to struggle like Esau and Jacob in the womb, and both endeavouring to be first born, the younger pulls back the elder by the heel. I promised to observe no order, and am performing my word before I was aware. After the barricades, and at many other times, the Duke of Guise, and Council of Sixteen, amongst the rest of the articles, demanded of the king to cashier his guards of the forty-five gentlemen, as unknown in the times of his predecessors, and unlawful; as also, to remove his surest friends from about his person, and from their places, both military and civil. I leave any man to judge, whether our conspirators did not play the second part to the same tune; whether his majesty’s guards were not alleged to be unlawful, and a grievance to the subjects; and whether frequent votes did not pass in the House of Commons at several times, for removing and turning out of office those, who, on all occasions, behaved themselves most loyally to the king, without so much as giving any other reason of their misdemeanors than public fame; that is to say, reports forged and spread by their own faction, or without allowing them the common justice of vindicating themselves from those calumnies and aspersions. I omit the many illegal imprisonments of freeborn men, by their own representatives, who, from a jury, erected themselves into judges; because I find nothing resembling it in the worst and most seditious times of France. But let the history be searched, and I believe Bussy Le Clerc never committed more outrages in pillaging of houses, than Waller in pretending to search for Popish relics:[43] Neither do I remember that the French Leaguers ever took the evidence of a Jew, as ours did of Faria.[44] But this I wonder at the less, considering what Christian witnesses have been used, if at least the chief of them was ever christened. Bussy Le Clerc, it is true, turned out a whole parliament together, and brought them prisoners to the Bastile; and Bussy Oates was for garbling too, when he informed against a worthy and loyal member, whom he caused to be expelled the House, and sent prisoner to the Tower:[45] But that which was then accounted a disgrace to him, will make him be remembered with honour to posterity. I will trouble the reader but with one observation more, and that shall be to show how dully and pedantically they have copied even the false steps of the League in politics, and those very maxims which ruined the heads of it. The Duke of Guise was always ostentatious of his power in the states, where he carried all things in opposition to the king: but, by relying too much on the power he had there, and not using arms when he had them in his hand, I mean by not prosecuting his victory to the uttermost, when he had the king enclosed in the Louvre, he missed his opportunity, and fortune never gave it him again.