Mr. Waller's Speech, praying for a Mitigation of the Sentence passed upon him by the Parliament.

Mr. Speaker,

I ACKNOWLEDGE it a great mercy of God, and a great favour from you, that I am once more suffered to behold this honourable assembly.

I mean not to make use of it to say any thing in my own defence, by justification or denial of what I have done. I have already confessed enough to make me appear worthy, not only to be put out of this house, but out of the world too. All my humble request to you is, that if I seem to you as unworthy to live as I do to myself, I may have the honour to receive my death from your own hands, and not to be exposed to a trial by the council of war. Whatever you shall think me worthy to suffer in a parliamentary way, is not like to find stop any where else.

This, sir, I hope you will be pleased, for your own sakes, to grant me, who am already so miserable, that nothing can be added to my calamity, but to be made the occasion of creating a precedent to your own disadvantage besides the right I may have to this, consider, I beseech you, that the eyes of the world are upon you. You govern in chief; and if you shall expose your own members to the punishment of others, it will be thought that you either want power or leisure to chastise them yourselves; nor let any man despise the ill consequence of such a precedent as this would be, because he seeth not presently the inconveniences which may ensue. You have many armies on foot, and it is uncer, tain how long you may have occasion to use them. Soldiers and commanders (though I know well they of the parliament's army excel no less in modesty than they do in courage,) are generally of a nature ready to pretend to the utmost power of this kind which they coneeive to be due to them, and may be too apt, upon any

occasion of discontent, to make use of such a precedent as this. In this very parliament you have not been without some taste of the experience hereof: it is now somewhat more than two years since you had an army in the north, paid and directed by yourselves; and yet you may be pleased to remember there was a consider. able number of officers in that army, which joined in a petition or remonstrance to this house, taking notice of what some of the members had said here, as they supposed, to their disadvantage, and did little less than require them of you. "Tis true, there had been some tampering with them; but what has happened at one time, may wisely be thought possible to fall out again at another.

Sir, I presume but to point you out the danger: if it be not just, I know you will not do me the wrong to expose me to this trial; if it be just, your army may another time require the same justice of you in your own behalf, against some other member, whom perhaps you would be less willing to part with. Necessity has of late forced you into untrodden paths, and in such a case as this, where you have no precedent of your own, you may not do amiss to look abroad upon other states and senates, which excercise the supreme power, as you now do here.

I dare confidently say you shall find none, either ancient or modern, which ever exposed any of their own order to be tried for his life by the officers of their armies abroad, for what he did while he resided among them in the senate.

Among the Romans the practice was so contrary, that some inferior officers in their army, far from the city, having been sentenced by their general or commander in chief as deserving death by their discipline of war, have nevertheless (because they were senators) appealed thither; and the cause has received a new hearing in the senate.

Not to use more words to persuade you to take heed

my

that you wound not yourselves, through my sides, in vio lating the privileges belonging to your own persons, I shall humbly desire you to consider likewise the nature of offence; not but that I should be much ashamed to say any thing in diminution thereof, (God knows 'tis horrid enough for the evil it might have occasioned) but if you look near it, it may perhaps appear to be rather a civil than a martial crime, and so to have title to a trial at the common law of the land. There may justly be some difference put between me and others in this business.

I have had nothing to do with the other army, or any intention to begin the offer of violence to any body; it was only a civil pretence to that which I then foolishly conceived to be the right of the subject. I humbly refer it to your considerations, and to your consciences. I know you will take care not to shed that blood by the law of war, which hath a right to be tried by the law of peace.

For so much as concerns myself, and my part in this business, (if I were worthy to have any thing spoken, or patiently heard in my behalf,) this might truly be said: that I made not this business, but found it; it was in other men's hands long before it was brought to me; and when it came, I extended it not, but restrained it. For the propositions of letting in part of the king's army, or offering violence to the members of this house, I ever disallowed, and utterly rejected them.

What it was that moved me to entertain discourse of this business so far as I did, I will tell you ingenously; and that rather as a warning for others, than it makes any thing for myself: It was only an impatience of the inconveniences of the present war; looking on things with a carnal eye, and not minding that which chiefly, if not only, ought to have been considered: the inestimable value of the cause you have in hand, the cause of God and of religion, and the necessities you are forced upon for the maintenance of the same. As a just pu

nishment for this neglect, it pleased God to desert me, and suffer me, with a fatal blindness, to be led on and engaged in such councils, as were wholly disproportioned to the rest of my life. This, sir, my own conscience tells me, was the cause of my falling; and not malice, or any ill habit of mind or disposition towards the common. wealth, or to the parliament. For, from whence should I have it? If you look on my birth, you will not find it in my blood. I am of a stock which hath borne you better fruit. If you look on my education, it hath been al most from my childhood in this house, and amongst the best sort of men; and for the whole practice of my life, till this time, if another were to speak for me, he might reasonably say, that neither my actions out of parlia ment, nor my expressions in it, have favored of disaffec tion or malice to the liberties of the people, or privi leges of parliament.

Thus, sir, I have set before your eyes, both my per. son and my case; wherein I shall make no such defence by denying or extenuating any thing I have done, as ordinary delinquents do. My address to you, and all my plea shall be, such as children use to their parents, I have offended; I confess it. I never did any thing like it before. It is a passage unsuitable to the whole course of my life besides; and for the time to come, as God, that can bring light out of darkness, hath made this business in the event useful to you, so also hath he to me. You have, by it, made an happy discovery of your ene mies; and I of myself, and the evil principles I walked by; so that if you look either on what I have been hereto. fore, or what I now am, and by God's grace assisting me I shall always continue to be, you may, perhaps, think me fit to be an example of your compassion and clemency.

Sir, I shall no sooner leave you, but my life will depend on your breath; and not that alone, but the subsistence of some that are more innocent. I might there. fore, shew you my children, whom the rigour of your

justice would make complete orphans, being already motherless. I might shew you a family wherein there are some unworthy to have their share in that mark of infamy which now threatens me. But something there is, which, if I could shew you, would move you more than all this it is my heart; which abhors what I have done more, and is more severe to itself, than the severest judge can be. A heart, Mr. Speaker, so awakened by this affliction, and so entirely devoted to the cause you maintain, that I earnestly desire of God to incline you so to dispose of me, whether for life or death, as may most conduce to the advancement thereof.

Sir, not to trouble you any longer, if I die, I shall die praying for you; if I live, I shall live serving you, and render you back the use and employment of all those days you shall add to my life.

WILLIAM LENTHALL,

(An eminent Lawyer, and Speaker of the Long Parliament,)

Was member for Woodstock. He was born 1591, and died 1662. This high-flown address to General Fairfax, is a model of the adulatory style Surely a great man does not stand in need of so much praise.

Sir,

I HAVE a very hard task to perform, to present the respects of the house of commons, according to your excellency's merit, and their desires. To effect this accordingly, I should have informed myself, from histories that have preserved the memories of the famous worthies of former ages, and should have taken the dimensions of the largest coronets and trophies wherewith VOL I.

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