An Apologie for the Royal Party; and A Panegyric to Charles the Second | Page 6

Justice could not reach them: By strange and unknown practises in this Nation, and not at all Justifiable by any known Lawes and Statutes_, But by certain diabolical principles of late distilled into some person of the Army, and which he would entitle to the whole, who (abating some of their Commanders, that have sucked the sweet of this Doctrine) had them never so much as entred into their thoughts, nor could they be so depraved, though they were Masters only of the Light of Nature to direct them. For Common sence will tell them, that whoever are our lawful Superiours, and invested with the supreame Authority, either by their own vertue, or the peoples due Election, have then a just right to challenge submission to their precepts, and that we acquiesce in their determinations; since there is in nature no other expedient to preserve us from everlasting confusion: But it is the height of all impertinency to conceive, that those which are a part of themselves, and can in so great a Body, have no other interests, should (without the manifest hand of God were in it to infatuate all your proceedings) fall into such exorbitant contradiction to their own good, as a child of four years old would not be guilty of; and as this Pamphleter wildly suggests in pp. 6. 11. 27, &c. did they steer their course by the known laws of the Land, and as obedient Subjects should do, who without the King and his Peers, are but the Carkass of a Parliament, as destitute of the Soul which should inform and give it being. And if so small a handful of men as appeared in the Palace-Yard, without consent of a quarter of the English Army, much lesse the tenthousand'th part of the Free-people that are not clad in red, shall disturb and alter your Government when it thinks fit to set aside a few imperious Officers, who plainly seek themselves, and derive their Commissions from superiours to whom they swear obedience; how can you ever hope, or live to see any government established in these miserably abused Nations? Behold then with how weak a party you are vanquish'd, even by those very instruments you had so long flatter'd with the title of the Free-people; imputing all the direful effects of your depraved principles to their desires, when as I dare report my self to the ingenuity of the very Souldiers themselves, if they, who have effected all these changes by your wretched instigations, and blind pretences, imagine themselves the People of this Nation, but are{1} a very small portion of them, compared to the whole, and who are maintained by them to recover, and protect the Civill Government, according to the Good old Lawes of the Land; not such as they themselves shall invent from Day to Day, or as the interests of some few persons may engage them.
But if the essential end of Rulers be the Common peace, and their Lawes obliging as they become relative: Restore us then to those under which we lived with so much sweetness and tranquility, as no age in the World, no Government under Heaven could ever pretend the like. And if the People (as you declare) are to be the Judges of it, summon them together in a Free Parliament, according to its legal Constitution; or make a universal Balott, and then let it appear, if Collonel Lambert and half a dozen Officers, with all their seduced Partizans, make so much as a single Cypher to the Summe Total. And this shall be enough to answer those devious Principles set down in the porch of that specious Edifice; which being erected upon the Sand, will (like the rest that has been _daubed with untempered mortar_) sink also at the next high wind that blowes upon it. But I am glad it is at last avowed, upon what pretexts that late pretended Parliament have pleaded on the behalf of themselves and party, their discharge from all the former Protestations, Engagements, solemn Vowes, Covenants, with hands (as you say) lift up to the most high God, as also their Oaths and Allegiance, &c. because I shall not in this discourse be charged with slandering of them, and that the whole World may detest the Actions of such perfidious Infidels, with whom nothing sacred has remain'd inviolable.
But there is yet a piece of Artifice behind, of no less consequence then the former, and that is, a seeking to perswade the present Army, that They were the men, who first engaged thus solemnly to destroy the Government under which they were born, and reduce it to this miserable condition: whereas it is well known by such as converse daily with them, that there is hardly one of ten amongst