B. To whom should they be sworn, when there is no Parliament?
A. No doubt but to the King, whether there be a Parliament sitting or no.
B. Then the King may release them of their oath.[1] Besides, if the King, upon the refusal, should fall upon them in his anger; who shall (the Parliament not sitting) protect either the Chancellor or the sheriffs in their disobedience?
A. I pray you do not ask me any reason of such things as I understand no better than you. I tell you only an act passed to that purpose, and was signed by the King in the middle of February, a little before the Archbishop was sent to the Tower. Besides this bill, the two Houses of Parliament agreed upon another, wherein it was enacted, that the present Parliament should continue till both the Houses did consent to the dissolution of it; which bill also the King signed the same day he signed the warrant for the execution of the Earl of Strafford.
B. What a great progress made the Parliament *towards their ends, or at least* towards the ends of the most seditious Members of both Houses in so little time! They sat down in November, and now it was May; in this space of time, which is but half a year, they won from the King the adherence which was due to him from his people; they drove his faithfullest servants from him; beheaded the Earl of Strafford; imprisoned the Archbishop of Canterbury; obtained a triennial Parliament after their own dissolution, and a continuance of their own sitting as long as they listed: which last amounted to a total extinction of the King’s right, in case that such a grant were valid; which I think it is not, unless the Sovereignty itself be in plain terms renounced, which it was not.
A. Besides, they obtained of the King the putting down the Star-chamber and High-Commission Courts.
- ↑ The words of A: “Besides … Courts,” have been transposed to a wrong place, after “release them of their oath,” in the former edd.
