CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE REVOLT OF PARLIAMENT

INEXORABLE FORCES COMPELLED THE KING TO DO WHAT HE MOST feared. The invading Scottish army had possession of Durham and Northumberland. Their leaders were in close correspondence with the Parliamentary and Puritan party in England. They put forward not only demands which affected the Northern kingdom, but others which they knew would reverberate in the South. They were careful that the supply of sea-coal to London should not fail for a single day; but at the same time their marauding bands lay heavy on the occupied counties. The King could not prevail against them. Strafford believed that he could hold Yorkshire, but that was all. The Privy Council addressed itself to making a truce with the Scots, who demanded forty thousand pounds a month to maintain their army on English soil until their claims should be met. By haggling this was reduced to £850 a day. Thus the two armies, facing each other with sheathed swords, were each to be maintained during an indefinite period of negotiation at the cost of the Crown, which was penniless. The so-called “Bishops’ War” was over; the real war had yet to begin.

There arose from all quarters a cry that Parliament should be summoned. At least half the lords had remained in London. A group of them, headed by the Earl of Bedford, who was in close touch with Pym, waited on the Privy Council and called for a Parliament. It was even implied that if the King would not issue the writs himself a Parliament would be convened without him. The Queen and such counsellors as were with her wrote urgently to Charles that they saw no other course. The King had himself arrived at the same conclusion. In these days his outlook underwent a decided change. He recognised that his theory of monarchy must be modified. In summoning the new Parliament he accepted a different relationship between the people and the Crown.

The calling of Parliament relieved for a space the severe tension, and the choosing of Members employed the zeal of partisans. But it was only after long begging, supported by the very lords who were opposing the King, and on their personal security, that the City of London consented to advance £50,000, pending the meeting of Parliament, to keep the Scottish army in victorious possession of the North of England and the English army from dissolving in mutiny.

There is no surer way of rousing popular excitement than the holding of General Elections in quick succession. Passions ran high; beer flowed. Although there was nothing like the organisation of the Scottish elections in 1639, the leaders of the popular party hastened from county to county exhorting their adherents. The King too appealed, not without response, to the great lords who stood by him. In some places four or five rival candidates appeared; but the tide ran strong against the Court. “We elected,” runs a pamphlet of 1643, “such as were not known to us by any virtue, but only by crossness to superiors.” Three-fifths of the Members of the Short Parliament, 294 out of 493, were returned, and nearly all the newcomers were opponents of the Government. Of the men who had made a name in Opposition not one was rejected. The King could count on less than a third of the House.

Thus on November 3, 1640, was installed the second longest and most memorable Parliament that ever sat in England. It derived its force from a blending of political and religious ideas. It was upborne by the need of a growing society to base itself upon a wider foundation than Tudor paternal rule. It used for tactical purposes the military threat of the invaders from Scotland. Scottish commissioners and divines arrived in London. They were astonished at the warmth of their welcome, and were hailed as the deliverers of England. They found themselves outpaced in their hostility to the bishops by some of their English Parliamentary allies. The negotiations were protracted from week to week at an expense to the Crown which could only be defrayed by Parliament. Demands in both kingdoms for far-reaching changes in the civil and religious government which had lasted for centuries were pooled and set forth again with combined force. The accession of James I had involved the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland; but now in a manner very different from what James or his son had conceived there was a union of the dominant political parties in both countries, and they strove together for a common cause. Here then was an explosive charge, pent in a strong cannon and directed upon King Charles and those who were his trusted Ministers.

