" He boldly maintains that they meant to
perpetuate themselves by filling up vacancies as they occurred, and had
made several applications to him to obtain his consent. He adds, "Poor men,
under this arbitrary power, were driven like flocks of sheep by forty in a
morning, to the confiscation of goods and estates, without any man being
able to give a reason that two of them had deserved to forfeit a shilling.
I tell you the truth; and my soul, and many persons whose faces I see in
this place, were exceedingly grieved at these things, and knew not which
way to help it, but by their mournings, and giving their negatives when the
occasion served." I notice this passage, because since the discovery of the
sequestrators' papers it has been thought, from the regularity with which
their books were kept, and the seeming equity of their proceedings, as they
are entered, that little injustice was done.]
have power to change the government as settled in one single person and the
parliament." He would, therefore, have them to know, that four things were
fundamental: 1. That the supreme power should be vested in a single person
and parliament; 2. that the parliament should be successive, and not
perpetual; 3. that neither protector nor parliament alone should possess
the uncontrolled command of the military force; and 4.
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