and undauntedly play upon his harp, whilst he saw it burning. I could reckon up five-hundred boldnesses of that great person, for why should not he too be called so? who wanted, when he was to die, that courage which could hardly have failed any womanı in the like necessity. It would look, I must confess, like envy or too much partiality, if I should say that personal kind of courage had been deficient in the man we speak of; I am confident it was not; and yet I may venture, I think, to affirm, that no man ever bore the honour of so many victories, at the rate of fewer wounds or dangers of his own body; and, though his valour might perhaps have given him a just pretension to one of the first charges in an army, it could not certainly be a sufficient ground for a title to the command of three nations. What then shall we say, that he did all this by witchcraft? He did so indeed in a great measure, by a sin that is called like it in the Scriptures. But truly and unpassionately reflecting upon the advantages of his person, which might be thought to have produced those of his fortune, I can espy no other but extraordinary diligence and infinite dissimulation; and believe he was exalted above his nation, partly by his own faults, but chiefly for ours. We have brought him thùs briefly, not through all his labyrinths, to the supreme usurped authority; and because, you say, it was great pity he did not live to command more kingdoms, be pleased to let me represent to you in a few words, how well I conceive he governed these. And we will divide the consideration into that of his foreign and domestick actions. The first of his foreign was a peace with our brethren of Holland, who were the first of our neighbours that God chastised for having had so great a hand in the encouraging and abetting our troubles at home. Who would not imagine, at first glympse, that this had been the most virtuous and laudable deed that his whole life could make any parade of? But no man can look upon all the circumstances without perceiving, that it was the sale and sacrificing of the greatest advantages that this country could ever hope, and was ready to reap, from a foreign war, to the private interests of his covetousness and ambition, and the security of his new and unsettled usurpation. No sooner is that danger past, but this Beatus Pacificus is kindling a fire in the northern world, and carrying a war two-thousand miles off westward. Two millions a year, besides all the vales of his protectorship, is as little capable to suffice now either his avarice or prodigality, as the two-hundred pounds were that he was born to. He must have his prey of the whole Indies, both by sea and land, this great alligator. To satisfy our Anti-Solomon, who has made silver almost as rare as gold, and gold as precious stones in his New Jerusalem, we must go, ten-thousand of his slaves, to fetch him riches from his fantastical Ophir. And, because his flatterers brag of him as the most fortunate prince, the Faustus as well as Sylla of our nation, whom God never forsook in any of his undertakings, I desire them to consider, how, since the English

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name was ever heard of, it never received so great and so infamous a blow, as under the imprudent conduct of this unlucky Faustus. And herein let me admire the justice of God in this circumstance, that they who had enslaved their country, though a great army, which, I wish, may be observed by ours with trembling, should be so shamefully defeated by the hands of forty slaves. It was very ridiculous to see, how prettily they endeavoured to hide this ignominy under the great name of the conquest of Jamaica, as if a defeated army should have the impudence to brag afterwards of the victory, because, though they had fled out of the field of battle, yet they quartered that night in a village of the enemies. The war with Spain was a necessary consequence of this folly, and how much we have gotten by it, let the Custom-house and Exchange inform you; and if he please to boast of the taking a párt of the silver fleet (which indeed no body else but he, who was the sole gainer, has cause to do) at least let him give leave to the rest of the nation, which is the only loser, to complain of the loss of twelve-hundred ships. But because it may here perhaps be answered, that his successes nearer home have extinguished the dis. grace of so remote miscarriages, and that Dunkirk ought more to be remembered for his glory, than St. Domingo for his disadvantage; I must confess, as to the honour of the English courage, that they were not wanting upon that occasion, excepting only the fault of serving at least indirectly against their master, to the upholding of the renown of their warlike ancestors. But for his particular share of it, who sat still at home, and exposed them so frankly abroad, I can only say, that, for less money than he in the short time of his reign exacted from his fellow subjects, some of our former princes (with the daily hazard of their own persons) have added to the dominion of England not only one town, but even a greater kingdom than itself. And, this being all considerable as concerning his enterprises abroad, let us examine in the next place, how much we owe him for justice and good government at home. And first he found the commonwealth, as they then called, it in a ready stock of about eight-hundred thousand pounds; he left the commonwealth, as he had the impudent raillery still to call it, some two-millions and an half in debt. He found our trade very much decayed indeed, in comparison of the golden times of our late princes; he left it as much again more decayed than he found it; and yet not only no prince in England, but no tyrant in the world ever sought out more base or infamous means to raise money. I shall only instance in one that he put in practice, and another that he attempted, but was frighted from the execution, even he, by the infamy of it. That which he put in practice was decimation; which was the most impudent breach of all publick faith that the whole nation had given, and all private capitulations which himself had made, as the nation's general and servant, that can be found out, I believe, in all history from any of the most barbarous generals of the most barbarous people.

