ready to receive him. The cornet advanced with authority he had to secure stood drawn up in the court, the mien of a great general. his person? "The soldiery of the army," replied Joyce. "That," objected Charles, "is no lawful authority: have you nothing in writing from Sir Thomas Fairfax? Deal with me ingenuously, Mr. Joyce. What commission have you?" "Here is my commission," answered Joyce; "here, behind me," pointing to his fifty troopers. The king glanced steadily along the line, and, with a smile, said, "I never before read such a commission. But it is written in characters fair and legible enough-a company of as handsome proper gentlemen as I have seen a long while. But what if, nevertheless, I refuse to go with you? I am your king; I hope you will not force me. Give me, however, satisfaction on these reasonable points-that I may be used with due respect, and that I may not be forced in anything against my conscience and honour; though I hope that my resolution is so fixed that no force can cause me to do a base thing. You are masters of my body, my soul is above your reach." The troopers signified their assent with acclamations, and Joyce added, that it was not their principle to force any man's conscience, least of all their king's: it was their enemies who used that practice. The commissioners now stepping forward, one of them, Lord Montague, addressed the soldiers, holding up before them a paper. "Here," said he, "are our instructions from the parliament, to keep the king at Holdenby. We protest against his Majesty's removal, and desire to know whether you agree to what Mr. Joyce has said and done?" With one voice they cried, "All, all!" Major Brown observed, that it was not the first time that he had been at the head of a party, and that he durst affirm, though they cried "All, all!" that scarce two in the company knew what had passed. "Let all," he continued, raising his voice, "who are willing the king should stay with the commissioners of parliament, now speak." The men unanimously exclaimed, "None! None!" "Then," said the major, "I have done." The soldiers answered, "We understand well enough what we do." Joyce now inquired to what place the king desired to go? "To Newmarket." What distance would he choose to ride that day? "Oh," replied Charles, smiling, "I can ride as far as you, or any man here." And the party, including the commissioners, set forward, under the direction of the adventurous cornet. The news of this astonishing exploit, with the menacing attitude and unanimous spirit of the army, struck terror into the Presbyterians. They perceived the unsubstantial nature of their parliamentary majority, and the imminent peril which threatened them. Convinced that they were no match for those intrepid disciples of the school of Machiavel, whose work they had been doing, they ordered, in abject alarm, the immediate payment of all arrears due to the army, and expunged the obnoxious vote against its petition from their journals. 2 G 226 CHAPTER XXV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE ARMY. THE army's head-quarters had been removed to Newmarket. Fairfax was with some of his officers, in the neighbourhood of that place, when a private soldier, riding suddenly up, acquainted him with the seizure of the king; at which the general testified such unaffected surprise, as, when confirmed by his subsequent assertions, must remove all suspicion of his privity to the design of Joyce. Returning instantly into the town, he met Cromwell. The lieutenant-general had just alighted from his horse, having ridden all night, after attending a late sitting of the Commons, in which, by force of tears and protestations, he had so thoroughly convinced the house of the sincerity, and the success, of his efforts to reduce the mutinous troops to obedience, that some of the members exclaimed, “He deserved a statue of gold, for his great services." Fairfax immediately despatched Whalley, with his regiment, to take charge of the king, to prevent his advance to Newmarket, and, if possible, to induce him to return to Holdenby. The commissioners, whom Whalley besought to second this request, declined to interfere, on the plea that the king had been forcibly taken out of their hands; and Charles himself, when appealed to, absolutely refused. It was at Childerley, in Cambridgeshire, near the house of Sir John Cutts, that the parties had encountered; and in that hospitable mansion it was finally agreed that the sovereign should take up his temporary abode. On the following day, Fairfax, attended by Cromwell, Ireton, and the other generalofficers, waited on the king. They were received by him in the garden; where this band of victor-courtiers (all kneeling down, except Cromwell and the general) kissed the hand from which they had successively wrung the sceptre and the sword. Charles inquired, whether it was by the general's orders that he had been brought from Holdenby? Fairfax solemnly denied his concurrence in the design. Cromwell also vehemently protested, that the scheme had been executed without his knowledge: yet we are assured, that at the house of that arch-deceiver the plot had been contrived, and that the individuals chosen for its execution were exclusively at his command. "Unless you hang up Joyce," said the king, "I cannot believe you." The cornet was sent for, to answer for himself. He repeated, in substance, what he had told the king at Holdenby, respecting his authority, and offered to appeal