LETTERS FROM BIRCH. 413 



fore I send Mr. Meautys to your lordship, that I might 

 reap so much your fruit of your lordship s professed good 

 affection, as to know in some more particular fashion, what 

 it is that your lordship doubteth, or disliketh, that I may 

 the better endeavour your satisfaction or acquiescence if 

 there be cause. So I rest 



Your Lordship s to do you service, 



FR. ST. ALBAN. 



October 18, 1621. 



Petition of the Lord Viscount St. Alban, intended 



for the House of Lords. 

 My right honourable very good Lords, 



In all humbleness, acknowledging your lordships justice, 

 I do now, in like manner, crave and implore your grace and 

 compassion. I am old, weak, ruined, in want, a very sub 

 ject of pity. My only suit to your lordships is to shew me 

 your noble favour towards the release of my confinement 

 (so every confinement is), and to me, I protest, worse than 

 the Tower. 5 * There I could have had company, physicians, 

 conference with my creditors and friends about my debts, 

 and the necessities of my estate, helps for my studies, and 

 the writings I have in hand. Here, I live upon the sword 

 point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if 

 I stay within, solitary and comfortless without company, 

 banished from all opportunities to treat with any to do 

 myself good, and to help out any wrecks ; and that, which 

 is one of my greatest griefs, my wife, that hath been no 

 partaker of my offending, must be partaker of this misery 

 of my restraint. 



May it please your lordships, therefore, since there is a 

 time for justice, and a time for misery, to think with compas 

 sion upon that which I have already suffered, which is not 

 little, and to recommend this my humble, and, as I hope, 

 modest suit to his most excellent majesty, the fountain of 

 grace, of whose mercy, for so much as concerns himself 

 merely, I have already tasted, and likewise of his favour of 

 this very kind, by some small temporary dispensations. 



Herein your lordships shall do a work of charity and 

 nobility; you shall do me good; you shall do my creditors 

 good ; and it may be, you shall do posterity good, if out of 



* He had been committed to the Tower in May, 1621, and discharged after 

 two days confinement there, according to Camden. Annales Regis Jacobi I. 

 p. 71. There is a letter of his lordship to the Marquis of Buckingham, dated 

 from the Tower, May 31, 1621 , desiring his lordship to procure his discharge 

 that day. 