Of these the first and most obnoxious was Strafford. Pym and Hampden, the leading figures in the new House of Commons, were immediately in command of a large and indignant majority. The Crown now made no resistance to the principle that redress of grievances should precede supply; but the grievances of the Commons could be satisfied only by vengeance. Strafford possessed convincing proofs of the correspondence carried on by Pym and others with the invading Scots. This was plain treason if the King’s writ ran. It was believed that Strafford meant to open this formidable case; but Pym struck first. All the rage of the Parliamentary party, all the rancour of old comradeship forsworn, all that self-preservation dictated, concentrated upon “the wicked Earl” a blast of fury such as was never recorded in England before or since. On the morning of November 11 the doors of St. Stephen’s Chapel were locked; the key placed upon the table; no strangers might enter, no Member might leave. Late in the afternoon Pym and Hampden, attended by three hundred Members, carried the articles of Strafford impeachment up to the House of Lords. At the King’s request Strafford had come to London. In the morning he had been greeted with respect by the peers. Hearing what was afoot, he returned to the Chamber. But now all was changed. He was received with a hollow murmur. Shouts were raised that he should withdraw while the issue was being debated. He was forced to do so. In less than an hour the powerful Minister saw himself transformed into an accused prisoner. He found himself to his own and the general surprise kneeling at the Bar to receive the directions of his peers. He was deprived of his sword and taken into custody by Black Rod. As he went through the crowd on his journey to Black Rod’s house the hostility of the populace was terrible. Such a downfall recalls, in its swiftness at least, the fate of Sejanus, the hated Minister of Tiberius.

The proscription extended to all the Ministers, as they would now be called, of the King. Archbishop Laud, impeached in the Lords, silenced when he sought to reply, was removed by water to the Tower. Sir Francis Windebanke, the Secretary of State, and some others escaped to the Continent. Lord Keeper Sir John Finch, leaving the Woolsack, appeared before the House of Commons in his robes of office bearing the Great Seal of England in his embroidered bag, and defended himself in such moving words that all were hushed. Nevertheless this produced no longer delay than was necessary for him to flee the country. All this was done by the fierce anger of the Commons, supported by the Londoners and by the distant military forces of Scotland, and accepted by the peers.

The main feature of the Puritan Revolution for our generation is its measured restraint. The issues were fought out with remorseless antagonism, not only in Parliament by men who glared upon one another and were prepared to send each other to the scaffold, but also in the streets of London, where rival mobs or bands came face to face or even mingled. Respect for law and for human life nevertheless prevailed. In this mortal struggle physical violence was long held in check, and even when it broke into civil war all those conventions were observed which protect even the sternest exercise of the human will from the animal barbarism of earlier and of later times.

The Commons were harassed by fears and rumours. They had been careful to pay the Scottish army for invading England; it was the English troops who had gone short. There were tales of mutinies and military plots. Pym, with cold-blooded skill, played upon these alarms, which indeed needed but a tremor of Parliamentary weakness to become real. The aggressive tendencies of the majority in the Commons shaped themselves into a demand for the abolition of Episcopacy. The Scots, now so influential in London and masters in the North, sought to establish the Presbyterian system of Church government. This was indeed turning the tables. A petition signed by fifteen thousand was presented to the House, and caught up by the majority, seeking to extirpate the Episcopate “root and branch.” But now for the first time effective counter forces appeared. A second petition signed by seven hundred clergymen hostile to the principles of the King and the Archbishop proposed the restriction of the bishops’ power to spiritual matters, and limited them at certain points in these. Here was a line of resistance upon which the other side could form. It was known that the King regarded the Episcopate, based upon the Apostolic Succession, as inseparable from the Christian faith. The English Episcopate went back to the days of St. Augustine, and Henry VIII’s break with Rome had made no difference to its continuity. The King held sincerely to his hereditary right of nominating bishops; his opponents saw in this a dangerous fount of power. Thus in the religious field the quarrel was between men who were all Christians and all Protestants, but who were divided upon the method of Church government. On this they were prepared to proceed to extremes against each other; but whereas in politics the opposition to Personal Rule was at this moment overwhelming, on the Church question the balance was far more even. Pym realised this and decided to delay a full debate. Both petitions were therefore sent to a committee.

