discovering the ridiculous folly as well as the outrageous fury of their persecutors. For at a private meeting in London, among others, some Scotsmen, of very mean figure, some taylors, a shoemaker, a chapman, &c. were taken, and being found to be Scotsmen, were not only examined at the common courts there, but by Sir Andrew Foster, by express commission from the late king a little before his death; who threatened them under a strange sort of certification, (considering what fell out immediately thereafter) that assuredly they should be sent to Scotland very shortly, if there were not a revolution of the government. But this revolution, following within a few days, retarded it a little: yet not long thereafter they were sent in a yacht, with a guard of soldiers, and a charge of high treason. But, when brought before the council of Scotland, the amount of all that bustle was, a question posed to them under pain of death, whether the king should be king or no? that is, whether they owned his authority or not. Yet though some of the poor men did own it, they were sent to Dunotter castle: and thence among the rest banished and transported to New Jersey; in which passage, by reason of their crude and bad provision, the most part in the ship were cast into a fever, and upwards of sixty died, yea even since the former proclamation for this pretended liberty, there are twenty-one men and five women sent to Barbadoes, against whom nothing could be alledged but matters of mere religion and conscience: which, as it proclaims the notoriousness of these impudent lies, wherewith the proclamations for this liberty are stuffed; so it puts an indelible brand of infamy upon some London merchants, that are said to pretend to some profession of religion, who sent the ship to transport them, thereby to make gain of the merchandise of the Lord's captives. 3. There have been more cruel acts of parliament enacted in this tyrant's time, than the former made all his reign. For in his first parliament held by Queensberry, commissioner, not only was there an act for making it treason to refuse the oath of abjuration, confirming all the illegalities of their procedure hereupon before; but an act making it criminal to own the covenant, and another act making it criminal for any to be present at a field-meeting, which was only so to preachers before. Yet neither these acts, and all the executions following upon them, have daunted, nor I hope shall drive them, nor the indemnity and toleration (so generally now applauded) draw them from the duty of owning both these, that are so much the more publicly to be avouched, that they are so openly interdicted by wicked and blasphemous tyranny, though for the same they expect from the Scottish inquisition all the murdering violence, that hell and Rome and malignant rage can exert.