offer them a sacrifice to the welfare of their prince and country. I say prince as well as country, for they looked upon him as the sovereign whom nature, duty, the command of God, and the laws of men obliged them to reverence, and to love as the head of the people; whose greatness consisted in his people's, and his people's in his; and therefore neither could be great, nor happy, without the other, which made those faithful ones put them both in the same balance, and rather adventure his displeasure by promoting the public cause, than (as they thought) his ruin by deserting it*."

SIR JOHN MAYNARD was a native of Devonshire, being born at Tavistock in 1602. He was successively a student of Exeter Hall, Oxford, and of the Middle Temple. He first came into parliament in 1640.

He opposed the illegal measures of the king, but he was as stern an opponent of the errors of the parliament and of Cromwell. Although a manager of the prosecutions against Strafford and Laud, he was, by particular desire, appointed with Mr. Whitelocke to a consultation with the Scotch commissioners, as to the best mode of removing Cromwell as a fomenter of disputes between the two nations; and then we find him, with Mr. Serjeant Glynn, a prisoner in the Tower, for opposing the violence of the parliamentarian army. Upon his release he was still the opponent of illegality by whoever practised, for

* Memoirs of Lord Hollis, 5.

C

he not only told the House that they dissolved themselves when they voted against any further addresses to the king; but, when he was excluded by their especial vote from his seat, he boldly risked the consequences of infringing that vote, and, presenting himself upon the floor of the House, poured forth such an eloquent and forcible persuasive against the execution of the king, that Cromwell thought the safest way to silence him was to bring him to its bar. Cromwell made him a serjeant, but he sent him to the Tower when he found that no favour would mitigate his opposition to his illegal measures. Charles the Second duly estimated his integrity, and not only confirmed him in the dignity of a serjeant, and conferred upon him a knighthood, but would have made him a judge, if he could have afforded to sacrifice the superior emoluments of his professional practice. In 1647, Whitelocke relates, that he is said to have realised seven hundred pounds on one circuit, which was esteemed a larger sum than had ever been taken before by a pleader upon such an occasion. He assisted in bringing about the revolution of 1688; and when nearly eighty-seven possessed his mental powers in undiminished vigour. Burnet* says, that William the Third once remarked to Sir John, that he had outlived all his contemporary lawyers, to which he replied, that, if his majesty had not come over, he might have also outlived the law. So

*Hist. of his Times, i. 803.

undisabled was his mind, that in 1689 he was made one of the lords commissioners of the great seal. He died in October 1690*.

Clarendon gives him due praise for integrity of purpose; and even the prejudiced Warburton in modern times observes of him, that he went through all periods at the same steady pace and with the same adherence to his party, adhering to presbytery for the sake of civil liberty, rather than to civil liberty for the sake of presbytery †.

MR. BULSTRODE WHITELOCKE was the son of a judge of the same name, and was born in 1605, in the house of Sir George Crooke, in London, who was his mother's uncle. He was successively at Merchant Tailors' School, and a commoner of St. John's College, Oxford. His studies subsequently at the Middle Temple were superintended by his father. In his public career he was invariably opposed to extreme measures; and though he accepted office and acted both in the senate and camp with the opponents of Charles, yet he was always in favour of his restoration, and that of his descendants to the powers of a limited monarchy. He opposed the assumption of the crown by Cromwell, and endured in consequence an embassage, but really a banishment to the court of Sweden. Charles viewed him as really friendly to the

There is a portrait of him in Lyson's Environs, ii. 235. See further of him in Athenæ Oxoniensis, and Noble's Memoirs of the House of Cromwell.

+ Warburton's Letters, 154, 4to.