A letter from Sir George Booth to a friend of his shewing the reasons of his present engagement in defence of his countries liberties, &c.

A letter from Sir George Booth to a friend of his shewing the reasons of his present engagement in defence of his countries liberties, &c.

Table of contents

〈…〉 present Engagement in Defence of his Countries Liberties, &c.

[Page]

[...] present Engagement in Defence of his Countries Liberties, &c.

[...]IR,

I Think my self, and the Gentlemen and others you know to be now engaged with me, have no hopes by new Troubles to better our present condition; with thankfulness we may say it, God hath made our Lot larger than our Desires in that kind; and we suppose by that blessing, put an obligation upon us, as we are considerable Members of our Countrey, to have more sober and couragious thoughts in time of extremity than other men have: And though the Indifference that lies upon other mens spirits might flat ours, yet we tannot think, but if it were represented to them, how the present Power doth obliege us to put out our right Eyes, when they require us to acknowledge them as a Parliament, and lay upon us such heavy and grievous Burthens, and such deceitful ones, as a Years Tax in Three Moneths, besides the many other Impositions of Excise, &c. And by raising among us a Militia, they cut off our right Hand, by subjecting us under the meanest and most fanatick Spirits of the Nation, under pretence of Protection; their spirits would be warmed into the same zeal and indignation that ours are kindled with. Now consider what it is we ask, and consider whether it be not the same thing we have asserted with our Lives and Fortunes? A Free Parliament: And what a slavery it is to our Understandings, that these men that now call themselves a Parliament, should declare it an act of Illegality and Violence in the late aspiring General Cromwell, to dissolve their Body in 1653. and not make it the like in the garbling the whole Body of the Parliament from 400 to 40, in 1648. What is this, but to act what they condemne in others? Why do they associate themselves to the present Army, or indeed to the present Commanders in chief, and keep out their numerous and fellow-Members, if committing Violence on a Parliament be so notorious a crime? And how do they teach the Souldiers boldly to do that, which themselves practise, and make them Instruments of? What is this, but under another shape to act the condemned acts of Usurpation and Tyranny in their old General? What is this, but to necessitate men to complain? and upon Complaints, to be invaded by their power, so to raise (if the English Spirits be not dissolved into baseness and aptitude for Slavery) a Civil War, and to endevour to water their owne root with the blood of many thousands of their Countrey-men; or to gape after those Confiscations, which by a Victory, upon presumption of the unity of their Army, they hope to gain over all those that dare with danger assert their Liberties, (which presumption yet may fail them; for the Souldier hath, and may declare himself, no Mercenary but an English Freeman; which indeed, thought it be now contrary to his actions, may return into his thoughts again:) And what will be the issue of all this? A mean and Schismatical party must depress the Nobility and Understanding Commons; the Land must waste it self, and Forainers, or others, must take the advantage of all. I dare say, I profess for my self, and the greatest part with me, we have no aspect but this singly, that we be not possest, as Waste Ground is, only by the title of Occupancy, or that the next that gets into the Saddle ride us. Let the Nation freely choose their Representatives, and they as freely sit without awe or force of Souldiery; and whatever in such an Assembly is determined, shall be by us freely and cheerfully submitted unto. If this satisfie you, I am glad of it, for you are my noble Friend. I use it not as an Artifice either to engage you, or to make other Counties follow our Example. Which if they doe not, let their posterity judge their action and ours: For we were born for our Countrey; and our Countrey, our Religion and Laws are in danger, and we will not be unconcerned: But we are faithful and peaceful in the Land, and if they in Authority will decline hostility, and agree of a means to admit the old Members of both Houses, or to call a new Free Parliament, Let him be (and he only is truly) a Traitor, that resolves not his Judgement and Obedience into their Determinations. I am

(SIR)

Chester Aug. 2. 1659.

Your humble Servant GEORGE BOOTH.

Information about this book

Title statement

A letter from Sir George Booth to a friend of his shewing the reasons of his present engagement in defence of his countries liberties, &c.

Delamer, George Booth, Baron, 1622-1684.

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]

A82295

ID [STC]

Wing D871

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.21[66]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211231

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99869961

ID [PROQUEST]

99869961

ID [VID]

163561

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. A82295)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 163561)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 247:669f21[66])

Source

— A letter from Sir George Booth to a friend of his shewing the reasons of his present engagement in defence of his countries liberties, &c., Delamer, George Booth, Baron, 1622-1684..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.,. [London :: 1659]. (Sir George Booth = Baron Delamer.) (In support of a free Parliament.) (Signed and dated at end: George Booth. Chester Aug. 2. 1659.) (Imprint from Wing.) (Annotation on Thomason copy: "August 5.".) (British Library copy cropped at head, with some loss of print.) (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.