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the dangers of a

CHAPTER they had resolutely set themselves against Laudian prelacy, they had never carried their speculations so far as to inquire what substitute should occupy its place. They resisted an enormous evil; they had not, even in thought, advanced to the bare contemplation of the fearful chasm which its overthrow would make. This is the course which a reformation, honestly begun, not unfrequently takes. Men of ulterior designs are prepared to impose some favourite scheme when the propitious moment shall arrive ;-men of perfect honesty are often surprised at their own successes, and vanquished by their own triumphs. They did not look beyond the present; they felt dominant superstition, and they strove against them; and long after the struggle had begun they still looked no farther. Thus the opponents of Laud contended for simplicity and purity in Christian worship, and they sought for nothing more. These men formed the great body of the puritans when the war broke out. There were some of them whose aim was chiefly political: they felt more for the dangers of the state, and less for the perils of the church. Still they were not two parties, but the same men influenced from time to time by different but concurring motives. To speak of the political as distinct from the religious puritans is, we conceive, to misrepresent the facts of history. The war had two objects: it was a struggle for liberty against an arbitrary sovereign, and for religion against tyranny and popery as represented by the Laudian party and the court. It was impossible to sever in practice these two independent

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aims. The parliament in London became puritans CHAPTER to a man; and the religious puritans, without exception, became the firm adherents of the parliament. So far the fusion was perfect; and we shall, therefore, speak of the parliamentary and of the puritan cause as one. As events pressed upon each other, feuds broke out and secessions occurred. Still, however, upon the whole, it was a war between the puritans on the one side and the adherents of the king and his prerogative upon the other. For the share which the people of England took in the war against the king the puritans are responsible. The character of the party is deeply concerned in the decision we form upon their conduct in this affair. No point in their history has been more severely censured; none has been more misrepresented or less generally understood. If success be the measure of right, they were wrong undoubtedly; for though they conquered Charles, they perished from the earth, and their name has been made a by-word. But this coarse estimate suffices no longer. The time has come when we wish to take a juster view. Two centuries have passed, and with them something at least of the rage and clamour which have long distorted this period of our history. We begin to perceive that measures may have been wise which were not successful; and that even success is to be measured by its remoter consequences rather than its immediate results. A great question, then, lies at the threshold of our history-Were the puritans justified in taking arms against the king? Was the civil war a vulgar instance of mere rebellion,-the resistance of those

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CHAPTER Who refuse to obey whenever obedience can no longer be enforced? Or was it a patriotic enterprise, CHAS. I. which the constitution justified, which the hapA.D. 1642. piness and well-being of the state demanded, and

over which religion, the pure religion of the gospel, threw her sublimer sanctions?

It is true that Charles was the first to draw the sword and to proclaim war, but the responsibility of arousing the nation against the king rests upon the parliament, that is, upon the puritans. They accepted the appeal to arms with alacrity; they had been preparing for this issue; they regarded it as the lesser evil; they were persuaded that it was only thus, upon the field of battle, that their lives, their rights, their protestant faith, could be secured. When Charles had dissolved the last parliament abruptly in the spring of 1640 the friends of the popular cause could not conceal their satisfaction. Saint John, a leader of the puritans, was overjoyed; he returned home exulting in his defeat. "It all goes well," he said to Mr. Hyde; "things must be worse yet, before they can improve!"* And this was the general opinion.

For many reasons it is difficult to do justice to the puritans. The subject is overlaid with prejudice, and upon a superficial glance appearances are much against them. When the king took the field, the parliament were already in a false position. The reasons they assigned were not sufficient to justify an armed resistance; and this the leaders of the popular party well knew. The grounds upon which

*Clarendon, i. p. 141.

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they professed to excuse themselves were, indeed, CHAPTER either frivolous, or unconstitutional, or palpably unjust. In the first place, they insisted that the king should return to London, for his absence in the north was a capital grievance: it shewed his majesty's distrust of his loyal subjects, his dislike to the house of commons, and his disregard of his people's welfare. All this was but an indifferent pretext for a civil war. They had already excluded the prelates from the house of peers, and set aside the royal prerogative of dissolving parliament, unless with its own consent; they now demanded the control of the militia and the Tower, the power of creating peers, of disposing of the royal children in marriage, of appointing and dismissing the king's ministers-in short, the destruction of the crown as an independent estate of the realm. "Should I grant these demands," said Charles, "I may still be waited on bare-headed; I may have my hand kissed; I may have swords and maces carried before me ;-but as regards any true and real power, I should be but the mere shadow of a king.'

The parliament, again, professed to arm, not against the king but against his evil counsellors, holding the constitutional fiction that the king can do no wrong. But this made their conduct still more perplexing. The royal prerogatives ought to have been safe beneath the sacred maxim, even had the king's person been assailed. The evil advisers of the sovereign should, however, have been singled

*Rushworth's Collections, i. p. 788.

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CHAPTER out and punished without injury to their master. 1. But the parliament drew no such distinctions. The A.D. 1642. king's prerogative and his privy councillors shared one fate and fell beneath the same desolating storm. Wentworth lord Strafford, the prime minister, died upon the scaffold as a traitor, and the king's undoubted rights perished soon afterwards in the house of commons. Laud was in prison as a pernicious adviser; but still the attack upon the sovereign was keenly pursued elsewhere. The command of the army was his by antient law and usage; and the right of influencing his own children in the affair of marriage belonged to him by nature; yet he was deprived of both. If the parliament fought against the king, their demands were unreasonable; if against his advisers, their behaviour was unjust. It was evident either that they were wrong, or that there was some motive for their conduct which they had not disclosed. Their professions and their actions were at variance; at least there was an obscurity which seemed to wait for its explanation. And this was in truth the real cause of their perplexity: they did not venture to trust the whole of their case to the decision of the nation at large, to whom their proclamations were addressed. The decisions of history may have been taken from their own statements, but those statements were imperfect. Whether necessity or policy dictated their reserve, it has been upon the whole injurious to their character.

The king had no such difficulties to cope with. Wherever lay the merits of the quarrel, he had the advantage of a cause well defined and clearly un