anan "De jure regni apud Scotos:" or your first Covenant and
new Association from the holy league of the French Guisards. Any one who
reads Davila, may trace your practices all along. There were the same
pretences for reformation and loyalty, the same aspersions of the king,
and the same grounds of a rebellion. I know not whether you will take
the historian's word, who says it was reported, that Poltrot, a
Huguenot, murdered Francis Duke of Guise, by the instigations of
Theodore Beza; or that it was a Huguenot minister, otherwise called a
Presbyterian (for our church abhors so devilish a tenet), who first writ
a treatise of the lawfulness of deposing and murdering kings of a
different persuasion in religion: but I am able to prove, from the
doctrine of Calvin, and principles of Buchanan, that they set the people
above the magistrate; which, if I mistake not, is your own fundamental,
and which carries your loyalty no further than your liking. When a vote
of the House of Commons goes on your side, you are as ready to observe
it as if it were passed into a law; but when you are pinched with any
former, and yet unrepealed act of parliament, you declare that in some
cases you will not be obliged by it. The passage is in the same third
part of the "No-Protestant Plot," and is too plain to be denied. The
late copy of your intended Association, you neither wholly justify nor
condemn; but as the Papists, when they are unopposed, fly out into all
the pageantries of worship, but in times of war, when they are hard
pressed by arguments, lie close intrenched behind the Council of Trent:
so now, when your affairs are in a low condition, you dare not pretend
that to be a legal combination, but whensoever you are afloat, I doubt
not but it will be maintained and justified to purpose. For, indeed,
there is nothing to defend it but the sword: it is the proper time to
say anything when men have all things in their power.

In the mean time, you would fain be nibbling at a parallel betwixt this
Association, and that in the time of Queen Elizabeth.[78] But there is
this small difference betwixt them, that the ends of one are directly
opposite to the other: one with the queen's approbation and conjunction,
as head of it; the other, without either the consent or knowledge of the
king, against whose authority it is manifestly designed. Therefore you
do well to have recourse to your last evasion, that it was contrived by
your enemies, and shuffle