their only priviledg and subsistence,
though they have been offered all they could desire for the security
of their Trade, and legal employment, and far beyond whatsoever any
Corporation of Apothecaries in all, or in any forreign part enjoy, yet
nothing would ever content them, but an unlawful, unreasonable,
dangerous, and destructive Usurpation of liberty to some pretended
practice, that thereby they might gain the whole.

Secondly, They have continually traduced the College, and troubled
them in Parliaments, at the Council-Board, &c. to their great charge
and molestation. And for such their great demerits against the
College, the King and his Council, Anno 1639. granted a Quo Warranto
to the Attorney General (the Judges having first heard the whole
matter) to take away their Charter, which doubtless had been effected,
had not the troubles, and long civil War immediately ensued.

Thirdly, And in this present Parliament, how did they endeavour to
prepossess the Members of the House of Commons with strange, and false
prejudices and assertions drawn from irrational, and groundless
suppositions, making us the greatest Tyrants in the World, inferring
ridiculously that a Lady, or Charitable Gentlewoman (for in that
believing Sex they have gain'd a great deal of ground by their
falsities) might not give the Poor a Cordial, &c. without being
questioned by the College; whereas they know in their Consciences,
that the College hath power enough by their first Charter to act as
much in this kind against themselves, and all other persons, as they
desired of this present Parliament; And yet neither Apothecary, or any
other who practised charitably, were ever troubled for so doing. They
pretended also they were abridged wholy from their Trade, and might
not sell a penny-worth of Mithridate, &c. without a Doctors Bill.
Whereas there's not a word in the Charter to that purpose; the sole
intent whereof was to keep them as well as other Mountebanks, from
prescribing (which they call selling) the Physicians only livelyhood.
And as to the bill itself so much railed on by them in
Westminster-Hall, Coffee-Houses, Ale-Houses, &c. 'tis easie to make it
out, that this Charter as proposed gives the Apothecaries more liberty
and freedom of exercising their lawful Trade, then is enjoyed in any
other Nation, where both Corporations are erected, and that it doth in
nothing infringe, or diminish their freedom as Citizens, or their
Charter as Apoth