the prosperity of
any party is the time to show their discretion, the Parliament showed
they knew as little where to stop as other people. The king was not in
a condition to deny anything, and nothing could be demanded but they
pushed it. They attainted the Earl of Strafford, and thereby made
the king cut off his right hand to save his left, and yet not save
it neither. They obtained another bill to empower them to sit during
their own pleasure, and after them, triennial Parliaments to meet,
whether the king call them or no; and granting this completed his
Majesty's ruin.

Had the House only regulated the abuses of the court, punished evil
counsellors, and restored Parliaments to their original and just
powers, all had been well, and the king, though he had been more than
mortified, had yet reaped the benefit of future peace; for now
the Scots were sent home, after having eaten up two countries, and
received a prodigious sum of money to boot. And the king, though too
late, goes in person to Edinburgh, and grants them all they could
desire, and more than they asked; but in England, the desires of ours
were unbounded, and drove at all extremes.

They drew out the bishops from sitting in the House, made a
protestation equivalent to the Scotch Covenant, and this done, print
their remonstrance. This so provoked the king, that he resolves upon
seizing some of the members, and in an ill hour enters the House in
person to take them. Thus one imprudent thing on one hand produced
another of the other hand, till the king was obliged to leave them to
themselves, for fear of being mobbed into something or other unworthy
of himself.

These proceedings began to alarm the gentry and nobility of England;
for, however willing we were to have evil counsellors removed, and
the government return to a settled and legal course, according to the
happy constitution of this nation, and might have been forward enough
to have owned the king had been misled, and imposed upon to do things
which he had rather had not been done, yet it did not follow, that
all the powers and prerogatives of the crown should devolve upon the
Parliament, and the king in a manner be deposed, or else sacrificed to
the fury of the rabble.

The heats of the House running them thus to all extremes, and at last
to take from the king the power of the militia, which indeed was
all that was left to make him anything of a king, put the king upon
opposing force with force; a