Page:The History of Birmingham (1835).djvu/84

60 of better ranke. Yet they desire to bear all these crosses patiently and profitably take with joy the spoyling of all their goods, knowing in themselves that they suffer in a good cause, and that they have in Heaven a farre better and more enduring substance.

Let all the Kingdome well consider Birminghams calamities and conclude what all are like to feele unlesse they maturely bestirre themselves to shake off the Cavaliers more then Egyptian yoke.

 Extract from “Vicars’s God in the Mount, or England’s Parliamentarie Chronicle,” which may be found at page 296 of that work:

“April the 8th came certain intelligence to London from Brumingham of the cruell slaughter of diverse of the inhabitants of that honest Town, and that about eighty of their dwelling houses were burnt downe by that barbarous and butcherly Prince of Robbers, and his accursed Cavaliers. But yet withall, that his filching Forces got little by their so humane barbarity: for, God fought for those poore unarmed inhabitants, who were for the most part, Smiths, whose profession or trade was to make nails, sythes and such like iron commodities; and that with such iron-weapons as they had they so knocked the Earl of Denbigh that he received his deaths wound in his furious pursuit of some of them, and immediately after dyed of those his wounds: And with him also (as it was credibly informed) the Lord Digby that arch-traitor to the Common wealth of England was sorely wounded in the same fight. And this