' claim concerning bishops; your words, of a tenor quite the opposite of these, I have quoted above in the third chapter: you there asserted "that seditions, dissensions, and discords of the nobles and commons are a much lighter mischief than sure misery and destruction under the government of one monarch who plays the tyrant." And then you spoke the truth, for you were not yet going mad, and not yet gilded with Charles's Jacobuses, had not yet got this gold-fever or king's evil. I should tell you perhaps, if you were anyone else, that you ought at length to be ashamed of your disgraceful double-talk. But you can sooner burst than blush, who long ago cast off shame for profit. Did you not remember that the Romans had a most flourishing and glorious commonwealth after they had banished their kings? Could you possibly forget the Dutch, whose Republic, when it had shook off the king of Spain after long but successful wars, bravely and gloriously got its freedom, and keeps you in its pay, Sir Knight Grammaticaster! Yet with no design that the Dutch youth may learn from you, sophist and double-dealer, such foolish advice as to choose rather to return to the bondage of Spain than inherit their fathers' glorious liberty. Go take along with you your plaguy teaching to utmost Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, and there, while you are at it, you may just as well go to the devil!

Your last example is the English, who put to death their tyrant Charles after he had been taken a prisoner of war and found incurable. "With their quarrels they defaced and dishonored an island which under its kings was happy and swam in luxury." Indeed, when its moral ruin through luxury was almost accomplished that it might the more indifferently bear with enslavement — when its laws were abolished, and its religion bought and sold — then they delivered it from slavery. Behold now the severest Stoic, editor of Epictetus with Simplicius's commentary, who considers "an island swimming in luxury" to be happy! I am sure no such doctrine ever came from Zeno's porch. What of that? Shall kings, according to your teaching, have leave to do as they please, and shall not you yourself, Sire du Loup, have leave to send forth whatever philosophy you please from your wolf-bitch's den, as from some strange new Lyceum?

Now begin again to act your part. "Never in any king's reign was so much blood spilt, so many families ruined." All this is to be imputed not to the English nation but to Charles, who had first raised an army of Irishmen against us, had by his own warrant asked the Irish nation unite in arms against the English, and had by their means slain near two hundred thousand Englishmen in the single province of Ulster; to say nothing of his other crimes — of how he had incited two armies to destroy the Parliament of England and the City of London, before the people had enlisted a single soldier to protect the realm.

What principles, what law, what religion ever taught men to consult their ease, to save their money, their blood, even their very lives, rather than oppose the public enemy — whether foreign or domestic what matter, since both alike threaten bitter calamity and ruin to the nation? All Israel saw that without great bloodshed they could not punish the outrage that had been done upon the Levite's wife; did they therefore think they must be still, or refrain from civil war, though of the cruelest? Did they on that account suffer one poor humble petite femme to die unavenged? Certainly if nature teaches us to endure the despotism of a king, no matter how bad, rather than endanger the safety of a great many men in the recovery of our liberty, she must teach us likewise to endure not only a kingly government, which yet is the only one that you argue ought to be submitted to, but even an aristocracy and an oligarchy too — and sometimes a gang of robbers and mutinous slaves! Fulvius and Rupilius must then not have engaged in the Servile War after the Praetorian armies were slain; Crassus should not have marched against Spartacus, after the camp of the ex-consuls was destroyed; nor should Pompey have gone to war against the pirates. Romans, at Nature's behest, even Romans, lest the blood of so many citizens should be shed, should have knuckled under to slaves or to pirates! Nowhere do you show that "nature has imprinted this feeling upon the nations" - or any feeling of the sort; and yet you cannot forbear wishing us ill, and denouncing God's vengeance upon us - which may heaven divert upon yourself and all such prognosticators as you! Denouncing it, I say, upon us, though we have done no more than inflict the death that was his due upon him that was our king only in name, but in fact our implacable enemy, and atone for the countless deaths of our good countrymen by punishing the author and cause of them.

Then you tell us that a kingly government appears to be more according to the laws of nature because "more nations, both in our days and of old, have adopted monarchy than aristocracy and democracy." I answer first that this was not done at the behest of either God or nature. It was only unwillingly that God allowed his own people to be under a king; and what nature and right reason dictates, is best ascertained from the practice not of most nations, but of the wisest. The Grecians, the Romans, the Italians, the Carthaginians, and many others, have in accordance with their own natural temper preferred a government by their aristocracy or by their people rather than by a king; and these nations are proper examples to stand for the rest. Hence Sulpitius Severus reports that "the name of king has always been hateful to nearly all free nations."

But these things concern not our present purpose, nor do many that come after, which in your empty folly you repeat again and again. I hasten to make plain by examples what I have established already by reason: namely, that it is in the highest degree agreeable to the law of nature, that tyrants should be punished anyhow; and that all nations, taught by nature herself, have punished them; which will expose your impudence, and make it evident to all men that you take a shameful liberty to publish lies. You begin with the Egyptians; and indeed who does not see that you play the gypsy throughout? "In their history," you say, "there is no mention of any king that was ever slain by the people in a popular insurrection, no war made upon any of their kings by their subjects, no attempt made to depose any of them." What think you then of Osiris, perhaps the first king of the Egyptians? Was not he slain by his brother Typhon and twenty-five other conspirators? And did not a great part of the body of the people side with them, and fight a great battle with Isis and Horus, the king's wife and son? I pass by Sesostris, whom his brother had well-nigh put to death by treachery, and Chemmis and Chephren, against whom the people were deservedly enraged, and threatened to tear them in pieces after they were dead, being unable to do it while they were alive. Do you think that a people who dared to cut down their best kings were restrained either by the light of nature or by any religious scruple from laying hands upon their worst ones? A people that repeatedly threatened to tear their kings, though dead and now at last beyond the power to do harm, from the tomb, where the body of any the meanest pauper is wont to be inviolable — would they, if they had the power, stand back in awe, and fear to punish according to the law of nature kings alive and noxious? I know you would not stick to answer me in the affirmative, how absurd soever it be; but that you may not dare, I will silence you. Know then that many centuries before Chephren's time Ammosis was king of Egypt, and was as great a tyrant as any the greatest. The people patiently bore with him. You exult: this is what you like. But hear what follows, my honest Telltruth. I quote Diodorus: "Weighed down, they bore with him for some while, for they were nowise able to resist them that were more powerful." But as soon as Actisanes king of Ethiopia began to make war upon him, most of them took the opportunity to revolt, and when he was easily subdued, Egypt was added to the kingdom of Ethiopia. You see here that the Egyptians, as soon as they could, took up arms against a tyrant, joined forces with a foreign prince to depose their own king and disinherit his posterity, and preferred a moderate and good king, as Actisanes was, though a foreigner, to a tyrant of their own. These same Egyptians by the hearty consent of them all took up arms against Apries their tyrant, who relied upon his mercenary troops. Under the command of Amasis they conquered and afterwards strangled him, and gave the kingdom to Amasis, who was a noble gentleman. And note this too: Amasis kept the captive king a good while in the palace, and treated him well; at last, when the people complained that he did wrong in maintaining his enemy and theirs, he delivered him over to the people, who put him to death in the manner I have mentioned. These things are related by Herodotus and Diodorus. What more do you want? Do you think that any tyrant would not choose the axe rather than the noose?

Afterwards, you say, when the Egyptians were "brought into subjection" by the Persians, they "continued loyal to them"; which is utterly false, for they never remained loyal to the Persians, but in the fourth year after Cambyses had subdued them, they rebelled. Afterwards, when Xerxes had tamed them, within a short time they revolted from his son Artaxerxes, and set up one Inarus to be their king. With him they were conquered, but rebelled again, and created Tachus king, and made war upon Artaxerxes Mnemon. Neither were they better subjects to their own king, for they deposed Tachus, and conferred the government upon his son Nectanebus, till at last Artaxerxes Ochus brought them again under subjection to the Persian empire. Even under the Macedonian empire they declared by their actions, as far as in them lay, that tyrants ought to be punished: they threw down the statues and images of Ptolemy Physco, but were unable to kill him, for his mercenary army was too strong. His son Alexander was forced by a popular uprising to leave his country because he had killed his mother. His son Alexander likewise, when he lorded it too insolently, the people of Alexandria had him dragged out of the palace, and killed in the public gymnasium. The same people, finally, deposed Ptolemy Auletes for his many crimes. Now since a learned man cannot be ignorant of such notorious facts, and a man whose profession it is to teach them, and who asks to be believed in matters of such moment, is in duty bound not to be ignorant of them; who would not pronounce it a shame and a disgrace that this person, if so ignorant and illiterate, should to the scandal of true scholarship puff himself about as a great scholar, and solicit pay from kings and commonwealths, or, if such a knave and liar, should not be branded with some special mark of infamy, and banished out of the company and fellowship of all scholars and gentlemen?

Having examined the Egyptians for examples, let us now look at the Ethiopians their neighbors. Their king, chosen, as they think, by God, they worship as a sort God, and yet whenever the priests condemn him, he kills himself; and in that manner, says Diodorus, they punish all their other criminals: they put them not to death, but send an officer of justice to bid the guilty die.

Next you come to the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians, who most revere their kings; and you affirm, contrary to the authority of all historians, that "the royal power there had an unbounded liberty annexed to it of doing what the king listed." In the first place, the prophet Daniel tells us how, when Nebuchadnezzar grew proud beyond excess, they drove him from men, and sent him away to the beasts. The law of those countries was not called royal law, but the law of the Medes and Persians, that is, of the people; which law, being irrevocable, bound the kings themselves. Thus Darius the Mede, though he earnestly labored to deliver Daniel from the hands of the satrap, yet could not effect it. "Nations in those days," say you, "thought it an impiety to reject a king because he abused that royal right." But in the very writing of these words you are so abjectly stupid that while you are commending the obedience and submissiveness of those nations, you go out of your way to mention that Arbaces deprived Sardanapalus of the crown. Not single-handed, however, for he was helped partly by the priests, who were very well versed in the law, and partly by the people. He deposed him chiefly upon the ground that Sardanapalus abused his royal right, not by way of cruelty, but oniy of luxury and wantonness. Peruse the histories of Herodotus, Ctesias, and Diodorus, and you will find, clean contrary to your assertion, that those kingdoms were destroyed for the most part by subjects, and not by foreigners; you will find that the Assyrians were deposed by the Medes their subjects, and the Medes by the Persians likewise their subjects. You yourself admit that "Cyrus rebelled, and that in divers parts of the empire despotic governments were seized." Is this how you vindicate the royal right among the Medes and Persians, and their reverence for their kings, to which you have appealed. What Anticyra can cure such raving lunacy like this?

You say: "With what power the Persian kings ruled is apparent from Herodotus." Cambyses being desirous to marry his sister, consulted the royal judges, eminent men chosen "from among the people," interpreters of the laws, to whom all such difficulties were submitted. What answer had he from them? They told him, you claim, that they found no law which bids a brother marry his sister, but they did find another law whereby the king of Persia may do as he likes. Now to this I answer, if the king of Persia were really so absolute, what need was there of any other interpreter of the laws than the king himself? Those superfluous judges would have remained anywhere but in the palace! Again, if the king of Persia might do whatever he would, it is not credible that Cambyses, eager for power as he was, should be so ignorant as to interrogate those judges concerning his liberties. What was the matter then? Either they were trying "to humor the king," as you admit, or they were afraid of what the tyrant might do to them, as Herodotus says, and feigned that they had found a law that would satisfy him, and fooled him, which even nowadays is no new thing with judges and gentlemen learned in the law. "But," you say, "Artabanus a Persian told Themistocles there was no better law in Persia than the one which enacted that kings were to be honored and worshiped. An admirable law for you to cite — a law enjoining king-worship! a law long ago condemned by even the early Church Fathers! And an admirable person to recommend this law too — Artabanus, who himself a little while after with his own hand slew Xerxes his king! Right king-defenders these you cite—these kingkillers! I suspect you have some secret design upon kings! In the next place, you quote the poet Claudian to prove how obedient the Persians were. But I refer you to their histories and annals, which are stuffed full of the revolts of the Persians, the Medes, the Bactrians, and the Babylonians, and with the murders of their kings. Your next authority is Otanes the Persian, who likewise killed Smerdis his king. While he, out of his hatred of royal government, sets forth the impieties and injurious actions of kings, their violation of the laws, their putting men to death without legal conviction, their rapes and adulteries, you will have all this called the right of kings, and slander Samuel again. You quote Homer, who says kings derive their authority from Jove, to which I have already given an answer. For king Philip of Macedon as an expounder of the right of kings, I had as lief take his interpretation as King Charles's!

Then you quote some sentences from a fragment of Diotogenes the Pythagorean, but you do not tell us what sort of king he speaks of. Observe therefore how he begins, for whatever follows must be understood to have relation to it: "Let him be king," says he, "that of all is most just, and most just is he that acts most according to law"; for without justice no man "can be king, and without law there can be no justice." This is directly opposite to that royal right of yours. And Ecphantas, whom you also quote, reasons to the same effect: "Whosoever takes upon him to be king, ought to be naturally most pure and clear from all imputation." And a little after: "He that governs according to virtue is called, and is, a king." He whom you call a king is therefore, in the judgment of the Pythagoreans, no king at all. Hear now, in your turn, what Plato says in his Eighth Epistle: "Let the royal power be liable to be called to account. Let the laws control not only the people but kings themselves, if they do anything not warranted by law." I will mention what Aristotle says in the Third Book of his Politics: "Among likes and equals it is neither profitable nor just that any one should lord and master over all the rest, or should himself be the law, either where there are no laws, or where there are laws; or that a good man should be lord over other good men, or a bad man over other bad men." And in the Fifth Book, he says, "That king whom the people do not wish, is no longer a king but a tyrant." Hear what Xenophon says in Hiero: "Cities are so far from punishing the killing of tyrants, that they confer great honor upon him that kills one, and erect statues of tyrannicides in their temples." Of this I can produce an eye-witness, Marcus Tullius, in his oration Pro Milone: "The Greeks," says he, "ascribe divine worship to men who have killed tyrants. What have I myself seen at Athens and in other cities of Greece — what religious observances instituted in their honor — what poems, songs, and hymns in their praise! They are almost consecrated to immortality in adoration and remembrance." And lastly, Polybius, a weighty authority, in the sixth book of his Histories, says thus: "When princes began to indulge their own lusts and avarice, then royal government turned into tyranny, and conspiracies against the lives of the despots were entered into; nor were the instigators the dregs of the citizenry, but the most noble and magnanimous." These few passages I have picked out to taste, for I have store far greater, and am overwhelmed with plenty.

After the philosophers you now appeal to the poets, and I am very willing to follow you. "Aeschylus by himself is enough to inform us," you say, "that kings in Greece held a power not subject to any laws or any judicature; for in the tragedy of The Suppliants he calls the king of the Argives 'a ruler not subject to judgment'." Know you (for the greater the variety of your arguments, the more I discern how recklessly uncritical you are), know then, I say, that we must not so regard the poet's words as his own, but consider who it is that speaks in the play, and what that person says; for different persons are introduced, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes wise men, sometimes fools, and they speak not always the poet's own opinion, but what is most fitting to each character. The fifty daughters of Danaus, being banished out of Egypt, betook themselves to the king of the Argives [Pelasgus] as suppliants, and begged him to protect them against the violence of the Egyptians, who were pursuing them with a fleet of ships. The king told them he could not without first imparting the matter to the people.

ἐγὼ δ᾿ ἂν οὐ κραίνοιμ᾿ ὑπόσχεσιν πάρος,
ἀστοῖς δὲ πᾶσι τῶνδε κοινώσας πέρι. (Suppliants 368-69)

I cannot make a binding promise beforehand, but only after making this matter known to the whole citizen body.

σύ τοι πόλις, σὺ δὲ τὸ δάμιον·
πρύτανις ἄκριτος ὢν (370-71)

You are the city, I tell you, you are the people! A head of state, not subject to judgement.

εἶπον δὲ καὶ πρίν, οὐκ ἄνευ δήμου τόδε
πράξαιμ᾿ ἄν, οὐδέ περ κρατῶν (398-99)

I have already said I am not prepared to do this without the people’s approval, even though I have the power

ἐγὼ δὲ λαοὺς ξυγκαλῶν ἐγχωρίους
πιετω, τὸ κοινὸν (517-18)

I am to call the people of this country to assembly.

θαρσεῖτε, παῖδες· εὖ τὰ τῶν ἐγχωρίων·
δήμου δέδοκται παντελῆ ψηφίσματα. (600-601)

Take courage, children: all is well so far as the natives are concerned. A most decisive decree has been passed by the people.

The same conclusion appears from the story of Euripides's Orestes, who being after his father's death himself king of the Argives, was yet brought to trial by the people for the slaying of his mother, pleaded his own cause, and by the people's vote was condemned to die. That at Athens the kingly power was subject to the laws, the same Euripides bears witness in his play likewise called The Suppliants, where Theseus, king of Athens, says: "Not ruled by one man, but free, is the city, yet the people reigns." In the same poet's Heracleidae, Theseus's son Demophoon, likewise king of the Athenians, says: "For I do not exercise tyrannical power over them, as if they were Barbarians: but if I do right, right is done me." Sophocles in his Oedipus Tyrannus shows that anciently in Thebes the right of kings was even so. Hence both Tiresias and Creon answer back courageously to Oedipus. The former says, "I am not your slave"; the latter, "I have some right in this city as well as you." And in the Antigone, Haemon tells Creon: "That is no city which belongs to one man."

All men know that the kings of Lacedaemon were often brought to trial, and sometimes put to death judicially. And no wonder, when Lycurgus himself, their lawgiver, might have learned from Homer, whom he had read attentively from beginning to end, that even in the heroic times kings were subject to the very same laws. Homer's Achilles, having found that Agamemnon was himself a pestilence unto his people, who were then suffering under a pestilence, did not, though himself a king, hesitate, in an assemblage of the Greeks frequent and full, to submit a king to his own subjects for judgment. These are his words (Iliad I.):

King, devourer of the people, since thou rulest over men of naught,
For else, Atrides, hadst thou now committed outrage for the last time.

The ghosts marvel at both as they sing of things that demand a reverent silence; but the crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder, drink in more eagerly with their ears tales of battles and banished tyrants.

Lay low, by any means you wish, a tyrant who devours the people. The gods show no resentment.

First you return to that phrase not of Sallust but of C. Memmius quoted in Sallust, "to do with impunity what you list." This I have answered already. Sallust himself says expressly that "the government of Rome was a government by law, though its name was regal," and when "it grew into a tyranny," you know they thrust it out. Cicero likewise in his oration against Piso, "Shall I," says he, "reckon as consul one who reckoned not upon the Senate's existence in the commonwealth? Shall I count as consul him who consults not that without which there could not even be kings at Rome?" Do you hear? At Rome the very king was nothing without the Senate. "But," you say, "Romulus, according to Tacitus, had governed the Romans exactly as he pleased." Yes, for, having as yet no foundation of laws, they were a rabble concourse of strangers rather than a state. Of old, before states came into being, all men lived lawless. But, as Livy informs us, when Romulus was dead, though all the people desired a king, not having yet tasted the sweets of liberty, "Yet the sovereign power was allowed to remain in the hands of the people; so that they gave not up more right than they kept." The same author tells us: "That right was afterwards extorted from them" by the Caesars. Servius Tullius at first reigned by indirection, and as it were a deputy of Tarquinius Priscus; but afterwards he referred it to the people "whether they would have him and bid him reign." At last, says Tacitus, "he became the author of laws such as even the kings obeyed." Do you think he would have done such an injury to himself and his posterity, if he had deemed that the right of kings before he did so had been above all laws? Their last king, Tarquinius Superbus, "was the first that put an end to the custom of consulting the Senate about everything"; and for this and other enormities the people annihilated the power of king Lucius Tarquinius, and banished him with his wife and children. To this effect speak Livy and Cicero, than whom you will hardly produce any better expositors of the right of kings among the Romans. As for the dictatorship, that was but temporary, was never applied but in the state's extremities, and was to be laid down within six months.