Which because it has been most excellently and most largely laid open by a whole book written upon that subject, I shall only desire you here to remember the thing in general, and to be pleased to look upon that author, when you would recollect all the particulars and circumstances of the iniquity. The other design of raising a present sum of money, which he violently pursued, but durst not put in execution, was by the calling in and establishment of the Jews at London; from which he was rebutted by the universal outcry of the divines, and even of the citizens too, who took it ill that a considerable number at least amongst themselves were not thought Jews enough by their own Herod. And for this design, they say, he invented (Oh antichrist! wongòr and i wonf®!) to sell St. Paul's to them for a synagogue, if their purses and devotions could have reached to the purchase. And this indeed if he had done only to reward that nation which had given the first noble example of crucifying their king, it might have had some appearance of gratitude, but he did it only for love of their mammon; and would have sold afterwards for as much more St. Peter's (even at his own Westminster) to the Turks for a mosquetto. Such was his extraordinary piety to God, that he desired he might be worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way of the Common-Prayer Book. But what do I speak of his wicked inventions for getting of money? When every penny, that for almost five years he took every day from every man living in England, Scotland, and Ireland, was as much robbery as if it had been taken by a thief upon the highways. Was it not so? Or, can any man think that Cromwell, with the assistance of his forces and moss troopers, had more right to the command of all men's púrses, than he might have had to any one's whom he had met and been too strong for upon a road? And yet when this came, in the case of Mr. Coney, to be disputed by a legal trial, he, which was the highest act of tyranny that ever was seen in England, not only discouraged and threatened, but violently imprisoned the council of the plaintiff; that is, he shut up the law itself close prisoner, that no man might have relief from, or access to it. And it ought to be remembered, that this was done by those men, who a few years before had so bitterly decried, and openly opposed the king's regular and formal way of proceeding in the trial of a little ship money. But, though we lost the benefit of our old courts of justice, it cannot be denied that he set up new ones; and such they were, that, as no virtuous prince before would, so no ill one durst erect. What, have we lived so many hundred years under such a form of justice as has been able regularly to punish all men that offended against it? and is it so deficient just now, that we must seek out new ways how to proceed against offenders? The reason, which can only be given in nature for a necessity of this, is, because those things are now made crimes, which were never esteemed so in former ages; and there must needs be a new court set up to punish that, which all the old ones were bound to protect and

reward. But I am so far from declaiming, as you call it, against these wickednesses (which if I should undertake to do, I should never get to the peroration) that you see I only give a hint of some few, and pass over the rest as things that are too many to be num. bered, and must only be weighed in gross. Let any man shew me, for, though I pretend not to much reading, I will defy him in all history; let any man shew me, I say, an example of any nation in the world, though much greater than ours, where there have in the space of four years been made so many prisoners only out of the endless jealousies of one tyrant's guilty imagination. I grant you that Marius and Sylla, and the accursed triumvirate after them, put more people to death; but the reason I think partly was, because, in those times that had a mixture of some honour with their madness, they thought it a more civil revenge against a Roman to take away his life, than to take away his liberty. But truly, in the point of murder too, we have little reason to think that our late tyranny has been deficient to the examples that have ever been set it in other countries. Our judges and our courts of justice' have not been idle; and to omit the whole reign of our late king, till the beginning of the war, in which no drop of blood was ever drawn but from two or three ears, I think the longest time of our worst princes scarce saw many more executions than the short one of our blessed reformer. And we saw, and smelt in our open streets, as I marked to you at first, the broiling of human bowels as a burnt-offering of a sweet savour to our