A declaration of the vvell-affected to the good old cause, in the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark with the joynt consent and concurrence of all the well-affected in all other the cities, towns and boroughs of England and Wales, for the return and session of the Long Parliament, (interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.

A declaration of the vvell-affected to the good old cause, in the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark with the joynt consent and concurrence of all the well-affected in all other the cities, towns and boroughs of England and Wales, for the return and session of the Long Parliament, (interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.

Table of contents

A DECLARATION Of the VVell-affected to THE GOOD OLD CAUSE, In the Cities of London, Westminster, and Borough of Southwark; with the joynt Consent and Concurrence of all the Well-affected in all other the Cities, Towns and Boroughs of England and Wales, for the Return and Session of The Long PARLIAMENT, (Interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) Directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.

§

[Page]

A DECLARATION Of the VVell-affected to THE GOOD OLD CAUSE, In the Cities of London, Westminster, and Borough of Southwark; with the joynt Consent and Concurrence of all the Well-affected in all other the Cities, Towns and Boroughs of England and Wales, for the Return and Session of The Long PARLIAMENT, (Interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) Directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.

GENTLEMEN,

IT is our desires to let you know, and by this Instrument to declare, That although for those many years your Session hath been interrupted by the late Protector, and your visible being withheld from this Nation; yet so long as a Quorum doth survive, notwithstanding that, or any other interruption, your Authority abideth, and you remain the onely Legal Parliament of England, until your Legal Dissolution; and no other Authority or Power ought to be owned or exercised amongst us: and for our parts, we will neither submit to, nor own any other for the present Authority, but Yours; and in Yours we will acquiesce, (as in the rightful Supreme Authority of England) and in no other whatsoever. And as it is our Duty to Own and Obey your Authority; so, it is your Duties (Providence having opened the way for you) to Return to your Trust. It is Treason in us to forsake and decline your Authority, and Breach of Trust in you not to take upon you the exercise thereof.

You are the rightful and natural Head of our Countrey, from whence all subordinate Powers and Administrations Civil are derivative, without which a Legal new Parliament cannot be called: Law and Common Right denies that to the Sword; it is inherent only in you.

The Army as de jure they may not disturbe or interrupt the Freedom of Parliaments, so de jure they cannot Summon a Parliament, nor impose a Government upon us: for the People of England are a free People, the true Original of their own Authority.

And as the Army can neither give nor take away the right of the People, so neither will they any waies hinder or interrupt your Session, or invade their Countries Right: for have they not like true English men appeared as one man for the Good Old Cause, and made so honest and honourable a procedure therein, as hath united all the hearts of the honest and well-minded of the Nation to them? for which most just and consciencious undertaking, we do declare our selves in union with them, and their friends to be our friends, their enemies our enemies; and that we will stand or fall with them in this their glorious enterprize. Therefore fear not their interposition; their interest and ours is all one, and we will joyntly stand by you and own you, as (indeed you are) the Supreme Authority of the Commonwealth of England (as it was established at your last Session) without King or House of Lords: The several seeming Parliaments in this deplorable interval of your Authority, and the several Models of obtruded Government since, being no other, then as one continued Act of usurpation and innovation upon the Rights of the People, and their Power of Parliaments.

And now the Grand Enemie and Interrupter of your Session being in the Dust, He that letted being taken away, your Authority ariseth and reviveth; and the Army, People and Nation, of course retire to the Good Old Cause; and all that have continued or are faithful to Authority of Parliaments, invite you and call for you, and challenge the Freedom of your Session as of English Right: and as you had and truly derived your first Session from the People, so we present you with this signal of our unanimous Agreement for your Re-assembling and Session at Westminster: but we desire you to humble your selves, and repent truly of your great failings in your last Session, which were very many and grievous; but we trust your eyes are opened, and you see your miscarriages, & that you will be faithful and careful Trustees for the People. Indeed so hath the Divine Providence of God ordered the state of Affairs, that your Interest is and must be, to be honest to the People, or you will perish by their hand. VVe do own and acknowledge, you are the fittest persons in this Nation to do the work of the People, and settle us in true freedom and peace; and therefore the hearts of the good people are towards you, and invite you: do but you appear, and all the Court-Policies and Practices will end in that moment, your enemies will be quite defunct and defeated; Plots and Designs, Insurrections and Invasions will be prevented, our Divisions and Distractions will be composed; and we shall return to settlement and safety; otherwise both Army and Navy, Nation and People, will be all confounded, ruined and lost.

But in Case of your Assembly again, we desire, That at your first sitting down, you may ascertain a time for your ending, and for the Succession and Beginning of a new Representative; and so settle the Foundations of our Government, as our Parliaments may be Successive, and of Course, with their certain times of their Beginning and Ending; and with such Boundaries, Limitations and Powers, as all Arbitrariness in Government may be prevented, and the Rights and Freedoms of the People secured. And we shall (together with your and our faithful Army) stand or fall with you, in the necessary and just Defence of your Persons and Authority.

§

§

London, Printed by J. C. 1659.

Information about this book

Title statement

A declaration of the vvell-affected to the good old cause, in the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark with the joynt consent and concurrence of all the well-affected in all other the cities, towns and boroughs of England and Wales, for the return and session of the Long Parliament, (interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.

Edition statement

1659

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A82244

ID [STC]

Wing D777

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.21[27]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211165

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99896328

ID [PROQUEST]

99896328

ID [VID]

154144

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. A82244)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 154144)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English books, 1641-1700 ; 2401:14)

Source

— A declaration of the vvell-affected to the good old cause, in the cities of London, Westminster, and borough of Southwark with the joynt consent and concurrence of all the well-affected in all other the cities, towns and boroughs of England and Wales, for the return and session of the Long Parliament, (interrupted by the late Protector April 20. 1653.) directed to the surviving Members of that Parliament.,

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

printed by J.C.,. London :: 1659.. (Annotation on Thomason copy: "May. 2".) (Reproduction of original in the Henry E. Huntington 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.