PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION,

LONDON, 1682.

It is not every period of time, not every king's or Cæsar's reign, that furnishes matter sufficient for an history. Tacitus in one place professes he cannot meet with any thing unless he should stuff out a volume in commending the foundation, or the huge timber that Cæsar employed at the building his amphitheatre. Elsewhere he complains of his being straitened and kept down, the times affording nothing notable besides the corruption of judges, the encouragement of informers, subornations and malicious prosecutions, treachery, and trepannings, new sorts of treason devised, and the laws (made for the people's security) turned into snares and gins to catch and destroy the brave and the virtuous, and all such as are like to resent or stem the inundation of villainy ready to overflow the land. Other writers, says he, ingentia bella, expugnationes urbium, fusos captosque reges, aut, si quando ad interna præverterent, discordias consulum adversum tribunos, agrarias frumentariasque leges, plebis et optimatium certamina, libero egressu memorabant, which may thus be Englished: "they had to write of great wars, the storming of towns, kings put to the rout and taken captive;

a Tac. Ann. lib. 4. cap. 32.

or (if they looked homeward) with a free hand they described the clashings of the chief magistrate with the people's representative, the great charter, the fundamental laws and liberty of the subject, with the warm debates and contestation betwixt the peers and the commons; these were what Tacitus accounted the noblest matter for an historian.

It has been ordinarily observed, that the sword cuts out work for the pen; and times of war are times of history. Upon that blow given to the barbarians in Armenia, a thousand Herodotuses, a thousand Xenophons and Thucydideses aroseb: every one bestirred himself and fell to scribble, and commenced historian immediately.

Whether we reflect on the course of war pursued for so many years throughout these three nations and English dominions; or that we consider the fatal strife of the higher powers and governing parts of the commonwealth amongst themselves, no nation or times. ever yielded a nobler subject: so far from stinting, that it rather might deter the ablest penman from so vast an undertaking and we may sooner despair of an historian, than want matter for an history.

Here wanted not the brisk attacks, the bold sallies, the resolute charges, the obstinate sieges, nor any of that glorious violence, desolation, and outrage, whereof the warriors make their wretched ostentation: yet the labour here was no less to subdue the understanding than to beat down the bodies of the enemy; nor was it less a dispute who had the better of the cause in a declaration than who got the victory in the field. Peradventure the arts and the ambushes and the b Lucian. de Hist. scrib.

management was not so fine, nor had so considerable a proportion in the story, as might be expected from some of our neighbours. The English stay not for so much ceremony, but fight in haste, not caring for more than that old Roman rule,

Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos;

"to give fair quarter to those that yield, and to knock them down that resist." These are their arts, these are their stratagems. These events, together with the changes and revolutions that usually follow the tempest of war, are things obvious, and not to be concealed from the inquisitive, but seldom it is that the rise and springs of great actions are open to view, Dion Cassius was sensible what difference there was in writing history under a commonwealth, where the counsels are all publicly canvassed and debated; and in a monarchy, where the affairs of state are for the most part managed in cabinets and by a few heads, and every thing made a mystery: so many disguises and so much mist intermingled in the transactions, that the most diligent historian is many times lost, and forced upon conjecture, and cannot distinguish what is real from what are state-pretences.

Besides the other advantages aforementioned for an history, the portion of time (within the compass of these Memorials), of all others, is that in which the state-cabinet was laid open, all the tricks exposed, all the mysterious characters deciphered, all the deeds and misdeeds, all the secret practices and intrigues unravelled to the eye and observation of the world, and such a foundation for certainty in an historian as rarely any times have afforded. This is so well understood, that for want of something accurately composed in