dition? Does your definition of _loyal_, which is
to serve the King according to the laws, allow you the licence of
traducing the executive power, with which you own he is invested? You
complain, that his Majesty has lost the love and confidence of his
people; and, by your very urging it, you endeavour, what in you lies,
to make him lose them. All good subjects abhor the thought of
arbitrary power, whether it be in one or many; if you were the patriots
you would seem, you would not at this rate incense the multitude to
assume it; for no sober man can fear it, either from the King's
disposition or his practice; or even, where you would odiously lay it,
from his ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the Government, and the
benefit of laws, under which we were born, and which we desire to
transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the public
liberty; and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much less
have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs, or to arraign
what you do not like; which in effect is everything that is done by the
King and Council. Can you imagine, that any reasonable man will believe
you respect the person of his Majesty, when 'tis apparent that your
seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If
you have the confidence to deny this, 'tis easy to be evinced from a
thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote because I desire they
should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers; and to
show you that I have, the third part of your _No-Protestant Plot_ is
much of it stolen from your dead author's pamphlet called the _Growth
of Popery_; as manifestly as Milton's defence of the English people is
from Buchanan, _de jure regni apud Scotos_; or your first covenant, and
new association, from the holy league of the French Guisards. Anyone,
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 murder'd 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
do