Richard Baxter was too thoroughly good for any experience to make him worldly wise; else, how could he have been simple enough to suppose, that Mazarine would leave such a question to be voted ‘pro’ and ‘con’, and decided by thirty emissaries in London!  And, how could he have reconciled Mazarine’s having any share in Charles’s death with his own masterly account, pp. 98, 99, 100?  Even Cromwell, though he might have prevented, could not have effected, the sentence.  The regicidal judges were not his creatures.  Consult the Life of Colonel Hutchinson upon this.

Ib. p. 374.

Since this, Dr. Peter Moulin hath, in his Answer to ’Philanax Anglicus’, declared that he is ready to prove, when authority will Call him to it, that the King’s death, and the change of the government, was first proposed both to the Sorbonne, and to the Pope with his Conclave, and consented to and concluded for by both.

The Pope in his Conclave had about the same influence in Charles’s fate as the Pope’s eye in a leg of mutton.  The letter intercepted by Cromwell was Charles’s death-warrant.  Charles knew his power; and Cromwell and Ireton knew it likewise, and knew that it was the power of a man who was within a yard’s length of a talisman, only not within an arm’s length, but which in that state of the public mind, could he but have once grasped it, would have enabled him to blow up Presbyterian and Independent both.  If ever a lawless act was defensible on the principle of self-preservation, the murder of Charles might be defended.  I suspect that the fatal delay in the publication of the ‘Icon Basilike’ is susceptible of no other satisfactory explanation.  In short it is absurd to burthen this act on Cromwell and his party, in any special sense.  The guilt, if guilt it was, was consummated at the gates of Hull; that is, the first moment that Charles was treated as an individual, man against man.  Whatever right Hampden had to defend his life against the King in battle, Cromwell and Ireton had in yet more imminent danger against the King’s plotting.  Milton’s reasoning on this point is unanswerable:  and what a wretched hand does Baxter make of it!

Ib. p. 375.

But if the laws of the land appoint the nobles, as next the King, to assist him in doing right, and withhold him from doing wrong, then be they licensed by man’s law, and so not prohibited by God’s, to interpose themselves for the safety of equity and innocency, and by all lawful and needful means to procure the Prince to be reformed, but in no case deprived, where the sceptre is inherited!  So far Bishop Bilson.

Excellent!  O, by all means preserve for him the benefit of his rightful heir-loom, the regal sceptre; only lay it about his shoulders, till he promises to handle it, as he ought!  But what if he breaks his promise and your head? or what if he will not