What you call the right of the Roman emperors was no right, however, but downright force, a power gained through no law but that of arms. "But Tacitus," you say, "who lived under the government of a single person, writes thus. The gods have given the sovereign power in human affairs to princes; what has been left to subjects is the honor of obedience. But you tell us not where Tacitus has these words, doubtless because you were conscious that you had egregiously misled your readers; which I detected at once, though I could not immediately find the place. For those words are not Tacitus's own, who is an approved writer, and the greatest possible enemy to tyrants, but are quoted by Tacitus as the words of M. Terentius, a gentleman of Rome, who being charged with capital crime, amongst other things that he said in fear of death, flattered Tiberius in this manner, Annals VI: "The gods have entrusted you with the ultimate judgment in all things; what has been left to us is the honor of submitting." And this you cite as if it were Tacitus's opinion! Whatever your motive — whether you would show off, or are conscious of your weakness — so indiscriminately do you scrape together everything from everywhere, that you would not reject opinions to suit your argument though they were the sweepings of a baker's shop or a barbershop — yes, or of the very gallows! Had you chosen to read Tacitus himself rather than copy too carelessly an extract you found somewhere, he would have taught you whence that imperial right had its origin. "After the victory of Actium," says he, "the whole state of our affairs was turned upside down; nothing of our ancient or uncorrupted manners anywhere to be seen; all men ignored political equality and began to attend to the orders of the chief of state." This you might have learned out of the third book of his Annals, whence you derive all your royal rights. "When equality was laid aside, and instead of moderation and self-restraint factiousness and violence stepped in, tyrannical forms of government started up, and fixed themselves in many countries." The same thing you might have learned out of Dio, if your natural levity and unsettledness of judgment would have suffered you to apprehend anything above you. He tells us in his fifty-third Book, from which you have quoted, that partly by the violence and partly by the fraud and hypocrisy of Octavianus Caesar, things were brought to that pass that the emperors were loosed from the laws. For though Octavianus promised before the popular assembly that he would lay down the principate, and obey the laws, and even the commands of others, yet under pretence of making war in his provinces he still kept the legions at hand, and so, while in appearance he declined power, he gradually entered upon the possession of it. This was not being duly released from the laws, but breaking forcibly through their bonds, as Spartacus the gladiator might have done; and then assuming to himself the style of princeps or imperator and αὐτοκράτορος, as if God or the law of nature had put all men and all laws into subjection under him. Would you inquire a little further back into the origin of the right of the Caesars? Mark Antony had been made consul at the bidding of Caesar, who by impiously taking up arms against the commonwealth had got all the power into his hands. Now at the celebration of the Lupercalia at Rome, Antony, by previous arrangement it seems, set a crown upon Caesar's head, amid the people's groans and lamentations. Thereupon he caused it to be entered upon the Calendar as a record of the events at the Lupercalia that Marcus Antonius had offered Caesar royal power at the people's instance! Of which action Cicero in his second Philippic says. Was it for this that Lucius Tarquinius was expelled, and Spurius Cassius, Spurius Melius, and Marcus Manlius put to death — that after many generations Mark Antony against the law should make a king in Rome?" Truly you deserve every form of torture and everlasting disgrace even more than Antony himself. Yet be not therefore puffed up, for I compare you not, most contemptible of men, with Antony in aught but wickedness: you that in these unspeakable Lupercalia of yours, most loose-lived Lupercus, or Scare-Wolf, have taken pains to bind about the head not of one tyrant only, but of all tyrants, a diadem loosed from all laws, but never to be loosened by any!

Indeed if we must believe the "oracle" of the emperors themselves — for so the Christian emperors Theodosius and Valens call their edict, Codex 1.14 — the authority of the emperors depends upon that of the law. So that the majesty of the person that reigns, even by the judgment or the oracle of the emperors themselves, must submit to the laws on which it depends. Hence Pliny tells Trajan in his Panegyric, when the power of the emperors was grown to its height: "A principate and a despotism are quite different in their nature. Trajan restrains and puts far from him power that is actually royal, and holds the throne as a prince, that there may be no room for a despot." And afterwards: "Whatever I have said of other princes, I said that I might show how our prince moulds anew and straightens the way of principates, which by long custom have been corrupted and perverted." What Pliny calls the corrupt and depraved customs of principates, are you not ashamed still to keep on calling the right of king So much, then, briefly, concerning the right of kings among the Romans.

How they dealt with their tyrants, whether kings or emperors, is generally known. They expelled Tarquin, yes and by ancestral custom even then; for either their neighbor Etruria offered a very ancient precedent in the expulsion of the tyrant Mezentius from the city of Agylla, or Virgil, past master of the fitting and beautiful, meant by that tale in the eighth book of the Aeneid to show even Caesar Octavianus, who then ruled in Rome, what rights kings had among all nations — and this from the utmost antiquity.

But while the madman yet meditates crimes unspeakable, the citizens, wearied out at last, in armed bands press round both him and his house, and slay his train, and hurl fire upon his rooftree. Slipping away from amid the slaughter, he betakes him to the territory of the Rutuli for refuge, and is defended by the arms of Turnus a stranger. 'Twas for this that all Etruria rose up in righteous rage: in open war they claim the king for execution.

"But," say you, "how did the Romans expel Tarquin? Did they bring him to trial? No such matter: when he would have come into the city, they shut the gates against him." Ridiculous fool! what else could they do but shut the gates, when he was hurrying thither with part of the army? Banished or put to death — no matter, so long as he surely was punished. Gaius Caesar the tyrant was killed in the senate by the choice and master spirits of that age. This action Marcus Tullius, himself an excellent man, and publicly entitled the father of his country, extols wonderfully in many passages of his works, particularly in his second Philippic. I will repeat some of his words: "All good men killed Caesar as far as in them lay. Some lacked the plan, others the courage, others the opportunity; none the wish." And afterwards: "What action ever was performed, oh venerable Jove! not in this city only but in all the world, that was greater, more glorious, and more to be commended to the everlasting remembrance of mankind? Not loath am I to be included in the fellowship that planned it, as with the band of chieftains in the Trojan horse.""

That familiar passage of Seneca the tragedian may relate both to the Romans and to the Greeks:

There can be slain
No sacrifice to God more acceptable
Than an unjust and wicked king.

By what has been said, it is evident that the most excellent of the Romans did not only kill tyrants however and whenever they could, but like the Greeks before them thought the deed most praiseworthy. For whenever they could not proceed judicially against a tyrant in his lifetime, being less powerful than he, yet after his death they would both judge him and by the Valerian Law condemn him; and Valerius Publicola, a colleague of Junius Brutus, perceiving that as tyrants were guarded by soldiers they could not be brought to trial, proposed a bill making it lawful to kill them uncondemned, by whatever method, and give an account afterwards. Hence, when Cassius had killed Gaius Caligula with a sword, and everybody else had done it with prayers and desires, Valerius Asiaticus, a governor of consular rank, then absent, cried out to the soldiers that began to mutiny because of the Emperor's death, "Would I had been the one to kill him!" The Senate at the same time was so far from being displeased with Cassius that they resolved to extirpate the memory of the emperors, and to raze their temples. When Claudius soon after was saluted as Emperor by the soldiers, the Senate forbade him by the tribune of the people to take the government upon him; but the power of the soldiers prevailed. The Senate declared Nero a public enemy, and searched him out to have him punished after the way of their ancestors, which required that he should be stripped naked, his neck thrust into the stocks, and with rods be whipped to death. Consider now how much more mildly and moderately the English dealt with their tyrant, though many are of an opinion that he caused more bloodshed than Nero himself. Just so the Senate condemned Domitian after his death; they commanded his statues to be publicly pulled down and dashed to pieces, which was all they could do. Commodus, slain by his own officers, was not avenged, but declared a public enemy, by both the Senate and the people, who sought out even his dead corpse for mutilation. The Senate's resolution upon this matter is extant in Lampridius: "Let the enemy of his country be deprived of all his titles; let the parricide be drawn, let him be torn in pieces in the gladiators' stripping-place; let the enemy of the gods, the executioner of the senate, be dragged with a hook." The same persons in a very full session of the Senate condemned the emperor Didius Julianus to death, and sent a tribune to slay him in the palace. The same Senate deposed Maximinus, and declared him a public enemy. It will be well to read from Capitolinus the Senate's resolution concerning him: "The consul put the question: 'Conscript Fathers, what is your pleasure concerning the Maximins?' They answered: 'They are enemies, they are enemies; whoever kills them shall be rewarded.'" Would you know whether the Roman people and the provinces obeyed the Senate, or obeyed Maximin the emperor? Hear what the same author says: "The Senate sent letters" to all the provinces, requesting them to come to the rescue of the common safety and liberty; the letters were publicly read. Everywhere the friends, the deputies, the generals, the tribunes, the soldiers of Maximin, were slain. Very few cities kept their allegiance to the public enemy. Herodian relates the same thing. What need of more instances from Roman history?

Let us now see what manner of thing the right of kings was in those days among the neighboring nations. Ambiorix, king of the Gauls, confesses "the nature of his dominion to be such that the people had as much right over him as he over them." Consequently he was always subject to judgment as much as he exercised judgment. Vercingetorix, also a king, was accused of treachery by his own people. These things Caesar relates in his history of the Gallic wars. Nor was "the power of the German kings absolute and unbounded: lesser matters are ordered and disposed by the chiefs, greater matters by all the people. The king or prince is heeded more through the influence of his persuasions than through his power to command. If his opinion has not pleased them, they reject it with a murmur." So says Tacitus. Indeed you yourself now confess that what but of late you exclaimed against as absolutely unheard of has been often done, to wit, that "no less than fifty Scottish kings have been either banished or imprisoned or put to death, nay, and some of them publicly executed." Which having been done over and over again in Britain itself, why do you, who spirit your tyrants away like paupers, hugger-mugger, for burial at dusk to conceal their violent deaths, how can you, I say, cry out upon it with so lamentable a voice as a thing unheard of?

You proceed to commend the Jews and Christians for their reverent obedience to tyrants, and with lies to sow a harvest of more lies, which I have so often confuted. A while ago you were praising far and wide the obedience of the Assyrians and Persians, and now you reckon up their rebellions; a little while ago you said they never rebelled at all, and now you give us a great many reasons why they rebelled so often! Then you resume your long-suspended narrative of our king's execution, in order that if perhaps you had not taken care enough to be a ridiculous fool then, you may do it now. You say, "He was led through the members of his court." What you mean by the members of the court, I wish I knew. You enumerate the disasters that the Romans underwent through changing their kingdom into a commonwealth; in which I have shown above how grossly you give yourself the lie. You, who when you wrote against the Jesuit, used to point out that "in an aristocracy or a democracy there could be seditions and tumults only, whereas under a tyrant destruction was sure," dare you now say, you empty-headed and thoroughly corrupt sinner, that "they drank the cup of the ills that arose from their seditions as punishments for banishing their kings aforetime"? To wit, because King Charles afterwards made you a present of a hundred sovereigns: that is the reason why the Romans expiated the banishing of their kings!

You say it went ill with the murderers of Julius Caesar. Indeed, if I would have had any tyrant spared, it should have been he. He did, to be sure, though a citizen of a republic, forcibly enter upon the exercise of royal power; yet he perhaps more than anyone else deserved it. Nor do I for this reason suppose anyone to have been punished for killing Caesar, any more than Gaius Antonius, Cicero's colleague, was punished for destroying Catiline. Afterward, when he was condemned for other crimes, says Cicero in his oration pro Flacco, "Catiline's tomb was decked with flowers," for they that favored Catiline then rejoiced, and "gave out then that Catiline's deeds were righteous," to kindle hatred against those that had cut him off. These are the artifices of wicked men to deter most excellent men from cutting off tyrants, and often from punishing even the most atrocious criminals. I might easily tell against you how often it hath gone well and prosperously with them that have killed tyrants, if from such cases any certain inference might be drawn concerning the outcome of human affairs.

You object further, "that the English put their hereditary king to death not as tyrants are usually sacrificed, but as robbers and traitors are executed." In the first place I do not know what heredity should contribute to impunity for crimes; that it contributes anything is scarcely possible for a wise man to believe. Next, in the conduct which you ascribe to "savage cruelty" there commendably appeared rather our English clemency and moderation; for, though to be a tyrant comprises within itself all sorts of enormities, robberies, treacheries, and treasons, against the whole nation, yet they were content to inflict no greater punishment upon a tyrant than they used of course to do upon any plain highwayman or common traitor!

You hope "that some Harmodius and Thrasybulus will rise up and make expiation" to the tyrant's spirit by the slaughter of my fellow-countrymen. But sooner will you run mad with despair, and, as you deserve all good men's curses, will first put an end to a life that suits you so well by hanging yourself, ere you see Harmodiuses offer the blood of Harmodiuses in atonement to a tyrant! That you will come to such an end is most probable (for who could foretell a more suitable fortune for such a rascal?) but the other thing is an utter impossibility. You mention thirty tyrants that rebelled in Gallienus's time. And what if one tyrant opposes another, must therefore all they that resist or destroy a tyrant be accounted such themselves? You cannot persuade men into such a belief, you slave-knight, nor can your authority Trebellius Pollio, well-nigh the most inconsiderable of historians. "If any of the emperors were declared enemies by the Senate," you say, it was done by faction, not law." You put us in mind of what it was that first made emperors: it was faction and violence, and to speak plainer, the madness of Antony, and not any law or right, that originally made the emperors themselves take the start in rebelling against the Senate and the people of Rome. "Galba," you say, "was punished for taking up arms against Nero." Tell us likewise how Vespasian was punished for taking up arms against Vitellius! "There was as much difference," you say, "betwixt Charles and Nero, as betwixt those English butchers and the Roman Senators of that age." Gallows-bird! by whom it is scandalous to be commended, and a praise to be evil spoken of. But a few sentences before, discoursing of this very thing, you said: "The Senate under the emperors was in effect but an assembly of toga'd slaves"; and now you say: "the Senate was an assembly of kings." If this be so, why should not kings, according to your own opinion, also be considered toga'd slaves? Blessed are kings in such a praiser! than whom no man is more a rascal, nor four-footed beast more void of sense, unless this may be said to be his singular property, that none brays more learnedly.

You make out that the Parliament of England is more like to Nero than to the Roman Senate. This itch of yours to paste together utterly inappropriate comparisons forces me to set you right: and I will let you see how like King Charles was to Nero. "Nero," you say, "slew his own mother" with a sword. But Charles murdered with poison one that was both his father and his king. For to omit other evidences: he that snatched from the law the Duke that was charged with the poisoning cannot but have shared the guilt. Nero slew many thousands of Christians, but Charles slew many more. There were those, says Suetonius, that praised Nero after he was dead, that longed to have had him again, that for a long time "used to deck his tomb with spring and summer flowers," and who threatened all evils to his enemies. And some there are that with the like frenzy wish for king Charles again, and exalt him with the highest praise; you, Knight of the Halter, lead their troop.

"The English soldiers, more savage than their own hounds, erected a new and unheard-of court of justice." Observe this ingenious symbol or adage of Salmasius, now obtruded six times over: "more savage than their own hounds." Come all ye orators and schoolmasters; pluck, if you are wise, this elegant flower, which Salmasius is so very fond of; commit to your tablets and cabinets this rhetorical cosmetic from this most eloquent man, lest it perish. Has your madness so destroyed your words that, cuckoo-fashion, you must needs sing the same ill-omened song over and over again? What sort of monstrosity shall I call this? Madness, says the tale, turned Hecuba into a dog; you, Seigneur of St. Wolf, it has turned into a cuckoo.

Now you come out with fresh inconsistencies. You had said before, on page 113, that "the prince is not bound by the laws, neither by laws coercive" only, but as well "from laws directory; that there are none at all to which he must answer." Now you say that "you will discourse further on of the difference betwixt some kings and others, in so far as some have had more power, some less." By what you call "a most solid argument" you would prove "that kings cannot be judged or condemned by their own subjects"; but it is a very stupid argument. You say: "There was no other difference betwixt judges and kings; and yet the reason why the Jews kept asking for a king was that they were weary of the judges, and hated them." Do you think that because they could judge and condemn judges for malfeasance in office they were therefore led by hatred and weariness of them to ask for kings, whom they could not punish or restrain though they should break all laws? Who but you ever argued so idiotically? They desired a king, then, for some other reason than that they might have a master whose power should be superior to that of the law; to guess what it was is not to our present purpose. Whatever it was, both God and his prophet have witnessed that it was ill-advised in the people to desire a king. Once more you fall foul of your rabbis, out of whose writings you said before you had proved that a king of the Jews could not be judged, for saying that a king might be not only judged, but condemned as well to undergo stripes — which is tantamount to confessing that you had made up out of whole cloth what you said you had proved out of their writings. Nay, you come at last to forgetting the king's defence, and raising wretched quibbles about the number of Solomon's stables, and how many "mangers he had for his horses."

Finally from a horse-boy you become once more the Knight of the Virtuous Preachments and Identical Repetitions, or rather the sort of monster you were before, a raving distracted cuckoo. You complain that in these "latter ages, the force of order has been slackened, and its rule destroyed"; because forsooth one tyrant loosed from every law is not allowed with impunity to slacken all order, and destroy all men's morals! This doctrine, you say, was introduced by "the Brownists amongst those of the reformed religion"; so that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Bucer, and all the most celebrated orthodox divines, are Brownists in your opinion. The English bear your reproaches the more calmly because they hear you rave with nearly the same slanders against the most eminent doctors of the Church, and in effect against the whole Reformed Church itself.

AFTER your fruitless and futile mishandling of the law of God and nature, from which you have brought off nothing but the reproach of ignorance and knavery combined, I do not see what you can farther allege in your royal cause but mere trifles. Though I for my part hope that even should I end my answer here, I have done enough to satisfy fully all men that are neither ignorant nor knavish — yes, done enough for this noble cause itself — yet lest others should think that I am retreating from what they suppose to be your keen ingenuity, rather than your immeasurable loquacity, I will go on as far as you like, but with such brevity as shall make it appear that after having performed all that the urgency, if not the dignity, of the cause demanded, I now do but comply with some people's expectation or, perhaps, curiosity.

"From now on," you say, "there rises before me another and a grander order of arguments." What! grander arguments than what the law of God and nature afforded? Help, Lucina! Mount Salmasius is in labor! It is not for nothing that he is married to a he-wife. Mortals, expect some huge and monstrous birth. "If he that is, and is called, king might be impeached before another power, this must of necessity be greater than the royal power. But the power that is constituted the greater must be called and be indeed the royal power, for royal power is to be thus defined: the power which is supreme in the state, and unique, and above which no other is acknowledged." A mountainous and a ridiculous mouse! Help, grammarians! help this grammarian in travail! the law of God and nature is safe; but 'tis all up with the dictionary!

What if I should answer you thus? Let names give way to things; to be cautious about the name is not our affair, who have got rid of the thing; let others, who are in love with kings, look to that; we are content with the enjoyment of our liberty. Such would be no unfair answer. But to let you see that I deal fairly and justly with you throughout, I will give you an answer based not upon my own opinion alone, but upon that of the best and wisest men of old, who have thought that both the name and the power of a king are entirely consistent with a greater power in the people and the law. In the first place, Lycurgus, a man very eminent for wisdom, designing, as Plato says, to provide in the highest degree for the interests of kingly government, could find no other expedient to preserve it than by making the power of the senate and of the Ephors, that is, of the people, superior to it in his own country. Theseus in Euripides was of the same opinion; for he, though king of Athens, yet to his great honor restored the Athenian people to liberty, and advanced the power of the people above that of the king, and left the regal power in that city none the less to his posterity. Whence Euripides, in The Suppliants, introduces him speaking in this manner: "I have established the people themselves in sovereignty, having freed this city, which hath an equal right of suffrage." And in another place, to the herald of Thebes: "In the first place you begin your speech, stranger, with a thing that is not true, in asking for the monarch here; for this city is not governed by a single person, but is free; the people is its lord." These were his words, though in that city he yet both was, and was called, king. Another authority on the same point is the divine Plato in his eighth epistle: "Lycurgus introduced the power of the senate and of the Ephors, τῆς βασιλικῆς ἀρχῆς σωτήριον, a thing very preservative of kingly government, which by this means has been kept in great honor for so many ages, because mistress law was made king." Now, the law cannot be king, unless there be somebody who, if there should be occasion, may enforce It against the king,too. A kingly government so modified and limited, he himself commends to the Sicilians: "Let there be liberty together with royal power; let royal power be ὑπεύθυνος, liable to give account; let law prevail even against kings, if they shall act contrary to law." Finally Aristotle says, in the third book of his Politics: "Of all royal powers that are governed by laws, that in the Spartan commonwealth seems to be most truly and properly royal." All forms of kingly government, however, he says, were according to laws, except one which he calls παμβασιλείαν, or absolute monarchy, and he does not mention that this existed anywhere. Aristotle, then, thought such a kingdom as that of the Spartans to be and deserve the name of a kingdom par excellence, and consequently could not deny that such a king as theirs, though the people were above him, none the less was, and was to be called, par excellence a king. Now since authors so many and great do upon their faith and credit warrant unto the king that both the name and the substance of his royalty shall be unimpaired, and vouch it safe, even where the supreme power, though generally unused, yet for times of need is kept by the people in their own possession, do you cease with so petty a mind to fear so much for the kingdom of grammar — of words, to wit — that rather than the public well-being of your glossary should be disturbed, or suffer aught of harm, you would willingly betray the liberty and common well-being of mankind. And for the future know that words are subordinate to things, not things to words. By this means you will have more discernment, and not run on "into the infinite and undefined" as you fear! "In vain then does Seneca," you say, "thus describe those three forms of government." Let Seneca describe in vain, so we enjoy our liberty; and if I mistake not, we are not the sort of men to be enslaved by Seneca's rhetorical gems. Yet Seneca, though he says that the sovereign power resides in a single person, says withal that "the power is the people's," and by them given to the king in trust for the welfare of the whole, not for their ruin and destruction, and that the people have not given him a property in it, but the use of it. "Kings at this rate," you say, "do not reign by God but by the people." As if God did not so overrule the people that they give the kingdom to whom God wills. The Emperor Justinian in his Institutes themselves openly acknowledges that the Caesars' reign began when "by the Lex Regia the people granted unto them and vested in them all their own power and authority."