Meanwhile the trial of Strafford had begun. Proceeding as they did upon admittedly rival interpretations of law and justice, the Commons at once found difficulty in establishing a case against the hated Minister. That he was the arch enemy of all that the majority championed, and indeed of the rights and liberties of the nation, was apparent. But to prove him guilty of the capital offence of treason was not possible. Within the large wooden structure erected in Westminster Hall the leaders of the nation, its magnates and politicians and divines, assembled. One third of the floor was thronged with the public. The King and Queen sat daily in their special box, hoping by their presence to restrain the prosecution. Strafford defended himself with magnificent ability. Each morning he knelt to the Lord Steward and bowed to the lords and to the assembly. Each day by logic and appeal he broke up the heads of accusation. He successfully derided the theory of “cumulative treason” to which the managers of the impeachment were soon reduced. How could a number of alleged misdemeanours be made to add up to treason? He drove home the massive doctrine of English liberty, “No law, no crime.” What law had he broken? With every art of the orator, or, as his foes said, of the actor, he wrought not only upon the minds but upon the sentiments of the audience. The King worked night and day upon the peers. There was nothing he would not concede to save Strafford. He had assured him on his kingly word that he should not suffer in liberty or life. The sympathy not only of the galleries, crowded with the wives of all the leading men, but of the peers themselves, was gradually gained. On the thirteenth day the prisoner’s hopes stood high.

Now Pym and his colleagues made a deadly stroke. Sir Henry Vane, Secretary of the Privy Council, had a son who was ardent for the popular cause. This son, by an act of bad faith which after many stormy years was to cost him his life, purloined a note which his father had preserved of the discussion in the King’s Council on May 5, 1640. The cryptic sentiments ascribed to Strafford were: “Everything is to be done as power will admit, and that you are to do. They refused, you are acquitted towards God and man. You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this kingdom. Confident as anything under Heaven, Scotland shall not hold out five months.”

The Commons declared that this convicted Strafford of advising the use of an Irish army to subdue England. The words in their context seem to mean that Scotland was intended, and Scotland at the time of their utterance was in rebellion against the King. Vane the elder, Secretary of the Council, in cross-examination could not, or would not, say whether the words “this kingdom” meant England or Scotland. The other members of the Council who were examined declared that they had no recollection of the words; that the debate regarded the means of reducing Scotland, not England; and that they had never heard the slightest hint of employing the Irish army anywhere but in Scotland. It must have been present in all minds that if an Irish army had been successfully used in Scotland it would assuredly have found other employment thereafter; but this was not the point in question. Strafford’s answer covered all issues. “What will be the end,” he said, “if words which are spoken in the King’s Privy Council, half understood or misunderstood by its members, are to be turned into crime? No one will any longer have the courage to speak out his opinion plainly to the King.” The lawyers also declared themselves on his side. There was no doubt that he had won his case.

The Commons, baffled, claimed to advance new evidence. Strafford demanded that if this were admitted he should have an equal right. The lords decided in his favour. And then suddenly there arose from the mass of Members gathered in the court loud cries of “Withdraw! Withdraw!” The Commons trooped back to St. Stephen’s Chapel and again locked their doors. Was this enemy of English rights to escape by legal processes? They knew he was their foe, and they meant to have his blood. They would dispense with a trial and have him declared guilty by Act of Parliament. Pym and Hampden did not themselves put forward the plan of a Bill of Attainder. They had it moved by one of their principal followers; but when it was launched they threw their weight behind it, and the weight of the angry, tumultuous City outside. The Lords affected to ignore what was known to be going forward in the Lower House, and listened with evident sympathy to Strafford’s closing speech. He struck deep into their hearts. “My lords, it is my present misfortune, but forever yours . . . and except your lordships’ wisdom provide for it, the shedding of my blood may make a way for the tracing of yours. You, your estates, your posterities, lie all at the stake if such learned gentlemen as these, whose lungs are well acquainted with such proceedings, shall be started out against you; if your friends, your counsel, were denied access to you; if your professed enemies admitted to witness against you; if every word, intention, circumstance of yours be alleged as treasonable, not because of a statute, but a consequence, a construction heaved up in a high rhetorical strain. I leave it to your lordships’ consideration to foresee what may be the issue of so dangerous, so recent precedencies.

These gentlemen tell me they speak in defence of the Commonweal against my arbitrary laws. Give me leave to say it, I speak in defence of the Commonweal against their arbitrary treason; for if this latitude be admitted, what prejudice shall follow to the King, to the country, if you and your posterity be disabled by the same from the greatest affairs of the kingdom. For my poor self, if it were not for your lordships’ interest, and the interest of a saint in heaven [his first wife], who hath left me two pledges here on earth [at these words he was overcome with emotion], were it not for this, I should never take the pains to keep up this ruinous cottage of mine. . . . Nor could I leave it in a better time than this, when I hope the better part of the world think that, by this my misfortune, I had given testimony of my integrity to God, my King, and country.