to the army in a general rendezvous. "If three, or even four parts of the army," said the spirited agitator, " do not approve of what I have done, I am content to be hanged at the head of my regiment." Charles reiterated his conviction, that Joyce would not have ventured on so audacious a measure, "without the countenance of great persons;" and Fairfax, who expressed his determination to bring the offender before a court-martial, found himself baffled by an influence stronger than the general's orders. The king had flattered himself, that the stroke of policy by which he had been transferred from the custody of the parliament to that of the now rival power, had received the general's sanction; for he reposed on the personal honour of Fairfax. He had now the means of being undeceived; but the buoyant faith of Charles clung to its object, and he appears still to have regarded the general as, at the least, looking on with tacit connivance; while the dexterous manoeuvre itself he considered as only the first step of the army towards realizing its friendly intentions. When Fairfax came to take his leave, he intimated privately to his sovereign his sincere desire to serve him. The king replied, "Sir, I have as good interest in the army as yourself." The general was astonished, and distressed. "By this," he says, "I plainly saw what broken reed he leaned on." Towards Joyce the king testified no displeasure; on the contrary, he seems to have taken rather a liking to the cornet's conversation. But the king's spirits must naturally have been raised, and his expectations excited, by the mere change in his immediate circumstances. He had suddenly emerged from the gloom of a total, cheerless seclusion from his people, as well as from his personal friends. At Newmarket, whither his desire to proceed was gratified, he found himself surrounded, not merely with formal respect, but with looks of intense though mingled interest, with shouts of gratulation, and with the long-unheard language of attachment. His friends and domestics, "the old familiar faces," were now freely admitted to his presence. In spite of remonstrance from the parliament (who, even in the peril and degradation to which they were reduced, would not bate one jot of their intolerance), the voice of piety, heard in the solemn tones of his revered parent the Church of England, from the lips of Sheldon and Hammond, once more hallowed his dwelling. Cambridge sent forth her masters, her fellows, and rejoicing students, with shouts of "Vivat Rex," to congratulate him. The neighbouring counties poured their gentry and people through the thronged presence-chamber, when the king dined or supped. In the enjoyment of his favourite exercises, tennis or riding, he forgot that he was a captive. His public progress with the army was preceded by an officer of rank, who rode bareheaded before him, as if in a festival procession; the streets, as he passed, were fragrant with garlands, strewn in his path; to the prayers and acclamations of the people and the troops, he was permitted to reply, in terms of familiar condescension, without the interference even of a suspicious and disapproving look. Charles's Presby But the present elation of the royal mind had a farther excuse. terian gaolers, even more unfeeling than disloyal, treated the sovereign with some degree of cold respect, but were wholly regardless of the father. When formerly he had besought the parliament to restore to him his children, the heartless answer was, that "they could take as much care at London, both of their bodies and souls, as could be done at Oxford!” The same request, urged by an approving letter from Fairfax, now met with a different reception. Northumberland was ordered to take his interesting charge, the Dukes of York and Gloucester, and their gentle sister, the Princess Elizabeth, to pass two days with their royal father. This meeting between the king and his children, after an eventful separation, took place at Caversham, while the army was advancing towards London; and the indulgence, so grateful to Charles, was frequently repeated after his arrival at Hampton Court. On this occasion, a yet louder burst of public interest demonstrated that the people were still the English people, and still felt as the king's subjects. Even the ambiguous Cromwell appears to have been subdued by the view of family endearment, presented in this reunion, to some sense of awakening loyalty,-unless we admit human nature to be indeed capable of a degree of dissimulation so intense, as, on any other hypothesis, would be requisite to explain his behaviour. Meeting at Caversham with Sir John Berkley, he told that honest loyalist, that he had lately seen the tenderest sight that ever his eyes beheld; which was the interview between the king and his children. "And then," says Berkley, "he wept plentifully at the remembrance of it, saying, that never man was so abused as he had been in his sinister opinion of the king, who he now thought was the most conscientious and upright man in the kingdom; concluding with this wish, that God would be pleased to look upon him according to the sincerity of his heart toward the king." Charles himself, sensible of the dangers which still surrounded him, and actually alive, both as a sovereign and as a parent, to the honour and welfare of his family, availed himself of the more private opportunities which the visits of his children supplied, earnestly to address them on the subject