tinual controversy thenceforth about 'surrendering of Records' and the like. In a little while (hour not named) comes Black Rod; reports that his Highness is in the Lords House, waiting for this House. Whereupon, Shoulder Mace, yes, let us take the Mace, and march. His Highness, somewhat indisposed in health, leaving the main burden of the exposition to Nathaniel Fiennes of the Great Seal who is to follow him, speaks to this effect; as the authentic Commons Journals yield it for us.

SPEECH XV.

MY LORDS, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS,

I meet you here in this capacity by the Advice and Petition of this present Parliament. After so much expense of blood and treasure, we are now' to search and try what blessings God hath in store for these Nations. I cannot but with gladness of heart remember and acknowledge the labor and industry that is past, 'your past labor,' which hath been spent upon a business worthy of the best men and the best Christians [May it prove fruitful!].

It is very well known unto you all what difficulties we have passed through, and what 'issue' we are now arrived at. We hope we may say we have arrived if not altogether' at what we aimed at, yet at that which is much beyond our expectations. The nature of this Cause, and the Quarrel, what that was at the first, you all very well know; I am persuaded most of you have been actors in it: It was the maintaining of the Liberty of these Nations; our Civil Liberties as Men, our Spiritual Liberties as Christians [Have we arrived at that?]. I shall not much look back; but rather say one word concerning the state and condition we are all now in.

You know very well, the first Declaration,* after the beginning of this War, that spake to the life, was a sense held forth by the Parliament, That for some succession of time designs had been laid to innovate upon the Civil Rights of the Nations, 'and' to innovate in matters of Religion. And those very persons who, a man would have thought, should have had the least hand in meddling with Civil things, did justify them all. [Zealous sycophant Priests, Sibthorp, Manwaring, Montagu, of the Laud fraternity: forced-loans, monopolies, ship-monies, all Civil Tyranny

* Declaration, 2 August, 1642, went through the Lords House that day ; it is in Parliamentary History, vi., 350. A thing of audacity reckoned almost impious at the time (see D'Ewes's мs. Journal, 23 July); corresponds in purport to what is said of it here.

[Yea!] And give you one heart and mind to carry on this work for which we are met together! If these things be so,-should you meet to-morrow, and accord in all things tending to your preservation and your rights and liberties, really it will be feared there is too much time elapsed already' for your delivering yourselves from those dangers that hang upon you!—

6

We have had now Six Years of Peace, and have had an interruption of Ten Years War. We have seen and heard and felt the evils of War; and now God hath given us a new taste of the benefits of Peace. Have you not had such a Peace in England, Ireland and Scotland, that there is not a man to lift up his finger to put you into distemper? Is not this a mighty blessing from the Lord of Heaven? [Hah!] Shall we now be prodigal of time? Should any man, shall we, listen to delusions, to break and interrupt this Peace? There is not any man that hath been true to this Cause, as I believe you have been all, who can look for anything but the greatest rending and persecution that ever was in this world! [Peppery Scott's hot head will go up on Temple Bar, and Haselrig will do well to die soon.*]-I wonder how it can enter into the heart of man to undervalue these things; to slight Peace and the Gospel, the greatest mercy of God. We have Peace and the Gospel! [What a tone!] Let us have one heart and soul; one mind to maintain the honest and just rights of this Nation;-not to pretend to them, to the destruction of our Peace, to the destruction of the Nation! [As yet there is one Hero-heart among you, ye blustering contentious rabble; one Soul blazing as a light-beacon in the midst of Chaos, forbidding Chaos yet to be supreme. In a little while that too will be extinct; and then!] Really, pretend what we will, if you run into another flood of blood and War, the sinews of this Nation being wasted by the last, it must sink and perish utterly. I beseech you, and charge you in the name and presence of God, and as before Him, be sensible of these things, and lay them to heart! You have a Day of Fasting coming on. I beseech God touch your hearts and open your ears to this truth; and that you may be as deaf adders to stop your ears to all Dissension! And may look upon them' who would sow dissension,' whoever they may be, as Paul saith to the Church of Corinth, as I remember: "Mark such as cause divisions and offences," and would disturb you from that foundation of Peace you are upon, under any pretence whatsoever!—

I shall conclude with this. I was free the last time of our meeting,

*He died in the Annus Mirabilis of 1660 itself, say the Baronetages. Worn to death, it is like, by the frightful vicissitudes and distracting excitement of those sad months.

to tell you I would discourse upon a Psalm; and I did it.* I am not ashamed of it at any time [Why should you, your Highness? A word that does speak to us from the eternal heart of things, "word of God" as you well call it, is highly worth discoursing upon !]-especially when I meet with men of such consideration as you. There you have one verse which I forgot. "I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for He will speak peace unto His people, and to His saints; but let them not turn again to folly." Dissension, division, destruction, in a poor Nation under a Civil War,--having all the effects of a Civil War upon it! Indeed if we return again to “folly," let every man consider, If it be not like turning to destruction? If God shall unite your hearts and bless you, and give you the blessing of union and love one to another, and tread down everything that riseth up in your hearts and tendeth to deceive your own souls with pretences of this thing or that, as we have been saying-[The Sentence began as a positive, “if God shall;" but gradually turning on its axis, it has now got quite round into the negative side]— and not prefer the keeping of Peace that we may see the fruit of righteousness in them that love peace and embrace peace,--it will be said of this poor Nation, Actum est de Anglia, 'It is all over with England !'

