VI. CHAS. I. A.D. 1647-8. land by the sword or by the pen. The very puritan CHAPTER divines who had attended on the king were not of. one mind. The solemn league and covenant was, in short, a mere phantom to scare away episcopalians—it was a violent negation of bishops, deans and chapters. It had yet to be interpreted, and until interpreted it could not be enforced. England might lie waste amidst the ruins of her ancient church; violence and war had brought her to this condition; but the covenant supplied no principles and no materials wherewith to reconstruct her; and then, if episcopacy were indeed so dangerous, and the directory so safe, it might reasonably be hoped that within the three years of probation the nation would learn to acquiesce in a change for which at present it was unprepared. The precipitancy of the puritans was as impolitic as their narrow conditions were unwise. Even had they been right in argument, their conduct gave little hope that the great Head and Master of the church was making use of them to amend the workmanship of Cranmer and the martyrs. Thirdly, the parliament required that the militia, that is, the army, should be entirely at their own disposal; and they claimed the right of levying taxes in order to support it. To this with much reluctance the king gave his consent. At the termination of a prosperous war the parliament demanded on this head no more than was reasonable. To give up the army was to throw away every advantage they had won, and to place the victors at the mercy of the vanquished. The peace which Ormond had made with the Irish rebels was CHAPTER annulled. The king urged that he had not been a VI. party to it; still he was reluctant to concede the point, probably out of a generous regard for the marquis of Ormond's safety.* CHAS. I. A.D. 1647-8. Upon the whole the terms of the treaty were such as conquerors impose. No attempt was made at conciliation; no indulgence was offered to the weaker party. The royalists and episcopalians were even in point of numbers by no means contemptible. True it was that while the presbyterians, the independents, and the sectarists could agree, they were crushed and outnumbered: but the elements of discord were fermenting their party had been cemented by a common danger; and now that it had passed, their quarrels plainly foreshadowed the speedy dissolution of the compact. The endeavour to crush a body still so powerful as the royalists was impolitic and ungenerous; and as statesmen, or as professors of a purer religion, it was equally dishonourable to the puritans. Liberty of conscience, the right of worshipping God unharmed, was their own justification of the war; and now they denied this privilege to their opponents-to one-third at least of their fellow-countrymen. Whoever might be allowed to plead for liberty of conscience, it was to be denied to the king himself and to his chaplains. The scruples of a sovereign with regard to his coronation oath were of no importance. Hammond, Sanderson, Prideaux, and Ussher, were not of sufficient account to be listened to in behalf of the book of common prayer! In the opinion of the great patriots of 1642, who still remained upon the scene, * Clarendon, book xi. p. 15. VI. CHAS. I. A.D. 1647-8. the cause was lost--lost by the vanity, the imbe- CHAPTER cility, and the bigotry of their successors. They had fought for liberty, but a dominant presbyterianism, which brooked no rival, was as inconsistent with it as Laud and the star chamber. They had fought to retrieve the institutions of England from those who made them instruments of oppression; but the institutions themselves had vanished, the oppressions were renewed. To compel the king and all his subjects to embrace the covenant, this then was the fruit of so many battles and of six years of sorrow such as England had never known! The revolution had failed. The cause of the parliament and of constitutional liberty was lost, and its few remaining members had become contemptible. Charles himself is perhaps the only person whose reputation does not suffer in the Newport treaty; for even his advisers, and sometimes his chaplains, from considerations of his personal safety, advised concessions which their conscience disapproved. No doubt his firmness was owing in some measure to the impression he entertained that without him nothing could be done: such language was often on his tongue: "They cannot do without me. I must turn the scale at last. The parliament cannot settle the nation without my assistance." Still however in the purest minds the best motives have their alloy, and the praise of Charles I. is, that he stood alone to defend the church of England at the certain hazard of his crown and the very probable forfeit of his life. Conceding every other demand he firmly resisted this. Such was his veneration for episcopacy that it rose superior in his mind to that VI. CHAS. I. A.D. 1647-8. CHAPTER duplicity which long habit had interwoven with his nature. During the Newport treaty he even sent private instructions to Ormond to assure him that his concessions went for nothing, and might one day be annulled. Yet his conscience did not allow him to trifle with episcopacy and the church: these were sacred things; this was a province into which diplomacy was not allowed to enter. Strange and incongruous perhaps it may appear, but such was Charles's character. The treaty, which was opened in September, was brought to a close on the 27th of November, 1618; the parliament debating each point in London, while the king and the commissioners were discussing it in the Isle of Wight. But it now became evident that a party had risen up whom no concessions would satisfy. They were republicans; and in the house of commons were represented by the younger sir Henry Vane. He made an angry speech and bitterly denounced the king as a tyrant, the author of all the evils under which the kingdom laboured. The debate upon the treaty lasted for six days. It was interrupted by the news that the army had repeated their old manœuvre. They had seized the king at Carisbrook castle and carried him by force to Hurst castle on the Hampshire coast. These evil tidings were accompanied with a"large remonstrance," so-called, which six officers on behalf of the whole army presented to the house of commons. In this, after denouncing the treaty, they demanding that public justice might be done on the chief actors in the late troubles, and calling for a new parliament, petitioned that VI. A.D. 1647-8. no king might hereafter be admitted but upon elec- CHAPTER tion of the people. The house of commons however behaved, on this the last occasion on which CHAS. I. freedom of debate remained, with becoming dignity. It resolved that the removal of the king was contrary to its instructions, and that he should be immediately placed as before under the care of colonel Hammond, the governor of Carisbrook. The army replied with the demand of their arrears and the threat of marching up to London, and sent up a "new declaration" in pursuance of their late remonstrance. This the house refused to take into consideration it was moved that they should be declared traitors, and that an impeachment of high treason should be issued against the officers, if the army should approach. The answer was emphatically given in the appearance of the whole army in London a few days afterwards. The house of commons immediately borrowed forty thousand pounds from the city for the payment of arrears, and again proceeded to discuss the Newport treaty. After a debate which continued from the forenoon till five o'clock the next morning, it was decided by a majority of one hundred and forty against one hundred and four, “that the king's answer was a ground for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom." Vane and the republicans were defeated, but they hastened their revenge. When the house met again it found a guard of musketeers drawn up at the door under the command of colonel Pride, the officers holding in their hands a list of the members, of whom they seized nearly a hundred and confined them in the neighbourhood. In the absence of |