THE MEDAL.

A SATIRE AGAINST SEDITION.

1681.

EPISTLE TO THE WHIGS:

FOR to whom can I dedicate this Poem with so much justice as to you? It is the representation of your own hero; it is the picture drawn at length, which you admire and prize so much in little '. None of your ornaments are wanting; neither the landscape of the Tower, nor the Rising Sun; nor the anno domini of your new sovereign's coronation. This must needs be a grateful undertaking to your whole party, especially to those who have not been so happy as to purchase the original. I hear the graver has made a good market of it: all his kings are bought up already; or the value of the remainder so enhanced, that many a poor Polander 2, who would be glad to worship the

1 On the Jury's refusing to find a bill against Lord Shaftesbury for high-treason in Nov. 1681, a medal was struck to commemorate the event, which gave occasion to Dryden's satire.

2 Shaftesbury was said to entertain hopes that he should be elected King of Poland.

image, is not able to go to the cost of him, but must be content to see him here. I must confess I am no great artist; but sign-post painting will serve the turn to remember a friend by, especially when better is not to be had: yet, for your comfort, the lineaments are true; and though he sat not five times to me, as he did to B.3 yet I have consulted history; as the Italian painters do, when they would draw a Nero or a Caligula; though they have not seen the man, they can help their imagination by a statue of him, and find out the colouring from Suetonius and Tacitus. Truth is, you might have spared one side of your Medal: the head would be seen to more advantage if it were placed on a spike of the Tower, a little nearer to the sun, which would then break out to better purpose.

You tell us, in your Preface to the No-protestant Plot, that you shall be forced hereafter to leave off your modesty. I suppose you mean that little which is left you; for it was worn to rags when you put out this Medal. Never was there practised such a piece of notorious impudence in the face of an established government. I believe, when he is dead, you will wear him in thumbrings, as the Turks did Scanderbeg; as if there were virtue in his bones to preserve you against monarchy. Yet all this while you pretend not only zeal for the public good, but a due veneration for the person of the King. But all men, who can see an inch before them, may easily detect those gross fallacies. That it is necessary for men 3 George Bower, a medallic engraver. A tract in three parts, printed in 1682.

in your circumstances to pretend both, is granted you; for without them there could be no ground to raise a faction. But I would ask you one civil question, What right has any man among you, or any association of men, (to come nearer to you) who out of parliament cannot be considered in a public capacity, to meet, as you daily do, in factious clubs, to vilify the government in your discourses, and to libel it in all your writings? Who made you judges in Israel? or how is it consistent with your zeal for the public welfare to promote sedition? Does your definition of loyal, which is to serve the King according to the laws, allow you the licence of traducing the executive power with which you own he is invested? You complain that his Majesty has lost the love and confidence of his people; and, by your very urging it, you endea. vour what in you lies to make him lose them. All good subjects abhor the thought of arbitrary power, whether it be in one or many: if you were the patriots you would seem, you would not, at this rate, incense the multitude to assume it; for no sober man can fear it, either from the King's disposition or his practice, or even, where you would odiously lay it, from his ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the government, and benefit of laws under which we were born, and which we desire to transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the public liberty; and, if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much less have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs, or to arraign what you do not like; which, in effect, is every thing that is done by the King and council. Can you imagine that any reasonable

man will believe you respect the person of his Majesty, when it is apparent that your seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If you have the confidence to deny this, it is easy to be evinced from a thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote, because I desire they should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers; and to show you that I have, the third part of your No-protestant Plot is much of it stolen from your dead author's pamphlet, called The Growth of Popery ; as manifestly as Milton's Defence of the English People is from Buchanan, De Jure Regni apud Scotos: or your first Covenant, and New Association, from the Holy League of the French Guisards. Any one who reads Davila, may trace your practices all along. There were the same pretences for reformation and loyalty, the same aspersions of the King, and the same grounds of a rebellion. I know not whether you will take the historian's word, who says it was reported that Poltrot, a huguenot, murdered Francis Duke of Guise, by the instigations of Theodore Beza; or that it was a huguenot minister, otherwise called a presbyterian, (for our church abhors so devilish a tenet) who first writ a treatise of the lawfulness of deposing and murdering kings of a different persuasion in religion. But I am able to prove, from the doctrine of Calvin, and principles of Buchanan, that they set the people above the magistrate; which, if I mistake not, is your own fundamental; and which carries your loyalty no farther than your

Written by Andrew Marvel, and published in 1678.

liking. When a vote of the House of Commons goes on your side, you are as ready to observe it as if it were passed into a law; but when you are pinched with any former and yet unrepealed act of parliament, you declare that, in some cases, you will not be obliged by it. The passage is in the same third part of the No-protestant Plot, and is too plain to be denied. The late copy of your intended Association you neither wholly justify nor condemn; but as the Papists, when they are unopposed, fly out into all the pageantries of worship, but, in times of war, when they are hardpressed by arguments, lie close intrenched behind the council of Trent; so now, when your affairs are in a low condition, you dare not pretend that to be a legal combination; but whensoever you are afloat, I doubt not but it will be maintained and justified to purpose: for indeed there is nothing to defend it but the sword. 'Tis the proper time to say any thing, when men have all things in their power.

In the mean time you would fain be nibbling at a parallel betwixt this Association and that in the time of Queen Elizabeth: but there is this small difference betwixt them, that the ends of the one are directly opposite to the other; one with the Queen's approbation and conjunction, as head of it, the other without either the consent or knowledge of the King, against whose authority it is manifestly designed. Therefore you do well to have recourse to your last evasion, that it was contrived by your enemies, and shuffled into the

In 1584. See Camden's History of Elizabeth.