regni apud Scotos:”  or your first Covenant and new Association from the holy league of the French Guisards.  Any one who reads Davila, may trace your practices all along.  There were the same pretences for reformation and loyalty, the same aspersions of the king, and the same grounds of a rebellion.  I know not whether you will take the historian’s word, who says it was reported, that Poltrot, a Huguenot, murdered Francis Duke of Guise, by the instigations of Theodore Beza; or that it was a Huguenot minister, otherwise called a Presbyterian (for our church abhors so devilish a tenet), who first writ a treatise of the lawfulness of deposing and murdering kings of a different persuasion in religion:  but I am able to prove, from the doctrine of Calvin, and principles of Buchanan, that they set the people above the magistrate; which, if I mistake not, is your own fundamental, and which carries your loyalty no further than your liking.  When a vote of the House of Commons goes on your side, you are as ready to observe it as if it were passed into a law; but when you are pinched with any former, and yet unrepealed act of parliament, you declare that in some cases you will not be obliged by it.  The passage is in the same third part of the “No-Protestant Plot,” and is too plain to be denied.  The late copy of your intended Association, you neither wholly justify nor condemn; but as the Papists, when they are unopposed, fly out into all the pageantries of worship, but in times of war, when they are hard pressed by arguments, lie close intrenched behind the Council of Trent:  so now, when your affairs are in a low condition, you dare not pretend that to be a legal combination, but whensoever you are afloat, I doubt not but it will be maintained and justified to purpose.  For, indeed, there is nothing to defend it but the sword:  it is the proper time to say anything when men have all things in their power.

In the mean time, you would fain be nibbling at a parallel betwixt this Association, and that in the time of Queen Elizabeth.[78] But there is this small difference betwixt them, that the ends of one are directly opposite to the other:  one with the queen’s approbation and conjunction, as head of it; the other, without either the consent or knowledge of the king, against whose authority it is manifestly designed.  Therefore you do well to have recourse to your last evasion, that it was contrived by your enemies, and shuffled into the papers that were seized; which yet you see the nation is not so easy to believe as your own jury; but the matter is not difficult to find twelve men in Newgate who would acquit a malefactor.