But the Bill of Attainder passed the House of Commons on April 21 by 204 votes to 59. Among the minority was Lord Digby, who had come to Parliament as one of the leading opponents of the Crown. With all his gifts, which were exceptional, he pleaded against his own party. He gained nothing but the suspicion of being a renegade. A surge of panic and of wrath convulsed the assembly. When a board creaked overhead they thought of Gunpowder Plot. The names of the fifty-nine were spread abroad as traitors defending a traitor. The aspect of the multitude which daily beset the approaches to Parliament became more than ever threatening. The peers deemed to be favourable to Strafford were cowed by the frenzy they saw around them. When Oliver St. John urged the case for the Attainder in a great conference between the Houses he used arguments not of law but of revolution. Parliament was not bound, like inferior tribunals, by existing laws, but was justified in making new ones to suit circumstances. Its only guide should be care for the public weal: it was the political body, embracing all, from the King to the beggar, and could deal with individuals for the good of the whole, could open a vein to let out the corrupted blood. It had been said that the law must precede the offence; that where no law was there could be no transgression. But that plea could not avail for the man who had desired to overthrow all laws. “It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play,” said St. John, “to knock foxes and wolves on the head because they be beasts of prey. The warrener sets traps for polecats and other vermin for the preserving of the warren.”

When Strafford heard this harsh cry for vengeance he raised his hands above his head, as if to implore the mercy of Heaven, knowing that all was lost on earth. Only half the lords who had been present at the impeachment dared to vote upon the Bill of Attainder, and these in great preponderance sent Strafford to his doom. They had become convinced that if they let him go the King would use him to make war upon the Houses; and, as the Earl of Essex, the discontented son of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite, brutally observed, “Stone-dead hath no fellow.”

There were however other chances. The King tried to gain control of the Tower and of the prisoner. But the Governor, Sir William Balfour, closed his gates against the forces which sought to enter. He also spurned an immense bribe offered him by Strafford. The cry for “Justice!” rang through London streets. A mob of several thousand, many of them armed, appeared before the palace roaring for Strafford’s head. In Parliament it was bruited that they would now impeach the Queen.

This was the agony of Charles’ life, to which none of his other sufferings compared. The question was not now whether he could save Strafford, but whether the royal authority would perish with him. He appealed to the bishops, who, with two exceptions, advised him that he must separate his feelings as a man from those of a sovereign. But his real release came from Strafford himself. In a noble letter, written before the vote in the Lords, he had urged the King not to let any promise to him endanger the monarchy or the peace of the realm. At last Charles made the surrender which haunted him to the last moment of his life. He gave his assent to the Bill of Attainder. But conscience stirred in him still. Abandoning his kingly authority, on the next day he sent the young Prince of Wales to beg the House of Lords to reduce the sentence from death to perpetual imprisonment. Those peers who still attended refused, and even an appeal for a few days of grace in which the victim might settle his worldly affairs was denied.

An immense concourse of persons such as had never yet been seen in the Island crowded to the place of execution. Strafford died with fortitude and dignity. He was beyond doubt a man conscious of commanding gifts, impelled by high ambition and a desire to rule. He had sought power by the path of Parliament. He had found it in the favour of the Crown. He adopted a system which suited his interests, and it became interwoven with his strong character. The circumstances of his trial and of the Attainder threw odium upon his pursuers. They slaughtered a man they could not convict. But that man, if given his full career, would have closed perhaps for generations the windows of civic freedom upon the English people.

