Here, I say, was some
room for an argument at least, and concessions on both sides were
needful to come to a peace. But for the Scots, all their demands had
been answered, all their grievances had been redressed, they had made
articles with their sovereign, and he had performed those articles;
their capital enemy Episcopacy was abolished; they had not one thing
to demand of the king which he had not granted. And therefore they had
no more cause to take up arms against their sovereign than they had
against the Grand Seignior. But it must for ever lie against them as
a brand of infamy, and as a reproach on their whole nation that,
purchased by the Parliament's money, they sold their honesty, and
rebelled against their king for hire; and it was not many years
before, as I have said already, they were fully paid the wages of
their unrighteousness, and chastised for their treachery by the very
same people whom they thus basely assisted. Then they would have
retrieved it, if it had not been too late.
But I could not but accuse this age of injustice and partiality, who
while they reproached the king for his cessation of arms with the
Irish rebels, and not prosecuting them with the utmost severity,
though he was constrained by the necessities of the war to do it,
could yet, at the same time, justify the Scots taking up arms in a
quarrel they had no concern in, and against their own king, with whom
they had articled and capitulated, and who had so punctually complied
with all their demands, that they had no claim upon him, no grievances
to be redressed, no oppression to cry out of, nor could ask anything
of him which he had not granted.
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