THE PETITION OF THE GENTLEMEN AND STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. Offered to both Houses, upon Wednesday, being the fifth day of January, 1642; upon the arrival of that news to them, of the bishops late imprisonment. With their appeal to his most excellent majesty. Printed at London, for John Greensmith, 1642. Quarto, containing eight pages. Humbly and plainly sheweth, THAT HAT, if the very front of our requests be assaulted with a refusal, before we further declare, we, in all humility and observancy, desire not to be admitted; so may we happily case ourselves of a danger to be bold where we ought, although not where we may; Yet, if we may be heard to those (we mean yourselves) whose ears cannot and (we dare say) must not, to any whatsoever just requests, we again, as in our former prostration, thus desire you, and, if the expression be more humble, beg of you: First, not to believe this in itself fictitious, humoursome, affronting, and, if not presumptuous, uno cætera diximus, those epithets which we know, but, if not know, wish, from yourselves, are not undeservedly, nor unjustly, nor illegally sent forth against those, who, according to your loss, your too much abused patience (heaven grant a speedier execution to your commands) daily, hourly, abuse, Et Regem et Regnum. Secondly, although we are not vor ipsa academiæ, nor all regentmasters in the cause, yet we hope the liberal sciences may be as prevalent as the mechanical, intruding, not with swords, but knees, which had not yet been bended, but in this alone our impetration. Now, our, most honoured senates, may we now, with what a too tedious preamble lulled you, now again awake you. We, the gentlemen and students of the university of Cambridge, do utterly, from our hearts, shoot back those arrows of aspersion newly cast npon us to be seducers, To be seducers is an easy matter, you'll say, if sophistry, with her fallacies, may intitle us. But we have sucked better milk from the tears of our mother; our mother, who never yet was more dejected, yet, from the dust, may ride upon the clouds, and in her due time shine, nay outshine the female conquest in the Revelation. The pillars of the mother is the church, you know it all, who Christians are, are those Incarcerati, those who, like Joseph in the pit, or St. Peter with the jailor; those who, with St. Paul, may pray to be let down by a basket (pardon our interruption) may the whole and holy assembly be pleased too, our meaning was good, although the fault of that omission was pardoned before the reiteration. Again, your supplicants, who, if without guns or feathers, or those, whose reasons are far lighter than their feathers. (Give us leave, yet without musquet-shot, we beseech you, to jog you by the elbow, a term-phrase or adagy, meanly given, if you are given to cavil.) Meanly, that is indifferently; but what need we fear a verbal answer, where too many real are so near at hand? Pro aris et focis was the Romans empress, pro focis for a King, pro aris for a temple, so on their very hearths they did adore a Majesty; so knew a King which way to go to St. Paul's Cathedral, which way to the Exchange. Again, we are ready with our lives and bloods to present all colle giate chapels, if that they lay in our power, as well in interioribus quam exterioribus, not acknowledging more or less divine service, than with what, as in former times our more primitive Christians did, with erected bodies, and drawn weapons, stand to the doxology creed, and responsals to the church. All this we protest, and have hitherto really professed in these too much to be lamented times, although our warrant, so far as we can read, was allowed of by Edward the Sixth, Separata Maria continuatum usque ad annum et tempus vicesimum septimum Caroli Regis. To whose Majesty, whose person, whose religion we appeal to. To his Majesty as God's vicegerent, to his person as God's representative image, to his religion as God himself alone. By this only consequence, Ubi Religio Templum Deme, Demus Deum; Deme Templum, Demas Deum. A DISCOURSE * CONCERNING THE SUCCESS OF FORMER PARLIAMENTS. Imprinted at London, 1642. Quarto, containing fourteen pages. SIR, HAVE, according to my small ability, and the shortness of time, fulfilled your command, in sending to you this brief and plain dis course concerning the ancient opinions and esteem of English parlia ments (for that was all which your desired) without any reflection upon the proceedings of this present parliament: Accept it only as a plain piece of common talk, which I would have delivered, had I been present with you: Such discourses need no dress of rhetorick. The constitution of our English monarchy is by wise men esteemed one of the best in Europe, as well for the strength and honour of the prince, as the security and freedom of the people; and the basis, on which both are founded, is the convenience of that great council the high court of parliament. Without which neither can the prince enjoy that honour and felicity, which Philip de Commines, a foreigner, so much admires, where he delivers what advantages the Kings of England have by that representative body of their people, by whose assistance in any action they can neither want means, or lose reputation, Nor, on the other side, can the people have any possibility of pleading their own rights and liberties. For, in the interim between parliaments, the people are too scattered and confused a body, to appear in vindication of their proper interests; and by too long absence of such assemblies they would lose all: For (as Junius observes) Populus Authoritatem suam tacitè non utendo admittit; sic plerumque accidit ut quod omnes curare tenentur curet nemo, quod omnibus commissum est, nemo sibi commendatum putet. The people insensibly lose their power for want of using it for so it happens, that what all should look after, no man does; what is committed to all, no man thinks his own charge. And in that interim it happens, that those Optimates Regni (as he speaks) who under the prince are intrusted with government, meaning counsellors, judges, and other great magistrates, either through fear, flattery, or private corruption, do often betray the people's rights to the prince. • Vide the 238th article in the Catalogue of Pamphlets in the Harleian Library. The state of government standing thus, if distempered times happen to be (as our chronicles have shewed some) where, by