To the supreme authority of the nation, the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled. The humble petition of divers young men, and apprentices of the city of London, and parts adjacent. In behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, M. William Walwin, M. Thomas Prince, and M. Richard Overton, now close prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. Willam Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.

To the supreme authority of the nation, the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled. The humble petition of divers young men, and apprentices of the city of London, and parts adjacent. In behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, M. William Walwin, M. Thomas Prince, and M. Richard Overton, now close prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. Willam Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.

Table of contents

TO THE SVPREME AVTHORITY OF THIS NATION, the COMMONS of ENGLAND, in Parliament assembled. The Humble Petition of divers Young men, and Apprentices of the City of London, and parts adjacent: in behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, Mr William Walwin, Mr Thomas Prince, and Mr Richard Overton, now close Prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. William Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.

[Page]

TO THE SVPREME AVTHORITY OF THIS NATION, the COMMONS of ENGLAND, in Parliament assembled.
The Humble Petition of divers Young men, and Apprentices of the City of London, and parts adjacent: in behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, Mr William Walwin, Mr Thomas Prince, and Mr Richard Overton, now close Prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. William Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.

Sheweth,

THat the honour of God, the good of the Nation in generall, and the Lives, Liberties and Estates of every Free Commoner in England in particular, is deerer unto us than our very Lives.

That about the year 1642. when the late King endeavoured in the like hostile way to secure the persons of the same number of men (who were then all Members of this House) you then declared that such his endeavour was against Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, and other the fundamental Lawes of the Land: as also a breach of the Priviledge of Parliament, and against the liberties of the Subject; whom since you have declared to be a free People.

That in their just Vindication, you then as fellow Members, and we (though bound to our Masters for a time, by our own free consent, yet) fellow Commoners with them, did joyn together: (we adding our power unto your authority) in managing whereof many of our deer friends and fellow Souldiers lost their lives, and others with some of our selves are sorely wounded.

That our dear friends before mentioned are tender unto us, like the apple of our eye, and shall never be otherwise untill we see just and apparent cause to the contrary.

That therefore it is no small grief and amazement to us, to see any (especially such eminent upholders of Englands Liberties, as we do apprehend them to be) violently fetcht out of their beds and houses, and forced to prison, there to be shut up, without allowing them so much as bread and water, to maintain life, for the space of more than forty dayes and nights; notwithstanding they are not known to be accused or suspected with the breach of any other Law than the wills of some men in Authority.

That we apprehend there is too just cause for us to fear, that seeing there is no particular Act either of Treason, Fellony, or any other crime laid to their charge, but only a general accusation (which neither in Law nor Reason is any whit valid) that therefore instead of bringing them to a Legal Tryal, they will be destroyed in Prisons, and that not in an open way at one blow, but by the most inhumane way of Martyrdom, viz. to be starved to death: for although they have no allowance (w [...]ich the worst of malefactors ought to have) yet their neer friends are forbidden either to releeve them with food, or other necessaries, nor yet to comfort them in this their sad condition: though in never so peaceable and earnest a manner desired.

That we cannot but take notice that the same condition which is theirs this day, may be ours the next, though we judge our selves cleer from doing any thing justly deserving the same.

That we find by the answer to a late Petition, presented by some of our Masters, in their behalfs, that it is not safe for them to move any more in their behalf, though in the like way of Petitioning (the most inferior badge of Freedome which we know.)

That therefore we are constrained by the law of Nature, and Reason which God hath given us, to appear for them, at least in this humble way, and in their behalf, as they are Englishmen, and [...]ellow Commoners with us, do humbly pray,

1. That we may be informed what particular offence every of them are particularly guilty of; that so if any of them shall plainly appear to be Malefactors, we may no longer take their parts.

2. That if no crime were legally laid to their charge before they were under their present restraint, they may be forthwith enlarged, and have just Reparation for the wrongs they have suffered.

3. That then, if any man have ought to lay to their charge, none but legal and just proceedings be exercised towards them; the contrary whereof will certainly be requited by him who is the Judge of all the Earth, and will do right.

4. That in case the former shall be, yet notwithstanding they may not be debarred of those priviledges which the worst of Theeves, Murderers and Traytors do enjoy; viz. to have such allowances as have formerly been given to Prisoners of the like nature▪ and be allowed the comfort of Friends in a peaceable way, according to the Lawes both of God and this Nation.

And if these our desires shall appear reasonable to you, so that we shall thereby obtain the same, we shall therein rejoyce; but if not, we shall fear that the same (if not worse) oppressions which were by you condemned in former powers, will now appear to ly upon the free Commoners of England, for the deliverance from which we have contested hitherto: and for the same We shall pray.

Information about this book

Title statement

To the supreme authority of the nation, the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled. The humble petition of divers young men, and apprentices of the city of London, and parts adjacent. In behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, M. William Walwin, M. Thomas Prince, and M. Richard Overton, now close prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. Willam Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.

Edition statement

1649

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A94700

ID [STC]

Wing T1737

ID [STC]

Thomason 669.f.14[31]

ID [STC]

ESTC R211131

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

99869864

ID [PROQUEST]

99869864

ID [VID]

163019

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. A94700)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 163019)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Thomason Tracts ; 246:669f14[31])

Source

— To the supreme authority of the nation, the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled. The humble petition of divers young men, and apprentices of the city of London, and parts adjacent. In behalf of Lieut. Col. John Lilburn, M. William Walwin, M. Thomas Prince, and M. Richard Overton, now close prisoners in the Tower of London, without any declared just cause: and of Capt. Willam Bray in the same condition in Windsor Castle.,

Extent

1 sheet ([1] p.)

s.n.,. [London :: 1649]. (Imprint from Wing.) (Annotation on Thomason copy: "may: 1649".) (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.