tion against those by whose evil counsel he was induced to it, that they might receive condign punishment.
B. This was a cruel proceeding. Do not the Kings of England use to sit in the Lords’ House when they please? And was not this bill in debate then in the House of Lords? It is a strange thing that a man should be lawfully in the company of men, where he must needs hear and see what they say and do, and yet must not take notice of it so much as to the same company; for though the King was not at the debate itself, yet it was lawful for any of the Lords to make him acquainted with it. Any one of the House of Commons, though not present at a proposition or debate in the House, nevertheless hearing of it from some of his fellow-members, may certainly not only take notice of it, but also speak to it in the House of Commons: but to make the King give up his friends and counsellors to them, to be put to death, banishment, or imprisonment, for their good-will to him, was such a tyranny over a king, no king ever exercised over any subject but in cases of treason or murder, and seldom then.
A. Presently hereupon began a kind of war between the pens of the Parliament and those of the secretaries, and other able men that were with the King. For upon the 15th of December they sent to the King a paper called A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom, and with it a petition; both which they caused to be published. In the remomstrance they complained of certain mischievous designs of a malignant party, then, before the beginning of the Parliament, grown ripe; and did set forth what means had been used for the preventing of it by the wisdom of the Parliament; what rubs they had found therein; what course was fit to be taken for restoring and establishing the ancient honour, greatness, and safety, of the Crown and nation.
And of these designs the promoters and actors were (they said) 1. Jesuited Papists:
2. The bishops, and that part of the clergy that cherish
