Every point which a monarch loses or relinquishes, but renders him the weaker to maintain the rest; and, besides, they so construe it, as if what he gave up were the natural right of the people, which he, or his ancestors, had usurped from them; which makes it the more dangerous for him to quit his hold, and is truly the reason why so many mild princes have been branded with the names of tyrants by their encroaching subjects. I have not room to enlarge upon this matter as I would, neither dare I presume to press the argument more closely; but passing by, as I promised, all the remarkable passages in the late king’s reign, which resemble the transactions of the League, I will briefly take notice of some few particulars, wherein our late associators and conspirators have made a third copy of the League; for the original of their first politics was certainly no other than the French. This was first copied by the rebels in forty-one, and since recopied within these late years by some of those who are lately dead, and by too many others yet alive, and still drawing after the same design; in which, for want of time, many a fair blot shall be left unhit; neither do I promise to observe any method of times, or to take things in order as they happened. As for the persons who managed the two associations, theirs and ours, it is most certain that in them is found the least resemblance: And it is well for us they were not like; for they had men of subtlety and valour to design, and then to carry on their conspiracy: Ours were but bunglers in comparison of them, who, having a faction not made by them, but ready formed and fashioned to their hands, (thanks to their fathers,) yet failed in every one of their projections, and managed their business with much less dexterity, though far more wickedness than the French. They had, indeed, at their head an old conspirator, witty and turbulent, like the Cardinal of Lorraine,[31] and for courage in execution much such another. But the good sense and conduct was clearly wanting on the English side; so that, if we will allow him the contrivance of the plot, or at least of the conspiracy, which is an honour that no man will be willing to take from him, in all other circumstances he more resembled the old decrepit Cardinal of Bourbon, who fed himself with imaginary hopes of power, dreamed of outliving a king and his successor, much more young and vigorous than himself, and of governing the world after their decease. To die in prison, or in banishment, I think, will make no mighty difference; but this is a main one, that the one was the dupe of all his party, the other led after him, and made fools of all his faction. As for a Duke of Guise, or even so much as a Duke of Mayenne, I can find none in their whole cabal. I cannot believe that any man now living could have the vanity to pretend to it. It is not every age than can produce a Duke of Guise,—a man who, without the least shadow of a title, (unless we will