But how long shall I keep warming over and over again that stuff of yours which I have so often rejected and refuted? Now once more you push yourself — and it is a thing which reveals your boorish unmannerly nature and odious ways — you, a foreign-born outsider, push yourself inquisitively into our state affairs, which are none of yours! Come on, then, with an egregious solecism, worthy of such a busybody. "Every single thing," say you, "every single thing that those desperadoes say, are only to deceive the people." Rascal! was it for this that you, an outlawed grammarian, were so forward to intermeddle with the affairs of our government — that you might stuff us with your solecisms and barbarisms? But say, how have we deceived the people? "The form of government which they have set up is not popular, but military." This is what that gang of renegades hired you — and hired you cheap — to write; so that I shall not trouble myself to answer you, who babble what you know nothing of, but I will answer them that hired you. Who "excluded the Lords from Parliament — was it the people?" Ay, it was the people; and in so doing they threw an intolerable yoke of slavery from off their necks. Those very soldiers who you say did it were not foreigners, but our own countrymen, and a great part of the people, and they did it with the consent and at the desire of almost all the rest of the people, and not without the authority of Parliament itself. "Was it the people that maimed the House of Commons by driving away some of the members, etc.? "Yes, I say, it was the people. For whatever the better, that is, the sounder, part of the legislature did, in which the true power of the people resided, why may not the people be said to have done it? What if the majority of the legislature should choose to be slaves, or to set the government to sale — ought not the minority prevent this, and keep their liberty, if it be in their power? "But the officers of the army with their soldiers did it." And thanks are due those officers for that they failed not the state, but repelled the riotous workmen and shopkeepers of London, who, like that rabble that appeared for Clodius, had but a little before beset the very parliament house. The original and proper right of Parliament to look out before all else for the people's liberty both in peace and in war — is this what you therefore call "a military despodsm"? It is no wonder indeed that the traitors who dictated these passages to you should talk in this strain, for so did that profligate crew of Antony and his adherents use to call the Roman Senate when they took arms against the enemies of their country, "Pompey's Camp." And now I am glad that they of your party looked grudgingly upon Cromwell, that most valiant general of our army, for undertaking the Irish campaign (so acceptable to Almighty God), surrounded with a joyful crowd of his friends, and followed up by the well-wishes of the people and the prayers of all good men; for I question not but at the news of his many victories there they are by this time rotted with spite.

I pass by your quantities of long-winded nonsense about the Roman soldiers. What follows is most notoriously false: "Power ceases to belong to a people," you say, "where it begins to belong to a king." By what law or right is that? For it is very certain that kings in general, throughout the world, receive from the people an authority entrusted to them subject to certain conditions; which if the king abide not by, pray tell us why that power, which was but a trust, should not return to the people, as well from a king as from a consul or any other officer of government. For what you say about "the public safety requiring it" is not to the point; the requirements of safety are identical whether "that power reverts to the people" from a King, or from an Aristocracy, or from a Triumvirate, in case any of them abuse the power entrusted to them; and yet you yourself grant that it may so revert from officers of every sort, a king only excepted. Certainly, if no people in their right wits ever gave power over themselves either to a king or to any magistrates for any other purpose than the common good of all, there can be no reason why, for exactly the inverse purpose, to prevent the utter ruin of them all, they may not take back again the power they gave, and this as well from a king as from other magistrates; nay, and it may with far greater ease be taken from one than from many. And to commit to any mortal creature a power over themselves on any other terms than upon trust were extreme madness; nor is it credible that any people since the creation of the world, who had freedom of will, were ever so miserably silly as either to part with the power absolutely and entirely, or, having once entrusted it to their magistrates, to recall it unto themselves without weightiest reasons. But though dissensions, though civil wars, arise thence, surely no royal right arises thence to withhold by force of arms that power which the people reclaims unto itself for its own.

Whence it follows that what you say, and we do not deny, that "the ruler ought not lightly to be changed," is true with respect to the people's prudence, not the king's right; but it nowise follows that therefore a ruler ought not to be changed ever or for any cause whatsoever. Nor have you hitherto adduced any reason, or produced any right of kings, which ought to hinder the people, when they all concur, from deposing an unfit king, provided it may be done, as it has been often done in your own country of France, without tumult or civil war. Since therefore the safety of the people, not the safety of a tyrant, is the supreme law, and consequently should advantage the people against a tyrant, and not a tyrant against the people; you that have dared invert so sacred and so glorious a law with your jugglings, you who would make this supreme law, which of all laws is most beneficial to mankind, serve only for the impunity of tyrants; let me tell you (since to you we Englishmen so often are "Enthusiasts," "Inspired," and "Prophets") let me, I say, be so far a prophet as to tell you that the vengeance of God and man hangs over your head for so horrid a crime; although your casting down the whole human race under the feet of tyrants, which is naught else than, as far as in you lies, condemning them to be thrown to the beasts of the amphitheatre, — this monstrous wickedness is itself part of its own vengeance upon you; and whithersoever on earth you flee, and wheresoever you wander, will pursue you with its furies soon or late, and drive and harass you with madness yet worse than now you rave with. I come now to your second argument, which is not unlike the first. If the people may resume their power, "there would be no difference," say you, "betwixt a democracy and a kingdom; but that in a kingdom the appointed governor is one man and in a democracy many." And what if that were true — would the state take any harm of it? But here are some other differences which you yourself bring forward, of "time and succession," to be sure, for "the magistrates in a democracy are generally chosen yearly," whereas kings, if they behave themselves well, are perpetual; and in most kingdoms there is a succession in the same family. But let them differ from one another, or not differ, I regard not those trifles: in this they surely agree, that in either a democracy or a kingdom, when the public good requires it, that power which the people had entrusted to another for the public safety may for the same reason, and without violation of right or law, be recalled by the people unto itself.

"According to the Lex Regia, however, or royal law, so called by the Romans, which is treated in the Institutes, the people of Rome granted all their power and authority to and for the chief of state." Certainly — upon compulsion by the Caesars, who under the honorable pretence of law ratified what was merely their own violence. But of this we have spoken before; and their own lawyers, commenting upon this passage in the Institutes, do not disguise the fact. Doubtless therefore what was not granted by right law or by true consent of the people is revocable. But most reasonable it is to suppose that the people of Rome transferred no other power to the prince than they had before granted to their own magistrates, that is a power to govern according to law, and a power revocable, not unreasonable or tyrannical. Hence it was that the Caesars took over the powers of the Consuls, and of the Tribunes of the People, but after Julius not one pretended to those of a Dictator; in the Circus they used even to adore the people, as I mentioned before, quoting Tacitus and Claudian.

But "as heretofore many a private person has sold himself into slavery to another, so may a whole nation. Jailbird knight from the slaves' prison-house! Slave dealer thyself! Everlasting reproach even to thy native country! The most degraded band of slaves exposed for sale at the block ought to abhor and spit upon so foul a slave-procurer, such a public pander! Certainly if a people had so enslaved themselves to kings, then might kings turn them over to any other master you like, or put them up for sale; and yet certain it is that kings cannot so much as alienate the demesnes of the crown. He then who holds as a grant from the people only the use and enjoyment of the crown (as the phrase is) and of the royal demesne, shall he be owner, as if by purchase, of the people itself? Though you stood forward, a riddled knight with both ears bored and gypsum-whitened feet, exposed for sale, you would not be so much the most contemptible of slaves as now you are, being the author of such a shameful doctrine.

Go on and punish yourself against your will for your rogueries, as now you do. Toward the last you stammer out quantities of things about the right of war and conquest, which have no place here. For on the one hand never did Charles conquer us (and for his ancestors, though it were never so much granted that they did, yet have they again and again renounced their title as conquerors), nor on the other hand were we ever so conquered but that as we swore allegiance to them, so they swore to maintain our laws. When Charles had notoriously violated these, and had first provoked us, we subdued him by force, take him in what capacity you will, as formerly king conqueror or as now king perjurer. But according to your own opinion, "Whatever is acquired by war becomes the property of him that has acquired it." And so in this your argument begin again and be as wordy as you will, be what you were not long ago upon Solinus, a Plinian carping controversialist, of all babblers the wordiest: whatever you chatter next, whatever uproar you make, whatever you quote from the rabbis, however you shout yourself hoarse even to the end of this chapter, be assured that in the sweat of your brow you have been doing it all, not for the conquered king, but for us, by God's help his conquerors.

TO avoid two great inconveniences, and, considering your own weight, very weighty ones indeed, you denied in the foregoing chapter that the people's power was greater than the king's; for if you granted that, then kings must look about for some other name, the appellation "king" being turned over to the people, and certain classifications in your system of politics would be confounded. The first of these consequences would spoil your dictionary, and the second be the death of your Politics. To these I have answered in such wise that a certain consideration might be given first to our own safety and liberty, and after even to your terminology and Politics! Now, say you, "Tis to be proved by other arguments that a king cannot be judged by his own subjects; of which arguments this shall be the most powerful and most convincing, that a king hath no peer in his kingdom." What? A king hath no peer in his kingdom? What then is the meaning of those old Twelve Peers of France? Are they fables and trumpery stuff of Turpin's invention? Are they called so in vain and in mockery? Have a care how you insult those Princes and Paladins of France! Or is it because they are equal among themselves? As if, forsooth, it were thinkable that of the whole French nobility only twelve were each other's peers, or that this were a reason for calling them Peers of France! Nay, if they are not in very truth the Peers of the King of France, and this because with him they govern the State by equal right and by conference with him as his equals — look to it lest the dictionary, which is the only thing you are concerned for, be more mocked in the Kingdom of France than in the Commonwealth of England! But go to, let us hear your demonstration that a king has no peer in his own kingdom. "Because," you say, "the people of Rome, when they had banished their kings, appointed not one, but two Consuls, that if one of them should transgress, he might be checked by his colleague." A sillier argument could hardly have been invented: how came it to pass then that but one of the Consuls kept the Fasces, and not both, if each had been appointed to check the other ? And what if both had conspired against the commonwealth, would the case have been better than if the Romans had not given one Consul a colleague? What is certain, however, is that the Consuls both, and all other magistrates, were bound to obey the Senate, whenever the Senate and the people decided that the interest of the commonwealth so required. For this I have abundant authority in Marcus Tullius's oration for Sestius. Listen at the same time to his concise account of the Roman constitution, which, he always said, was "very wisely framed," and that it behooved all good citizens to be well acquainted with it. And so say I.

Our ancestors, when they had thrown off the power of the kings, created offices to last one year, but in such wise that over the commonwealth they set the deliberative assembly of the Senate to last forever; that members, however, were to be elected into this assembly by the people as a whole; and that entrance into that exalted body should stand open to the industry and worth of all citizens. They stationed the Senate as the guardian, protector, and champion of the State. This body's authority it was that they would have the magistrates employ, and would have them be, as it were, servants of this most weighty assembly.

Your assertion that "it is a property peculiar to kingly majesty that the power resides in a single person" is not less slippery, and is at once contradicted by yourself. "The Hebrew judges," you say, "ruled as long as they lived, and there was but one of them at a time: the Scripture also calls them kings; and yet they were accountable to the Sanhedrin." So it happens that while wishing to be thought to have said all that can be said, you say hardly anything but contradictions. Then I ask what kind of government you call it when sometimes two, sometimes three emperors at once held the Roman Empire? Do you reckon them to have been emperors, that is, kings, or members of an aristocracy, or a triumvirate? Or will you say that the Roman Empire under Antoninus and Verus, under Diocletian and Maximian, under Constantine and Licinius, was not one empire? If these were not kings, your "three forms of government" are endangered by your own cleverness; if they were kings, then it is not an essential property of royal power to reside in a single person. If one of these offend," say you, "then may the other report upon him to the people, or to the Senate, that he may be accused and condemned." And is it not an act of judging that is performed by the Senate and the people, to whom that second colleague reports? So that if you give any weight to your own statement, there was no need of a second colleague to judge the first. Alas, what a defender! — really to be pitied if you were not rather to be cursed! You lie every way so open to blows that if one were minded for sport's sake to thrust at any part of you, he could hardly miss, were his aim never so ill. You call it "ridiculous that a king should be supposed willing to appoint judges empowered to condemn him to death." But against you I cite the in no wise ridiculous but most excellent Emperor Trajan, who when, as the custom was, he delivered to Saburanus, Captain of the Praetorian Guard, the dagger which was the badge of his office, frequently thus admonished him: "Take this sword, and use it for me, if I do as I ought; if otherwise, against me; because for the governor and guide of all to go astray is especially unlawful." This Dion and Aurelius Victor say of him. You see here that an admirable emperor appointed one, though not his peer, to be his judge. Tiberius perhaps might have said such words as these out of vanity and hypocrisy; but it is almost a crime to imagine that Trajan, a man most virtuous and blameless, did not speak in all sincerity what he thought true and right and just. Superior to the Senate in power, he might have refused them obedience; how much the more righteous was it that he actually did obey them purely out of consideration for his duty, and acknowledge that they were by law set above him. Pliny tells us in his Panegyric: "The Senate both desired and commanded you to be Consul a fourth time; this, you may trust your own submissiveness, is no word of flattery, but of command"; and a little after: "What you strive for is this, namely, to recall and restore our liberty." And what Trajan thought of himself, the Senate thought of Trajan, and were of opinion that their authority was indeed supreme, for they who might command their emperor might judge him. So the emperor Marcus Aurelius, when Cassius governor of Syria endeavored to get the empire from him, submitted himself to the judgment of either the Senate or the Roman people, and declared himself ready to lay down the government if they would have it so. How indeed could anyone appraise and determine the right of kings better or more truly than out of the very mouths of the best kings?

Indeed by the law of nature every good king always accounts the senate or the people not only his peers but his betters. But a tyrant being by nature inferior to all men, whoever is stronger than he ought to be accounted equal and superior to him. For even as nature of old taught men from force and violence to betake themselves to law, so wherever the law is set at naught, the same dictate of nature must necessarily prompt us to betake ourselves to force again. "To be convinced of this," says Cicero pro Sestio, "is the part of wisdom; to practice it, the part of courage; but both to think and do it too belongs to manly excellence accomplished in full measure." Let this stand then as a settled maxim of the law of nature, never to be shaken by any tricks or sleights of kings' toadies, that the senate or the people are superior to kings good or bad. This is what yourself do in effect confess, when you tell us that the authority of kings was derived from the people. For that power which they gave the king, they do yet, by nature and a sort of virtue, or, as I may say, virtually, even though they have given it to the other party, hold in themselves; for whatever natural causes produce any effect in such outstanding degree still retain more of their own virtue than they impart; nor do they, by imparting it to others, exhaust themselves. You see, the closer we approach nature, the more evidently does the people's power stand out above that of the king.

And this likewise is certain, that the people, so the choice be but left free to them, never grant their power to a king in absolute and unconditional ownership, nor by nature can do so; but only for the public safety and liberty, which when the king ceases to take care of, then it is understood that the people have given him nothing at all: for, being warned by nature herself, they gave it him for a certain purpose only; so that if neither nature nor the people can attain this, then their gift or grant will be no more valid than any other void covenant or agreement. These reasons establish unshakably the people's superiority to the king; and so your "most powerful and convincing argument that a king cannot be judged by his people, because in his kingdom he has no peer or superior melts away. For you take for granted that which we do not grant by any means.

"In a democracy," you say, "the magistrates, being appointed by the people, may likewise be punished by the people for crime; in an aristocracy the nobles may be punished by their colleagues; but it is monstrous that a king in his own kingdom should be forced to plead for his life." What can you conclude but that they who set up a king over them are the most wretched and foolish of mankind? But pray what is the reason why the people may not punish a guilty king as well as a popularly appointed magistracy or the nobility? Do you think that all peoples who live under kings were so desperately in love with slavery that when they were free they chose vassalage, and to put themselves all and entirely under the despotism of one man — often an evil man, often a fool and all this in such wise that against a most outrageous tyrant, if such fall to their lot, they have not left to themselves in the laws or in nature herself any protection whatever for their safety, or asylum for themselves? Why then do they tender conditions to their kings when these first come to the throne, and even prescribe laws for them to govern by? Is it that they may suffer themselves to be the more trampled upon and laughed to scorn? Would a whole people ever so vilify themselves, so forsake their own interest, and fail their own cause, as to place all their hopes in one man, usually a most empty insubstantial one? Why, likewise, do kings swear an oath not to act in any manner contrary to law? In order, of course, that wretched mortals may learn to their deep sorrow that only kings may perjure themselves with impunity! This is the plain import of your wicked conclusions: "If a king that is elected promise even upon oath any thing which if he had not promised perhaps they would not have chosen him, yet if he refuse to abide by the agreement he cannot be judged by the people. Nay, though at his election he have sworn to his subjects that he will administer justice according to the laws of the realm, and that if he do not they shall be discharged of their oath of allegiance and he shall ipso facto abdicate, yet if he break his oath it is God and not man that must exact the penalty." I have transcribed these lines, not for their elegance, for they are barbarously expressed, nor because I think there needs any additional answer to them, for they answer themselves — they explode and damn themselves — by their barefaced falsehood and loathsomeness, but to recommend you to kings for your distinguished merits, in order that among so many places as there are at court they may procure for you some preferment or office that may be fit for you. Some are Chancellors of the Exchequer, some are cup-bearers some seneschals and stewards, some Masters of the Revels: you will most fittingly be their Master of the Perjuries. You shall not be, like the famous Petronius, Master of the Royal Literary Graces — you are too ignorant for that — but you shall be Lord High Master of the Royal Treacheries.

Yet, that all men may acknowledge how extreme folly in you is joined with extreme knavery, let us weigh a little more carefully those brilliant propositions which you have just asserted. "A king," you say, "though at his election he have sworn to his subjects that he will govern according to law," and that if he do not "they shall be discharged of their oath of allegiance, and he shall ipso facto abdicate," yet cannot be deposed or punished by them. Why not a king, pray, as well as a magistrate in a democracy? Because in a democracy the people do not transfer all their power to the magistrate. But do they then vest it all in a king, to whom they convey royal power over themselves for no longer than he uses it well? Therefore a king sworn to observe the laws, may, if he transgress them, be punished and deposed as well as a democratic magistrate. So you can make no more use of your all-powerful argument that the entire power has been transferred to the king, for it is hoist with your own petard.

