PRELATES and Judges! Privy-Councillors!
In virtue of my office I besought
Your presence.
Ye were taught obedience,
And ye should teach it, if so be ye learnt
Your lesson ere ye thrust it into hands
Under your ferule, smarting from it yet.
What is that word I caught from yonder corner
Jabber no longer. Talk to me of laws!
Laws there are thousands; Justice there is one,
One only. God created her, well pleas’d
With his creation. Men like you can make,
And do make, year by year and day by day,
What ye call laws. Laws thrust down Eliot
Into Death’s chamber, agonized with blows
Of ponderous damp incessant. Better men
Than you or I are doom’d if one escape.
But, by the Lord above! whose holy name
I utter not profanely, by the Lord!
That one shall not escape. God’s signature
I bear, and I affix it on the blood
Of those brave hearts that bounded at Dunbar.
[The Prelates and Judges &c go)
Are those folks gone?
Conduct them tenderly;
Draw up the gloves for it, thy softest pair.
Ireton! thou hast not gliber speech than I,
But tell those cravats, frills, and furbelows,
Those curl’d purveyors to the Unicorn,
A bushel of such heads, priced honestly,
Is not worth one grey hair of Eliot
Pluckt by the torturer Grief, untoucht by Time.
Givers of laws, forsooth!
The feast is over
Which they got drunk at, striking right and left
Until their shins and shoulders fared the worst.
Troth! I can scarce be grave in looking at them;
They have now done their work, let us do ours.
We, tho’ unworthy of a sight so grand,
Shall see God strike the throne: they who again
So sin, shall see Him raise it in His wrath.