To the Parliament of the Common-VVealth of England. The humble petition of diuers afflicted women, in behalf of M: Io hn [sic] Lilburn prisoner in Newgate.

To the Parliament of the Common-VVealth of England. The humble petition of diuers afflicted women, in behalf of M: Io hn [sic] Lilburn prisoner in Newgate.

Table of contents

TO THE PARLIAMENT OF THE COMMON-VVEALTH OF ENGLAND. The humble Petition of diuers afflicted WOMEN, in behalf of M: Iohn Lilburn Prisoner in Newgate.

[Page]

TO THE PARLIAMENT OF THE COMMON-VVEALTH OF ENGLAND.
The humble Petition of diuers afflicted WOMEN, in behalf of M: Iohn Lilburn Prisoner in Newgate.

HUMBLIE SHEWETH,

THat seeing nothing is more manifest then that God is pleased often times to raise up the weakest means to work the mightiest effects, and inasmuch as the holy Prophet David himselfe was prevented, by the timely addresses of weak woman, from a most resolved purpose of shedding of Blood: Although we have heard, to our no small grief, that no word of comfort hath been drawn from you by all the many Petitions presented unto you, in behalf of Mr. Lilburn, yea our hearts melting in tendernesse towards so great and causelesse a sufferer, and▪ being astonished with feare of the heaviest wrath of God, if your new Authority should lay its foundation in his innocent blood, whose life hath escaped, and innocency been manifested in the worst of times, we could not forbeare to make this our humble application unto you, beseeching you to consider. Whether the sparing of blood be not more suitable to the work before you, It being denyed unto David, because his hands had been dipt in blood, to build a Temple for the Lord: and we humbly offer it unto you, Whether the ready pronenesse to the spilling of blood in the last Parliament all along, although the Cause were iust, being seldome without some hardnesse of heart, too often with delight, and many times with revenge, were not the maine cause that God forsook them, and gave them up to strong delusions, placeing their security in worldly policy and outward strength, and upon confidence thereof▪ doing all kind of injustice, even as they did to Mr. Lilburne in their barbarous proceedings towards him, rather then in the wayes of Christ, who came not to destroy, but save mens lives, neither did it profit them at all either with God or man. Then their Voice was Iacobs, their tongues and Declarations filled ever with the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, or their frequent seeking of God, and holding daies of Prayer, whilst their hands were the hands of Esau, & their feet were swift to shed blood, whilst their ears were deaf to Petitioners and Prisoners, the Widdow and the Fatherless were neglected by them, making no conscience of trampling all the known ancient Liberties of the Nation under their feet, and putting their Wills into Lawes, as the Act for banishing Mr▪ Lilburn, in a higher measure then all the tyrants that ever were before them, and for which they are now cast out as unsavory Salt.

All that you have to say, as yet, for your selves, is, That they were broken oss, that you might be grafted in Well: because of walking in the wayes of unbelief (such are worldly policies) they were broken off: and you stand by faith and a good conscience both towards God and Man: Be not high minded, but fear. For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not you: Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them that fell, severity: but towards you goodness, if you continue in his goodness, otherwise you also shall be cut off: For he is yesterday, today, and the same for ever.

Al which we crave leave to alude unto in your case, that, if it be possible, we may prevaile with▪ you to propose unto your selves to be unlike unto them in al things, not to walk in any way of their evil wayes, as in pride, in keeping at distance with other People, or in Apparel, Diet, housing, and Fantastique Fashions, complements, couches and congees, Cloathing in Scarlet, and Faring deliciously every day, or in covetousnesse, advancing their estates, Families, and Relations, upon the ruins of the People, taxing them without measure, laying also of heavy burdens upon them, whilst Pharisee-like, they felt not the weight with one of their fingars: scorned information, and despised Petitions: yea, were come to that height, that none durst epproach their doore with any word concerning the Liberoies of the Nation. These things manifestly abounded in them; but, os any thing, we, beseech you to watch over your selves against the spilling of Blood, especially of the blood of the Innocent, which cryeth aloud for vengeance in the eares of God.

And truly we cannot possibly conceive, but in your permitting M. Lilburn to be imprisoned, and to be put upon his Tryal for his life upon that sordid and groundless ins [...]aring Act of theirs, you are so far guilty of the exposing his innocent blood to an unjust hazard: and if the Jury should be so far misled in their Judgments, as to find him guilty thereupon, as surely none that have any spark of conscience will do, you cannot be acquitted in the sight of God: For you ought to repeal that bloody Act, and deliver him out of that snare; it being the most unheard of oruelty that ever was, that that Parliament shal be justified by you, voting a mans estate from him, his person to banishment, and enacting him to be a Felon, for what in it self was at the most but a Trespass, and a Jury to be countenanced, encouraged, yea terrified with a party of horse to find him guilty of Felony thereupon.

You see the thing is so gross, that even Women perceive the evil of it: We beg you therefore, as upon our knees, not to persist in your resolution of making good a [...] Act so notoriously evil: and that you wil not do the less▪ because petitioned, another mortall disease of your Predecessors, nor abhor to change your purpose once taken, though never so pernicious, an evil spirit which led the [...]ate King. Bishops, Lords, and Prelatical Clergy and wil as many as use it, to unavoidable ruin: but that you would be pleased to put a stop to M. Lillburns Tryal, and to make full inquiry into the whole matter [...]pon which the late Parliament grounded their unj [...]st Sentence and Act.

And your Petitioners shal pray, &c.

Information about this book

Title statement

To the Parliament of the Common-VVealth of England. The humble petition of diuers afflicted women, in behalf of M: Io hn [sic] Lilburn prisoner in Newgate.

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]

A94571

ID [STC]

Wing T1585

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.17[26]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211563

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99870279

ID [PROQUEST]

99870279

ID [VID]

163276

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. A94571)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 163276)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 246:669f17[26])

Source

— To the Parliament of the Common-VVealth of England. The humble petition of diuers afflicted women, in behalf of M: Io hn [sic] Lilburn prisoner in Newgate.,

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.,. [London :: 1653]. (Imprint from Wing.) (Annotation on Thomason copy: "June 25 1653".) (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.