Hear now another "most powerful and invincible reason why subjects" cannot judge their king, namely, "because he is bound by no law, being himself the sole lawgiver. But as I have so often proved this to be utterly false, even this invincible argument of yours, as well as the former, comes to nothing. For the rest, if a king is sometimes left unpunished for personal and private crimes, as fornication, adultery and the like, this is not because the people feel that he ought not in justice be punished, but because they are long-suffering — lest they be more hurt through disturbances occasioned by the king's death and the change of state, than profited by the vindication of individual rights. But when he begins to be injurious and insufferable to everybody, then indeed all nations have believed it lawful to slay the tyrant any how, condemned or uncondemned. Hence Marcus Tullius in his Second Philippic says of those who killed Caesar: "They were the first that ran through with their swords, not a man who affected to be king, but one who was actually settled in the government; which, as it was a glorious and godlike action, so it is set before us for our imitation." How unlike are you to him!

"Murder, adultery, injustice, are not regal and public, but private and personal crimes." Well said, toady! you have obliged all pimps and profligates at court by this expression. How charmingly by a single act do you play at once both parasite and pimp! "A king that is an adulterer or a murderer may yet govern well, and consequently ought not to be put to death, for with his life he must lose his kingdom; and it was never approved by God's laws or man's that for one and the same crime a man was to be punished twice." Shameless disreputable foulmouth! By the same reason the magistrates in a democracy or in an aristocracy ought never to be put to death, for fear of double punishment, nor any corrupt judge or senator, for with their lives they must lose their magistracy too.

As you have endeavored to take all power out of the people's hands, and vest it in the king, so you would all majesty too: a delegated transferred majesty if you will, but surely not their original primary majesty, any more than their original primary power. "A king," you say, "cannot commit treason against his people, but a people can against their king." And yet a king is what he is for the people only, not the people for him. Hence I infer that the whole body of the people, or a majority of them, must needs have greater power than the king. This you deny, and begin to cast up accounts. "He has more power than any one, than any two, than any three, than any ten, than any hundred, than any thousand, than any ten thousand." So be it. "More power than half the people." I will not deny that. "Add now half of the other half, will he not have more power than all those?" By no means!

Go on, O skilful logician, why do you take away the counting-board; do you not understand arithmetical progression? He begins to reckon after another manner, and asks "whether the king together with the nobility have not more power?" No, good Master Chapman Chop-and-Change, I deny that too, if by the nobility you mean the Lords only, because it may happen that among them there may be not one man deserving the name of noble: for it often falls out that among the Commons there are many far better and wiser men than among the Lords. When the majority or the better part of the people joins these, I should not scruple to say that they represent and stand for the whole people. "But if the king is not superior in power to all the people together, he is then king but of single persons, not of all taken together." True; no more he is, unless they are content he should be. Now balance your accounts, and you will find that by miscasting you have lost your principal.

"The English say that the right of majesty by its origin and its nature resides in the people; this would indeed bring on the overthrow of all states." What, of an aristocracy and of a democracy? But you say well, after all, for what if it should overthrow a gynaecocracy too, under which state, they say, you go near to being beaten at home? Would not the English do you a kindness in that, Master Faint-heart? But there is no hope for that; for it is most justly so ordered that since you would impose tyranny upon all mankind abroad, you yourself should live in a shameful impotent unmanly slavery at home.

"It behooves us English to tell you," you say, what we mean by the word People." There are a great many things which it would more behoove you to be told; for of things that more immediately concern you, you seem altogether ignorant, and never to have learnt or even been able to understand more than the alphabet. But this you suppose you know, that by the word people we mean the common people only, because we "have abolished the House of Lords." And yet this is the very thing that shows that under the word people we comprehend all our citizens, of what order and degree soever; in that we have established a single supreme Commons' House only, in which the lords also have by law the right to vote as a part of the people, not in their own right as they did before, but as representing those constituencies by which they have been chosen.

Then you inveigh against the common people as being "blind and dull, ignorant of the art of governing"; you say there is "nothing more empty and changeable than they, nothing more fickle and excitable." All which is very true of yourself, and it is true likewise of the rabble, but not of the middle sort, amongst whom the wisest men and most skilful in affairs are generally found; the rest are most commonly diverted, on the one hand by luxury and wealth, on the other by want and poverty, from achieving excellence, and from the study of laws and government.

"There are many ways" now, you say, "by which kings are established, so as not to be beholden to the people at all on that score," and first "those who hold their kingdom by inheritance." But those nations must certainly are slaves, and born to slavery, who acknowledge a lord and master so absolute that they believe themselves to have fallen to his lot by inheritance, without any consent of their own. Surely they cannot be held to be citizens, or freemen, or freeborn, nor are they to be accounted as having a body politic, but must be reckoned among the goods and chattels, estates and properties of their owner and his son and heir; for as to ownership I see no difference betwixt them and slaves or cattle. Secondly, you say: "He that carves out a kingdom with his sword cannot acknowledge the people as the originator of the power he has extended or usurped." But what we are talking about now is not a conquering king, but a conquered king; what a conqueror may do, we will discourse elsewhere; do you keep to your subject.

Whereas you repeatedly ascribe to kings the ancient right of the paterfamilias, in order to fetch thence "a model of the unlimited power of kings," I have shown already over and over that there is no likeness at all betwixt them. And that very Aristotle whom you keep prating about would have taught you as much even at the beginning of his Politics, if you had read it. There he says that they judge amiss who think there is but little difference betwixt a king and the head of a household: "For a kingdom is different from a household, not in number only, but in kind." For when villages grew to be towns and cities, that right of the king as head of the household vanished by degrees, and was recognized no more. Hence Diodorus in his first book says that anciently kingdoms were transmitted not to the former kings' sons, but to those whose services to the people were most eminent. And Justin says: "Originally the government of peoples and races was by kings, who were exalted to that pinnacle of majesty, not by soliciting the people's support, but for a moderation well regarded among good men."

Whence it is manifest that in the very beginning of nations, paternal and hereditary government was soon replaced by personal worth and the people's right. This is the most natural reason and cause, and was the true rise of royal power. For it was for this very reason that at first men entered into societies: not that any one might insult over all the rest, but that in case any should injure another, law might not be wanting, and a judge between man and man, whereby the injured might be protected or at least avenged. When men were at first scattered asunder and straying about, some wise and eloquent man brought them over into civil life; "chiefly," say you, "that when he had got them gathered together he might exercise dominion over them." Perhaps you meant this of Nimrod, who is said to have been the first tyrant, or else it is your own wickedness only, which could have no application to those great and high-souled men of yore — a mere fiction of yours, not asserted, as far as I know, by anyone before you. For it is delivered by the memorials of all the ancients that those first founders of cities had in view not any profit or power of their own, but the advantage and safety of mankind.

One thing I cannot pass by, with which I suppose you intended to decorate the rest of this chapter as with some motto in mosaic inlay. "If a Consul," say you, "had been required to come to trial while still in office, there must have been a Dictator created for that purpose;" though at the beginning you had said that "for that very purpose the Consul's colleague was provided." Just so your statements always agree with one another, and reveal on almost every page how whatever you say or write upon any subject is of no weight or importance. "Under the ancient Anglo-Saxon kings," you say, "it was never the custom to call the people to the national councils." If any of our own countrymen had asserted such a thing, I could without much trouble have convinced him that he was in error. But I am not so much concerned at this assertion of yours, which wanders about in foreign parts, and wanders in its mind too about our affairs. This in effect is all you say of the right of kings in general. The many things that remain — for you much too often digress — I omit: things that either rest on no foundation or are nothing to the purpose; for it is not my design to be thought your equal in talkativeness.

IF YOU had published your own opinion, Salmasius, concerning the right of kings in general, without insulting anyone, albeit amid this revolution in England, yet while you did but use your own liberty to write, there was no reason why any Englishman should be displeased with you, nor would you have been less successful in establishing the opinion you maintain. For if it be a positive command both of Moses and of Christ "That all men whatsoever, whether Spaniards, French, Italians, Germans, English, or Scots, should be subject to their kings, whether good or bad," as you asserted before (page 127), what business had you, a foreigner, and unknown, to babble about our laws, and read us professorial lectures out of them as if they were your own papers and miscellanies, when all the while you had taught us already in a great many words that our laws, be they how they will, ought to give way to the laws of God?

But now it is apparent that you have undertaken the defence of this royal cause not so much out of your own inclination as because you were hired, partly for payment — and a good round payment too, considering your employer's finances — and partly by hope of some greater reward hereafter; hired, I say, to rend and tear with your disreputable book the English, who trouble none of their neighbors, and meddle with their own matters only. Were it not so, is it credible that any man should be so shameless and so mad as not to hesitate, though he be a stranger far away, to plunge into our affairs for nothing, and even attach himself to a party? What the devil is it to you what the English do amongst themselves? What would you have, Olus? what do you mean? Have you no concerns of your own at home? I wish you had the same concerns that the much celebrated Olus had in the Epigram; and perhaps so you have; you thoroughly deserve them. Or did that hotspur your wife, who is said to have spurred you — willing horse! — to write all this stuff to please the exiled Charles, — did she expect for you some more profitable professorship in England, and God knows what fees, at Charles's return? But assure yourselves, Madame la femme et Monsieur le mari, that England has no place for a wolf or for the Seigneur of a wolf. No wonder, then, that you have so often spit so much venom at our English mastiffs! It were better for you to return to those illustrious titles of yours in France: first to that hungerstarved Seigneurie of St. Loup, and next to that sacré Council of the Most Christian King; you are too far abroad from your own country for a counsellor. But I see full well that France desires neither you nor your counsel, and did not, even when you were back a few years ago, and were beginning to smell out and hunt after a Cardinal's kitchen. She is right, by my troth, she is right, and can willingly allow you, you French capon, with your mankind wife and your desks chock-full of emptiness, to wander about, till somewhere in creation you light upon a dole bountiful enough for a grammarian-cavalier or illustrious hippo-critic, — always supposing any king or state has a mind to bid highest for a vagabond pedant that is on sale. But here am I that will bid for you; whether you are a merchantable commodity or not, and what you are worth, we shall see at once. You say: "The parricides assert that the kingdom of England is of a composite kind, not purely royal." In the time of Edward the Sixth, Sir Thomas Smith, a countryman of ours, a good lawyer and statesman, whom you will not call a parricide, asserts the same thing near the beginning of his book on the commonwealth of England. He states that it is true not of our government only, but of almost all others — this upon the opinion of Aristotle; and that otherwise no government can subsist. But as if you thought it a sin to say anything without unsaying it, you repeat your former threadbare contradictions. You say: "There neither is nor ever was any nation that did not understand by the name of king that power which is inferior to God alone, and which has God for its sole judge." And yet, a little after, you confess that "The name of king was formerly given to such powers and magistrates as had not a full and unlimited right, but one depending upon the people's will," for example "the suffetes of the Carthaginians, the judges of the Hebrews, the kings of the Lacedaemonians," and, lastly, "of Aragon. Isn t this a pretty piece of self-consistency?

Then you muster out of Aristotle five several sorts of monarchies, only one of which possessed that right which you say is common to all kings. Concerning this I have said already more than once that no instance of it, either cited by Aristotle or anywhere else, has existed. The other four kingships, he clearly shows, were limited by laws, and subject to them. The first of these was that of the Lacedaemonians, which of the four limited monarchies did in his opinion best deserve the name of kingship. The second, of a kind foreign to the Greeks, was lasting only in that it was limited, and that the people willingly submitted to it; for according to Aristotle's own opinion in his fifth book, once the people are unwilling, whatever king retains the throne against their will, will instantly be no king, but a tyrant. The same is to be said of his third sort of kings, which he calls Aesymnetes, who were chosen by the people, most commonly for a certain time only, and for certain purposes; such, or nearly such, were the Roman dictators. The fourth is the kind that reigned in the heroic days, upon whom for their extraordinary merits the people of their own accord conferred the government, but yet limited; nor yet did these retain the throne unless the people were willing. And these four sorts of kingship, he says, differ from tyranny in no respect more than in this: that these governments are with the consent of the people, and tyranny against their will. The fifth sort of royal government, finally, called παμβασιλεία, and endowed with the supreme power, which you pretend to be the right of all kings, is utterly condemned by the philosopher, as neither profitable nor just nor natural — unless some people should be able to endure a government of this kind, and withal should confer it upon such as outshine all others in virtue. These things lie open and accessible to anyone in the third book of the Politics. But you, that for once in your life you might appear witty and florid, I suppose, pleased yourself by likening "these five sorts of monarchy to the five zones" of the world. Between the two extremes of royal power three more temperate kinds appear to be interposed, even as those which lie in the midst between the torrid and the frigid zones." Pretty wit! what lovely comparisons you always make for us! Away with you, doublequick, whither you banish "absolute monarchy," to the frigid zone, which after your arrival will be more than doubly frigid. Meanwhile we await from you, our modern Archimedes, that wondrous globe which you describe, in which there be two extreme zones, one torrid and the other frigid, and three temperate ones between.

"The kings of the Lacedaemonians," you say, "might lawfully be imprisoned, but it was not lawful to put them to death." Why not? Is it because the officers of justice and some foreign soldiers, being surprised at the novelty of the thing, thought it not lawful to lead King Agis to his execution, though condemned to die? Yea, even the Spartan people took his death ill, not because it was a king that was condemned to die, but because he was a good man and beloved by them, and had been hunted to his death by a faction of wealthy men. Says Plutarch: "Agis was the first king that was put to death by the ephors"; in which words he tells us only what actually was done, not what lawfully might be done. For it were childish to imagine that they who may lawfully bring a king to trial, and imprison him, may not also lawfully put him to death.

At last you gird yourself up to tackle the law of English kings. "In England," you say, "there was always one king at a time." This you say because you had said before that "unless a king be sole in the government, he cannot be a king." If so, some who I used to think had been kings of England were not really kings; for — to omit many of our Saxon kings, who had either sons or brothers partners with them in the government — it is not disputed that King Henry II, of the Norman stock, reigned jointly with his son. "Let them show," say you, "any kingdom under the government of a single person who has not absolute power, in some kingdoms, however, more loosened, in others more tightened." Ass, do you show us any absolute power that is loosened; is not that power that is absolute the supreme power? How can it then be both supreme and loosened? Whatsoever kings you shall acknowledge to be invested with a loosened power, those I will clearly prove to have no absolute power; and consequently to be inferior to a people free by nature, which, as it is its own lawmaker, can loosen or tighten the power of the king.

Whether the whole of Britain was anciently governed by kings or not is uncertain; it is most likely that they employed now one form of government, now another, according to the exigencies of the time. Whence Tacitus says: "The Britons anciently were under kings; now their chiefs distract them into parties and factions." When the Romans left them, they were about forty years without kings; that "perpetual kingship" which you allege had therefore no existence in ancient times. I positively assert that their kingship was not hereditary, which is evident both from the succession of their kings, and from their way of creating them; for the approval of the people is asked in express words. When the king has taken the accustomed oath, the archbishop, stepping to the four sides of the platform erected for the purpose, asks the body of the people four several times in these words, "Will ye consent to have this man your king?" Just as if he said, Roman fashion, "Do ye desire, do ye command, this man to reign?" Which would be needless if the kingdom were by law hereditary.

But with kings usurpation passes very frequently for law and right. You strive to ground Charles's royal right, who was so often conquered himself, upon the right of conquest. William, surnamed "the Conqueror," forsooth, subdued us. But they who are not strangers to our history know full well that the strength of the English nation was not so broken in that one fight at Hastings but that they might easily have renewed the war. Yet they chose rather to accept a king than to endure a conqueror and a tyrant: they swear therefore to William to be his liegemen, and he likewise swears to them at the altar to conduct himself towards them in all respects as a good king ought. When he broke his word, and the English betook themselves again to their arms, William, mistrusting his strength, renewed upon the Gospels his oath to keep the ancient laws of England. Therefore, if after that he miserably oppressed the English, he did it not by right of conquest, but by right of perjury. Besides, it is certain that many ages ago the conquerors and conquered coalesced into one and the same people; so that that right of conquest, if any such there ever were, must needs have been long ago barred by antiquity. His own words at his death, which I report as transcribed from the Caen Book — a thoroughly trustworthy document — remove all doubt. "I appoint no man," says he, "heir of the kingdom of England." By which words that right of conquest and that right of inheritance were at once and together officially bewailed as dead, and buried together with the dead Conqueror.

I see now that you have got a place at court, as I foretold: you are become High Treasurer and Steward of Court Craft; and the following passage you seem to write as if by virtue of your office, magnificent Sir. "If any among preceding kings, being thereunto compelled by factions of great men or seditions among the common people, have remitted somewhat of his right, that cannot hinder a successor from reclaiming it unto himself." A proper reminder! If therefore at any time our ancestors have through neglect lost any thing that was their right, will that hinder us their posterity? If they were willing to promise for themselves to be slaves, they could make no such promise for us, who shall always retain the same right of setting ourselves free that they had of enslaving themselves to any whomsoever.

You wonder "how it comes to pass that a king of Great Britain must nowadays be looked upon as merely a magistrate of the kingdom, whereas they who govern other kingdoms in Christendom wield plenary and unlimited authority." For Scotland I refer you to Buchanan; for your native France (where you seem a stranger), to Hotman's Franco-Gallia and Gerard the historian of France: for the rest, to other authors, of whom none as far as I know were Independents: out of whom you might have learned concerning the right of kings a lesson quite diiferent than what you teach.

Not being able to claim for the kings of England a tyrannical power by right of conquest, you now make trial by right of toadyism. Kings proclaim openly, you say, that they reign "by the Grace of God." What of it? What if they were to proclaim that they are Gods? They might, I believe, easily get you for a priest! So the Pontiff of Canterbury made public pretence to archbishop it "by the Providence of God." Are you such a fool that you refuse to acknowledge the Pope as king in the Church in order to establish the king a more than Pope in the State? But in the statutes of the realm, you say, the king is called "our Lord the king." Flunkey, doorkeeper slave at the king's levee, you are turned out on a sudden marvelously skilled in the names in our statutes that you call out to your royal owner! But what you know not is that many are called lords who are not lords; you know not how unfair it is to determine of the right and truth of things from titles of honor, not to say of flattery. Make the same inference from the Parliament's being called "the King's Parliament; for it is called the king's bridle too, and the king is not on that account any more master of his Parliament than a horse is master of his bridle. But "why is it not a fair inference that Parliament is the king's, since he summons it?" I will tell you. The Roman Senate's being summoned by a Consul did not make him master of that assembly either. And so, too, when the king summons Parliament, he does it by virtue of and in discharge of his duty and of the office which he has received from the people, that he may advise even with them he summons, about the difficult business of the kingdom, not his own; or if any can be called his own, this they have always been wont to move last, and not at the king's pleasure, but even at the pleasure of Parliament. And they whom it concerns to know this, know very well that Parliament anciently might by law meet twice in the course of a year, whether summoned or not. But "the laws too are called the king's laws." These phrases, to be sure, are trappings and gewgaws for a king, but a king of England can of himself make no law, for he was appointed not to make laws, but to keep the laws which the people have made.

And you yourself here admit that "Parliament meets to make laws." Wherefore the law is also called the Law of the Land, and the Common Law. Whence king Aethelstan in the Preamble to his laws, speaking to all the people, says: I have bestowed all things "upon you according to your own law." And in the form of the oath whereby the kings of England were wont to bind themselves before they were made kings, the people formally demand of them: "Do you grant those just laws which the people shall choose? The king answers, "I grant." And when you say: "While Parliament is not in session, the king governs the whole state of the kingdom fully and entirely by royal right," you again stray wide of the truth by the length and breadth of all England. For he can determine nothing of much moment with respect to either peace or war; nor even in administering justice can he interfere with the decisions of the courts. It is on this account the judges swear that in performing their judicial functions they will do nothing but according to law, even though the king himself by word, or injunction, yes, or letter under his own seal, should command otherwise. Hence it is that the king is often said in our law to be "an infant," and to possess his rights and dignities only as a child or a ward does his: see the Mirror of Justices, Chapter 4, Section 22. Hence too that common saying amongst us, "The king can do no wrong"; which you interpret in this rascally fashion: "That is no wrong which the king does, because he is not liable to be punished for it." From this single interpretation would not anyone see through the man's astonishing impudence and villainy?

"It belongs to the head," you say, "to command, and not to the members; the king is the head of the parliament." Would you argue so flippantly if you were wise in heart or had any whiff or savor of wit?

