Page:Celebrated Trials - Volume 2.djvu/125

Rh law or reason, but are a company of usurping tyrants and destroyers of your laws, liberties, &c.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Mr. Lilburne is more than a leveller, he endeavours to pull up the laws of England by the roots, for he says there is no magistracy, and if so, I conclude there is no propriety.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lilburne.—Mr. Prideaux, it is not long since you suffered the same aspersion, and were penned down in a black bill to my knowledge; pray who were the greatest rooters, those who endeavoured to prevent the mischief, or those who gave the cause? And your inference is very strange, since propriety is antecedent to magistracy, and first in being; I wish your practices were as consonant thereto as my principles.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Read the second page at the mark.

Clerk reads.—I shall hinder (as much as I am able) all addresses to the usurping tyrants as a parliament, &c.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Read page 2.

Clerk.—Your officers have often styled them no better than a mock parliament, a shadow of a parliament, &c.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Read page 3, at the mark.

Clerk reads.—Misery, poverty, &c. never were so extreme under the most tyrannical of our kings, as under the sepretendedthese pretended [sic] friends, &c.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Read page 4.

Clerk reads.—And nothing but the groundless wills of these men of blood rageth and ruleth over us, &c.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lilburne.—Pray, Sir, are those quotations verbatim in the indictment?

Mr. Attorney-General.—No, we say you published those among other clauses and things in the books, and produce no books but those charged in the indictment.—Read pages 68 and 72.

Clerk reads.—That the high court of justice is unlawful, if those who set it up were a legal parliament, which they were not, but a pack of traitorous tyrannical usurpers, &c. and they being no Parliament, the other is no court of justice.

Mr. Attorney-General.—Now read in The Salva Libertate, at the mark.

Clerk reads.—That a paper warrant, from any pretended power now visible, was not valid, because Fairfax had broke the magistracy, and set up pretended magistrates, and amongst them the Attorney-General, in opposition to whom I will spend my blood, &c.

Mr. Attorney-General observed, that in these books it was said the present government was a mock power, a tyrannical, usurped and unlawful authority; that they were murderers, thieves and robbers, no parliament, but Thomas Pride's junto, destroyers of the liberties, &c. and he hoped the court and jury were sensible that the proof was clear, as to Mr. Lilburne's publishing those books, which he thought was sufficient without further charge; however he should proceed to prove likewise, that Mr. Lilburne had plotted and contrived to raise forces to subvert the present government, though what had been already said (being declared to the army) was sufficient proof thereof, and ordered the fifth page of his book, intitled "An Impeachment of High Treason," &c. to be read; wherein he says, that he hoped the people would make the scheme in his book, called