IV. A.D. 1645. The incapacity of distinguishing between great CHAPTER powers and the right use of them, marks a weak or a perverted mind; it obliterates the distinctions of CHAS. I. vice and virtue, and substitutes the pagan superstition which burnt incense at the shrines of good and bad fortune. When a nation once arrives at this point it is utterly debased. All pure morality is undermined; the love of virtue for its own sake, and as that which is most acceptable to God and most like himself, vanishes away; and men sink to the condition of the brutes, who crowd around the tall and stately deer, but chase it, wounded, from the flock and leave it to die in solitude."* Success becomes the sole standard by which virtue itself is to be applauded or condemned. The power of the presbyterians was now at an end. The independents and sectaries had combined against them, and their victory was complete. But it was dearly purchased; for the blow meant for the presbyterians felled the parliament. It retained indeed the power of naming its commanders, and seems to have calculated upon their dutiful submission to its orders. It expected the army to be as docile as before. But the army was no sooner remodelled than it began to assert its independence, and to act as if the great quarrel between the nation and the king had been submitted not merely to its * I have read with the attention due to its author's name and character the "Vindication of Cromwell" lately published by Dr. Merle D'Aubigné, and need scarcely add that I am dissatisfied with it. He dismisses the subject of the self-denying ordinance in a few sentences. 'Cromwell prepared to take leave of his general Fairfax: but circumstances which seemed to proceed from the hand of God prevented him. Hostilities broke out afresh, and Oliver did not think it right at such a moment to return his sword into the scabbard." This is not a vindication! IV. CHAS. I. A.D. 1645. CHAPTER valour in the field, but to its final arbitration. Everything portended change; a new order of things was evidently at hand, though none could yet foresee what the future might bring forth. It was under these circumstances that presbyterianism was at length established. On the sixth of August the house of commons sent up to the lords the ordinance for settling the government of the church. Yet it refused, soon after, the petition of the assembly to be allowed to suspend profane and ignorant persons from the sacrament; voted a petition, which prayed for the establishment of presbytery "as the discipline of Jesus Christ," to be scandalous;* and when the Scotch remonstrated with it upon its tardy zeal and imperfect reformation, had the petition burnt by the common hangman. The lords, after some delay, passed the ordinance, and presbyterianism became the established church by law; but it was never so in practice; and presbyterians say, with truth, that in England their system was not fairly tried. London was presbyterian already, in the judgment of its clergy and the temper of the citizens. Lancashire adopted the discipline. In no other part of England does it appear that any vigorous effort was made to carry it into operation. The cause was lost by the folly of its advocates. The parliament justly dreaded another ecclesiastical despotism. The nation remembered but too well the spiritual courts of the prelates, and viewed with aversion the machinery of presbyterian judicatories, with which it was proposed to overspread the land. Provincial synods and classical assemblies had a new and suspicious sound: * Whitelocke, p. 159. IV. CHAS. I. A.D. 1645. they afforded endless mirth to the royalists, and met CHAPTER with no encouragement from any party. Selden and the lawyers denounced them; the people were anxious; and the soldiers laughed in scorn. The scheme was utterly unpopular; and, as the king rejected it by proclamation, presbyterianism could not be accepted even as a compromise between the two great parties. But, in truth, the institutions of a nation are like the habits of a man: they may be altered and improved by gradual change: but to root them up at once, and to supply their place with others, belongs to Him who only can regenerate either men or nations. The new-modelled army was spoken of with scorn by the royalists; for its numbers had been reduced from thirty-six to twenty-one thousand men; and its officers were in general plebeians. But it soon made its power felt: the decisive struggle came; and the last great battle was fought on the 14th of June, 1645, upon the field of Naseby, near Northampton. The king was on the field in person, and his nephew prince Rupert commanded the cavalry. Fairfax, Cromwell, Shippon, and Ireton led on the puritans; and when the day was over, the royal cause was hopeless. The king was the last to quit the field, on which he had displayed at least the heroic virtues of a cavalier. When the battle was all but lost, he placed himself at the head of his only regiment in reserve, to confront the dreadful Cromwell. The earl of Carnwarth, alarmed for his safety, or struck with a sudden panic, caught at Charles's bridle and turned his horse. The contagion seized the officers who surrounded him and IV. A.D. 1645. The CHAPTER all fled. The king waved his sword and cried, "One charge more and we recover the day:" but all was CHAS. I. lost. He retreated with two thousand horse, the wreck of his army, towards Leicester. Six thousand prisoners were taken; and amongst them, six colonels, eight lieutenant-colonels, eighteen majors, seventy captains, eighty lieutenants, eighty ensigns, two hundred inferior officers, about a hundred and forty standards, and the royal standard amongst the number, the king's footmen and servants, and the whole train of artillery and baggage.* slaughter was not great; for it soon became a panic rather than a fight. The prisoners and the standards that were taken were carried in triumph through London to Westminster. The standards were hung in Westminster hall. The prisoners were secured in the artillery-ground, in Tothill-fields. Such as promised to take no further part in the war were dismissed. By far the greater number, still loyal to the king, refused the easy condition, and were shipped off to foreign parts. Within two days Leicester capitulated. Bristol, Winchester, Bath, and Bridgewater followed; the king was hopeless, and his army was no more. But the loss of his army was not the only calamity which befel the king at Naseby. His cabinet was amongst the spoils. It contained his secret diplomatic correspondence and copies of his private letters to the queen. The loss of the cabinet completed his ruin. The disaster at Naseby might have been retrieved. A generous and forgiving * Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, p. 59. Ludlow, lieutenant-general of horse to the parliament, was present at the fight. IV. CHAS. I. nation might have conceded to a king subdued CHAPTER what they had scorned to surrender to a king in arms. All but a few ambitious soldiers were weary AD. 1645. of the war. A republic existed yet, only in the dreams of a few headlong zealots, and in the pene But the loss of trating ambition of Cromwell. |