You are mistaken again (but there is no end of your mistakes) in not distinguishing the king's Councillors from the Houses of Parliament; for the king was so bound that he might choose not even all of his Council, and none to be of the House of Lords unless approved by the rest, while as for choosing anyone to the House of Commons, he never so much as pretended to it. They whom the people appointed to that service were chosen severally for their respective constituencies by the votes of all; I speak now of things universally known, and therefore I am the briefer. But you say: "It is false that Parliament was instituted by the people, as the worshippers of Saint Independency assert." Now I see why you strive with so much violence to subvert the papacy: you carry another papacy in your belly, as we say. For what else should you be in labor of, you wife of your wife, you he-wolf pregnant by a she-wolf, but either a monster or some new sort of papacy? At least you make he-saints and she-saints at your pleasure, as if you were a genuine Pope; you absolve kings too, of sin; and as if you had laid low the Pope your enemy, you deck and enrich yourself with his spoils. But whereas you have not yet quite prostrated the Pope till the second and third and perhaps the fourth and fifth part of your book de Primatu come out, and whereas this will bore many poor mortals to death ere you shall put down the Pope by it, let it suffice you in the meantime, I beseech you, to climb up to only an Antipapacy. For besides that Independency that you deride, there is another she-saint that you have canonized in good earnest, that is, Royal Tyranny; you shall therefore be Supreme Pontiff of Saint Tyranny Royal; and that you may want none of the Papal titles, you shall be even "a Servant of the Servants," not of God, but of the court; for that curse pronounced upon Canaan seems to stick as close to you as your shirt.

You call the people "a beast." What are you then yourself? For neither that Sacré Council nor your Holy Wolf can exempt you, its Sire and Seigneur, from being one of the people, nay, of the rabble rout; nor can make you other than the loathsome beast you are. Indeed the Prophets in Holy Scripture shadow forth to us the monarchy and dominion of great kings by the name and under the figure of a great beast.

You say: "There is no mention of a Parliament held under the kings before William." It is not worth while to quibble about a French word; the thing was always in being, and you yourself admit that in Saxon times it used to be called "Concilium Sapientum," Witena-gemot, or Meeting of the Wise Men. And there are wise men among the common people as well as among the nobility. But "in the statute of Merton, in the twentieth of Henry the Third, mention is made of earls and Barons only." Thus you are always imposed upon by words, who yet have frittered away your whole life in nothing else but words. For we know very well that in that age the word Baron was applied not only to the Wardens of the Cinque Ports, and to members from cities, but sometimes even to tradesmen; and doubdess all members of Parliament, though commoners never so much, might then with all the greater reason be called Barons. For the Statute of Marlbridge and most of the other statutes declare in express words that in the fifty-second year of the same king the commoners as well as the lords were summoned. These commoners King Edward the Third, in the Preamble of the Statute Staple, as you very learnedly quote it for me, calls "Comitatuum Magnates," the great men of the counties, those, to wit, "that had come out of the several cities to serve the whole county." And these it were that constituted the House of Commons, and neither were lords, nor could be. Again, a book more ancient than those statutes, called Modus habendi Parlamenta, or The Manner of Holding Parliaments, tells us that the King and the Commons may hold a Parliament and enact laws though the Earls and the Bishops are absent, but that the King with the Earls and the Bishops cannot do so in the absence of the Commons. And there is a reason given for it, namely, that before any Earls or Bishops were made, kings yet held Parliaments and Councils with their people; then, too, the Earls serve for themselves only, the Commons each for his constituency. Therefore the Commons are felt to be present in the name of the whole nation, and in that name to be more powerful and more noble than the Lords, and altogether to be preferred.

But "the power of judicature," you say, "never was vested in the House of Commons." Nor was it ever vested in the King of England. Remember, though, that originally all power proceeded, and still does proceed from the people. Which Marcus Tullius excellently well shows in his oration Of the Agrarian Law: "As it is fitting that all powers, authorities, and commissions proceed from the people as a whole, this is especially true of those which are ordained and appointed for the people's benefit and interest. In such a case on the one hand the people as a whole pick out whomever they think will best advance their interests, and on the other hand each individual by electioneering and by his vote may pave the way to receiving the appointment."

Here you see the true origin of Parliaments — one much more ancient than the Saxon chronicles. Whilst we may dwell in such a light of truth and wisdom, you labor in vain to spread around us the gloom of the Dark Ages. Let no one think I say this as if I would derogate in the least from the authority and prudence of our ancestors, who certainly went further in the enacting of good laws than either those ages or their own wit and learning seem to have been capable of. And though they seldom imposed laws that were not good, yet, being conscious of the ignorance and infirmity of human nature, they chose to hand down to posterity as the foundation of all laws, this principle, which likewise all our lawyers recognize: that if any law or custom be contrary to the law of God or of nature, or, in fine, to reason, it shall not be held a valid law. Whence you may learn that even though you shall perchance succeed in finding in our law some proclamation or statute whereby tyrannical power is ascribed to the king, yet this, since it would be repugnant to the will of God, to nature, and to reason, is repealed among us by that general and primary law of ours which I have cited, and is null and void. But indeed you will find in our law no such right of kings. Since it is plain therefore that the power of judicature was originally in the people themselves, and that the English never did by any Lex Regia part with it to the king (for the kings of England neither use to judge any man, nor can do it, otherwise than according to laws already provided and approved: Fleta, Book 1, Chap. 17), it follows that this power remains yet whole and entire in the people themselves. For that it was either never conveyed away to the House of Peers, or if it were, that it may be recovered from them again by law, you yourself will not deny.

But "it is in the king's power," you say, "to make a village into a borough, and that into a city, and consequently the king does appoint those that constitute the Lower House." But I say towns and boroughs are more ancient than kings, and the people are the people, though they should live in the open fields.

And now we take huge delight in your Anglicisms, "County Court," "The Turn," "Hundred": you have learnt with amazing docility to count your hundred Jacobuses in English!

Who provided" Salmasius with his Hundred,
And "taught the magpie to attempt our words?
His Master of Arts was his guts," and Jacobuses
One Hundred, the guts of the exiled king's money-bag.
"For if the hope of treacherous coin shall gleam,"
The very man who but now threatened to puff away
With a single breath the Primacy of the Pope as Antichrist
Will of his own accord "sing a tune" to praise a Cardinal.

Next you subjoin a long discourse of the Earls and the Barons, to show that the king created them all; which we readily grant, and for that reason they were most commonly at the king's beck; wherefore we have done well to take care that for the future they shall not be judges of a free people. You affirm that "the power of calling parliaments as often as he pleases, and of dissolving them when he pleases, has belonged to the king time out of mind." Whether you, mercenary foreign buffoon, who transcribe what some fugitives dictate to you, or the explicit words of our own laws are more to be trusted in this matter, we shall inquire hereafter. "But," say you, "there is another argument, and an invincible one, to prove the power of the kings of England superior to that of the Parliament. The king's power is continuous and of course, and by itself administers the government without the Parliament; that of the Parliament is out of course, and limited to particulars only, and incapable of enacting anything valid without the king." Where should I say the great force of this argument lies hid? In the words "of course and continuous"? Why, many inferior magistrates, whom we call justices of the peace, have a power of course and continuous. Have they therefore the supreme power? And I have said already that the king's power was committed to him by the people for the definite purpose that by the authority entrusted to him he should see that nothing were done contrary to law, and that he might watch over our laws, not lay his own upon us; and consequently that the king has no power but in and through the courts of the realm; nay, all the ordinary power is rather the people's, who determine all controversies themselves by juries of twelve men. And hence it is, that when a defendant is asked in court, "How will you be tried? he answers always, according to law and custom, "By God and my country" — not by God and the King or the King's deputy. But the authority of the Parliament, which indeed and in truth is the supreme power of the people committed to that senate, this power, I say, if it may be called extraordinary, out of order, or out of course, must be so called by reason of its eminence only. And another reason: our Estates in Parliament, as everybody knows, are called Orders, and therefore cannot properly be said to be out of order; and they have a continuous control and authority, if not in act, or actually, as the phrase goes, yet potentially and virtually, over all courts and ordinary powers, — and this without the king.

And now it seems our barbarous terms grate upon your critical ears, forsooth! whereas, if I had leisure, or it were worth the trouble, I could reckon up so many barbarisms of yours in this one book that if you were to be whipped for them as you deserve, all schoolboys' ferules must surely be broken upon you; nor would you receive so many pieces of gold as that worst of poets did aforetime, but many more boxes on the ear. You say: "It is a prodigy more monstrous than all the most absurd opinions in the world put together, that the madmen should make a distinction betwixt the king's person and his power." I will not quote what every author has said upon this subject; but if by person you mean the man, then Chrysostom, who was no madman, might have taught you that the person might without absurdity be distinguished from the power; for he explains the aposde's command to be subject to the higher powers, as meant of the thing, the power itself, and not of the man. And why may not I say that a king who acts any thing contrary to law, acts so far forth as a private person or a tyrant, and not as a king invested with legal authority? If you do not know that there may be in one and the same man more persons or capacities than one, and that those capacities may in thought and conception be severed from the man himself, you are altogether ignorant both of Latinity and of common sense. But this you say to absolve kings from all sin, and to make us believe that you are invested with that Primacy you have snatched from the Pope.

"The king," you say, "is supposed incapable of crime, because no punishment follows upon any crime of his." Whoever therefore is not punished offends not: it is not the theft but the punishment that makes the thief! Salmasius the Grammarian commits no solecisms now, because he has pulled his hand from under the ferule! When you have overthrown the Pope, let these, then, be the canons of your pontificate, or at least your indulgences, whether you shall choose to be called the High Priest of Saint Tyranny, or of St. Slavery. I pass by the foul abusive language which at the last of your chapter you have heaped upon "the state of the English Commonwealth and Church"; it is common to such as you, contemptible varlet, to rail most at those things that are most praiseworthy.

But that I may not seem to have asserted anything rashly concerning the right of the king among us, or rather concerning the people's right over the king, I will not grudge the task to cite from our records themselves a few things indeed of many, yet such as will make it evident that the English lately tried their king according to the settled laws of the realm and the customs of their ancestors. After the Romans quitted this island, the Britons for about forty years were sui juris, and without kings; of those whom they first set up, some they put to death. Gildas reprehends them for that, upon a very different ground from yours, — not for killing their kings, but for killing them without trial, or, to use his own words, "without an inquiry into the truth." Vortigern, as Nennius informs us, the most ancient of all historians next to Gildas, was for his incestuous marriage with his own daughter condemned "by St. Germain and a general council of the Britons," and his son Vortimer set up in his stead. This came to pass not long after St. Augustine's death; which easily disproves your unfounded statement that it was a Pope, namely Zachary, who first asserted the lawfulness of judging kings. About the year of our Lord 600, Morcantius, who then reigned in Wales, was by Oudoceus, bishop of Llandaff, condemned to exile for the murder of his uncle, though he bought off the sentence by bestowing certain landed estates upon the church.

Come we now to the Saxons; since their laws are extant I shall quote none of their deeds. Remember that the Saxons were sprung from Germans, who never gave their kings absolute or unlimited power, and who used to hold a council of the whole tribe upon the more weighty affairs of government, whence we may perceive that Parliament, the name itself only excepted, flourished in high authority even among the ancestors of the Saxons. By these it is called, in fact, Council of the Wise Men, all the way from those very times down to the time of Ethelbert, who, says Bede, "with a Council of Wise Men made decrees patterned upon those of the Romans." So Edwin king of the Northumbrians, and Ina king of the West Saxons, made new laws, "having held a Council with their wise men and the elders of the people." Other laws king Alfred likewise promulgated "from an assemblage of his wisest men," and he says: "All of these decreed their observance." From these and many other like passages it is clear as day that chosen men, even from amongst the common people, were members of the supreme councils — unless we must believe that no men but the nobility are wise.

We have likewise a very ancient law-book, called the Mirror of Justices, in which we are told that the early Saxons, when they had subdued Britain and set up kings, required an oath of them to submit to the judgment of the law as much as any of their subjects, Chap. 1, Sect. 2. In the same place it is said that it is but just and right that the king have his peers in Parliament to take cognizance of wrongs done by the king or the queen; and that a law made in king Alfred's time required Parliament to be held twice a year at London, or oftener if need were: which law, when through neglect it grew into disuse, was renewed by two re-enactments in King Edward Ill's time. And in another ancient manuscript, called The Manner of Parliament, we read: "If the king shall dissolve Parliament before it have disposed of all those things wherefore the council was summoned, he is guilty of perjury, and shall be deemed to have broken his coronation oath." For how does he grant, as he is sworn to do, those good laws which the people chose, if he hinders the people from choosing them, either by summoning Parliaments seldomer, or by dissolving them sooner, than the people's business requires? That oath which the kings of England take at their coronation has always been looked upon by our lawyers as a most sacred law. And what remedy can be found for greatest dangers to the state (which is the very end of summoning Parliaments) if that great and august assembly may be dissolved at the pleasure (oftentimes) of a silly and headstrong king?

To absent himself from Parliament is certainly less than to dissolve it; and yet by our laws, as the aforementioned Manner reports them, the King neither can nor ought to absent himself from Parliament unless he be quite ill, nor even then unless his body have been inspected by twelve peers of the realm, who may present in Parliament the evidence of his indisposition. Do slaves behave thus to a master? On the other hand the House of Commons, without which Parliament cannot be held, may, though summoned by the King, absent itself, and, having withdrawn, expostulate with the king concerning maladministration, as the same book has it.

But — and this is the greatest thing of all — among the laws of King Edward commonly called the Confessor there is a very excellent law relating to the kingly duty: which if the king do not discharge as he ought, then, says the law, "he shall not retain the name of king." Lest these words should not be sufficiently understood, it subjoins the example of Chilperic king of the Franks, whom the people for that cause deposed. That by this law a wicked king is liable to punishment was betokened by that sword of Saint Edward, called Curtana, which the Earl Palatine used to carry in the procession at a coronation, "in token," says our historian Matthew Paris, "that he has authority by law to restrain and control even the king if he go astray": but punishment with a sword is hardly other than capital. This law, together with the other laws of good King Edward, did William the Conqueror himself ratify in the fourth year of his reign, and in a very full council of the English held at Verulam did with a most solemn oath confirm. By so doing he not only extinguished his right of conquest, if he ever had any over us, but even subjected himself to judgment according to the tenor of this very law. His son Henry also swore to the observance of king Edward's laws — this among the rest, and upon those terms only was he chosen king while his elder brother Robert was alive. The same oath was taken by all succeeding kings before they were crowned. Hence, saith our ancient and famous lawyer Bracton, in his first book, Chapter viii,

There is no king in the case Where will rules and law takes not place.

Since our king therefore is liable to be judged, whether by the name of tyrant or of king, it ought not be difficult to say who are his lawful judges. Nor will it be amiss to consult the same authors upon that point. Bracton, Book II, Chap, xvi; Fleta, Book I, Chap, xvii: "The king has his superiors in the government: the law, which made him king, and his court, to wit, the Earls and the Barons. Comites (earls) are as much as to say the king's fellows; and he that has a fellow has a master; and therefore, if the king will be without a bridle, that is, lawless, they ought to bridle him." That the Commons are comprehended in the word Barons has been shown already; nay, our old law-books tell us quite generally that they were called Peers of Parliament: the Manner of Parliament, especially, says: "From all the peers of the realm there shall be chosen five and twenty," of whom there shall be "five knights, five citizens," that is, representatives of cities, "and five burgesses. Two knights of the shire, furthermore, have a greater vote in granting and rejecting than the greatest Earl of England." And it is but reasonable they should, for they vote for some whole county or borough or other constituency, the Earls for themselves only. And who can fail to see that those Earls "by Patent" as you call them, and Earls "by Writ," since we have now none that hold by ancient feudal tenure, are less fit than anyone else to try the king who conferred their honors upon them? Since therefore by our law, as appears by that old book, The Mirror, the king has his peers, who in Parliament have cognizance and jurisdiction "if the king have done wrong to any of his people"; and if it is notorious, as it is, that any individual subject may even in inferior courts sue the king for damages, how much more just, how much more necessary is it that if the king have done wrong to his whole people, there should be such as have authority not only to bridle him and keep him within bounds, but to judge and punish him? For that government must needs be very ill and very ridiculously constituted, in which remedy is provided for even private persons in case of the least injuries done by the king, and no remedy, no redress for the greatest, no care taken for the safety of the whole; no provision made but that the king, who by law could not hurt even one of his subjects, may, without any law to the contrary, ruin all of them together!

Yet since I have shown that it is neither fit nor proper for the Earls to be the king's judges, it follows that that jurisdiction does wholly, and by the best possible right, belong to the Commons, who are Peers of the realm, and Barons as well, and are vested with the power and authority of all the people committed to them. Now as we find it expressly written in our law, which I have already cited, that the Commons alone, together with the king, made a good Parliament without the Lords or the Bishops, because Kings used to hold Parliaments with their Commons alone before either Lords or Bishops came into existence; by the very same reason the Commons apart shall have a power that is sovereign, and independent of the king, and capable of judging the king himself; because before there ever was a king, they in the name of the whole body of the nation had been wont to hold Councils and Parliaments, to judge, to pass laws, yea to make kings: not that these might lord it over the people, but that they might manage the people's business. But if the king instead shall try to do them wrong and crush them into servitude, then by the express tenor of our law the name of king remains not in him; he is no king; and if he be no king, why should we have his Peers far to seek? For being then by all good men adjudged already and actually a tyrant, there are none but who are Peers good enough for him, and a court capable enough to pronounce sentence of death upon him.

These things being so, I think that by means of the many authorities and laws which have been cited I have sufficiently proved what I undertook, to wit, that since authority to try the King is by very good right lodged with the Commons, and since they have actually put the king to death for the mischief which without any hope of amendment he had done both in church and in state, — in view of all this, they have acted justly and regularly, for the interest of the State, and in the discharge of their trust, in a manner becoming their dignity, and, finally, according to the law of the land. And here I cannot but congratulate myself upon our ancestors, who founded this State with no less prudence and liberty than did the most excellent of the ancient Romans or Grecians; and they likewise, if they have any knowledge of our affairs, cannot but congratulate themselves upon their posterity, who, when almost reduced to slavery, yet with such wisdom and courage reclaimed that state, so wisely founded upon so much liberty, from a king's outrageous despotism.

I THINK it by this time sufficiently evident that the king of England may be judged even by the laws of England, and that he has his lawful judges; which was the thing to be proved. How do you go on? — for to your mere repetitions I shall not repeat my answers. "Now even from the very business for which Parliaments are wont to be summoned, it appears that the king is above the Parliament. The way to this demonstration," you say, "slopes down steep and easy ahead." Let it slope as steep as you will, for you shall instantly feel yourself hurled down it headlong. "The Parliament," you say, "is wont to be assembled upon affairs of uncommon weight, wherein the safety of the realm and of the people is concerned." If therefore the king call Parliament to attend to the people's business, not his own, nor to settle even that but by the consent and at the discretion of those he has called, what is he more than the people's servant and agent? For without the suffrages of them that are delegated by the people he cannot resolve the least thing with relation either to others or even to himself. Which also goes to show that it is the king's duty to call Parliaments whenever and as often as the people ask, since it is the people's business, and not the king's, that is to be treated of by that assembly, and to be ordered as the people wish.

For although the king's assent also were asked customarily out of respect, and although in lesser matters, concerning the welfare of private persons only, he might refuse it, and use that form, "The king will advise," yet in affairs that concerned the public safety and the liberty of all the people he had no negative voice whatsoever; for this would have been both against his coronation oath, which was as binding upon him as the most rigorous law, and against the chief article of Magna Charta, chap. 29: "We will not refuse nor will we delay, right and justice to any man." Shall it be out of the king's power to refuse right and justice, and shall it therefore be in his power to refuse the enacting of just laws? Shall it be out of his power to refuse justice to any man, and shall it therefore be in his power to refuse it to all men? Shall it be out of his power to refuse it in any inferior court, and therefore be in his power to refuse it in the highest court of all? Or can any king be so arrogant as to suppose that he — one person — knows what is just and profitable better than the whole body of the people? Especially, since "he is created and chosen for this very end and purpose, to do justice to all," as Bracton says, lib. iii. c. 9 — that is, according to those laws which "the people" have chosen. Hence this passage in our records, 7 H. IV, Rot. Parl. num. 59: "There is no royal prerogative that derogates aught from justice and equity." And formerly when kings have refused to confirm Acts of Parliament, to wit, Magna Charta, and others the like, our ancestors often have brought them to it by force of arms; nor yet are our lawyers of opinion that those acts are on that account any less valid, or any less the law of the land, since the king was forced to assent to decrees which he ought in justice to have assented to voluntarily. Again, while striving to prove that kings of other nations have been as much under the power of their Sanhedrin or Senate or Council as our kings were, you do not argue us into slavery, but them into liberty. In which you keep on doing over again what you have done from the very beginning of your discourse, and what incompetent practitioners do — argue unawares against their own side of the case.

