war is such a calamity as nothing but the most indispensable necessity can authorise any party to bring on; the other, that the mixed government of England by king, lords, and commons, was to be maintained in preference to any other form of polity. The first of these can hardly be disputed; and though the denial of the second would certainly involve no absurdity, yet it may justly be assumed where both parties avowed their adherence to it as a common principle. Such as prefer a despotic or a republican form of government will generally, without much further inquiry, have made their election between Charles 1. and the parliament. We do not argue from the creed of the English constitution to those who have abandoned its communion. There was so much in the conduct and circumstances of both parties in the year 1642 to excite disapprobation and distrust, that a wise and good man could hardly unite cordially with either of them. On the one hand he would entertain little doubt of the king's desire to overthrow by force or stratagem whatever had been effected in parliament, and to establish a plenary despotism; his arbitrary temper, his known principles of government, the natural sense of wounded pride and honour, the instigations of a haughty woman, the solicitations of favourites, the promises of ambitious men, were all at work to render his new position as a constitutional sovereign, even if unaccompanied by fresh indignities and encroachments, too grievous and mortifying to be endured. He had already tampered in a conspiracy to overawe, if not to disperse, the parliament he had probably obtained large promises, though very little to be trusted, from several of the presbyterian leaders in Scotland during his residence there in the summer of 1641: he had attempted to recover his ascendency by a sudden blow in the affair of the five members; he had sent the queen out of England, furnished with the crown jewels, for no other probable end than to raise men and procure arms in foreign countries: he was now about to take the field with an army, composed in part of young gentlemen disdainful of a puritan faction that censured their licence, and of those soldiers of fortune, reckless of public principle, and averse to civil control, whom the war in Germany had trained; in part of the catholics, a wealthy and active body, devoted to the crown, from which alone they had experienced justice or humanity, and from whose favour and gratitude they now expected the most splendid returns. But, on the other hand, the house of commons presented still less favourable prospects. After every allowance has been made, he must bring very heated passions to the records of those times who does not perceive in the conduct of that body a series of glaring violations, not only of positive and constitutional, but of 272 COMMENCEMENT OF CIVIL WAR. CHAP. IX. those higher principles which are paramount to all immediate policy. Witness the ordinance for disarming recusants passed by both houses in August, 1641, and that in November authorising the earl of Leicester to raise men for the defence of Ireland without warrant under the great seal, both manifest encroachments on the executive power; and the enormous extension of privilege, under which every person accused on the slightest testimony of disparaging their proceedings, or even of introducing new-fangled ceremonies in the church, a matter wholly out of their cognizance, was dragged before them as a delinquent, and lodged in their prison. Witness the outrageous attempts to intimidate the minority of their own body in the commitment of Mr. Palmer, and afterwards of sir Ralph Hopton to the Tower, for such language used in debate as would not have excited any observation in ordinary times;-their continual encroachments on the rights and privileges of the lords, as in their intimation that if bills thought by them necessary for the public good should fall in the upper house, they must join with the minority of the lords in representing the same to the king; or in the impeachment of the duke of Richmond for words, and those of the most trifling nature, spoken in the upper house ;—their despotic violation of the rights of the people, in imprisoning those who presented or prepared respectful petitions in behalf of the established constitution; while they encouraged those of a tumultuous multitude at their bar in favour of innovation;—their usurpation at once of the judicial and legislative powers in all that related to the church, particularly by their committee for scandalous ministers, under which denomination, adding reproach to injury, they subjected all who did not reach the standard of puritan perfection to contumely and vexation, and ultimately to expulsion from their lawful property. Witness the impeachment of the twelve bishops for treason, on account of their protestation against all that should be done in the house of lords during their compelled absence through fear of the populace; a protest not perhaps entirely well expressed, but abundantly justifiable in its argument by the plainest principles of law. These great abuses of power, becoming daily more frequent, as they became less excusable, would make a sober man hesitate to support them in a civil war, wherein their success must not only consummate the destruction of the crown, the church, and the peerage, but expose all who had dissented from their proceedings, as it ultimately happened, to an oppression less severe perhaps, but far more sweeping, than that which had rendered the star-chamber odious. Thus, with evil auspices, with much peril of despotism on the one hand, with more of anarchy on the other, amidst the apprehensions and sorrows of good men, the civil war commenced in the summer of 1642. I might now perhaps pass over the period that intervened, until the restoration of Charles II., as not strictly belonging to a work which undertakes to relate the progress of the English constitution. But this would have left a sort of chasm that might disappoint the reader; and as I have already not wholly excluded our more general political history, without a knowledge of which the laws and government of any people must be unintelligible, it will probably not be deemed an unnecessary digression, if I devote one chapter to the most interesting and remarkable portion of British story. 