e
king, resuming his speech, remarkably reproached the parliament--

Now that you have all things according to your wishes, and that _I am
so far engaged that you think there is no retreat, now you begin to
set the dice, and make your own game_. But I pray you be not
deceived; it is not a parliamentary way, nor is it a way to deal with
a king. Mr. Clement Coke told you, "It was better to be eaten up by a
foreign enemy than to be destroyed at home!" Indeed, I think it more
honour for a king to be invaded and almost destroyed by a foreign
enemy than to _be despised by his own subjects_.

The king concluded by asserting his privilege to call or to forbid
parliaments.

The style of "the bold speakers" appeared at least as early as in April;
I trace their spirit in letters of the times, which furnish facts and
expressions that do not appear in our printed documents.

Among the earliest of our patriots, and finally the great victim of his
exertions, was Sir John Eliot, vice-admiral of Devonshire. He, in a tone
which "rolled back to Jove his own bolts," and startled even the writer,
who was himself biassed to the popular party, "made a resolute, I doubt
whether a timely, speech." He adds Eliot asserted that "They came not
thither either to do what the king should command them, nor to abstain
when he forbade them; they came to continue constant, and to maintain
their privileges. They would not give their posterity a cause to curse
them for losing their privileges by restraint, which their forefathers
had left them."[287]

On the 8th of May the impeachment of the duke was opened by Sir Dudley
Digges, who compared the duke to a meteor exhaled out of putrid matter.
He was followed by Glanville, Selden, and others. On this first day the
duke sat out-facing his accusers and out-braving their accusations,
which the more highly exasperated the house.[288] On the following day
the duke was absent, when the epilogue to this mighty piece was
elaborately delivered by Sir John Eliot, with a force of declamation and
a boldness of personal allusion which have not been surpassed in the
invectives of the modern Junius.

Eliot, after expatiating on the favourite's ambition in procuring and
getting into his hands the greatest offices of strength and power in the
kingdom, and the means by which he had obtained them, drew a picture of
"the inward character of the duke's mind." The duke's plurality of
offices reminded