We grant, you think, that "the king, wherever he absent himself, yet is supposed still to be present in his Parliament by virtue of his power, insomuch that whatever is transacted there is supposed to be done by the king himself. Then as if you had made a great haul, or, for that matter, a pittance either, and tickled as you are with the remembrance of your gold-pieces from Charles, "We take," you say, "what they give us." Take what you deserve, then, a malediction. For we grant not what you were hoping we granted, namely, that thence this follows: "That court possesses no other power than is delegated from the king." For if it is said that the king's power, be it what it will, cannot be absent from Parliament, is it necessarily and immediately said that that power is supreme? Does not the royal power rather appear to be transferred to Parliament, and, as a lesser, to be comprised in its greater? Certainly, if Parliament may rescind the king's acts without his consent and against his refusal, and revoke privileges granted by him to whomsoever; if they may set bounds to the king's own prerogative, as they see cause; if they may regulate his yearly revenue, and the expenses of his court, his very retinue, and, in sum, all the concerns of his household; if they may remove even his bosom friends and counsellors, nay, pluck them from his lap to the scaffold; finally, if unto any soever of the people there is granted by law an appeal in any cause from the king to Parliament, but not so from Parliament to the king — all of which both our public records and the most learned of our lawyers assure us not only can be done, but have been frequently done — I suppose no man in his right wits but will confess Parliament to be above the King. Even in an interregnum the authority of the Parliament is in being, and — than which nothing is more clearly attested in our histories — they have often, without any regard to hereditary descent, appointed by free choice whomever they pleased to be king.

To sum up the whole truth, Parliament is the supreme council of the nation, constituted and appointed by an absolutely free people, and armed with ample power and authority, for this end and purpose: namely, to consult together upon the most weighty affairs; the king was created to take care that there should be executed, obedient to their vote and resolution, all the acts and decrees of those Orders, Estates, or Houses.

Which things after the Parliament themselves had lately declared in a public edict of theirs, — for such is the justice of their proceedings that of their own accord they have been willing to give an account of their actions, — look! here from his hovel appears this man of no standing or influence or property or credit, this home-born Burgundian slave, and accuses the supreme Senate of England, when it is asserting by a public instrument its own and its country's right, "of a detestable and horrible imposture!" Your country shall be ashamed, you rascal, to have brought forth so prodigiously impudent a midget.

But perhaps you have somewhat to tell us that may be for our good: go on, we are listening. "What laws," say you, "can be enacted by a Parliament in which not even the order of Bishops is present?" Did you then, you madman, go about to uproot the Bishops out of the Church, that you might transplant them into Parliaments? A wicked wretch! who ought to be delivered over to Satan, and whom the church ought not fail to excommunicate as a hypocrite and an atheist, and no civil society of men to take in, being a common plague-sore to the liberty of mankind. Nay, and besides he struggles to prove out of Aristotle and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and next from papistical statutes of the most corrupt ages, that the King of England is the head of the Church of England, a thing not to be proved at all if it be not proved from the Gospel; all this to the end that he may once more, as far as in him lies, set up over God's holy Church those bishops, grown of late his intimates and boon-companions, whom God himself thrust out; set them up, I say, to be robbers and tyrants anew, whose whole order, as in his formerly published books he had noisily maintained, ought to be exterminated root and branch as the bane of the Christian religion. What apostate did ever so shamefully and wickedly desert as this man has done, I do not say his own doctrine, for he has none that is settled, but the Christian doctrine which he had formerly asserted?

"The Bishops being removed, who under the king and by his permission had jurisdiction of ecclesiastical causes, upon whom," ask you, "will that jurisdiction devolve?" O villain! have some regard at least to your own conscience; remember before it be too late, unless indeed this admonition of mine be already too late, remember that this mocking of God's Holy Ghost is the unpardonable sin, and will not be left unpunished. Stop at last, and set bounds to your madness, lest the wrath of God whom you have provoked lay hold upon you suddenly — you that are fain to deliver Christ's flock, and God's untouchable anointed, to be crushed and trampled again by those same enemies and cruel tyrants from whom God's wonder-working hand did lately stretch out and set them free. Yes, and from whom you yourself maintained that they ought to be set free, I know not whether for any good of theirs, or to the hardening of your own heart and the furthering of your own damnation. If the bishops have no right to lord it over the church, certainly much less have kings, whatever human statutes may be to the contrary. For they that have tasted the Gospel more than lip-deep know that the government of the church is altogether divine and spiritual, not civil.

Whereas you say that "in secular affairs, the king of England has always had the highest jurisdiction," our laws do abundandy show this to be false. Our courts of justice are erected and suppressed, not by the King's authority, but by that of the Parliament, and yet in them the meanest subject might go to law with the King. Nor did the judges seldom give judgment against him, which if the King should endeavor to obstruct by any prohibition, charge, or letter, the judges were bound by law and by their oaths not to obey him, but rejected such charges, and held them for naught. The king could not imprison any man, or seize his estate as forfeited; he could not inflict the penalty of death upon any man who had not first been summoned to appear in some court where not the king but the ordinary judges gave sentence; and this, frequently, as I have said, against the king. Hence our Bracton, book 3, ch. 9: "The royal power is a power according to law, not a power to do wrong; and the king cannot do anything else than what he can do lawfully." Those pettifoggers you have consulted, men that have lately fled their country, insinuate something else to you — something, to be sure, based upon certain statutes, not very ancient ones, made in the reigns of Edward IV, Henry VII, and Edward VI. But they overlooked the fact that what power soever those statutes granted the king was granted all by Parliament — begged for as a favor, so to speak — and revocable by the same power that conferred it. How could sagacious you let yourself be so put upon that you thought you were proving the king's power to be absolute and supreme by the very argument which most convincingly proves that it depends upon Acts of Parliament? Also our records of great authority declare that our kings owe all their power, not to any right of inheritance, of conquest, or of succession, but to the people. So in the Parliament Rolls of the first of Henry IV, number 108, we read that such a kingly power was granted by the Commons to Henry IV, and before him to Richard II, just as any king customarily grants to his commissioners their governorships and official charges by edict and patent. Thus the House of Commons ordered expressly to be entered upon record "that they had granted to King Richard" to use "the same good liberty that the Kings of England before him had." And because that king abused it to the subversion of the laws, and "contrary to his oath at his coronation," he was by these same Commons bereft of his kingdom. The Commons, as also appears by the same Roll, publish in Parliament that, having confidence in the prudence and moderation of Henry IV, "they will and enact that he be in the same great royal liberty that his ancestors possessed." Had the former, however, been other than wholly a trust, as the latter was, then indeed not only must those Houses of Parliament have been foolish and vain to grant what was none of their own, but those Kings too that were willing to receive as a grant from others what was already theirs, must have been too injurious both to themselves and to their posterity; neither of which can be believed.

"A third portion of the royal power," say you, "concerns the forces; this portion the kings of England have handled without peer or competitor." This is no truer than the rest that you have written in reliance upon what the renegades told you. In the first place, both our own histories and those of foreigners that have been in the least exact touching our affairs declare that the making of peace and war always did belong to the Great Council of the realm. And the laws of St. Edward, which our kings are bound to swear that they will maintain, put this beyond dispute in the chapter "De Heretochiis," that is, "That there were certain officers appointed in every province and county of the realm, that were called Heretochs, in Latin ductores exercitus, commanders of the army," that were to command the forces of the several counties not "for the honor of the crown" only, but "for the good of the realm." And they were chosen "by the common council and by the several counties in full public assemblies of the inhabitants, as sheriffs ought to be chosen." Whence it is evident that the forces of the kingdom, and the commanders of those forces, were anciently, and ought to be still, not at the king's command, but at the people's; and that this most just law obtained in this our kingdom no less than heretofore it did in the Roman republic. Concerning which it will not be amiss to hear what Cicero says, Philipp. 10: "All the legions, all the forces, wheresoever they are, belong to the Roman people. For not even those legions that deserted Antony when he was Consul are said to have belonged to Antony rather than to the Commonwealth." That law of St. Edward, together with the rest of his laws, did William, called the Conqueror, at the desire and command of the people, confirm by oath, yes and added over and above, chap. 56: "All cities, boroughs, and castles to be so guarded every night, as the Sheriff, the Aldermen, and the other officers placed in command by the Common Council shall think meet for the safety of the realm." And in the 62d law, "Castles, boroughs, and cities were built for the protection of the folks and peoples of the realm, and therefore ought to be maintained free, entire, and unimpaired, by all ways and means." How then? Shall towns and places of strength in times of peace be guarded against thieves and evildoers no otherwise than by the Common Council of each place; and shall they not be defended in dangerous times of war, against enemies both domestic and foreign, by the Common Council of the whole nation? If this be not granted, they surely cannot be guarded and maintained "free" or "unimpaired" or "by all ways and means"; nor shall we obtain any of those ends for which the law itself tells us that towns and fortresses are founded in the first place. Indeed our ancestors were willing to put anything into the king's power rather than their arms and the garrisons of their towns; conceiving that that would be as if they went about to hand over their liberty to the unrestrained cruelty of their kings. Of which there are so very many instances in our histories, and those so generally known, that it would be superfluous to mention any of them here.

But "the king owes protection to his subjects; and how can he protect them unless he have men and arms at command? But, say I, he had all this for the good of the kingdom, as has been said, not for the destruction of his people and the ruin of the realm. In Henry III's time, one Leonard, a learned man, in an assembly of the Bishops, wisely answered Rustand, the Pope's Nuncio and the king's Chancellor, in these words: "All churches belong to My Lord the Pope, as we say all things belong to a prince, for protection, not for his use and enjoyment or his property," as the phrase is; for defence, "not for destruction." The aforementioned law of St. Edward is to the same purpose; and what is this but a power in trust — not a power absolute? Now, though the commander of an army in the field has much this same sort of power — delegated, that is, and not absolutely his own — yet he is generally none the slower to defend both at home and abroad the people that chose him. Vainly had our Parliaments contended of old with our kings about liberty and St. Edward's laws, and surely it had been an unequal match, had they been of opinion that the power of the sword must belong to the king alone; for how unjust laws soever the king would have imposed upon them, in vain would they have defended themselves against his sword by a "Charter," however "Great"!

But, you ask, "What shall it profit Parliament to have command of the forces, since towards the maintenance of them they cannot without the king's assent raise a farthing from the people?" Let not that trouble you! In the first place you go upon the false supposition that the Estates in Parliament "cannot without the king's assent impose taxes upon the people" — the very people who send them, and whose side they are taking! In the next place it cannot have escaped you — so busy an inquirer into other people's business — that the people by melting down their gold and silver vessels raised a great sum of money of their own accord toward the carrying on of this war against the king.

Then you recount the large annual revenues of our kings; you rattle on about nothing less than "five hundred and forty thousands"; you have heard, and greedily, that those of our kings that have been eminent for their bounty and liberality" have used to give "large boons out of their own patrimony." Greedily you heard this; it was by this allurement that those traitors to their country enticed you to their side, as the wicked Balaam was enticed of old, so that you dared to curse the people of God and to clamor against the divine judgments. Fool! what, pray, did such boundless wealth profit that unjust and violent king? What did it profit you? For I hear that nothing whatever of all you had been devouring with your huge expectations did reach you, beyond that one paltry purse wrought with glass beads and stuffed with a hundred gold pieces. Balaam, take your wages of unrighteousness that you loved, and much good may it do you!

You go on playing the fool. "The setting up of the standard," that is, "of the signal of battle, is a prerogative that belongs to the king only." Why? Why because

Turnus set up an ensign of war on the top of the tower of Laurentum.

As for "tenants by knight-service," the King was not allowed to summon them to a war which the authority of Parliament had not resolved upon; as is evident from many statutes. The same is true of Tonnage and Poundage and Ship Money; these the king could not exact from his subjects without an Act of Parliament; as was publicly resolved by the ablest of our lawyers about twelve years ago, when the king's authority was at its height. And, long before them, Fortescue, an eminent lawyer, and chancellor to Henry the Sixth, was of the same opinion. The king of England, says he, can neither alter the laws, nor lay taxes without the people's consent.

Nor can any testimonies be brought from antiquity to prove "the government of the realm of England an unmixed monarchy." "The king," says Bracton, "has jurisdiction over all his subjects"; that is, in his courts of justice, where justice is administered in the king's name indeed, but according to our own laws. "Everyone is subject to the king" — that is, every private individual; and so Bracton explains himself in the passages that I cited before.

What follows is but turning the same stone over and over again — a sport at which I believe you able to tire out Sisyphus himself — and is sufficiendy answered by what has been said already. For the rest, if our Parliaments have sometimes offered deference to good kings with expressions as generous as they could be this side of flattery and servility, this should not be understood as offered in like measure to tyrants, or in prejudice of the people; for liberty is not impaired by proper deference. As for what you cite out of Sir Edward Coke and others, "that the realm of England is an absolute power," so it is with regard to any foreign king, or to the Emperor, or, as Camden says, "because it is not among the dependents of the Empire": but each of them adds, besides, that this power dwells not "in the king" alone, but "in the body politic." Whence Fortescue says, de Laud. Leg. Ang. ch. 9: "The king of England" governs his people "not by an unmixed royal power, but by the power of a State; for the English people is governed by those laws which" it makes. Foreign authors were not ignorant of this: hence Philippe de Comines, a weighty authority, says in the Fifth Book of his Commentaries: "Of all the kingdoms of the earth that I have any knowledge of, I think there is none where government is carried on under more restraint, or where the king is allowed less power against his people, than in England."

Finally you say: "Ridiculous is the argument they adduce — that kingdoms existed before kings; which is as much as to say there was light before the sun was created." But, my good Sir, we do not say that kingdoms, but that the people, were before kings. In the meantime, whom shall I call more ridiculous than you, in denying (as if it were ridiculous) that light came into being before the sun? Thus while you would be inquisitive in other men's matters you have unlearned your very rudiments! You wonder, in the last place, "how they that have seen the King at a session of Parliament sitting upon his throne under the golden and silken heaven of his canopy of state, should so much as make a question whether the majesty resided in him or in the Parliament." Hard of belief indeed are they, whom so brilliant an argument, prayed down from "heaven," especially a "golden and silken heaven," cannot convince. Which golden heaven, you, like a Stoic, have so devoutly and singly gazed upon, that you seem to have quite forgot the heaven of Moses and the heaven of Aristotle; for you have denied that in Moses's heaven "there was any light before the sun"; and in Aristotle's you have exhibited three temperate zones. How many zones you observed in that golden and silken heaven of the king's I know not, but so much I know: you got one money-belt — one zone well tempered with an hundred golden stars — by this your heavenly contemplation!

SINCE this whole controversy, whether concerning the right of kings in general, or that of the king of England in particular, has been rendered more difficult by partisan obstinacy than by the nature of the thing itself, I hope that for those who prefer the pursuit of truth before the interest of faction I have produced out of the law of God, the laws of nations, and the municipal laws of my own country, such abundance of proofs as shall leave it beyond question that a king of England may be brought to trial and put to death. With the rest, whose minds fanaticism possesses wholly, or whose wit has been so blunted by premature admiration of royal splendor that they can see nothing glorious or magnificent in true magnanimity and liberty — with these whether we strive either by reason and arguments or by examples, we strive in vain.

In fact, Salmasius, absurdly as you seem to do all else, you seem to fill up the measure of absurdity in this, that while you cannot give over heaping all manner of abuse upon all Independents, you assert that the very king you defend was the most Independent of all, for that he did not "owe his sovereignty to the people, but to his descent."

Next, whereas in the beginning of your book you vehemently bewailed him for being "forced to plead for his life," now you complain "that he perished unheard." But if you have a mind to look into his whole defence, which is very correctly published in French, it may be you will be of another opinion. Whereas Charles certainly was afforded for some days together the fullest opportunity to say what he could for himself, he made no use of it — not he — to clear himself of the crimes laid to his charge, but utterly to spurn his judges and their jurisdiction. Now whenever the accused either is mute, or always says nothing to the purpose, then, if his guilt is evident beyond all doubt, there is no injustice in condemning him even unheard.

If you say that Charles "died a death fully answerable to his life," I agree with you; if you say that he died piously, holily, and "composedly," remember that his grandmother Mary, an infamous woman, died on the scaffold with as much outward show of piety, holiness, and constancy as he did. And lest you should ascribe too much to that very strong impression of courage which any common malefactors often give at their death, let me tell you that despair or a hardened heart many times puts on a certain look and mask, as it were, of fortitude, and stupidity many times a show of tranquillity of mind. The worst of men desire to appear good, undaunted, innocent, and sometimes holy, not only in their life, but at their death as well. In going to their death for very villainies, they are wont to make a last parade of their hypocrisy and deception as handsomely as they can, and, as is the way of foolish poets or stageplayers, hanker after applause even when the play is over.

Now you say you are "come to that part of the inquiry where you must discuss who were the chief movers of the king's condemnation." Whereas it ought rather to be inquired into how you, a foreigner and a French vagabond, came to hold an inquiry into our affairs, so strange to you? And bought with what price? That, however, is well enough known. But who at last satisfied your curiosity about our affairs? Even those deserters and traitors to their country that got hold of your eminent emptiness and easily hired you to speak ill of us. Then there was handed you some paltry account of the state of our affairs, written either by some crazy half papist chaplain or by some cringing courtier, and you were given the job of turning it into Latin. Out of that you took those made-up stories of yours, which, if you please, we will examine a little.

"Not the hundred thousandth part of the people consented to this sentence of condemnation." What were the rest of the people then, that suffered so great a deed to be done against their will? Were they stocks and stones, were they mere trunks of men only, or such utterly inert creatures as those in Virgil's tapestry?

Britons interwove hold up the purple hangings.

"The Lords Spiritual were turned out by the Parliament itself." The more deplorable is your madness therefore — for you are not yet sensible that you rave — to complain that Parliament turned out those who, as you yourself say in a lengthy book, ought to be turned out of the Church. "A second Estate of Parliament, to wit, the Lords Temporal, consisting of dukes, earls, and viscounts, was cast down from its place." And deservedly, for, not being returned by any constituency, they represented themselves only. They had no right over the people, but by a sort of old-established custom of their own used for the most part to oppose the people's rights and liberties. Created by the king, they were his companions, his servants, and, as it were, his shadows; and, the king once got rid of, they must needs be reduced to the body of the people, from whom they rose.

"One part of the Parliament, and that the worst of all, ought not to have assumed unto itself that power of judging kings." But I have shown you already that the House of Commons was not only the chief part of our Parliament, even while we had kings, but made in and by itself a Parliament in all respects perfect and lawful, even without the Lords Temporal, much more the Lords Spiritual. But "not even the whole House of Commons itself was admitted to vote at the king's trial." True, for the part that was not admitted had in sentiment and counsel openly revolted to Charles - to one whom, though they deemed him their king in words, they had yet in their deeds so often deemed an enemy. The Estates of the Parliament of England, and the deputies sent from the Parliament of Scotland, had written to the king on the 13th of January, 1645, in answer to his request for a deceitful truce and for a conference with them at London, that they could not admit him into the City till he had made satisfaction to the state for the civil war that he had raised in the three kingdoms, and for the deaths of so many of his subjects slain by his order, and till he had in writing provided and taken order for a true and firm peace upon such terms as the Parliaments of both kingdoms had offered him so often already, and should offer him again. He for his part had either rejected their very just requests by answering that he refused to listen, or by ambiguous answers had evaded them, though most humbly presented to him seven times over. After so many years' patience, the Houses at last, lest the deceitful king, even in prison, should by his temporizings ruin that Commonwealth which he had not the strength to subdue in the field, and by gathering the sweet fruit of our divisions be restored, though a public enemy, and triumph unexpectedly over his conquerors, — this to prevent, the Houses resolve that for the future they will pay no attention to the king, send him no more requests, and receive no more from him. After this resolution there were yet found even some members of Parliament who hated that invincible army, envied its glorious deeds, and, after it had deserved so well of the nation, desired to disband it in disgrace. They were under the thumb of a certain number of seditious ministers, by whom they were governed like miserable slaves. They found their opportunity when many whom they knew to be far otherwise minded than themselves were absent in the provinces, sent by the House itself to put down the Presbyterian rising which had already begun to spread. With a strange levity, not to say perfidy, they vote that that inveterate enemy of the state, king in name only, though he had given scarce any security or satisfaction, should be brought back to the City and restored to his throne and sovereignty, exactly as if he had deserved excellently well of the nation. So that they preferred the king before their religion, their liberty, and that Covenant of theirs which so often they had vaunted. Meantime what of those who were sound themselves, and saw such pestilent councils on foot? Ought they to have been wanting to their country, and have failed to provide for the safety of their countrymen, because the infection had spread even into their own House?

