upon himself and his father's house (God so disposing it) by his usurped and ill-imitated prayer: Let thy anger, I beseech thee, be against me and my father's house; as for these sheep, what have they done?" For if David indeed sinned in numbering the people, of which fault he in earnest made that confession, and acquitted the whole people from the guilt of that sin; then doth this king using the same words, bear witness against himself to be the guilty person; and either in his soul and conscience here acquits the parliament and the people, or else abuses the words of David, and dissembles grossly to the very face of God; which is apparent in the next line; wherein he accuses even the church itself to God, as if she were the church's enemy, for having overcome his tyranny by the powerful and miraculous might of God's manifest arm for to other strength, in the midst of our divisions and disorders, who can attribute our victories? Thus had this miserable man no worse enemies to solicit and mature his own destruction, from the hastened sentence of divine justice, than the obdurate curses which proceeded against himself out of his own mouth.

323. Hitherto his meditations, now his vows; which, as the vows of hypocrites use to be, are most commonly absurd, and some wicked. Jacob vowed, that God should be his God, if he granted him but what was necessary to perform that vow, life and subsistence; but the obedience proffered here is nothing so cheap. He, who took so heinously to

be offered nineteen propositions from the parliament, capitulates here with God almost in as many articles.

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If he will continue that light," or rather that darkness of the gospel, which is among his prelates, settle their luxuries, and make them gorgeous bishops;

If he will "restore" the grievances and mischiefs of those obsolete and popish laws, which the parliament without his consent had abrogated, and will suffer justice to be executed according to his sense;

"If he will suppress the many schisms in church," to contradict himself in that which he hath foretold must and shall come to pass, and will remove reformation as the greatest schism of all, and factions in state, by which he means in every leaf, the parliament;

If he will" restore him" to his negative voice and the militia, as much as to say, to arbitrary power, which he wrongfully avers to be the "right of his predecessors;"

"If he will turn the hearts of his people" to their old cathedral and parochial service in the liturgy, and their passive obedience to the king;

"If he will quench" the army, and withdraw our forces from withstanding the piracy of Rupert, (87) and the plotted Irish invasion; (88)

(87) The reader may see in Guizot, (Histoire de la Revolution de l'Angleterre, passim,) the conduct and character of this instrument of tyranny. His insolent behaviour to Newcastle on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor, (t. ii. p. 51, 52,) and the total

"If he will bless him with the freedom" of bishops again in the house of peers, and of fugitive delinquents in the house of commons, and deliver the honour of parliament into his hands, from the most natural and due protection of the people, that entrusted them with the dangerous enterprize of being faithful to their country against the rage and malice of his tyrannous opposition;

"If he will keep him from that great offence," of following the counsel of his parliament, and enacting what they advise him to; which in all reason,

want of foresight and ability on that celebrated field, expose him to our contempt; elsewhere his actions entitle him to our hatred. Alluding to the treacherous advance upon Brentford during treaty with the parliament, of which I have given the history above, (note 77,) Warburton observes :-"He seems to have done it for no other reason than to break off the treaty. He was a soldier of fortune, and loved the service, and his whole conduct was conformable to that character. In a word, the king was ruined by his ministers in peace, and by his officers in war. But he who certainly most contributed to the ill-success of his arms, was Prince Rupert; and this was one of the most mischievous as well as barbarous of his exploits. In this affair, if the king's sole purpose was to disengage Prince Rupert's horse on Hounslow Heath, why did he advance to Hounslow (a mistake for Brentford) with his foot, and force the barricades of the town, defended by the parliament's foot? I doubt he was not so clear in his purpose as his historian represents him." (History, &c. vii. 564.) Clarendon, who has always something civil to say of a tyrant, or a tyrant's instruments, calls Rupert and Newcastle," two great generals;" upon which Warburton remarks:- "These two great generals ought both to have been hanged, and where any discipline or law prevailed would have been so.' ." (Notes on Clarendon's History, vii. 597.)

(88) See on this point, Guizot's "Histoire de la Revolution de l'Angleterre," (ii. 323, 404); and Brodie's "History of the British Empire." (iii. 489.)

and by the known law, and oath of his coronation, he ought to do, and not to call that sacrilege, which necessity, through the continuance of his own civil war, hath compelled him to; necessity, which made David eat the shewbread, made Ezekiah take all the silver which was found in God's house, and cut off the gold which overlaid those doors and pillars, and gave it to Sennacherib; necessity, which ofttimes made the primitive church to sell her sacred utensils, even to the communion-chalice;

"If he will restore him to a capacity of glorifying him by doing" that both in church and state, which must needs dishonour and pollute his name;

"If he will bring him again with peace, honour, and safety, to his chief city," without repenting, without satisfying for the blood spilt, only for a few politic concessions, which are as good as nothing; "If he will put again the sword into his hand, to punish" those that have delivered us, and to protect delinquents against the justice of parliament;

Then, if it be possible to reconcile contradictions, he will praise him by displeasing him, and serve him by disserving him.

324. "His glory," in the gaudy copes and painted windows, mitres, rochets, altars, and the chanted service-book, "shall be dearer to him," than the establishing his crown in righteousness, and the spiritual power of religion. "He will pardon those that have offended him in particular," but there shall want no subtle ways to be even with them upon another score of their supposed offences against the commonwealth; whereby he may at

once affect the glory of a seeming justice, and destroy them pleasantly, while he feigns to forgive them as to his own particular, and outwardly bewails them.

325. These are the conditions of his treating with God, to whom he bates nothing of what he stood upon with the parliament: as if commissions of array could deal with him also. But of all these conditions, as it is now evident in our eyes, God accepted none, but that final petition, which he so oft, no doubt but by the secret judgment of God, importunes against his own head; praying God, "That his mercies might be so toward him, as his resolutions of truth and peace were toward his people." It follows then, God having cut him off, without granting any of these mercies, that his resolutions were as feigned, as his vows were frustrate.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Upon the Army's surprisal of the King at Holmby.

326. To give account to royalists what was done with their vanquished king, yielded up into our hands, is not to be expected from them, whom God hath made his conquerors. And for brethren to debate and rip up their falling out in the ear of a common enemy, thereby making him the judge,