The committee brought into the house that remonstrance which has become so memorable, and which was soon afterwards attended with such important consequences. It was not addressed to the king; but was openly declared to be an appeal to the people. The harshness of the matter was equalled by the severity of the language. It consists of many gross falsehoods, intermingled with some evident truths: malignant insinuations are joined to open invectives; loud complaints of the past, accompanied with jealous prognostications of the future. Whatever unfortunate, whatever invidious, whatever suspicious measure had been embraced by the king, from the commencement of his reign, is insisted on and aggravated with merciless rhetoric: the unsuccessful expeditions to Cadiz and the Isle of Rhé are mentioned; the sending of ships to France for the suppression of the Hugonots; the forced loans; the illegal confinement of men for not obeying illegal commands; the violent dissolution of four parliaments; the arbitrary government which always succeeded; the questioning, fining, and imprisoning of members for their conduct in the house; the levying of taxes without consent of the commons; the introducing of superstitious innovations into the church, without authority of law: in short, every thing which, either with or without reason, had given offence during the course of fifteen years, from the accession of the king to the calling of the present parliament. And though all these grievances had been already redressed, and even laws enacted for future security against their return, the praise of these advantages was ascribed, not to the king, but to the parliament, who had extorted his consent to such salutary statutes. Their own merits too, they asserted, towards the king, were no less eminent than towards the people. Though they had seized his whole revenue, rendered it totally precarious, and made even their temporary supplies be paid to their own commissioners, who were independent of him, they pretended that they had liberally supported him in his necessities. By an insult still more egregious, the very giving of money to the Scots for levying war against their sovereign, they represented as an instance of their duty towards him. And all their grievances, they said, which amounted to no less than a total subversion of the constitution, proceeded entirely from the formed combination of a Popish faction, who had ever swayed the king's counsels, who had endeavored, by an uninterrupted effort, to introduce their superstition into England and Scotland, and who had now at last excited an open and bloody rebellion in Ireland.[*]