But who excluded those unsound members? "The English army," you say. So it was not an army of foreigners, but of most valiant and faithful citizens, officered for the most part by the very members of Parliament whom those excluded Honorable Members had thought fit to exclude from their very country, and send far away into Ireland! The Scots, meanwhile, acting in what had by now become very dubious good faith, were occupying with large forces the four English counties nearest their border, were keeping garrisons in the strongest towns of those parts, and were holding the king himself in custody. They also encouraged here and there in both city and country factions and uprisings of their own countrymen, which were more than threatening to Parliament, and which soon after broke out into not only our Civil War but the Scottish War as well.

If it has been always counted praiseworthy in private men to succour the state by advice or arms, there surely is no reason why our army can be blamed, who being by authority of Parliament summoned to the City, obeyed orders, and quelled with ease an uprising of the royalist faction which more than once threatened the House itself. Things had been brought to such a pass indeed, that of necessity either we must be crushed by them, or they by us. On their side were most of the London hucksters and handicraftsmen, and generally the most factious of the ministers; on ours an army known for its great loyalty, moderation, and courage. It being in our power by their means to keep the liberty, the safety, of our state, do you think that all ought to have been surrendered and betrayed by negligence and folly?

The leaders of the Royalist party, when subdued, had unwillingly laid down their arms indeed, but not their hatred; and they had flocked to town, watching all opportunities of renewing the war. With these men (though their greatest enemies) the Presbyterians, seeing themselves not admitted to civil as well as ecclesiastical despotism over everybody, had begun to make common cause, secret and most unworthy of what they had formerly both said and done. They went on to such a degree of bitterness that they would rather enthrall themselves to the king again than admit their own brethren to that portion of liberty which they too had purchased with their own blood, and would rather try being lorded over once more by a tyrant dyed in the gore of so many of his own subjects and burning with rage and with the vengeance he already imagined against the survivors, than endure their brethren and friends to share and share alike with them. Only those who are called Independents knew from first to last how to be true to their cause, and what use to make of their victory. They would not — and wisely, in my opinion — that he who when he was king had made himself the state's enemy should ever, from being the state's enemy, be king any more; nor were they on this account averse to peace, but they very prudently dreaded either new war or perpetual slavery wrapped up in the name of peace.

To slander our army the more fully, you begin a dry disorderly narrative of our affairs; in which though I find many things false, many things frivolous, many things laid to our charge which ought rather to be credited in our praise, yet I think it will be to no purpose for me to set over against it another narration from the opposite side. For our contest is by reasonings, not by narrations, and both sides will believe the former, but not the latter. And indeed the nature of the things themselves is such that for their weight and worth they cannot be related as they deserve but in a right history; so that I think it better, as Sallust said of Carthage, rather to say nothing at all about things of such weight and importance than to say too little. Nor will I so much offend as to interweave in my book the praises not of great men only, but above all of Almighty God, which in this wonderful course of affairs ought to be most often repeated, to interweave these, I say, amongst your slanders and reproaches. I will therefore, as is my wont, pick out only such things as seem to have any color of argument.

You say: "The English and the Scots by solemn covenant promised to preserve the majesty of the king." But you omit upon what terms they promised it — to wit, if it might consist with the safety of their religion and their liberty; to both of which that king was so hostile and treacherous, even unto his last breath, that it was evident their religion would be endangered, and their liberty would perish if he lived.

But now you come back to the movers of the king's execution: "If the thing be considered according to the influences that decided it, the conclusion of this abominable action must be imputed to the Independents in such a way that the Presbyterians may justly claim the glory of its beginning and progress." Hark, ye Presbyterians, how does it help, how does it profit your reputation for innocence and loyalty that ye seemed so much to abhor putting the king to death? According to this everlasting talkative advocate of the king, your accuser, ye "went more than half-way"; "to the fourth act and beyond ye were beheld twittering and stammering while ye turned this tragedy into a circus feat of jumping or straddling two horses at once." But meanwhile, o wielder of farfetched rhetoric, why imitate so readily those whom you accuse so toilsomely - being yourself so often "beheld" in this Royal Defence "twittering and stammering" while you "straddle two horses at once!"

But, once more, O Presbyterians! you "may justly be charged with the crime of killing the king, since ye paved the way to killing the same." "You, and no others, struck the accursed axe upon his neck." Woe to you before all others, if ever Charles's stock recover the crown of England; upon my word, you are like to pay the piper! But make your prayers to God, and love your brethren your deliverers, who have hitherto kept that calamity and sure destruction from you, though against your wills. You are accused likewise for that "some years ago ye endeavored by sundry petitions to lessen the king's authority; that in the very papers you presented to the king in the name of Parliament, you inserted and published some expressions abusive of the king": to wit, "in that Declaration of the Lords and Commons of the 26th of May, 1642, you declared openly, in some mad proposals that breathed rebellion, what you thought of the king's authority. Hotham, by order of Parliament, shut the gates of Hull against the king": you "aimed by this first act of rebellion to make trial how much the king would bear." What could be said more perfectly adapted to reconcile the minds of all Englishmen to one another, and estrange them wholly from the king? For hereby they may understand that if ever the king come back, they chall be punished not only for his father's death, but for petitions they made long ago, and Acts passed in full Parliament for putting down the Bishops, and the Book of Common Prayer, and for the Triennial Parliament, and what was else enacted with the people's fullest consent and applause — all these as seditious and "mad proposals of the Presbyterians"!

But this slight fickle fellow changes his mind all of a sudden; and what but of late "when he reckoned the thing itself aright" he thought was due wholly to the Presbyterians, this, now that "he turns over from on high" the very same "thing," he thinks is due wholly to the Independents. A moment ago he was averring that the Presbyterians "advanced against the king with overt force of arms," and that by them the king was "defeated, taken, and put in prison." Now he says this whole "theory of rebellion" belongs to the Independents. Such trustworthiness and consistency in the man! What need is there now of a counter-narrative to this of yours, that has so shamefully failed to meet its own obligations ?

But if anyone should question whether you are an honest man or a knave, let him read these following lines of yours: "It is time to explain whence and at what time this sect of enemies to kingship first broke out. Why truly these charming Puritans began in Queen Elizabeth's time to issue forth out of the darkness of Hell, and thenceforward to disturb the Church, yea and the State itself too; for they are no less plagues to the State than to the Church." Now your very speech bewrays you right Balaam; for where you designed to vomit out all the venom of your bitterness, there unwittingly and against your will you have pronounced a blessing. For it is notorious throughout all England that if any endeavored, after the pattern of those churches, whether French or German, which they accounted more truly reformed, to follow a purer type of divine service, which our Bishops had almost universally defiled with their ceremonies and superstitions or if any, in fine, excelled the rest either in piety toward God or in purity of conduct, such persons were by the Bishops party termed Puritans. These are they whose principles you so loudly declare to be unfriendly to kings; nor are they alone in this, for "the majority of Protestants, who have not adopted the rest of their principles," you say, "yet seem to have approved of this only, which opposes royal despotism." So that while you inveigh bitterly against the Independents, you praise them in deriving their descent from the most pure and uncorrupted family of Christians; and a principle which you everywhere affirm to be peculiar to the Independents, you now confess that "the majority of Protestants have approved." Nay, you are arrived to that degree of temerity, impiety, and apostasy, that even the Bishops, who, you formerly maintained, ought to be uprooted out of the church, as so many plagues and Antichrists, you now aver "ought to have been protected by the king" in order not to "impair his coronation oath"! Beyond your present villainy and shame there is no step you can take but one alone — to abjure as soon as possible the Reformed religion which you taint with your presence. Whereas you say we "tolerate all sects and heresies," you ought not to find fault with us for that as long as the Church tolerates you, impious wretch and empty-headed lying slanderer for hire, you Apostate who have the impudence to say that the most saintly Christians, and even the majority of Protestants - a majority which happens to be opposed to you - issue forth out of the darkness of Hell!

Why should I not pass by the telltale rascalities upon which you spend a great part of the rest of your chapter, and those prodigious tenets that you ascribe to the Independents, to render than odious? For they concern not at all this disputed question about kings, and are for the most part such as deserve anybody's laughter or contempt rather than refutation.

YOU seem to me to approach this eleventh chapter, Salmasius, though still unashamed, yet with some sense of your inefficiency. For whereas you proposed to yourself to inquire in this place "by what authority" sentence was given against the king, you add immediately something which nobody expected of you, that "it is in vain to make any such inquiry," to wit, because "the quality of the persons that did it leaves hardly any room for such a question." And therefore as the conviction of meddlesomeness and impudence of which you have been found guilty in the undertaking of this cause is now matched by your present guilty consciousness of your own impertinent garrulity, I shall give you the shorter answer. To your question then "by what authority" the House of Commons either condemned the king themselves, or delegated that power to others, I answer: "the highest in the land." How they came to have the highest authority, you may learn from what I said before, when I was refuting your persistent nonsense upon this very subject; for if you believed yourself capable of ever saying the sufficient and satisfactory thing, you would not have the habit of so often and so tediously repeating the same old singsong. And the House of Commons might delegate their judicial power in the same way in which you say the king, who himself likewise received all he had from the people, may delegate his. Hence in that Solemn League and Covenant that you have brought against us, the Estates of England and Scotland solemnly protest and engage to each other to punish traitors in such manner as "the supreme judicatories of both Kingdoms respectively, or others having power from them for that effect, shall judge convenient." Now you hear the Parliaments of both nations with one voice bearing witness that they may delegate their judicial power, which they call "supreme"; so that the controversy you raise about delegating this power is vain and frivolous.

"But," you say, "with those judges that were chosen from the lower House were joined even judges from the army; soldiers never, though, had a right to sit in judgment upon a citizen." I will turn the edge of your argument in a very few words; for remember that we are not now talking of a citizen, but of an enemy. Suppose such an enemy taken prisoner, and to be dispatched at once if duly sentenced; now if the commander of the army with his officers should decide to try him before a Court Martial, would he be deemed to have done aught contrary to martial law and custom? An enemy to a state, made a prisoner of war, cannot be looked upon to be so much as a citizen in that state, much less a king. This is the purport of the sacred law of St. Edward, which declares that a bad king neither is a king, nor ought to be called a king.

To your objection that it was "not a whole" House of Commons, but a house "maimed and mutilated, that tried and condemned the king," take this answer The number of them Who gave their votes for putting the king to death wa greater than is lawfully necessary — even in the absence of the rest — to transact any business whatsoever in Parliament. Now since they were absent through their own fault, nay guilt (for their hearts' desertion to the common enemy was the worst sort of absence) they could not delay the rest, who had continued faithful to the cause, in the work of preserving the state, which, when it was tottering and almost quite reduced to slavery and utter ruin, the whole body of the people had before all else committed to their fidelity, prudence, and courage. And they acted their parts like men; they set themselves against the unruly wilfulness, the rage, the secret designs of an embittered king; they held the common liberty and safety before their own; they outdid all former Parliaments, they outdid all their ancestors, in wisdom, magnanimity, and steadfastness to their cause. Yet a great part of the people, though it had promised full fidelity, support, and assistance, did ungratefully desert these men in the midst of their undertaking. This part was for slavery and peace, with sloth and luxury, upon any terms; the other part, however, kept demanding liberty, and no peace but what was sure and honorable. What was the Parliament to do now? Ought it to have defended the part that remained sound and faithful to it and to the country, or to have sided with the one that deserted both? I know what you will say it ought to have done, for you are not Eurylochus, but Elpenor, a miserable Circean beast, a filthy swine, accustomed to foulest slavery even under a woman; so that you have not the least relish of manliness or of the liberty which is born of it. You would have all men slaves, because you feel not in your heart aught magnanimous or free; you say nothing, you breathe nothing, but what is mean and servile.

You raise another scruple, to wit, "that he whom we condemned was the king of Scotland too." As if he might therefore do what he would in England! But that you may conclude this chapter, which of all others is the most dry and doddering, at least with some witty quirk, "There are two little words," you say, "consisting of the same letters and the same number of them, and differing only in the position of them, but differing enormously in meaning, to wit, VIS and IVS (might and right)." Of course it is no great wonder that you, being a man of three letters (fur, a thief), should make such a clever little quibble upon three letters; much more wonderful is this which you affirm throughout your book: that two things "differing" so much in all other respects should yet be one and the same thing in kings. For did kings ever perpetrate a royal violence which you do not affirm to be their royal right?

In nine long, long pages these are the matters that I could observe worth answering. The rest are either matters which, having been again and again repeated, have been more than once refuted, or matters which have no bearing upon this discussion. So that my more than usual brevity should not be counted against my diligence, which, though I be irked in the extreme, I let not slack, but against your everlasting talk, so void and vacant of matter and sense.

IN order that no one shall by any chance get the impression that I am unfair or too severe to King Charles, now he has fulfilled his destiny and borne his punishment, I for my part, Salmasius, wish you had passed over in silence this whole passage concerning "his crimes," as it had been more advisable for yourself and your party to do. But since it has pleased you rather to talk copiously and over-confidently upon them, I will make you clearly perceive that you could not have done a more inconsiderate thing than to save up the worst part of your cause — namely the tearing open and searching those old wounds, the king's crimes — to the last. For when I shall have proved them to have been actually committed and most heinous, they will not only render his memory repulsive and hateful to all good men, but leave in your readers' minds as well an intense final hatred of you as his defender.

"The indictment against him," you say, "may be divided into two parts: one is concerned with censure of his way of life; the other with faults he might commit as king. I will be content to pass by in silence the life he spent amid banquets, plays, and bevies and troops of women; for what can there be in luxury and excess worth relating? And what would those things have been to us if he had been only a private person? but he would act the king; consequently, as he could not live unto himself alone, so neither could he sin unto himself alone. For in the first place, he did his subjects much mischief by his example; in the second place, all the time — and it was very much — that he spent upon his lusts and sports, he stole away from the State which he had undertaken to govern; lastly, he squandered away upon the luxury of his household boundless wealth, uncounted sums of money which were not his own but the public revenue of the nation. So it was in his private life at home that he first began to be an ill king. But let us rather "pass over to those crimes that he is charged with having committed in misgoverning." Here you lament his being condemned as "a tyrant, a traitor, and a murderer." That in this he was not wronged shall now be shown. First, however, let us define a tyrant, not according to the notions of the crowd, but according to the judgment of Aristotle and of all learned men. A tyrant is one who regards his own welfare and profit only, and not that of the people. So Aristotle defines one in the tenth book of his Ethics, and elsewhere, and so do many others. Whether Charles regarded his own advantage or the people's, these things, which I shall only touch upon, and which are only a few out of many, will serve to show.

When his crown property and royal revenue could not defray the expenses of the court, he laid very heavy taxes upon the people, and having squandered these, invented new ones — not for the benefit, honor, or defence of the state, but that he might hoard up in one house, or in one house fritter away, the riches of nations more than one. When in this fashion he had unlawfully scraped together an incredible amount, he attempted either wholly to do away with Parliament, which he knew was the only thing that could bridle him, or to summon it no oftener than suited his convenience, and to make it accountable to himself alone. This bridle being once cast off himself, he put another bridle upon the people: he had German horse and Irish foot stationed in many towns and cities as if to garrison them, though in time of peace. Do you think he does not begin to look like a tyrant? In this very thing, as in many others which I have exhibited above upon occasion given me by you — in this, I say, though you scorn to have Charles compared with so cruel a tyrant as Nero, he resembled him extremely, for Nero likewise often threatened to abolish the Senate.

Meanwhile the king bore extremely hard upon the consciences of godly men, and compelled all to use certain ceremonies and superstitious worships which he had brought back into the Church again from the midst of popery. Those that would not conform he banished or imprisoned; and he made war upon the Scots twice for no other cause than that. So far he may seem to have surely deserved the name of tyrant at least "once over."

Now I will tell you why the word traitor was put into his indictment. While he had again and again assured this Parliament by promises, by proclamations, by imprecatory oaths, that he had no design against the state, at that very time either he was recruiting levies of Papists in Ireland, or by secret embassy to the king of Denmark he was begging arms, horses, and troops, expressly to be used against the Parliament, or he was endeavoring to raise an army, first of Englishmen, and then of Scots, by bribes. To the English he promised the plunder of the City of London; to the Scots, that he would annex the four northern counties to Scotland, if they would but help him get rid of the Parliament by any means whatsoever. These projects not succeeding, he gave one Dillon, a traitor, secret instructions to the Irish to fall suddenly upon all the English colonists in Ireland. These are the proofs of his treasons, and they are not gathered out of idle reports, but are certainties found in letters under his own hand and seal.

Finally, I suppose no man will withhold the name of murderer from him by whose order the Irish took arms and put to death with most exquisite torments five hundred thousand English, who in a time of profound peace apprehended nothing of the kind; nor will any man, I suppose, deny that he who raised so great a civil war in the other two kingdoms was a murderer. I add that at the conference held on the Isle of Wight the king openly took upon himself the guilt of this war and the blame for it, and in his confession known of all men cleared the Parliament. Thus you have in short why King Charles was adjudged a tyrant, a traitor, and a murderer. But you ask "why was he not so adjudged before by either the Presbyterians or the Independents," either in that "Solemn League and Covenant," or afterwards when he was surrendered, but rather "was received as became a king to be received, with all reverence?" This very point is sufficient to convince any man of good understanding that only at long last, and after they had borne all things, and tried all things and steadfastly endured all things, were the Estates resolved to depose the king. That which to ail good men stands as evidence of their extreme patience, calm, self-control, and perhaps overlong forbearance with the king's pride, you alone maliciously seize upon as a reproach.

But "in the month of August before the king suffered, the House of Commons, which already ruled alone and was controlled by the Independents, wrote a letter to the Scots protesting that it had never had in mind an alteration of the form of government which had obtained so long in England under King, Lords, and Commons." See now how little the deposing of the king is to be ascribed to the principles of the Independents! They, who are not wont to dissemble their principles, profess even then, when they have the sole management of affairs, that they "had never had in mind an alteration of the form of government." But if a thing which at first they had not in mind afterwards came into their mind, why might they not take the course which seemed to lead more directly to the common weal? Especially when they found that Charles could not possibly be entreated or anywise moved to assent to those just demands which they presented, and which were always the same from the beginning. Those froward opinions with respect to religion and his own right which he had all along maintained, and which were so destructive to us, in these he persisted, nothing changed from that too-well-known Charles who both in peace and in war had done us all so much mischief. If he assented to anything, he gave intimations not obscure both that he did it against his will, and that as soon as he should have his own way he would hold it null and void. The same thing his son openly declared by a published writing, when in those days he ran away with part of the fleet, and so did the king himself by letter to certain of his party in town.

In the mean time, against the open disapprobation of Parliament, he had in secret struck up a peace upon base dishonorable terms with the Irish, our most savage and inhuman enemies; but whenever he invited the English to negotiations for peace — which he kept asking for, and which were always bootless — at those very times he was making every effort to prepare for war against them. In this situation, which way should they turn who were charged with the common weal? The safety of us all, with which they were entrusted — should they betray it to our most bitter adversary? Should they leave us another seven years of almost exterminating war to bear again to the bitter end, not to forebode worse? God gave them a better mind, to prefer, pursuant to that Solemn League and Covenant, the common weal, and religion, and liberty, before their former thoughts of not dethroning the king (for they had not come to a vote); all which they saw — later indeed than behooved them, but still in time! — could not stand firm if and while the king stood. Surely Parliament ought never to be otherwise than entirely free and uncommitted, to provide in the best possible way for the good of the nation as occasion requires, nor so bound to their former opinions as to scruple to change - though God have given them the understanding and the means - to wiser ones thereafter for their own or the nation's good.

