His majesties reasons against the pretended iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice which he intended to deliver in vvrititing [sic] on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648. Faithfully transcribed out of the originall copie under the kings own hand.

His majesties reasons against the pretended iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice which he intended to deliver in vvrititing [sic] on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648. Faithfully transcribed out of the originall copie under the kings own hand.

Table of contents

HIS MAJESTIES REASONS Against the pretended Iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice, which he intended to deliver in VVrititing on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648. Faithfully transcribed out of the Originall Copie under the Kings own Hand.

§

[Page]

HIS MAJESTIES REASONS Against the pretended Iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice, which he intended to deliver in VVrititing on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648.
Faithfully transcribed out of the Originall Copie under the Kings own Hand.

HAving already made my protestations not onely against the illegality of this pretended Court, but also that no earthly power can justly call me (who am your King) in question as a Delinquent, I would not any more open my mouth upon this occasion, more then to referre my selfe to what I have spoken, were I alone in this case concerned. But the duty I owe to God in the preservation of the true Liberty of my People, will not suffer mee at this time to be silent: For, how can any free-born Subject of England call life or any thing he possesseth his owne, if power without right daily make new, and abrogate the old fundamentall Law of the Land, which I now take to be the present case. Wherefore when I came hither, I expected that you would have indeavoured to have satisfied me concerning these grounds, which hinder me to Answer to your pretended impeachment; but since I see that nothing I can say will move you to it (though Negatives are not so naturally proved as Affirmatives) yet I will shew you the Reason why I am confident you cannot judge me, nor indeed the meanest man in England; for I will not (like you) without shewing a reason, seek to impose a beliefe upon my Subjects.

There is no proceeding just against any man,Hereabout I was stopt, and not suffered to speak any more concerning Reasons but what is warranted either by Gods Lawes, or the municipall Lawes of the Country where he lives. Now I am most confident, that this daies proceeding cannot be warranted by Gods Law, for on the contrary the authority of obedience unto Kings is clearly warranted and strictly commanded both in the Old and new Testament; which if denied, I am ready instantly to prove: and for the question now in hand, there it is said, That where the word of a King is, there is Power, and who may say unto him, what doest thou: Eccles. 8.4. Then for the Lawes of this Land, I am no lesse confident, that no learned Lawyer will affirme that an impeachment can lie against the King, they all going in his name; and one of their Maximes is, that the King can do no wrong. Besides the Law upon which you ground your proceedings, must either be old or new; if old, shew it; if new, tell, what authority warranted by the fundamentall Lawes of the Land hath made it, and when. But how the House of Commons can erect a Court of Judicature, which was never one it selfe (as is well known to all Lawyers) I leave to God and the World to judge; And it were fall as strange that they should pretend to make Lawes without King or Lords-House, to any that have heard speak of the Lawes of England.

And admitting, but not granting, that the people of Englands Commission could grant your pretended power, I see nothing you can shew for that; for certainly you never asked the question of the tenth man of the Kingdome, and in this way you manifestly wrong even the poorest Plough-man, if you demand not his free consent; nor can you pretend any colour for this your pretended, Commission without the consent at least of the major part of every man in England, of whatsoever quality or condition, which I am sure, you never went about to seek; so farlare you from having it. Thus you see that I speak not for my own right alone, as I am your King, but also for rhe true Liberty of all my Subjects, which consists not in sharing the power of Government, but in living under such Lawes, such a Government as may give themselves the best assurance of their lives and propriety of their goods. Nor in this must or do I forget the Priviledges of both Houses of Parliament, which this daies proceedings doth not only violate, but likewise occasion the greatest breach of their Publike Faith that (I beleeve) ever was heard of, with which I am far from charging the two Houses: for all the pretended Crimes laid against me, bear date long before this late Treaty at Newport, in which I having concluded as much as in me lay, and hopefully expecting the two Houses agreement there unto, I was suddenly surprized, and hurried from thence as a prisoner, upon which accompt I am against my will brought hither, where since I am come, I, cannot but to my power defend the ancient Lawes and Liberties of this Kingdome, together with my own just right; then for any thing I can see the higher House is totally excluded.

And for the House of Commons, it is too well known that the major part of them are detained or deter'd from sitting, so as if I had no other, this were sufficient for me to protest against the lawfulnesse of your pretended Court. Besides all this, the peace of the Kingdome is not the least in my thoughts, and what hopes of settlement is there so long as power reigns without rule of Law, changing the whole frame of that Government under which this Kingdom hath flourished for many hundred yeares, (nor will I say what will fall out in case this lawlesse unjust proceeding against me do go on) and beleeve it the Commons of England will not thanke you for this change, for they will remember how happy they have been of late years under the Reign Q. Elizabeth, the King my Father, and my selfe, untill the beginning of these unhappy troubles, and will have cause to doubt that they shall never be so happy under anie new. And by this time it will be too sensibly evident, that the Armes I tooke up were onely to defend the fundamentall Lawes of this Kingdom, against those who have supposed my power hath totally changed the ancient Government.

Thus having shewed you briefly the Reasons, why I cannot submit to your pretended authority without violating the trust which I have from God, for the welfare and liberty of my People; I expect from you either clear Reasons to convince my Judgement, shewing me that I am in an error (and then truely I will readily answer) or that you will withdraw your proceedings.

This I intended to speak in Westminster-Hall on Monday 22. January, but against reason was hindered to shew my Reasons.

§

§

Printed in the Yeer 1648.

Information about this book

Title statement

His majesties reasons against the pretended iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice which he intended to deliver in vvrititing [sic] on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648. Faithfully transcribed out of the originall copie under the kings own hand.

Charles I, King of England, 1600-1649.

Edition statement

1649

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2009-03 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A79058

ID [STC]

Wing C2740

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.13[81]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211203

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99869934

ID [PROQUEST]

99869934

ID [VID]

162977

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A79058)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 162977)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 246:669f13[81])

Source

— His majesties reasons against the pretended iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice which he intended to deliver in vvrititing [sic] on Munday Ianuary 22. 1648. Faithfully transcribed out of the originall copie under the kings own hand., Charles I, King of England, 1600-1649..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.],. [London :: Printed in the yeer 1648 [i.e. 1649]. (Place of publication suggested by Wing.) (His protest against the legality of the Court has not been answered. No impeachment lies against the King in law. The people have not been consulted. The majority of the Commons has been excluded. To try him for anything before the Treaty of Newport is a breach of public faith -- Cf. Steele.) (Annotation on Thomason copy: "Feb 5".) (Reproduction of the original in the British Library.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.