But I trust God will never leave it to such a spirit. And while I live, and am able, I shall be ready

[Courage, my brave one! Thou hast but some Seven Months more of it, and then the ugly coil is all over; and thy part in it manfully done; manfully and fruitfully, to all Eternity! Peppery Scott's hot head can mount to Temple Bar, whither it is bound; and England, with immense expenditure of liquor and tarbarrels, can call in its Nell Gwyn Defender of the Faith,— and make out a very notable Two Hundred Years under his guidance; and, finding itself now nearly got to the Devil, may perhaps pause, and recoil, and remember: who knows? Nay who cares ? may Oliver say. He is honorably quit of it, he for one; and the Supreme Powers will guide it farther according to their pleasure.]

-I shall be ready to stand and fall with you, in this seemingly promising Uniont which God hath wrought among you, which I hope neither the pride nor envy of man shall be able to make void. I have taken my

The Eighty-Fifth; antea, pp. 387, et seq. †The new Frame of Government.

"Truth shall grow out of the Earth, and Righteousness shall come down from Heaven." Here is the Truth of all 'truths;' here is the righteousness of God, under the notion of righteousness confirming our abilities, answerable to the truth which He hath in the Gospel revealed to us! [According to Calvin and Paul.] And the Psalm closeth with this: "Righteousness shall go before Him, and shall set us in the way of His steps;"--that righteousness, that mercy, that love and that kindness which we have seen, and been make partakers of from the Lord, it shall be our Guide, to teach us to know the right and the good way; which is, To tread in the steps of mercy, righteousness and goodness that our God hath walked before us in.

We 'too' have a Peace this day! I believe in my very heart, you all think the things that I speak to you this day. I am sure you have

cause.

And yet we are not without the murmurings of many people, who turn all this grace and goodness into wormwood; who indeed are disappointed by the works of God. And those men are of several ranks and conditions; great ones, lesser ones,-of all sorts. Men that are of the Episcopal spirit, with all the branches, the root and the branches ;-who gave themselves a fatal blow in this Place,* when they would needs make a "Protestation that no laws were good which were made by this House and the House of Commons in their absence;" and so without injury to others cut themselves off! Men of an Episcopal spirit:' indeed men that know not God; that know not how to account upon the works of God, how to measure them out; but will trouble Nations for an Interest which is but mixed, at the best,-made up of iron and clay, like the feet of Nebuchadnezzar's Image: whether they were more Civil or Spiritual was hard to say. But their continuance was like to be known beforehand [Yes, your Highness !] ; iron and clay make no good mixtures, they are not durable at all!—

You have now a godly Ministry; you have a knowing Ministry; such a one as, without vanity be it spoken, the world has not. Men knowing the things of God, and able to search into the things of God,-by that only which can fathom those things in some measure. The spirit of a beast knows not the things of a man; nor doth the spirit of man know the things of God! "The things of God are known by the Spirit.”+—Truly I will remember but one thing of those, 'the misguided persons now cast out from us:' Their greatest persecution hath been of the People

* In this same House of Lords, on the 18th of December, 1641. Busy Williams the Lincoln Decoy-duck, with his Eleven too-hasty Bishops, leading the way in that suicide. (Antea, vol. i., p. 119.)

† 1 Corinthians, ii., 11.

was grown quite dark before his Highness had done; so that we could hardly see our pencils go, at the time.*

The Copy given here is from the Pell Papers, and in part from an earlier Original; first printed by Burton's Editor; and now reproduced, with slight alterations of the pointing, &c., such as were necessary here and there to bring out the sense, but not such as could change anything that had the least title to remain unchanged.

SPEECH XVII.

His Highness's last noble appeal, the words as of a strong great Captain addressed in the hour of imminent shipwreck, produced no adequate effect. The dreary Debate, supported chiefly by intemperate Haselrig, peppery Scott, and future-renegade Robinson, went on, trailing its slow length day after day; daily widen. ing itself too into new dreariness, new questionability: a kind of pain to read even at this distance, and with view of the intemperate hot heads actually stuck on Temple Bar! For the man in 'green oilskin hat with nightcap under it,' the Duke of Ormond namely, who lodges at the Papist Chirurgeon's in Drury Lane, is very busy all this while. And Fifth-Monarchy and other Petitions are getting concocted in the City, to a great length indeed;—and there are stirrings in the Army itself;and, in brief, the English Hydra, cherished by the Spanish Charles-Stuart Invasion, will shortly hiss sky-high again, if this continue.

As yet, however, there stands one strong Man between us and that issue. The strong Man gone, that issue, we may guess, will be inevitable; but he is not yet gone. For ten days more the dreary Debate has lasted. Various good Bills and Notices of Bills have been introduced: attempts on the part of wellaffected Members to do some useful legislation here;† attempts which could not be accomplished. What could be accomplished

* Burton, ii., 351.

* Parliamentary History, xxi., 203-4.