ty to avail himself of this
advantage. He urged that, if a compliance with the government at that
time established in England, and the acknowledging of its authority,
were to be regarded as criminal, the whole nation had incurred equal
guilt, and none would remain whose innocence could entitle them to try
or condemn him for his pretended treasons: that, according to these
maxims, wherever an illegal authority was established by force, a total
and universal destruction must ensue; while the usurpers proscribed
one part of the nation for disobedience, the lawful prince punished the
other for compliance: that the legislature of England, foreseeing
this violent situation, had provided for public security by the famous
statute of Henry VII.; in which it was enacted that no man, in case of
any revolution, should ever be questioned for his obedience to the king
in being: that whether the established government were a monarchy or a
commonwealth, the reason of the thing was still the same; nor ought the
expelled prince to think himself entitled to allegiance, so long as he
could not afford protection: that it belonged not to private persons,
possessed of no power, to discuss the title of their governors;
and every usurpation, even the most flagrant, would equally require
obedience with the most legal establishment: that the controversy
between the late king and his parliament was of the most delicate
nature; and men of the greatest probity had been divided in their choice
of the party which they should embrace; that the parliament, being
rendered indissoluble but by its own consent, was become a kind of
cooerdinate power with the king; and as the case was thus entirely new
and unknown to the constitution, it ought not to be tried rigidly by the
letter of the ancient laws: that for his part, all the violences which
had been put upon the parliament, and upon the person of the sovereign,
he had ever condemned; nor had he once in the house for some time before
and after the execution of the king: that, finding the whole government
thrown into disorder, he was still resolved, in every revolution,
to adhere to the commons, the root, the foundation, of all lawful
authority: that in prosecution of this principle, he had cheerfully
under gone all the violence of Cromwell's tyranny; and would now with
equal alacrity, expose himself to the rigors of perverted law and
justice: that though it was in his power, on the king's restoration, to
ha