Now concerning your Majesty's servants, and namely the Duke of Buckingham: We humbly beseech your Majesty to be informed by us your faithful Commons, who can have no private end but your Majesty's service, and the good of our country, that it hath been the ancient constant and undoubted right and usage of Parliaments to question and complain of all persons, of what degree soever, found grievous to the Commonwealth, in abusing the power and trust committed to them by their sovereign. A course approved not only by the examples in your Father's days of famous memory, but by frequent precedents in the best and most glorious reigns of your noble progenitors, appearing both in records and histories; without which liberty in Parliament no private man, no servant to a king, perhaps no counsellor, without exposing himself to the hazard of great enmity and prejudice, can be a means to call great officers in question for their misdemeanours, but the Commonwealth might languish under their pressures without redress. And whatsoever we shall do accordingly in this Parliament, we doubt not but it shall redound to the honour of the Crown, and welfare of your subjects.... THE COMMONS IN TEARS (1628). =Source.=--Rushworth, _Historical Collections_. Vol. i., p. 609. _Mr. Alured to Mr. Chamberlain._ SIR, Yesterday was a day of desolation among us in Parliament, and this day we fear will be the day of our dissolution: Upon Tuesday Sir John Eliot moved, that as we intended to furnish his Majesty with money, we should also supply him with Counsel, which was one part of the occasion why we were sent by the Country, and called for by his Majesty; And since that House was the greatest Council of the Kingdom, where, or when should His Majesty have better Council than from thence? So he desired there might be a Declaration made to the King of the danger wherein the Kingdom stood by the decay and contempt of Religion, the insufficiency of his Generals, the unfaithfulness of his Officers, the weakness of his Councils, the exhausting of his Treasure, the death of his Men, the decay of Trade, the loss of Shipping, the many and powerful Enemies, the few and the poor Friends we had abroad.