But "the Scots are of another opinion; for in a letter to the younger Charles they call his father a most sacred king, and the putting him to death a most execrable villainy." Take care to say no more of the Scots, whom you know not; we know them, and know the time when they called that very king a "most execrable" murderer and traitor; and the putting the tyrant to death a "most sacred" deed.

Then you pick holes in the sentence we drew up against the king, as not being properly drafted, and you ask "why we needed to add to the count of tyrant the titles of traitor and murderer, since the name tyrant includes all evils," and then you actually explain to us grammatically and lexicographically what a tyrant is! Off with your trifles, pedant, which that definition of Aristotle's that has lately been cited will alone easily blow away, and teach you, teacher, that the word tyrant (for you care not to understand aught but words) may well fall short of treason and murder.

But "the laws of England do not declare it treason or lese-majesty in the king to stir up sedition against himself or his people." Nor, say I, do they declare that Parliament can be guilty of lese-majesty, or hurting majesty, in deposing a bad king, or ever was guilty, though it has often deposed one in times past; but our laws do plainly declare that a king may indeed hurt his own majesty, and diminish it yes and wholly lose it. For that expression in the law of St. Edward of "losing the name of king," signifies neither more nor less than being deprived of the kingly office and dignity; as befell Chilperic king of France, whose example the law itself mentions in the same passage for the sake of illustration. There is not a lawyer amongst us who can deny that high treason may be committed against the kingdom as well as against the king. I appeal to Glanville himself, whom you cite: "If any man attempt to put the king to death, or raise sedition in the realm, it is high treason." Thus that machination whereby certain Papists were making ready to blow up the Parliament-house with the Estates themselves in a single explosion of gunpowder was by King James himself and both Houses of Parliament adjudged to be "high treason" not against the King only, but against the Parliament and the realm. Where the truth is so clear, of what use is it to quote, as I yet could easily, more of our precedents established? For the thing itself is highly ridiculous, and contradictory to reason itself, that treason can be committed against the king, and cannot be against the people, on account of whom, for whose sake, by the grace of whom, and by whose good leave, so to speak, the king is what he is. So that you babble in vain over so many statutes of ours; in vain you torment yourself and steep yourself in our ancient law-books; for the laws themselves Parliament always had power to confirm or repeal; and to Parliament alone it belongs to declare what is treason, and what lese-majesty. And have often shown that this majesty never has so far deserted the people for the king, as not to be visibly more lofty and august in Parliament.

Who can yet endure to hear such an inspid French mountebank as you expound our laws? But you Enghsh deserters! so many bishops, doctors, and lawyers, who proclaim that all learning and literature is fled out of England with yourselves, did not one of you know how to defend the king's cause and his own with sufficient vigor and Latinity, and submit it to the judgment of other nations? Did you fall so far short that this crackbrained purse-snatcher of a Frenchman must needs be fetched out for hire to take sides with you, and undertake the defence of a helpless poverty-stricken king, attended though he was with so much infantry of speechless priests and doctors? Even for this too, believe me, your dishonor will blaze forth notorious among foreigners; and all men will consider that you deserved to fail at any rate in a cause which you availed not even to uphold by words, much less by force of arms and valor.

Now, goodman speechifier, I come to you again, if at least you are come to yourself again; for here, so near the end of your book, I catch you snoring, and sleepily yawning out an irrelevant something-or-other about voluntary death. Then you deny "that it can occur to a king in his right wits to embroil his people in seditions, betray his own forces to defeat by enemies, and raise factions against himself." All which things having been done by many kings, and particularly by Charles himself, you can no longer doubt, especially being a Stoic, that, like all profligate villains, all tyrants too are downright mad. Hear what Flaccus says: "Whoever, led blindly on by malign stupidity and by whatever ignorance of truth, him doth Chrysippus' porch and school account a madman. This saying includes great kings, this whole nations except the wise man only." So that if you would clear King Charles from the imputation of acting like a madman, you must rid him of wickedness first, before you can rid him of insanity. But you say: "The king could not commit treason against such as were his own vassals and subjects." In the first place, since we are as free as any nation of mankind, we will not endure any barbarous custom to our hurt. In the second place, suppose we had been the king's "vassals"; even so we were not bound to endure a tyrant to lord it over us. And as for our being "subjects," all such subjection, as our own laws declare, is limited to what is "honorable and beneficial." Leg. Hen. I. Cap. 55. All our lawyers tell us that this engagement is "mutual" upon condition that the lord shall give, as the phrase goes, "liege protection and defense"; but if the lord be too harsh to his tenant, and do him some cruel hurt, "all bond of homage is dissolved and utterly extinguished." These are the very words of Bracton and Fleta. Hence there are situations in which the law itself arms the vassal against the lord, and delivers the lord over to be killed, if it so fall out, by the vassal in single combat. If a whole state or nation may not lawfully do the same to a tyrant, the condition of freemen will be worse than that of slaves.

Then you strive to excuse king Charles's murders, partly by murders committed by other kings, and partly by instances of right action on their part. For the matter of the Irish butchery, you "refer the reader to the king's well-known work the Eikon Basiliké," and I refer you to Eikonoklastes. "The taking of La Rochelle," the betrayal of its townsmen, "the making a show of assistance instead of giving it them," you will not have laid at Charles's door, nor have I anything to say as to whether it deserves to be; he did mischief enough and more than enough at home, so that I need not take the trouble to follow up his misdemeanors abroad. (But you in the mean time would make out all the Protestant churches that have at any time defended themselves by force of arms against kings who were professed enemies of their religion, to have been upon this one ground guilty of rebellion. Let these churches themselves consider how important it is for the preservation of ecclesiastical discipline and of their own integrity, not to pass by this insult offered them by their own nursling and disciple.) What troubles us most is that we English were betrayed in that expedition. He who had long designed to convert the government of England into a tyranny thought he could not accomplish his plan till the flower and strength of his subjects' military power were cut off.

Another of the king's crimes was the causing some words to be struck out of the usual coronation oath before he would take it. Unworthy and abominable action! Him that did it I call wicked; what shall I call him that defends it? For by the eternal God, what breach of faith and violation of the laws can possibly be greater? What ought to be more sacred to him, next to the holy sacraments themselves, than that oath Which, pray, is guiltier, he that offends against the law, or he that endeavors to make the law his accomplice in offending, or rather, destroys the law that he may not seem to offend against it? Look you: that oath, which he ought most scrupulously to to have sworn to, this king of yours did violate; but that he might not seem openly to violate it, he craftily adulterated and foully corrupted it, and lest he might be said to have perjured himself, turned the very oath into a perjury. What else could be expected than that one who began his reign with so detestable a wrong, and dared as a first step to adulterate that law which he thought his only hindrance from perverting all the laws, would rule most unrighteously, craftily, and disastrously? But that "Oath" (thus you justify him) "cannot bind kings more than do the laws; and kings pretend that they will be bound by laws, and live according to them, though actually they are unbound by them." To think that anyone should express himself so impiously and sacrilegiously as to assert that a most solemn oath, sworn upon the Holy Evangelists, may without cause be unbound as if in itself it were the merest trifle! Scoundrel, monster, you are refuted by Charles himself, who, thinking that oath no trifle, chose rather by stealth to evade, or by artifice to elude, its binding force, than openly to violate it, and chose rather to be a corrupter and falsifier of the oath, than visibly a perjurer.

"The king indeed swears to his people, as the pcop e c0 0 him; but the people swear fealty to the king, not the king to them." Pretty invention! Does not he that promises and engages under oath faithfully to perform something bind his fidelity to them that require the oath of him? To the performance of what he promises, every king does in fact swear to the people his "fealty, service, and obedience." Then you come back to William the Conqueror; yet even he was forced more than once to swear to perform not what was agreeable to him, but what the people and the great men of the realm demanded of him.

If many kings "receive the crown" without the usual solemnity, and accordingly reign without taking an oath, the same thing may be said of the people, a great many of whom never have taken the oath of allegiance. If the king by not taking an oath be unbound, the people are so too. And that part of the people that swore, swore not to the king only, but to the realm and the laws by which the king came to his crown, and to the king so far only as he should act according to those laws which "the common people," that is, the commonalty or House of Commons, "should choose." For it were folly always to wish to turn the phraseology of our laws into purer Latin. This clause, "which the commons shall choose," Charles before he was crowned procured to be razed out of the form of the royal oath. "But," say you, "without the king's assent the people can choose no laws"; and for this you cite two statutes, one 37 Henry VI, Chap. 15, and the other 13 Edward IV, Chap. 8. But either of the two is so far from appearing in our statute-books, that in the years you mention neither of those kings enacted any statute at at all! Now that you are fooled, go and complain of the bad faith of those renegades in dictating to you statutes that never were heard of; while other people stand astonished at the combination of presumption with empty-headedness in you, who were not ashamed to pretend to be thoroughly versed in books which you have so clearly shown you have never looked into or so much as seen.

As for that clause in the coronation oath, which you, brazen-faced jack-pudding, dare to call "fictitious," you yourself say: "The king's defenders say that possibly" it may be extant in some ancient copies, "but that it fell into disuse because it had no satisfactory meaning." But precisely on this account did our ancestors put that clause into this oath, that it might have a meaning which would forever be not satisfactory to tyranny! If it had really fallen into disuse, however, which yet is utterly false, who would deny that there was the greater need of reviving it? But even that would have been to no purpose, according to your doctrine; for that custom "of taking an oath, as kings nowadays generally use it, is only ceremonial." Yet the king, when it behooved him to put down the bishops, pretended that he could not do it by reason of this same oath. Consequently that sacred solemn oath, according as it serves the king's turn or not, will be something genuine and immovable, or merely something empty and "ceremonial."

Englishmen, take notice of this, I adjure you, again and again, and consider what manner of king you are like to have, if he ever come back! For it would never have entered into this rascally foreign grammarian's head to wish to write, or to think himself able to write, of the law of the English crown, had not Charles's banished son, deep-dyed in his father's teachings, together with those profligate prompters of his, eagerly supplied what they would have him write. Twas they dictated to him "that Parliament as a whole was liable to be charged with treason against the King" even for this alone, that "without the king's assent it declared all to be traitors who have taken arms against the Parliament of England; for that Parliament is the king's vassal"; but that the king's coronation oath is "merely a matter of ceremony." Then why not the vassal's oath too? So that no reverence for laws, no binding force of an oath, or scruple to break it, will avail to protect your lives and fortunes either from the cupidity of a king unbridled, or from the revenge of a king embittered, who from childhood has been taught to think that laws, religion, nay, and his own promise, ought to be his vassals, and subject to his will and pleasure. If you desire riches, liberty, peace, and empire, how much more excellent, how much more becoming yourselves would it be, resolutely to seek all these by your own virtue, industry, prudence, and valor, than under a royal despotism to hope for them in vain? They who think that these things cannot be compassed but under a king and lord — it cannot well be expressed how meanly, how dishonorably (I do not say how unworthily!) they think of themselves; for what do they other than confess that they themselves are lazy, weak, wanting in intelligence and prudence, and born to be slaves body and soul? All manner of slavery indeed is disgraceful to a man freeborn; but for you, after recovering your liberty with God to warrant and your own arms, after so many brave deeds done, and so notable an example made of a most mighty and putssant king, for you to desire against your very destiny, to return again into bondage, will be not only most shameful, but a thing sinful and wicked. And your wickedness will be like unto the wickedness of them who were seized with desire of their former Egyptian bondage, and were at length divinely cut off with many and divers destructions, paying to God their deliverer the penalty for so slavish a mind.

You who would persuade us to become slaves, meanwhile what say you? "The king," you say, "had power to pardon treason and other crimes; which sufficiently proves that the king himself was not bound by the laws." The king might indeed pardon treason, not against the kingdom, but against himself, as anybody else may pardon a wrong done to himself; and he might perhaps pardon some other offenders, though not always. But does it follow that one who sometimes has some right to save an evildoer, shall therefore necessarily have any right whatever to destroy all good men? If the king be impleaded in an inferior court, he, like any one of the people, to be sure, is not obliged to answer but by his attorney; shall he therefore, when summoned by all of his subjects to appear in Parliament, refuse to come - refuse to answer in person?

You say that we "endeavor to justify our action by the example of the Dutch"; and hence, fearing to lose the pay with which the Dutch support such a murrain and pest as you, you would fain show "how unlike are their actions and ours" lest in defaming the English you should appear also to defame the Dutch who support you. I shall omit this comparison of yours, though some things in it are quite false, and other things reek of flattery lest perchance you should not bring an acceptable offering unto your wages. For the English think they need not justify their actions by the example of any foreigners whatever. They have their laws of the land, which they have followed — laws which in this matter are the best in the world; they have for their imitation the examples of their ancestors, great and gallant men who never gave way to the unrestrained power of kings, and who put many of them to death when their government became insupportable. They were born free; they stand in need of no other nation; they can make unto themselves what laws they desire. One law in particular they venerate before the rest, a very ancient one enacted by nature itself, which measures all human laws, all civil right and government, not according to the lust of kings, but, above all else, according to the safety and welfare of good men.

Now I see nothing left over but rubbish and fragments of your earlier chapters; yet as you have raised an huge great heap of these at the end, I cannot imagine what other design you could have than to forebode the ruin of your whole fabric. At last after unmeasured talk you shut off the stream, "calling God to witness that you undertook the defence of this cause not only because you were asked, but because your conscience prompted you that you could defend no better cause." Merely because you were asked, would you intermeddle with our affairs, so utterly foreign to you, when we ourselves did not ask you? Would you rend with insults undeserved, would you in a disreputable book libel and defame the supreme magistracy of the English nation, when according to the authority and power to them entrusted they do but their duty within their own jurisdiction — and all this without the least injury or provocation from them, for they did not even know that you were born? By whom, though, were you asked? By your wife, I suppose, who, they say, exercises the royal right over you, and, like the notorious Fulvia in the obscene epigram from which a while ago (p. 320) you patched together a cento, cries to you whenever she has a mind: "Either" write "or we must fight!" Wherefore you preferred to write rather than the trumpets should sound the charge! Or were you asked by the younger Charles and that profligate crew of vagabond courtiers, like a second Balaam solicited by a second King Balak, to deign to restore by curses and ill writing a king's desperate cause that was lost by ill fighting? That may well be, except there was something like this difference: when he came to curse, he was a clever man sitting upon a talkative little ass; you are a very talkative ass yourself, sat upon by a woman, and being overgrown with the healed healed heads of the bishops that heretofore you had wounded, you seem to present a sort of miniature portrait of that beast in Revelation.

But they say that you repented yourself of this book a little after you had written it. It is mighty well; and therefore to witness your repentance unto all men, the first thing you ought to do will be, instead of so long a book, to make only just one proper long letter of yourself. For it was so Judas Iscariot repented himself, whom you resemble Young Charles found it out too, and he sent you the purse, that badge of traitor Judas, precisely because he had heard before, and knew afterward by experience, that you were an apostate and the Devil. That other Judas betrayed Christ, and you betray Christ's Church. You had taught heretofore that Bishops were Antichrists; you have deserted to them. You have undertaken the cause of them that you had damned to Hell. Christ delivered all men; you have attempted to drive all men back into slavery. Never question, since you have been such a wicked wretch to God, to the Church, and to every nation of men, that the same fate awaits you as erewhile befell your double: out of despair rather than repentance, and utterly weary of yourself, to hang at last upon the gallows-tree and burst asunder as he did; and to send beforehand that faithless and treacherous conscience of yours, that persecutor of good and holy men, to the place of torment that is sooner or later prepared for you.

And now I think, through God's good help, I have finished the work I undertook at the beginning, namely to defend both at home and abroad the noble actions of my countrymen against the brainsick envious rage of this mad sophist, and to assert the people's common rights against the unrighteous despotism of kings - and this not out of any hatred of kings, but of tyrants. Nor have I knowingly left unanswered any argument or example or document alleged by my adversary, that seemed to possess any solid substance or power to convince. Perhaps I have been nearer the opposite fault, that by rather too often answering also his silliness and threadbare quibbles as if they were arguments, I may seem to have given them an importance that they nothing deserved.

One thing yet remains, haply the greatest, and that is, that you too, my countrymen, yourselves refute this adversary of yours, which to do I see no other way than by striving constantly to outdo all men's bad words by your own good deeds. Your vows, your burning prayers, when, crushed beneath more than one kind of slavery, you fled to God for refuge, he has graciously heard and granted. Gloriously has he delivered you before all other nations from what surely are the two greatest mischiefs of this life, and most pernicious to virtue - Tyranny and Superstition; he has inspired you with the greatness of soul to be the first of mankind who, after having conquered their own king, and having him delivered into their hands, have not hesitated to judge him with a judgment that yet resounds in men's ears, and to condemn him, and pursuant to that condemnation to put him to death. After so glorious a deed, you ought to think, you ought to do nothing that is mean and petty, nothing but what is great and sublime. This praise that you may attain, there is but one path to tread: as you have subdued your enemies in the field so you shall prove that unarmed and in the midst of peace you of all mankind have highest courage to subdue what conquers the rest of the nations of men — faction, avarice, the temptation of riches, and the corruptions that wait upon prosperity; and in maintaining your liberty shall show as great justice, temperance, and moderation as you have shown courage in freeing yourselves from slavery. By these arguments and documents only can you prove you are not such as this libeler reproaches you with — being "Traitors, Robbers, Assassins, Patricides, Madmen"; that what you did was not the slaughtering of a king because you were driven by factiousness, or a desire to usurp the rights of others, or mere quarrelsomeness, or perverse desires, or fury or madness, but was the punishing of a tyrant because you were aflame with love of your liberty and your religion, of justice and honor, yea — and is not this the sum and end of all these? — with dear love of your country.

But if you prove to be of other mind — which may the good God forbid forever! — if as you have been valiant in war, you should grow debauched in peace, if you that have had such visible demonstrations of the goodness of God to yourselves, and of his wrath against your enemies, have not learned by so eminent and memorable an example before your eyes, to fear God and work righteousness, I for my part shall verily grant and confess, for I cannot deny, that the worst which slanderers and liars now speak or think of you is true. And in a little time ye will find God far more wrathful against you than either your adversaries have found him embittered, or you have found him aforetime gracious and favorable beyond all other nations at this time on earth.

It is now several years since I published the forgoing, in haste, as reason of state then required, for I kept thinking that if ever I might take it in hand again at leisure, as occasionally happens, I might thereupon smooth out, or remove, maybe, or add somewhat. This I now judge that I have accomplished, though more briefly than I used to count upon doing it: a memorial which, such as it is, I see will not easily perish. Though someone may be found who may have defended civil freedom more freely than here it is defended, yet there shall hardly be found anyone who hath defended it in a greater and more glorious example. If, then, an action of example so high and illustrious is believed to have been as successfully accomplished as not without God's prompting undertaken, let this be good reason for thinking that in these my praises too it hath even by the same Might and Inspiration been glorified and defended. Indeed I had much rather all men thought so, than that any other success, whether of wit or judgment or industry, were allowed me. Yet as that famous Roman Consul, upon retiring from office, swore in the popular assembly that the state and the city owed their safety to his single efforts, even so, as I now put the last touches to this work, so much only I dare assert, calling God and man to witness: that in this book I have indicated and brought to light, from the highest authors of wisdom both divine and human, matters whereby, I trust not only the English people has been a adequately defended in this cause, to the everlasting reputation of its posterity, but numerous other human beings as well, hitherto deluded by foul ignorance of their right and by false show of religion — multitudes of men, I say, except such as themselves prefer and deserve to be slaves — have been quite set free. Now the oath of that Consul, great as were its claims, was in that same assembly ratified by oath of the whole Roman people with one mind and one voice; this conviction of mine, I have long understood, is fully ratified by the mosty excellent not only of my fellow-citizens, but of foreigners too, with the loud voice of nations everywhere.

This my zealous labor's fruit — the highest that I for my part have set before me in this life — I gratefully enjoy; yet therewith too consider chiefly how I best may bear witness, not only to my own country, to which I have paid the highest I possessed, but even to men of whatever nation, and to the cause of Christendom above all — that I am pursuing yet greater things if my strength suffice (nay, it will if God grant), and for their sake meanwhile am taking thought, and studying to make ready.

THE END.