Nor did he desert his Majesty, as you falsely accuse him, as his Majesty himself knows. Nor was his Majesty, as you unmannerly term it, in distress. He had the title, right, and reverence of a King, and maintained his faithful servants with him. It is true that Mr. Hobbes came home, but it was because he would not trust his safety with the French clergy.
Do you know that ever he sought any benefit either from Oliver, or from any of his party, or was any way familiar with any of his ministers, before or after his return; or curried favour with any of them, as you did by dedicating a book to his vice-chancellor, Owen?
Did you ever hear that he took anything done to him by his Majesty in evil part, or spake of him otherwise than the best of his servants would do; or that he was sullen, silent, or sparing, in praising his Majesty in any company, upon any occasion?
He knew who were his enemies, and upon what ground they misconstrued his writings.
But your indiscretion appears more manifestly in giving him occasion to repeat what you have done, and to consider you, as you professedly have considered him. For with what equity can it be denied him to repeat your manifest and horrible crimes, for all you have been pardoned; when you publish falsely pretended faults of his, and comprehended in the same pardon?
If he should say and publish, that you deciphered the letters of the King and his party, and thereby delivered his Majesty’s secrets to the enemy, and his best friends to the scaffold, and boasted of it in your book of arithmetic, written in Latin, to all the world, as of a monument of your wit, worthy to be preserved in the University Library: how will you justify yourself, if you be reproached for having been a rebel and a traitor? It may be you, or some for you, will now say, you deciphered those letters to the King’s advantage: but then you were unfaithful to your masters of the Parliament: a very honest pretence, and full of gallantry, to excuse treason with treachery, and to be a double spy. Besides, who will believe it? Who enabled you to do the King that favour? Why herded you with his enemies? Who brought the King into a need of such a fellow’s favour, but they that first deserted him, and then made war upon him, and which were your friends and Mr. Hobbes his enemies? Nay more, I know not one enemy Mr. Hobbes then had, but such as were first the King’s enemies, and, because the King’s, therefore his. Your being of that party, without your deciphering, amounts to no more than a desertion. Of the bishops that then were, and for whose sakes, in part, you raised the war, there was not one that followed the King out of the land, though they loved him, but lived quietly under the protection, first of the Parliament, and then of Oliver, (whose titles and actions were equally unjust) without treachery. Is not this as bad as if they had gone over, and (which was Mr. Hobbes his case) been driven back again? I hope you will not call them all deserters, or, because by their stay here openly they accepted of the Parliament’s and of Oliver’s protection, defenders either of Oliver’s or of the Parliament’s title to the sovereign power.
How many were there in that Parliament at first that did indeed and voluntarily desert the King, in consenting to many of their unjust actions? Many of these afterwards, either upon better judgment, or because they pleased not the faction, (for it was a hard matter for such as were not of Pym’s cabal to please the Parliament), or for some other private ends deserted the Parliament, and did some of them more hurt to the King than if they had stayed where they were; for they had been so affrighted by such as you, with a panic fear of tyranny, that seeking to help him by way of composition and sharing, they abated the just and necessary indignation of his armies, by which only his right was to be recovered.
That very entering into the Covenant with the Scottish nation against the King, is by itself a very great crime, and you guilty of it. And so was the imposing of the Engagement, and you guilty of that also, as being done by the then Parliament, whose democratical principles you approved of.
You were also assisting to the Assembly of Divines that made the Directory, and which were afterwards put down by Oliver for counterfeiting themselves ambassadors. And this was when the King was living, and at the head of an army, which with your own endeavour might have protected you. What crime it is, the King being head of the Church of England, to make Directories, to alter the Church-government, and to set up new forms of God’s service, upon your own fancies, without the King’s authority, the lawyers could have told you; and what punishment you were to expect from it, you might have seen in the statute printed before the Book of Common Prayer.
Further he may say, and truly, that you were guilty of all the treasons, murders, and spoil committed by Oliver, or by any upon Oliver’s or the Parliament’s authority: for, during the late trouble, who made both Oliver and the people mad, but the preachers of your principles? But besides the wickedness, see the folly of it. You thought to make them mad, but just to such a degree as should serve your own turn; that is to say, mad, and yet just as wise as yourselves. Were you not very imprudent to think to govern madness? Paul they knew, but who were you? You were they, that put the army into Oliver’s hands, who before, as mad as he was, was too weak, and too obscure to do any great mischief; with which army he executed upon such as you, both here and in Scotland, that which the justice of God required.