In the crash of the Strafford trial and execution the King let various matters slip. The Triennial Bill providing for the summoning of Parliament at least once in three years, if necessary in spite of the Crown, put a final end to the system of Personal Rule over which Charles had so far presided. The grant of tonnage and poundage for one year only was accompanied by a censure upon the exaction of Ship Money, and reparation to all who had suffered for their resistance to it. The King perforce subscribed to all this. But he must have been completely broken for the moment when he assented to a measure designed “to prevent inconvenience that may happen by the untimely prorogation or dissolving of this present Parliament” except by its own consent. He accepted this on the same day as the Bill of Stafford’s Attainder. It was in fact a law making this Parliament, since called the Long Parliament, perpetual. Many other changes necessary to the times and remedial to the discontents were made. The judges, whose tenure had hitherto been dependent upon the pleasure of the Crown, now held office on good behaviour. The Court of Star Chamber, which, as we have seen, Henry VII had used to curb the baronage, but which had in the lapse of time become oppressive to the people, was abolished. So was the Court of High Commission, which had striven to impose religious uniformity. The jurisdiction of the Privy Council was strictly and narrowly defined. The principles of the Petition of Right about personal liberty, particularly freedom from arbitrary arrest, were now finally established. Charles endorsed these great decisions. He had realised that in his trusteeship of the rights of monarchy he had grasped too much. Henceforward he took his stand on broader ground. The whole Tudor system which the Stuarts had inherited was shaken from its base.

But everything was now fluid, and in that strong-willed, rugged, obstinate England men, without regard to their former actions, looked about them for sure foothold. From the day when Stafford’s head fell beneath the axe there began a conservative reaction, partial but nationwide. Charles, who at the meeting of the Parliament had been almost alone with his cluster of hated Ministers, found himself increasingly sustained by strong and deep currents of public feeling. If he had only allowed these to have their flow he might have reached a very good establishment. The excesses and fanaticism of the Puritan party, their war upon the Church, their confederacy with the Scottish invaders, roused antagonisms of which the hitherto helpless Court was but a spectator, but from which the Crown might by patience and wisdom emerge, curtailed certainly but secure. Henceforward the quarrel was no longer between King and people, but between the two main themes and moods which have until the confusion of the modern age disputed for mastery in England. The twentieth century was to dawn before men and women became unable to recognise their political ancestors in this ancient conflict.

Charles now felt that his hope lay in a reconciliation with Scotland. The interplay of the Scots army in the North with the Puritan faction at Westminster was irresistible. He resolved to go to Scotland himself and open a Parliament in Edinburgh. Pym and his adherents could hardly object to this. Moderate opinion welcomed the plan. “If the King shall settle and establish a perfect quietness with the Scots,” wrote his sagacious Secretary, Sir Edward Nicholas, “it will open a way for a happy and good conclusion of all differences here.”

To Scotland then the King proceeded. Far gone were the days of the new Liturgy and the dreams of uniformity in Church and State between the two kingdoms. Charles accepted everything he had most abhorred. He strove to win the hearts of the Covenanters. He listened devoutly to their sermons and sang the psalms in the manner of the Kirk. He assented to the establishment of total Presbyterianism in Scotland. But all was in vain. Charles was accused of complicity in an ill-starred attempt of Royalist partisans to kidnap the Scottish leader, the Marquess of Argyll. The Scots were confirmed in their obduracy, and the King returned to England crestfallen.

Upon this melancholy scene a hideous apparition now appeared. The execution of Strafford liberated all the elemental forces in Ireland which his system had so successfully held in restraint. The Irish Parliament in Dublin, formerly submissive, had hastened to voice their complaints against his rule. At the same time a Roman Catholic Celtic people regarded the English Protestantism with the utmost aversion. Strafford’s disciplined Irish army was disbanded. Some efforts were made by Charles’ Ministers to enlist the religious convictions of the Irish in the royal cause. But all this fused into inextricable ruin. The passions of the original inhabitants and of the hungry, downtrodden masses, bursting from all control, were directed upon the gentry, the landowners, and the Protestants, both within and without the Pale. A veritable Jacquerie, recalling the dark times in France, broke upon the land in the autumn of 1641. The propertied classes, their families and dependents, fled to the few garrisoned towns. “But,” says Ranke, “no one can paint the rage and cruelty which was vented, far and wide over the land, upon the unarmed and defenceless. Many thousands perished, their corpses filled the land and served as food for the kites. . . . Religious abhorrence entered into a dreadful league with the fury of national hatred. The motives of the Sicilian Vespers and of the night of St. Bartholomew were united.”¹ Cruelties unspeakable were reported on all sides, and the Government, under the Lords Justices, struck back without mercy. A general slaughter of males and a policy of devastation were proclaimed throughout large parts of the countryside. As the tale of these atrocities crept home to England it gave a shock to men’s minds which even amid their own preoccupations lasted long. It was deeply harmful to the King’s interests. The Puritan party saw, or declared that they saw, in the Irish outrage the fate to which they would be consigned if the Popish tendencies of the bishops were armed with the sword of an absolute sovereign. They regarded the native Irish as wild beasts to be slain at sight, and the cruelties which they in their turn were to wreak in their hour of triumph took their impulse from this moment.

