But if your intentions were so pure, and the methods, by which you resolved to prosecute them, so blameless, how happened it that any plot could be worked up of so much danger to your life and person?
MR. WALLER.
This was the very thing I was going to explain to you. My intentions towards the parliament were fair and honourable: as I retained my seat there, I could not allow myself in the use of any but parliamentary methods to promote the cause I had undertaken. And this, as I said, was the whole purpose of the combination, which was made the pretence to ruin me: for my unhappy project of a reconciliation was so inextricably confounded with another of more dangerous tendency, the commission of array, sent at that time from Oxford, that nothing, I presently saw, could possibly disentangle so perplexed a business, or defeat the malice of my enemies, if I attempted, in the more direct way, to stand on my defence. Presumptions, if not proofs, they had in abundance: the consternation of all men was great; their rage, unrelenting; and the general enthusiasm of the time, outrageous. Consider all this, and see what chance there was for escaping their injustice, if I had restrained myself to the sole use of those means, which you men of the cloister magnify so much, under I know not what names of Sincerity and Honour. And, indeed, this late experience, of what was to be expected from the way of plain dealing, had determined me, henceforth, to take a different route; and, since I had drawn these mischiefs on myself by Sincerity, to try what a little management could do towards bringing me out of them.
DR. MORE.
It was not, I perceive, without cause, that the subtlety you had begun to have recourse to, filled me with apprehensions. Sincerity and Honour, Mr. Waller, are plain things, and hold no acquaintance with this ingenious casuistry.
MR. WALLER.
What, not in such a situation? It should seem then, as if you moralists conceived a man owed nothing to himself: that self-preservation was not what God and Nature have made it, the first and most binding of all laws: that a man’s family, not to say his country, have no interest in the life of an innocent and deserving citizen; and, in one word, that prudence is but an empty name, though you give it a place among your cardinal virtues. All this must be concluded before you reject, as unlawful, the means I was forced upon, at this season, for my defence: means, I presume to say, so sagely contrived, and, as my very enemies will own, executed so happily, that I cannot to this day reflect on my conduct in that affair without satisfaction.
DR. MORE.
Yet it had some consequences which a man of your generosity would a little startle at.—