Note 437 — Chapter X · (continued 2)

It may be fair towards Cromwell to give his own apology for the decimation of the royalists, in a declaration, published 1655. "It is a trouble to us to be still rubbing upon the old sore, disobliging those whom we hoped time and patience might make friends; but we can with comfort appeal to God, and dare also to their own consciences, whether this way of proceeding with them hath been the matter of our choice, or that which we have sought an occasion for; or whether, contrary to our own inclinations and the constant course of our carriage towards them, which hath been to oblige them by kindness to forsake their former principles, which God hath so often and so eminently bore witness against, we have not been constrained and necessitated hereunto, and without the doing whereof we should have been wanting to our duty to God and these nations.

"That character of difference between them and the rest of the people which is now put upon them is occasioned by themselves, not by us. There is nothing they have more industriously laboured in than this; to keep themselves distinguished from the well-affected of this nation: To which end they have kept their conversation apart; as if they would avoid the very beginnings of union, have bred and educated their children by the sequestered and ejected clergy, and very much confined their marriages and alliances within their own party, as if they meant to entail their quarrel, and prevent the means to reconcile posterity; which with the great pains they take upon all occasions to lessen and suppress the esteem and honour of the English nation in all their actions and undertakings abroad, striving withal to make other nations distinguish their interest from it, gives us ground to judge that they have separated themselves from the body of the nation; and therefore we leave it to all mankind to judge whether we ought not to be timely jealous of that separation, and to proceed so against them as they may be at the charge of those remedies which are required against the dangers they have bred."