The mere fact of his absence from London, which had left the Parliamentary forces to their full play, had served the King’s interests better than the closest attention to English affairs. During September and October conservative reaction had become a tide. Who could accuse the Court of army plots when the English and Irish armies had both been disbanded? Englishmen, irrespective of religious and constitutional convictions, were ill disposed to be taxed for the upkeep of invading Scottish troops. Presbyterianism made little appeal to the bulk of the English people, who, so far as they were not satisfied with the Elizabethan Church tradition, sought spiritual comfort or excitement in the more vehement sects which had sprung up in the general turmoil of the Reformation, or in the Puritan body itself, such as Anabaptism and Brownism, both of which were as much opposed to Presbytery as to Bishops. The House of Commons at the end of 1641 had travelled far. Pym and his supporters were still dominant and more extreme. But there was an opposition equally resolute. The Lords were now at variance with the Commons, and a large majority, when they attended, sided with the King. From being the servants of the national cause, the Puritans had become an aggressive faction. But the argument, even in that persevering age, was becoming too long and harassing for mere words. Men felt their right hands itching to grasp the swords by which alone it seemed their case could be urged.

It was in this stormy weather that Pym and Hampden sought to rally their forces by bringing forward what was called the “Grand Remonstrance.” This long document, on which committees had been at work for many months, was in fact a party manifesto. It was intended to advertise all that had so far been accomplished by Parliament in remedying old grievances, and to proclaim the future policy of the Parliamentary leaders. Pym’s hope was to re-establish the unity of his diverse followers, and so the more extreme demands for religious reform were dropped. The power of Bishops was to be curtailed, but they were not to be abolished. Nevertheless the growing body of Conservatives, or “Episcopalian Party,” as they were sometimes named, were affronted by the Remonstrance and determined to oppose it. They did not like the way that Pym was going. They wanted “to win the King by the sweeter way of concealing his errors than by publishing of them.” Pym however was preparing to carry the struggle further; he would appeal to the people and win complete control for Parliament over the King’s Ministers. Already, in a message about the Irish rebellion, he had demanded that the King should “employ such counsellors and Ministers as shall be approved by his Parliament.” If this were not conceded he threatened that Parliament would take Irish affairs into its own hands. Here was a sweeping challenge to royal authority. But the King now had at his side very different counsellors from those of a year before. Many of his former opponents, chief among them Digby and his father, the Earl of Bristol, were hostile to Pym. Bishop Williams, foremost of Laud’s critics, now stood against Laud’s accusers. Falkland and Colepeper ranged themselves against the violence of the majority and were soon to take office in the King’s Government. Edward Hyde, later famous as the historian Clarendon, opened the debate by insisting that the aim must now be peace: if the Remonstrance as a whole were carried, and especially if it were published, the disputes would be embittered and prolonged.

The debate was long and earnest, vehement with restrained passion. At last at midnight the Remonstrance, somewhat amended, was put to the vote. When Parliament had met a year earlier the King’s party could not count on a third of its members. Now the Grand Remonstrance was carried only by eleven votes. A motion was put forward by the majority that it should be printed forthwith. On this the Commons rose to a clash of opposing wills. About one o’clock in the morning a lawyer of the Middle Temple, Mr Geoffrey Palmer, demanded that the clerk should record the names of all who protested. The procedure of protest by a minority was, and long continued to be, customary in the House of Lords, but the principle of the Commons was that the vote of the majority was the vote of the House. Palmer seemed to ask who was prepared to protest. A great crowd rose to their feet with the cry, “All! All!” Plumed hats were waved, men laid their hands upon their swords, some even drew them and rested their hands upon the pommels. “I thought,” wrote a Member, Philip Warwick, of this moment in the crowded, dimly lighted room of the chapel, “we had all sat in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, that we, like Abner’s and Joab’s young men, had catched at each other’s locks and sheathed our swords in each other’s bowels.” Only Hampden’s suave, timely intervention prevented a bloody collision. But here the pathway of debate was broken, and war alone could promise further steppingstones.

