A second address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at White-Hall being the humble petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne.

A second address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at White-Hall being the humble petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne.

Table of contents

A Second Address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall CROMWELL, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at WHITE-HALL: Being, The humble Petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne.

§

[Page]

A Second Address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall CROMWELL, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at WHITE-HALL: Being, The humble Petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne.

SHEWETH,

THat your Petitioner hath long suffered a very hard exilement from his dearest Christian friends, his nearest relations, his estate, imployments, and native Country, by vertue of an Act of the late Parliament. And your Petitioner hath been a very gazing-stock beyond the Seas, and in constant peril of his life, only for his love to this Commonwealth, and faithfulness to their service.

That the late Parliament being dissolved, and the present care of the Government devolved upon your Honours, who profess the fear of the Lord, and the design of advancing Christs Kingdom; your Petitioner believed that he should find mercy and impartial justice from you, and a readiness to loose every heavy yoke, and cut in sunder all wicked bonds, the Lord having led you forth to break many of the bonds of men, in order to those ends: And in this confidence the Lord perswading your Petitioners heart that he had mercy for him and his poor ruined family, in his own Country, resolved to depend upon your Justice and goodness to protect him, and to admit of a Legal examination of the late Parliaments sentence of Banishment against your Petitioner: But having thus cast▪ himself and his life at your feet, he finds your Order to apprehend him, and execute the said Sentence; whereupon he is now a Prisoner.

That the authority of the late Parliament being taken from them for misgovernment, your Petitioner hopes you will please to suspend at least the execution of any Acts made by them, which shall not clearly and evidently appear to your spirits and consciences to have such Justice in them, as God may be truly glorified in your execution of them. And therefore he humbly offers to your considerations these things following concerning the Act made by them for his perpetual banishment.

1. First, that the Parliament in the said Act did not judge your Petitioner an Offender according to any Law in being; and unless there were a Civil Law against what he had done, he was no Offender in the least against the Laws of man.

2. Secondly, the said Act is a Law made after a fact is done, to ordain a punishment for that fact which was never ordained or heard of before; and if that practise be admitted, the very foundations of all Government (which are Laws) are utterly overturned, and every Man governing may destroy all or any of the governed at his will, without possibility of account to man; for that cannot be given or taken, but by a Rule between the Governours and the governed.

3. Thirdly, That your Petitioner was not tryed with liberty of defence, for or against any of the pretended crimes, for which he was banished by the said Act; for nothing was examined by the Committee of Parliament, upon whose Report the said Act was made; but the matter of Mr Primats Petition, for whom your Petitioner appeared only as Councel; and if that was scandal, and your Petitioner concerned therein, he conceives that he ought then to have been tryed legally for that crime at the Common Law, and no where else.

4. Fourthly, that if your Petitioner were guilty of Scandal against Sir Arthur Haslerigg, as the Parliament had judged; yet that sentence of absolute Ruine to him and his whole Family is not a punishment proportionable to the Offence; and the Laws of God, and the Fundamentall Lawes of this Land require a proportion between Crimes and Punishments.

5. Fifthly, that if the said Act he admitted to be Just, and to be drawn into President, then no English-man whatsoever can justly or rationally claim from the Governors any Freedom, Right, benefit, or Priviledg of being Tryed and Judged according to the Laws, whether he offends or not, or whether his Life, Liberty, or Estate shall be taken from him, or preserved.

And your Petitioner further Offers to your Honors, that he hath neither in the least offered, nor intended any Contempt unto any Authority, in coming into this Nation against the said Act; he humbly conceiving, That in this juncture of Time, wherein the Parliament is dissolved, and Right is declared to be universally done to all of this Nation, he was capable of making his humble Addresse to those who have so Declared, as a Party much grieved by the said Act of the late Parliament.

Therefore the whole Premises considered; he humbly prays your protection, and suspention of any proceedings against him upon the said Act, untill the Justice of the same, as to the matter and manner of it, be legally examined; That whatsoever he now suffers, being to be under your Power, your Consciences may be clearly satisfied, that you do therein glorifie God, and do evident good to the Common-wealth.

And he shall pray, &c.

JOHN LILBURNE.

From Mr Sheriff Underwoods-House in Bucklers-Bury in London, June 16. 1653.

§

§

London, Printed by Tho. Newcomb dwelling in Thamestreet over against Baynards Castle.

Information about this book

Title statement

A second address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at White-Hall being the humble petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne.

Lilburne, John, 1614?-1657.

Edition statement

1653

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A88250

ID [STC]

Wing L2178

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.17[20]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211539

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99870256

ID [PROQUEST]

99870256

ID [VID]

163270

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. A88250)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 163270)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 246:669f17[20])

Source

— A second address directed to his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell, and the Right Honourable the Councell of State sitting at White-Hall being the humble petition of Lieutenant Colonell John Lilburne., Lilburne, John, 1614?-1657..

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

Printed by Tho. Newcomb dwelling in Thamestreet over against Baynards Castle,. London :: [1653]. (Dated at end: From Mr Sheriff Underwoods house in Bucklers-Bury in London, June 16. 1653.) (Imprint date from Wing.) (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.