ts who had done more to keep him out, and had
attacked him and his more ferociously, more relentlessly, and more
successfully, than any other living. Suppose that his Majesty,
waiting at Breda, was curious to know already, for certain reasons,
what person, not on the actual list of those who had signed his
father's death-warrant, would be designated to him by universal
opinion at home as the least pardonable traitor; and read this as the
answer of G.S.:--

This detestable, execrable murder, committed by the worst of
parricides, accompanied with the disclaiming of your whole royal
stock, disinheriting your Majesty's self and the rest of the royal
branches, driving you and them into exile, with endeavouring to
expunge and obliterate your never-to-be-forgotten just title;
tearing up and pulling down the pillars of Majesty, the Nobles;
garbling and suspending from the place of power all of the Commons
House that had anything of honesty or relenting of spirit toward
the injured Father of three Nations and his royal posterity: acts
horrible to be imagined, and yet with high hand most villainously,
perfidiously, and perjuriously perpetrated by monsters of mankind,
yet blasphemously dishonourers of God in making use of His name and
usurping the title of Saints in their never-before-paralleled nor
ever-sufficiently-to-be-lamented-and-abhorred villanies:--this
Murder, I say, and these Villainies, were defended, nay extolled
and commended, by one MR. JOHN MILTON, in answer to the most
learned Salmasius, who declaimed against the same with most solid
arguments and pathetical expressions; in which Answer he did so
bespatter the white robes of your Royal Father's spotless life
(human infirmities excepted) with the dirty filth of his satirical
pen that to the vulgar, and those who read his book with prejudice,
he represented him a most debauched, vicious man (I tremble, Royal
Sir, to write it), an irreligious hater and persecutor of Religion
and religious men, an ambitious enslaver of the nation, a bloody
tyrant, and an implacable enemy to all his good subjects; and
thereupon calls that execrable and detestable horrible Murder a
just Execution, and commends it as an heroic action: and, in a
word, whatever was done in prosecution of their malice toward your
Royal Progenitor and his issue, or relations, or friends and
assistants, he calls Restoring of the nation to its Liberty