A hitherto little-noticed Member for Cambridge, Oliver Cromwell, rather rough in his manners, but an offshoot of Thomas Cromwell’s line, said to Falkland as they left the House, “If the Remonstrance had been rejected I would have sold all that I had next morning, and never have seen England any more; and I know there are many honest men of the same resolution.” He, and Pym also, looked across the ocean to new lands where the cause for which they were prepared to die, or kill, could breathe, albeit in a wilderness. Their sentiments awoke echoes in America that were not to be stilled until more than a century later, and after much bloodshed.

The King, who, in spite of his failure in Scotland and the Irish catastrophe, had been conscious of ever-gathering support, was now drawn into various contradictory blunders. At one moment he sought to form a Ministry dependent upon the majority faction which ruled the House of Commons. A dozen of the Opposition lords were sworn members of the Privy Council. But when in a few weeks it was found that these noblemen began to speak of the King in terms of undue respect the London factions howled upon them as backsliders. Still seeking desperately for a foothold, Charles invited Pym himself to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Such a plan had no contact with reality. Colepeper took the post instead, and Falkland became Secretary of State. Next, in violent revulsion, Charles resolved to prosecute five of his principal opponents in the Commons for high treason. Upon this wild course he was impelled by Queen Henrietta Maria. She taunted him with cowardice, and exhorted him, if he would ever see her again, to lay strong hands upon those who spent their nights and days seeking his overthrow and her life. He certainly convinced himself that Pym meant to impeach the Queen.

Thus goaded, Charles, accompanied by three or four hundred swordsmen—“Cavaliers” we may now call them—went down to the House of Commons. It was January 4, 1642. Never before had a king set foot in the Chamber. When his officers knocked at the door and it was known that he had come in person members of all parties looked upon each other in amazement. His followers beset the doors. All rose at his entry. The Speaker, William Lenthall, quitted his chair and knelt before him. The King, seating himself in the chair, after professing his goodwill to the House, demanded the surrender of the five indicted Members—Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg, and Strode. But a treacherous message from a lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber had given Pym a timely warning. The accused Members had already embarked at Westminster steps and were safe amid the train bands and magistrates of the City. Speaker Lenthall could give no information. “I have only eyes to see and ears to hear as the House may direct,” he pleaded. The King, already conscious of his mistake, cast his eyes around the quivering assembly. “I see that the birds are f lown,” he said lamely, and after some civil reassurances he departed at the head of his disappointed, growling adherents. But as he left the Chamber a low, long murmur of “Privilege” pursued him. To this day the Members for the City take their places on the Treasury bench at the opening of a session, in perpetual acknowledgment of the services rendered by the City in protecting the five.

Upon this episode the wrath of London became uncontrollable. The infuriated mobs who thronged the streets and bellowed outside the palace caused Charles and his Court to escape from the capital to Hampton Court. He never saw London again except to suffer trial and death. Within a week of his intrusion into the House the five Members were escorted back to Parliament from the City. Their progress was triumphal. Over two thousand armed men accompanied them up the river, and on either bank large forces, each with eight pieces of cannon, marched abreast of the flotilla. Henceforth London was irretrievably lost to the King. By stages he withdrew to Newmarket, to Nottingham, and to York. Here he waited during the early months of 1642, while the tireless antagonisms which rent England slowly rebuilt him an authority and an armed force. There were now two centres of government. Pym, the Puritans, and what was left of the Parliament ruled with dictatorial power in London in the King’s name. The King, round whom there gathered many of the finest elements in Old England, freed from the bullying of the London mob, became once again a prince with sovereign rights. About these two centres there slowly assembled the troops and resources for the waging of civil war.