greatest happiness (Christian Religion excepted), that ever this kingdom received from God, certainly the peace between the two lions of gold and gules, and the making them one, doth by many degrees exceed the former; for by it, besides the sparing of our British blood, heretofore and during the difference, so often and abundantly shed, the state of England is more assured, the kingdom more enabled to recover her ancient honor and rights, and by it made more invincible, than by all our former alliances, practises, policies, and conquests.  It is true that hereof we do not yet find the effect.  But had the Duke of Parma in the year 1588, joined the army which he commanded, with that of Spain, and landed it on the south coast; and had his Majesty at the same time declared himself against us in the North:  it is easy to divine what had become of the liberty of England, certainly we would then without murmur have bought this union at far greater price than it hath since cost us.  It is true, that there was never any common weal or kingdom in the world, wherein no man had cause to lament.  Kings live in the world, and not above it.  They are not infinite to examine every man’s cause, or to relieve every man’s wants.  And yet in the latter (though to his own prejudice), his Majesty hath had more comparison of other men’s necessities, than of his own coffers.  Of whom it may he said, as of Solomon,[6] “Dedit Deus Solomon! latitudinem cordis”:  Which if other men do not understand with Pineda, to be meant by liberality, but by “latitude of knowledge”; yet may it be better spoken of His Majesty, than of any king that ever England had; who as well in divine, as human understanding, hath exceeded all that fore-went him, by many degrees.

I could say much more of the King’s majesty, without flattery:  did I not fear the imputation of presumption, and withal suspect, that it might befall these papers of mine (though the loss were little) as it did the pictures of Queen Elizabeth, made by unskilful and common painters, which by her own commandment were knocked in pieces and cast into the fire.  For ill artists, in setting out the beauty of the external; and weak writers, in describing the virtues of the internal; do often leave to posterity, of well formed faces a deformed memory; and of the most perfect and princely minds, a most defective representation.  It may suffice, and there needs no other discourse; if the honest reader but compare the cruel and turbulent passages of our former kings, and of other their neighbor-princes (of whom for that purpose I have inserted this brief discourse) with his Majesty’s temperate, revengeless and liberal disposition:  I say, that if the honest reader weigh them justly, and with an even hand; and withal but bestow every deformed child on his true parent; he shall find, that there is no man that hath so just cause to complain, as the King himself hath.  Now as we have told the success of the trumperies and cruelties of our own kings, and other great personages: