An Apologie for the Royal Party; and A Panegyric to Charles the Second | Page 4

fine new Trinkets of
Reformation? Were not all these taken out of their hand, while now
they were in the height of their pride and triumph? And their dull
Generall made to serve the execution of their Sovereign, and then to be
turn'd off himself, as a property no more of use to their designes? Their
riches and their strength in which they trusted, and the Parliament
which they even idoliz'd, in sum, the prey they had contended for at the
expence of so much sin and damnation, seizd upon by those very
instruments, which they had rais'd to serve their insatiable avarice, and
prodigious disloyalty. For so it pleased God to chastise their implacable
persecution of an excellent Prince, with a slavery under such a Tyrant,
as not being contented to butcher even some upon the Scaffold, sold
divers of them for slaves, and others he exild into cruell banishment,
without pretence of Law, or the least commiseration; that those who
before had no mercy on others, might find none themselves; till upon
some hope of their repentance, and future moderation, it pleased God to
put his hook into the nostrills of that proud Leviathan, and send him to
his place, after he had thus mortified the fury of the Presbyterians. For
unlesse God himself should utter his voice from Heaven, _yea, and that
a mighty voice_, can there any thing in the world be more evident, then
his indignation at those wretches and barefac't Impostors, who, one
after another, usurped upon us, taking them off at the very point of
aspiring, and præcipitating the glory and ambition of these men, before
those that were, but now, their adorers, and that had prostituted their
consciences to serve their lusts? To call him the Moses, the Man of God,
the Joshua, the Saviour of Israel; and after all this, to treat the Thing
his son with addresses no lesse then blasphemous, whose Father (as
themselves confess to be the most infamous Hypocrite and profligate
Atheist of all the Usurpers that ever any age produc'd) had made them
his Vassalls, and would have intaild them so to his posterity for ever?

But behold the scean is again changed, not by the Royall party, the
Common Enemy, or a forreign power; but by the despicable Rumpe of
a Parliament, which that Mountebanke had formerly serv'd himself of,
and had rais'd him to that pitch, and investiture: But see withall, how
soon these triflers and puppets of policy are blown away, with all their
pack of modells and childish Chimæras, nothing remaining of them but
their Coffine, guarded by the Souldiers at Westminster; but which is yet
lesse empty then the heads of those Polititians, which so lately seemed
to fill it.
For the rest, I despise to blot paper with a recitall of those wretched
Interludes, Farces and Fantasms, which appear'd in the severall
intervalls; because they were nothing but the effects of an extream
gyddiness, and unparallel'd levity. Yet these are those various
despensations and providences in your journey to that holy land of
purchases and profits, to which you have from time to time appeal'd for
the justification of your proceedings, whilst they were, indeed, no other
then the manifest judgments of God upon your rebellion and your
ambition: I say nothing of your hypocriticall fasts, and pretended
humiliations, previous to the succeeding plots, and supposititious
Revelations, that the godly might fall into the hands of your Captains,
because they were bugbears, and became ridiculous even to the
common people.
And now Sr. if you please, let us begin to set down the product and
survey the successe of your party and after all these faces and vertigo's
tell me ingenuously, if the single chastisment which is fallen upon one
afflicted man, and his loyall subjects, distressed by the common event
of war, want of treasure, the seizure of his Fleet, forcing him from his
City, and all the disadvantages that a perfidious people could imagine;
but in fine the crowning him with a glorious Martyrdome for the
Church of God and the liberty of his people (for which his blood doth
yet cry aloud for vengeance) be comparable to the confusion which you
(that have been the conquerours) have suffered, and the slavery which
you are like to leave to the posterities which will be born but to curse
you, and to groan under the pressures which you bequeath to your own
flesh & blood? For to what a condition you have already reduced this

once flourishing kingdom, since all has been your own, let the
intolerable oppressions, taxes, Excises, sequestrations confiscations,
plunders, customes, decimations, not to mention the plate, even to very
thimbles and the bodkins (for even to these did your avarice descend)
and other booties, speak. All this