274 THE CIVIL WAR. CHAP. X. CHAPTER X. FROM THE BREAKING OUT OF THE CIVIL WAR TO THE RESTORATION. PART I. 1. Success of the King in the first part of the War. 2. Efforts by the Moderate Party for Peace. Affair at Brentford. § 3. Treaty of Oxford. § 4. Impeachment of the Queen. 5. Waller's Plot. 6. Secession of some Peers to the King's Quarters. Their Treatment there impolitic. § 7. The Anti-pacific Party gain the ascendant at Westminster. § 8. The Parliament makes a new Great Seal. 9. And takes the Covenant. § 10. Persecution of the Clergy who refuse it. § 11. Impeachment and Execution of Laud. § 12. Decline of the King's Affairs in 1644. § 13. Factions at Oxford. 14. Royalist Lords and Commoners summoned to that City. Treaty of Uxbridge. Impossibility of Agreement. § 15. Miseries of the War. § 16. Essex and Manchester suspected of Lukewarmness. § 17. Self-denying Ordinance. 18. Battle of Naseby. Desperate condition of the King's Affairs. He throws himself into the hands of the Scots. 19. His Struggles to preserve Episcopacy, against the advice of the Queen and others. Bad Conduct of the Queen. § 20. Publication of Letters taken at Naseby. 21. Discovery of Glamorgan's Treaty. § 22. King delivered up by the Scots. 23. Growth of the Independents and Republicans. Opposition to the Presbyterian Government. Toleration. § 24. Intrigues of the Army with the King. His Person seized. § 25. The Parliament yield to the Army. 26. Mysterious Conduct of Cromwell. § 27. Imprudent Hopes of the King. He rejects the Proposals of the Army. 28. His Flight from Hampton Court. Alarming Votes against him. 29. Scots' Invasion. The Presbyterians regain the Ascend30. Treaty of Newport. § 31 Gradual Progress of a Republican Party. 32. Scheme among the Officers of bringing Charles to Trial. This is finally determined. Seclusion of Presbyterian Members. § 33. Motives of some of the King's Judges. 34. Question of his Execution Discussed. 35. His Character. 36. Icon Basiliké. ant. § 1. FACTIONS that, while still under some restraint from the forms at least of constitutional law, excite our disgust by their selfishness or intemperance, are little likely to redeem their honour when their animosities have kindled civil warfare. If it were difficult for an upright man to enlist with an entire willingness under either the royalist or the parliamentarian banner at the commencement of hostilities in 1642, it became far less easy for him to desire the complete success of one or the other cause, as advancing time displayed the faults of both in darker colours than they had previously worn. Of the parliament-to begin with the more powerful and victorious party-it may be said, I think, with not greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom or courage, are recorded of them from their quarrel with the king to their expulsion by Cromwell. Notwithstanding the secession from parliament before the commencement of the war of nearly all the peers who could be reckoned on the king's side, and of a pretty considerable part of the com- . mons, there still continued to sit at Westminster many sensible and moderate persons, who thought that they could not serve their country better than by remaining at their posts, and laboured continually to bring about a pacification by mutual concessions. Such were the earls of Northumberland, Holland, Lincoln, and Bedford, among the peers; Selden, Whitelock, Hollis, Waller, Pierpoint, and Rudyard, in the commons. These, however, would have formed but a very ineffectual minority if the war itself, for at least twelve months, had not taken a turn little expected by the parliament. The hard usage Charles seemed to endure in so many encroachments on his ancient prerogative awakened the sympathies of a generous aristocracy, accustomed to respect the established laws, and to love monarchy, as they did their own liberties, on the score of its prescriptive title; averse also to the rude and morose genius of puritanism, and not a little jealous of those upstart demagogues who already threatened to subvert the graduated pyramid of English society. Their zeal placed the king at the head of a far more considerable army than either party had anticipated. In the first battle, that of Edgehill, though he did not remain master of the field, yet all the military consequences were evidently in his favour. In the ensuing campaign of 1643,*the advantage was for several months entirely his own, nor could he be said to be a loser on the whole result, notwithstanding some reverses that accompanied the autumn. A line drawn from Hull to Southampton would suggest no very incorrect idea of the two parties, considered as to their military occupation of the kingdom, at the beginning of September, 1643; for if the parliament, by the possession of Gloucester and Plymouth, and by some force they had on foot in Cheshire and other midland parts, kept their ground on the west of this line, this was nearly compensated by the earl of Newcastle's possession at that time of most of Lincolnshire, which lay within it. Such was the temporary effect, partly indeed of what may be called the fortune of war, but rather of the zeal and spirit of the royalists, and of their advantage in a more numerous and intrepid cavalry. § 2. It was natural that the moderate party in parliament should acquire strength by the untoward fortune of its arms. Their aim, as well as that of the constitutional royalists, was a speedy pacification. On the king's advance to Colņbrook, in November, 1642, the two houses made an overture for negotiation, on which he |