(Preface.)

Source.—Harleian Miscellany. Vol. IV., p. 289.

To His Highness Oliver Cromwell.

May it please Your Highness,
How I have spent some hours of the leisure your Highness has been pleased to give me, the following paper will give your Highness an account; how you will please to interpret it, I cannot tell; but I can with confidence say, my intention in it is to procure your Highness that justice nobody yet does you, and to let the people see, the longer they defer it, the greater injury they do both themselves and you. To your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation to you, in the last moments of your life, to consider with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it. It is then only, my Lord, that the title you now usurp will be truly yours: you will then be indeed the Deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his. You will then be that true Reformer which you would now be thought; religion shall then be restored, liberty asserted, and parliaments have those privileges they have fought for. We shall then hope that other laws will have place besides those of the sword, and justice shall be otherwise defined than as the Will and Pleasure of the Strongest; and we shall then hope men will keep oaths again, and not have the necessity of being false and perfidious to preserve themselves and to be like their rulers. All this we hope from your Highness's happy expiration, who are the true father of your country: for while you live, we can call nothing ours, and it is from your death that we hope for our inheritances. Let this consideration arm and fortify your Highness's mind against the fear of death and the terrors of your evil conscience, that the good you will do by your death will somewhat balance the evils of your life. And if, in the black catalogue of high malefactors, few can be found that have lived more to the affliction and disturbance of mankind than your Highness hath done; yet your greatest enemies will not deny, but there are likewise as few that have expired more to the universal benefit of mankind, than your Highness is like to do. To hasten this great good is the chief end of my writing this paper, and if it have the effects I hope it will, your Highness will be quickly out of reach of men's malice and your enemies will only be able to wound you in your memory, which strokes you will not feel. That your Highness may speedily be in this security, is the universal wish of your grateful country; this is the desire and prayer of the good and of the bad, and, it may be, is the only thing wherein all sects and factions do agree in their devotions, and is our only Common Prayer. But amongst all that put in their requests and supplications for your Highness's speedy deliverance from all earthly troubles, none is more assiduous, nor more fervent than he that (with the rest of this nation) hath the honour to be, may it please your Highness,

Your Highness's present slave and vassal,
W. A.