idol; but all murdering, and all torturing, though after the subtlest invention of his predecessors of Sicily, is more human and more supportable, than his selling of Christians, Englishmen, Gentlemen; his selling of them, oh monstrous! oh incredible! to be slaves in America. If his whole life could be reproached with no other action, yet this alone would weigh down all the multiplicity of crimes in any of our tyrants; and I dare only touch, without stopping or insisting upon so insolent and so execrable a cruelty, for fear of falling into so violent, though a just passion, as would make me exceed that temper and moderation which I resolve to observe in this discourse with you. These are great calamities; but even these are not the most insupportable that we have endured; for so it is, that the scorn and mockery, and insultings of an enemy, are more painful than the deepest wounds of his serious fury. This man was wanton and merry, unwittily and ungracefully merry, with our sufferings; he loved to say and do senseless and fantastical things, only to shew his power of doing or saying any thing. It would ill befit mine, or any civil mouth, to repeat those words which he spoke concerning the most sacred of our English laws, the petition of right, and Magna Charta. To-day you should see him ranting so wildly, that no body durs. come near him; the morrow flinging of cushions, and playing at snow-balls, with his servants. This month he assembles a parliament, and professes himself with humble tears to be only their servant and their minister; the next month he swears

by the living God, that he will turn them out of doors, and he does so, in his princely way of threatening, bidding them turn the buckles of their girdles behind them. The representative of a whole, nay of three whole nations, was in his esteem so contemptible a meeting, that he thought the affronting and expelling of them to be a thing of so little consequence, as not to deserve that he should advise with any mortal man about it. What shall we call this? Boldness, or brutishness; rashness, or phrensy; there is no name can come up to it, and therefore we must leave it without one. Now a parliament must be chosen in the new manner, next time in the old form, but all cashiered still after the newest mode. Now he will govern by major-generals, now by one house, now by another house, now by no house; now the freak takes him, and he makes seventy peers of the land at one clap (extempore, and stans pede in uno) and, to manifest the absolute power of the potter, he chose not only the worst clay he could find, but picks up even the dirt and mire, to form out of it his vessels of honour. It was said anciently of fortune, that, when she had a mind to be merry and to divert herself, she was wont to raise up such kind of people to the highest dignities. This son of fortune, Cromwell, who was himself one of the primest of her jests, found out the true hautgoust of this pleasure, and rejoiced in the extravagance of his ways as the fullest demonstration of his uncontroulable sovereignty. Good God! what have we seen? And what have we suffered? What do all those actions signify, what do they say aloud to the whole nation, but this, even as plainly as if it were proclaimed by heralds through the streets of London, You are slaves and fools, and so I will use you? These are briefly a part of those merits which you lament to have wanted the reward of more kingdoms, and suppose that, if he had lived longer, he night have had them; which I am so far from concurring to, that I believe his seasonable dying to have been a greater good fortune to him than all the victories and prosperities of his life. For he seemed evidently, methinks, to be near the end of his deceitful glories; his own army grew at least as weary of him as the rest of the people; and I never passed of late before his palace. His, do I call it? (I ask God and the king pardon) but I never passed of late before Whitehall without reading upon the gate of it, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. But it pleased God to take him from the ordinary courts of men, and juries of his peers, to his own high court of justice, which being more merciful than ours below, there is a little room yet left for the hope of his friends, if he have any; though the outward unrepentance of his death afford but small materials for the work of charity, especially if he designed even then to entail his own injustice upon his children, and by it inextricable confusions and civil wars upon the nation. But here's at last an end of him; and where's now the fruit of all that blood and calamity which his ambition has cost the world? Where is it? Why, his son (you'll say) has the whole crop; I doubt he will