ever doctrine looked with an ill aspect upon their interest; and consequently all true philosophy, especially civil and moral, which can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from their obedience due to the sovereign power. *[That reputation they have in the sciences, hath not proceeded from anything they have effected by those sciences, but from the infirmity of the people that understand nothing in them, and admire nothing but what they understand not. There was lately erected a company of gentlemen for the promoting of natural philosophy and mathematics. What they will produce, I know not yet, but this I am sure of, that the authority of licensing the books that are to be written of that subject, is not in them, but in some divines, who have little knowledge in physics, and none at all in mathematics.]*
After the King had accused the Lord Kimbolton, a member of the Lords’ house; and Hollis, Haslerigg, Hampden, Pym, and Stroud, five members of the Lower House, of high-treason; and after the Parliament had voted out the bishops from the House of Peers; they pursued especially two things in their petitions to his Majesty: the one was, that the King would declare who were the persons that advised him to go, as he did, to the Parliament-house to apprehend them, and that he would leave them to the Parliament to receive condign punishment. And this they did, to stick upon his Majesty the dishonour of deserting his friends, and betraying them to his enemies. The other was, that he would allow them a guard out of the city of London, to be commanded by the Earl of Essex; for which they pretended, they could not else sit in safety; which pretence was nothing but an upbraiding of his Majesty for coming to Parliament better accompanied than ordinary, to seize the five seditious members.
B. I see no reason *why* in petitioning for a guard, they should determine it to the city of London in particular, and the command by name to the Earl of Essex, unless they meant the King should understand it for a guard against himself.
