How I have spent some hours of the leisure your Highness has been
pleased to give me, the following paper will give your Highness an
account; how you will please to interpret it, I cannot tell; but
I can with confidence say, my intention in it is to procure your
Highness that justice nobody yet does you, and to let the people see,
the longer they defer it, the greater injury they do both themselves
and you. To your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for
the people; and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation
to you, in the last moments of your life, to consider with how much
benefit to the world you are like to leave it. It is then only, my
Lord, that the title you now usurp will be truly yours: you will then
be indeed the Deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage
little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his. You will
then be that true Reformer which you would now be thought; religion
shall then be restored, liberty asserted, and parliaments have those
privileges they have fought for. We shall then hope that other laws
will have place besides those of the sword, and justice shall be
otherwise defined than as the Will and Pleasure of the Strongest;
and we shall then hope men will keep oaths again, and not have the
necessity of being false and perfidious to preserve themselves and
to be like their rulers. All this we hope from your Highness's happy
expiration, who are the true father of your country: for while you
live, we can call nothing ours, and it is from your death that we
hope for our inheritances. Let this consideration arm and fortify
your Highness's mind against the fear of death and the terrors
of your evil conscience, that the good you will do by your death
will somewhat balance the evils of your life. And if, in the black
catalogue of high malefactors, few can be found that have lived more
to the affliction and disturbance of mankind than your Highness hath
done; yet your greatest enemies will not deny, but there are likewise
as few that have expired more to the universal benefit of mankind,
than your Highness is like to do. To hasten this great good is the
chief end of my writing this paper, and if it have the effects I hope
it will, your Highness will be quickly out of reach of men's malice
and your enemies will only be able to wound you in your memory,
which strokes you will not feel. That your Highness may speedily be
in this security, is the universal wish of your grateful country;
this is the desire and prayer of the good and of the bad, and, it
may be, is the only thing wherein all sects and factions do agree in
their devotions, and is our only Common Prayer. But amongst all that
put in their requests and supplications for your Highness's speedy
deliverance from all earthly troubles, none is more assiduous, nor
more fervent than he that (with the rest of this nation) hath the
honour to be, may it please your Highness,
Your Highness's present slave and vassal,
W. A.