subscribing the covenant, which they abhorred.
Besides pitying the ruin and desolation of so many ancient and honorable
families, indifferent spectators could not but blame the hardship of
punishing with such severity actions which the law, in its usual and
most undisputed interpretation, strictly required of every subject.

The severities, too, exercised against the Episcopal clergy naturally
affected the royalists, and even all men of candor, in a sensible
manner. By the most moderate computation,[v] it appears, that above one
half of the established clergy had been turned out to beggary and
want, for no other crime than their adhering to the civil and religious
principles in which they had been educated, and for their attachment
to those laws under whose countenance they had at first embraced that
profession.

* Clement Walker's History of Independency, p. 3, 166.

** Clement Walker's History of Independency, p, 8.

*** Clement Walker's History of Independency, p. 8.

**** Clement Walker's History of Independency, p. 8.

v See John Walker's Attempt towards recovering an Account of
the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy. The parliament
pretended to leave the sequestered clergy a fifth of their
revenue; but this author makes it sufficiently appear that
this provision, small as it is, was never regularly paid the
ejected clergy.

To renounce Episcopacy and the liturgy, and to subscribe the covenant,
were the only terms which could save them from so rigorous a fate; and
if the least mark of malignancy, as it was called, or affection to the
king, who so entirely loved them, had ever escaped their lips, even this
hard choice was not permitted. The sacred character, which gives the
priesthood such authority over mankind, becoming more venerable from
the sufferings endured for the sake of principle by these distressed
royalists, aggravated the general indignation against their persecutors.

But what excited the most universal complaint was, the unlimited
tyranny and despotic rule of the country committees. During the war,
the discretionary power of these courts was excused, from the plea of
necessity; but the nation was reduced to despair, when it saw neither
end put to their duration, nor bounds to their authority. These could
sequester, fine, imprison, and corporally punish, without law or
remedy. They interposed in questions of private property. Under color of