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HIS HIGHNESS OLIVER CROMWELL.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR HIGHNESS,

How I have spent some hours of the leisure your Highness hath been pleased to give me this following paper will give your Highness an account. How you will please to interpret it I cannot tell; but I can with confidence say, my intention in it is to procure your Highness that justice nobody yet does you, and to let the people see the longer they defer it the greater injury they do both themselves and you. To your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it. It is then only, my Lord, the titles you now usurp will be truly yours; you will then be indeed the deliverer of your country, and free it from a bondage little inferior to that from which Moses delivered his.

You will then be that true reformer which you would be thought. Religion shall be then restored, liberty asserted, and Parliaments have those privileges they have fought for. We shall then hope that other laws will have place besides those of the sword, and that justice shall be otherwise defined than the will and pleasure of the strongest; and we shall then hope men will keep oaths again, and not have the necessity of being false and perfidious to preserve themselves, and be like their rulers. All this we hope from your Highness's happy expiration, who are the true father of your country; for while you live we can call nothing ours, and it is from your death that we hope for our inheritances. Let this consideration arm and fortify your Highness's mind against the fears of death, and the terrors of your evil conscience, that the good you will do by your death will something balance the evils of your life. And if in the black catalogue of high malefactor few can be found that have lived more to the affliction and disturbance of mankind than your Highness hath done, yet your greatest enemies will not deny but there are likewise as few that have expired more to the universal benefit of mankind than your Highness is like to do. To hasten this great good is the chief end of my writing this paper; and if it have the

effects I hope it will, your Highness will quickly be out of the reach of men's malice, and your enemies will only be able to wound you in your memory, which strokes you will not feel. That your Highness may be speedily in this security is the universal wishes of your grateful country. This is the desires and prayers of the good and of the bad, and it may be is the only thing wherein all sects and factions do agree in their devotions, and is our only common prayer. But amongst all that put in their requests and supplications for your Highness's speedy deliverances from all earthly troubles, none is more assiduous nor more fervent than he who, with the rest of the nation, hath the honour to be,

May it please your Highness,

Your Highness's present slave and vassal,

W. A.

KILLING NO MURDER.

IT is not any ambition to be in print, when so few spare paper and the press, nor any instigations of private revenge or malice (though few that dare be honest now want their causes), that have prevailed with me to make myself the author of a pamphlet, and to disturb that quiet which at present I enjoy by his Highness's great favour and injustice. Nor am I ignorant to how little purpose I shall employ that time and pains which I shall bestow upon this paper. For to think that any reasons or persuasions of mine, or conviction of their own, shall draw men from any thing wherein they see profit or security, or to any thing wherein they fear loss or see danger, is to have a better opinion both of myself and them than either of us both deserve.

Besides, the subject itself is of that nature, that I am not only to expect danger from ill men, but censure and disallowance from many that are good; for these opinions only looked upon, not looked into (which all have not eyes for), will appear bloody and