truth of a full and pertinent reply. As he, to acquit himself, hath not spared his adversaries to load them with all sorts of blame and accusation, so to him, as in his book alive, there will be used no more courtship than he uses; but what is properly his own guilt, not imputed any more to his evil counsellors, a ceremony used longer by the parliament than he himself desired, shall be laid here without circumlocutions at his own door, that they who from the first beginning, or but now of late, by what unhappiness I know not, are so much affatuated, not with his person only, but with his palpable faults, and doat upon his deformities, may have none to blame but their own folly, if they live and die in such a strooken blindness, as next to that of Sodom hath not happened to any sort of men more gross, or more misleading. Yet neither let his enemies expect to find recorded here all that hath been whispered in the court, or alleged openly, of the king's bad actions; it being the proper scope of this work in hand, not to rip up and relate the misdoings of his whole life, but to answer only and refute the missayings of his book.

First, then, that some men, whether this were by him intended, or by his friends, have by policy accomplished after death that revenge upon their enemies which in life they were not able, hath been oft related. And among other examples we find that the last will of Cæsar being read to the people, and what bounteous legacies he had bequeathed them, wrought more in that vulgar audience to the avenging of his death, than all the art he could ever use to win their favor in his lifetime. And how much their intent, who published these overlate apologies and meditations of the dead king, drives to the same end of stirring up the people to bring him that honor, that affection, and by consequence that revenge to his dead corpse, which he

himself living could never gain to his person, it appears both by the conceited portraiture before his book, drawn out to the full measure of a masking scene, and set there to catch fools and silly gazers, and by those Latin words after the end, Vota dabunt quæ bella negarunt, intimating that what he could not compass by war, he should achieve by his meditations; for in words which admit of various sense, the liberty is ours to choose that interpretation which may best mind us of what our restless enemies endeavour, and what wę are timely to prevent.

And here may be well observed the loose and negligent curiosity of those who took upon them to adorn the setting out of this book; for though the picture set in front would martyr him and saint him to befool the people, yet the Latin motto in the end, which they understand not, leaves him, as it were, a politic contriver to bring about that interest by fair and plausible words, which the force of arms denied him. But quaint emblems and devices begged from the old pageantry of some Twelfth Night's entertainment at Whitehall, will do but ill to make a saint or martyr; and if the people resolve to take him sainted at the rate of such a canonizing, I shall suspect their calendar more than the Gregorian.

In one thing I must commend his openness who gave the title to this book, Ex Bain, that is to say, The King's Image; and by the shrine he dresses out for him, certainly would have the people come and worship him. For which reason this answer also is intitled, Iconoclastes, the famous surname of many Greek emperors, who in their zeal to the command of God, after long tradition of idolatry in the church, took courage and broke all superstitious images to pieces. But the people, exorbitant and excessive in all their motions, are prone ofttimes, not to a religious

only, but to a civil kind of idolatry, in idolizing their kings, though never more mistaken in the object of their worship, heretofore being wont to repute for saints those faithful and courageous barons who lost their lives in the field, making glorious war against tyrants for the common liberty; as Simon de Momfort, Earl of Leicester, against Henry the Third ; Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, against Edward the Second. But now, with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English fortitude and love of freedom, and have testified it by their matchless deeds, the rest, embastardized from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath offered at more cunning fetches to undermine our liberties, and put tyranny into an art, than any British king before him; which low dejection and debasement of mind in the people, I must confess I cannot willingly ascribe to the natural disposition of an Englishman, but rather to two other causes; first, to the prelates and their fellow teachers, though of another name and sect, whose pulpit stuff, both first and last, hath been the doctrine and perpetual infusion of servility and wretchedness to all their hearers, and whose lives, the type of worldliness and hypocrisy, without the least true pattern of virtue, righteousness, or self denial, in their whole practice. I attribute it next to the factious inclination of most men divided from the public by several ends and humors of their own.

At first no man less beloved, no man more generally condemned than was the king, from the time that it became his custom to break parliaments at home, and either wilfully or weakly to betray protestants abroad, to the beginning of these combustions. All men inveighed against him; all men, except court

vassals, opposed him and his tyrannical proceedings; the cry was universal; and this full parliament was at first unanimous in their dislike and protestation against his evil government. But when they who sought themselves and not the public, began to doubt that all of them could not by one and the same way attain to their ambitious purposes, then was the king, or his name at least, as a fit property first made use of, his doings made the best of, and by degrees justified; which begot him such a party, as after many wiles and strugglings with his inward fears, emboldened him at length to set up his standard against the parliament, whenas before that time, all his adherents, consisting most of dissolute swordsmen, and suburb roysters, hardly amounted to the making up of one ragged regiment strong enough to assault the unarmed house of commons. which attempt, seconded by a tedious and bloody war on his subjects, wherein he hath so far exceeded those his arbitrary violences in time of peace, they who before hated him for his high misgovernment, nay, fought against him with displayed banners in the field, now applaud him and extol him for the wisest and most religious prince that lived. By so strange a method amongst the mad multitude is a sudden reputation won, of wisdom by wilfulness and subtle shifts, of goodness by multiplying evil, of piety by endeavouring to root out true religion.

After

But it is evident that the chief of his adherents never loved him, never honored either him or his cause, but as they took him to set a face upon their own malignant designs; nor bemoan his loss at all, but the loss of their own aspiring hopes, like those captive women, whom the poet notes in his Iliad, to have bewailed the death of Patroclus in outward show, but indeed their own "condition.

Πάτροκλον πρόφασιν, σφῶν δ ̓ ἀυτῶν κήδε' ἑκάστη.
Hom. Iliad.

And it needs must be ridiculous to any judgment uninthralled, that they who in other matters express so little fear either of God or man, should in this one particular outstrip all precisianism with their scruples and cases, and fill men's ears continually with the noise of their conscientious loyalty and allegiance to the king, rebels in the mean while to God in all their actions besides; much less that they whose professed loyalty and allegiance led them to direct arms against the king's person, and thought him nothing violated by the sword of hostility drawn by them against him, should now in earnest think him violated by the unsparing sword of justice, which undoubtedly so much the less in vain she bears among men, by how much greater and in highest place the offender. Else justice, whether moral or political, were not justice, but a false counterfeit of that impartial and godlike virtue. The only grief is, that the head was not struck off to the best advantage and commodity of them that held it by the hair; an ingrateful and perverse generation, who having first cried to God to be delivered from their king, now murmur against God that heard their prayers, and cry as loud for their king against those that delivered them.

But as to the author of these soliloquies, whether it were undoubtedly the late king, as is vulgarly believed, or any secret coadjutor, and some stick not to name him, it can add nothing, nor shall take from the weight, if any be, of reason which he brings. But allegations, not reasons, are the main contents of this book, and need no more than other contrary allegations to lay the question before all men in an even balance, though it were supposed that the testimony of one man, in his own cause affirming, could be of any moment to bring in doubt the authority of a parliament denying. But if these his fair spoken words shall be