dissension between prince and people, the kingdom's ruin hath been endangered, it doth not so much prove that the English government is not the best, as that the best government may be abused. For in every monarchy, how limited soever, the prince's person is invested with so much Majesty, that it would seem a mockery in state, if there were no considerable power intrusted into his hands; yea, so much as that, if he be bad or weak, he may endanger the ruin of the kingdom; so necessary is it for all human ordinances, how wise soever, to leave somewhat to chance, and to have always need of recourse to God, for his assisting or curing providence. And though the kingdom of England, by vertue of the government thereof, will be as hardly brought into a confusion, as any in Europe; yet there is no warrant against the possibility of it. For it was ever heretofore seen, that our parliaments were rather a strength and advantage to an honourable wise prince, than a remedy against a bad or weak one; or, if we change the expression, they were rather an excellent diet to preserve a good reign in strength, than physick to cure a bad one; and therefore have been as much loved by sound and healthy princes, as loathed by them that were out of temper: the latter having thought them a depression of their dignity: As the former have esteemed them an advantage to their strength. So that in such times only the true convenience of that great council hath been perceived by England, and admired by foreign authors: In the other times it was, that those witty complaints have been in fashion (as Sir Robert Cotton speaks of a bad time) that princes in parliaments are less than they should be, and subjects greater. But on the contrary, that they have been an advantage to Kings, the constant series of our history will shew: 1. By those great atchievements which they have inabled our wise Kings to make, who were most constant in calling them, and consenting to them. 2. That no one prince was ever yet happy without the use of them. It may therefore seem a paradox, that any prince should disaffect that which is so high an advantage to him, and a great wonder, that some Kings of England, not vicious in their dispositions, nor very shallow in their understandings, have so much kicked against parliaments. And that such have been, before we shew what reasons may be of it, see the characters of some princes, whose success and fortunes are known to all that read the histories, as they are delivered by Polydore Virgil, who in his sixteenth book speaks thus of Henry the Third: Fuit ingenio miti, animo magis nobili quàm magno, cultor Religionis, adversus inopes`liberalis. He was of a gentle nature, a mind rather noble than great, a lover of religion, and liberal to the poor. In his eighteenth book thus of Edward the Second: Fuit illi natura bona, ingenium mite, quem primò juvenili errore actum in leviora vitia incidentem, tandem in graviora malorum consuetudines et consilia traxerunt. Non deerant illi animi vires, si repudiatis malis suasoribus illas justè exercuisset. He was of a good nature and mild disposition, who, first by the errors and rashness of youth falling into small faults, was afterwards drawn into greater, by the society and counsels of wicked men. There was not wanting in him a strength of mind, if, avoiding evil counsel, he could have made a just use of it. And in his twentieth book, thus of Richard the Second: Fuit in illo spiritus non vilis, quem consciorum improbitas, et insulsitas extinxit. He was of a spirit not low or base, but such as was quite destroyed by the wickedness and folly of unhappy consociates. A reason of this accident may be, that their souls, though not vicious, have not been so large, nor their affections so publick, as their great calling hath required; but being too much mancipated to private fancies and unhappy favourites, and long flattered in those affections under the specious name of firmness in friendship (not being told that the adequate object of a prince's love should be the whole people, and that they who receive publick honour, should return a general love and care) they have too much neglected the kingdom, and grow at last afraid to look their faces in so true a glass as a parliament, and, flying the remedy, increase the disease, till it come to that unhappy height, that, rather than acknowledge any unjust action, they strive for an unjust power to give it countenance, and so by a long consequence become hardly reconcileable to a parliamentary way. Such princes (though it may see mstrange) have been a greater affliction to this kingdom, than those who have been most wicked, and more incurable, for these reasons: 1. They have not been so conscious to themselves of great crimes; and therefore not so apt to be sensible of what they have been accidentally made to do against their people by evil counsel, whose poison themselves did not perfectly understand. And therefore they are more prone to suspect the people, as unkind to them, than themselves as faulty, and so the more hardly drawn to repent their actions, or meet heartily with a parliament. 2. The second reason is from the people, who naturally look with honour upon the prince, and when they find none, or few personal vices in him (not considering that the true virtues of princes have a larger extent than those of private men) will more hardly be brought to think, though themselves feel, and suffer for it, that he is faulty; and therefore sometimes (which would hardly be believed, if experience had not shewed it) the people have been so rash as that, to maintain for the King an unjust prerogative, which themselves understand not, they have to their own ruin, and the King's too (as it hath after proved) deserted that great council whom themselves have chosen, and by whom only they could be preserved in their just rights; until too late, for the King's happiness and their own, they have seen and repented their great folly. Such a desertion was too sadly seen, at the end of that parliament of Edward the Second, where the two Spencers were banished, and the tragical effects that followed, when the King found so great a party, both of clergy and laity, as inabled him to call home again his banished favourites; and proved fatal to so many parliamentary lords, as the like execution of nobility had never before been seen in England; over whose graves the people afterwards wept, when it was too late, and |