B. If the King had escaped into France, might not the French have assisted him with forces to recover his kingdom, and so frustrated the designs both of Cromwell and all the King’s other enemies?
A. Yes, much; just as they assisted his son, our present most gracious Sovereign, who two years before fled thither out of Cornwall.
B. It is methinks no great polity in neighbouring princes to favour, so often as they do, one another’s rebels, especially when they rebel against monarchy itself. They should rather, first, make a league against rebellion and afterwards, (if there be no remedy) fight one against another. Nor will that serve the turn amongst Christian sovereigns, till preaching be better looked to, whereby the interpretation of a verse in the Hebrew, Greek, or Latin Bible, is oftentimes the cause of civil war and the deposing and assassinating of God’s anointed. And yet, converse with those divinity-disputers as long as you will, you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affair, either of war or peace. It is not the right of the sovereign, though granted to him by every man’s express consent, that can enable him to do his office; it is the obedience of the subject, which must do that. For what good is it to promise allegiance, and then by and by to cry out (as some ministers did in the pulpit) To your tents, O Israel!? Common people know nothing of right or wrong by their own meditation; they must therefore be taught the grounds of their duty, and the reasons why calamities ever follow disobedience to their lawful sovereigns. But to the contrary, our rebels were publicly taught rebellion in the pulpits; and that there was no sin, but the doing of what the preachers forbade, or the omission of what they advised.—But now the King was the Parliament’s prisoner, why did not the Presbyterians advance their own interest by restoring him?
A. The Parliament, in which there were more Presbyterians yet than Independents, might have gotten what they would of the King during his life, if they had not by an