of their duties and probable destinies. The Duke of York was at this time about fourteen years of age; the princess, a year or two younger; the Duke of Gloucester, an intelligent child of seven years. On these objects of his tenderness, doubly endeared by the sad peculiarity of their circumstances, he impressed his solemn counsel and injunctions. His own fate, he told them, he looked upon as full of peril and uncertainty. He was at present wholly in the power of the army, from whose custody his enemies in the parliament were quite unable to withdraw him. But what the real designs of his new masters were, he could not discern. He hoped well, yet with much fear and doubt. He therefore reminded them all of the affection and duty they owed to the prince, their brother; and recommended them to prepare for the probability of a darker turn of his affairs to succeed the present gleam of prosperity. To the Duke of York he spoke with peculiar earnestness, not only as he was the eldest, but because his name had already been whispered as the watch-word of a treasonable project, by some of the Independents, who, uniting with the king's most violent enemies in the wish to put him aside, were yet unprepared for the doubtful experiment of a commonwealth. He put the youth solemnly in mind of his allegiance to the Prince of Wales, in case of his own death; and commanded him, that if a change should occur in the behaviour of the army, and his children and friends should be again debarred from approaching him, he should endeavour to make his escape, and place himself under the protection of his brother-in-law, the Prince of Orange. The like injunction, never to allow himself to be made king, unless he should arrive at the throne by the previous removal of his father and his brothers, Charles likewise laid upon the little Gloucester. With the Princess Elizabeth, a child of uncommon sensibility and quickness of under standing, the king took great delight in conversing. On one point in which he relieved her from submission and obedience to her royal mother, viz. in religion, he had the gratification to discover in her a degree both of knowledge and of firmness, unusual at her years. The subject of religion was that with which, on each repetition of his counsels, the king concluded. He enjoined them all alike to persevere, against all entreaty and opposition, in the profession of that form of Christianity in which they had been educated, "what discountenance and ruin soever might befall the poor church." That these admonitory discourses were heard by his little group of serious and wondering listeners with a devout purpose to obey, the king felt a natural but just assurance. Nor was it long before their obedience began to be put to a practical test: a few months afterwards, the Duke of York, under the care of Colonel Bamfield, a gentleman employed for that purpose by the king, made his escape from St. James's, and, in female attire, crossed safely into Holland. The brightness which at that moment shone on Charles's prospects, proved, as he foresaw, transient and deceptive. Under the management of Cromwell and Ireton, the army had grown to be a republic. "The agitators had become masters of their masters.” In the Military legislature, the upper house, or council of officers, continued indeed to be governed absolutely by the lieutenant-general and his adroit son-in-law; but the council of agitators had views of their own, and, aware of their strength and importance, were resolved to pursue them. These views appear to have been at that time consistent with their notions of loyalty. They had foiled the Presbyterians; they were charmed with the honour and influence conferred on the army by the king's residence among them; and as far as their rude habits and independent mode of thinking allowed, were willing to return to the obedience of subjects. It had always been the policy of Cromwell, to throw himself headlong into each current of faction, as it successively rose to supreme influence; to appear at the head of every movement; to outstrip the foremost partizans. Ever keeping in view his own ambitious ends, he employed indifferently all men, and all methods, to promote them. "When," observes Berkley, "he thought the parliament would make his fortune, he resigned himself totally to them; when the Presbyterians prevailed, he took the covenant; when he quitted the parliament, his chief dependence was on the army, which he endeavoured by all means to keep in unity; and if he could not bring it to his sense, he, rather than suffer any division in it, went over himself, and carried his friends with him into that way which the army chose." The idol of the army was, for the moment, the king. To affect an earnest loyalty, therefore, was now his business; and such was the energy, and, at the same time, the flexibility of this wonderful man's nature, that by conforming, not his words and demeanour only, but his thoughts and will, to this pretence, he, for the time, really became so; could drop tears (not altogether "crocodile's tears") profusely, on the sovereign's hand, while he kissed it in token of dutiful affection; and could blame the business-like delays of Ireton, in drawing up those proposals of the army, which were to be the means of restoring the king to his power and dignities. On his first experience of the feeling which prevailed among the military, Charles himself may have been deluded—may have forgotten the transitory and |