people; and, by your very urging it, you endeavour, what in you lies,
to make him lose them. All good subjects abhor the thought of
arbitrary power, whether it be in one or many; if you were the patriots
you would seem, you would not at this rate incense the multitude to
assume it; for no sober man can fear it, either from the King's
disposition or his practice; or even, where you would odiously lay it,
from his ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the Government, and the
benefit of laws, under which we were born, and which we desire to
transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the public
liberty; and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much less
have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs, or to arraign
what you do not like; which in effect is everything that is done by the
King and Council. Can you imagine, that any reasonable man will believe
you respect the person of his Majesty, when 'tis apparent that your
seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If
you have the confidence to deny this, 'tis easy to be evinced from a
thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote because I desire they
should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers; and to
show you that I have, the third part of your _No-Protestant Plot_ is
much of it stolen from your dead author's pamphlet called the _Growth
of Popery_; as manifestly as Milton's defence of the English people is
from Buchanan, _de jure regni apud Scotos_; or your first covenant, and
new association, from the holy league of the French Guisards. Anyone,
who reads Davila, may trace your practices all along. There were the
same pretences for reformation and loyalty, the same aspersions of the
King, and the same grounds of a rebellion. I know not whether you will
take the historian's word, who says, it was reported, that Poltrot a
Huguenot murder'd Francis Duke of Guise, by the instigations of
Theodore Beza; or that it was a Huguenot minister, otherwise called a
Presbyterian (for our Church abhors so devilish a tenet) who first
writ a treatise of the lawfulness of deposing and murdering Kings, of a
different persuasion in religion. But I am able to prove from the
doctrine of Calvin, and principles of Buchanan, that they set the
people above the magistrate; which, if I mistake not, is your own
fundamental; and which carries your loyalty no farther than your
liking. When a vote of the House of Commons goes on your side, you are
as ready to observe it, as if it were passed into a law: but when you
are pinch'd with any former, and yet unrepealed, Act of Parliament, you
declare that in some cases you will not be obliged by it. The passage
is in the same third part of the _No-Protestant Plot_; and is too plain
to be denied. The late copy of your intended association you neither
wholly justify nor condemn: but as the Papists, when they are
unoppos'd, fly out into all the pageantries of worship, but, in times
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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