Pressed thus on a topic, so important above all others in his eyes, the king gave a proof of his sincerity by greater concessions of power than he had ever intended. He had some time before openly offered to let the parliament name all the commissioners of the militia for seven years, and all the officers of state and judges to hold their places for life.[305] He now empowered a secret agent in London, Mr. William Murray, privately to sound the parliamentary leaders, if they would consent to the establishment of a moderated episcopacy after three or five years, on condition of his departing from the right of the militia during his whole life.[306] This dereliction of the main ground of contest brought down the queen's indignation on his head. She wrote several letters, in an imperious and unfeeling tone, declaring that she would never set her foot in England as long as the parliament should exist.[307] Jermyn and Colepepper assumed a style hardly less dictatorial in their letters,[308] till Charles withdrew the proposal, which Murray seems never to have communicated.[309] It was indeed the evident effect of despair and a natural weariness of his thorny crown. He now began to express serious thoughts of making his escape,[310] and seems even to hint more than once at a resignation of his government to the Prince of Wales. But Henrietta forbade him to think of an escape, and alludes to the other with contempt and indignation.[311] With this selfish and tyrannical woman, that life of exile and privacy which religion and letters would have rendered tolerable to the king, must have been spent in hardly less bitterness than on a dishonoured throne. She had displayed in France as little virtue as at home; the small resources which should have been frugally dispensed to those who had lost all for the royal cause were squandered upon her favourite and her French servants.[312] So totally had she abandoned all regard to English interest, that Hyde and Capel, when retired to Jersey, the governor of which, Sir Edward Carteret, still held out for the king, discovered a plan formed by the queen and Jermyn to put that island into the hands of France.[313] They were exceedingly perplexed at this discovery, conscious of the impossibility of defending Jersey, and yet determined not to let it be torn away from the sovereignty of the British Crown. No better expedient occurred than, as soon as the project should be ripe for execution, to despatch a message "to the Earl of Northumberland or some other person of honour," asking for aid to preserve the island. This was of course, in other words, to surrender it into the power of the parliament, which they would not name even to themselves. But it was evidently more consistent with their loyalty to the king and his family, than to trust the good faith of Mazarin. The scheme, however, was abandoned; for we hear no more of it.

It must, however, be admitted at the present day, that there was no better expedient for saving the king's life, and some portion of royal authority for his descendants (a fresh renunciation of episcopacy perhaps only excepted), than such an abdication; the time for which had come before he put himself into the hands of the Scots. His own party had been weakened, and the number of his well-wishers diminished, by something more than the events of war. The last unfortunate year had, in two memorable instances, revealed fresh proofs of that culpable imprudence, speaking mildly, which made wise and honest men hopeless of any permanent accommodation. At the battle of Naseby, copies of some letters to the queen, chiefly written about the time of the treaty of Uxbridge, and strangely preserved, fell into the hands of the enemy, and were instantly published.[314] No other losses of that fatal day were more injurious to his cause. Besides many proofs of a contemptible subserviency to one justly deemed irreconcilable to the civil and religious interests of the kingdom, and many expressions indicating schemes and hopes inconsistent with any practicable peace, and especially a design to put an end to the parliament,[315] he gave her power to treat with the English catholics, promising to take away all penal laws against them as soon as God should enable him to do so, in consideration of such powerful assistance, as might deserve so great a favour, and enable him to effect it.[316] Yet it was certain that no parliament, except in absolute duress, would consent to repeal these laws. To what sort of victory therefore did he look? It was remembered that, on taking the sacrament at Oxford some time before, he had solemnly protested that he would maintain the protestant religion of the church of England, without any connivance at popery. What trust could be reposed in a prince capable of forfeiting so solemn a pledge? Were it even supposed that he intended to break his word with the catholics, after obtaining such aid as they could render him, would his insincerity be less flagrant?[317]

Discovery of Glamorgan's treaty.—These suspicions were much aggravated by a second discovery that took place soon afterwards, of a secret treaty between the Earl of Glamorgan and the confederate Irish catholics, not merely promising the repeal of the penal laws, but the establishment of their religion in far the greater part of Ireland.[318] The Marquis of Ormond, as well as Lord Digby who happened to be at Dublin, loudly exclaimed against Glamorgan's presumption in concluding such a treaty, and committed him to prison on a charge of treason. He produced two commissions from the king, secretly granted without any seal or the knowledge of any minister, containing the fullest powers to treat with the Irish, and promising to fulfil any conditions into which he should enter. The king, informed of this, disavowed Glamorgan; and asserted in a letter to the parliament that he had merely a commission to raise men for his service, but no power to treat of anything else, without the privity of the lord lieutenant, much less to capitulate anything concerning religion or any property belonging either to church or laity.[319] Glamorgan however was soon released, and lost no portion of the king's or his family's favour.

This transaction has been the subject of much historical controversy. The enemies of Charles, both in his own and later ages, have considered it as a proof of his indifference at least to the protestant religion, and of his readiness to accept the assistance of Irish rebels on any conditions. His advocates for a long time denied the authenticity of Glamorgan's commissions. But Dr. Birch demonstrated that they were genuine; and, if his dissertation could have left any doubt, later evidence might be adduced in confirmation.[320] Hume, in a very artful and very unfair statement, admitting the authenticity of these instruments, endeavours to show that they were never intended to give Glamorgan any power to treat without Ormond's approbation. But they are worded in the most unconditional manner, without any reference to Ormond. No common reader can think them consistent with the king's story. I do not, however, impute to him any intention of ratifying the terms of Glamorgan's treaty. His want of faith was not to the protestant, but to the catholic. Upon weighing the whole of the evidence, it appears to me that he purposely gave Glamorgan, a sanguine and injudicious man, whom he could easily disown, so ample a commission as might remove the distrust that the Irish were likely to entertain of a negotiation wherein Ormond should be concerned; while by a certain latitude in the style of the instrument, and by his own letters to the lord lieutenant about Glamorgan's errand, he left it open to assert, in case of necessity, that it was never intended to exclude the former's privity and sanction. Charles had unhappily long been in the habit of perverting his natural acuteness to the mean subterfuges of equivocal language.

By these discoveries of the king's insincerity, and by what seemed his infatuated obstinacy in refusing terms of accommodation, both nations became more and more alienated from him; the one hardly restrained from casting him off, the other ready to leave him to his fate.[321]

The king delivered up by the Scots.—This ill opinion of the king forms one apology for that action which has exposed the Scots nation to so much reproach—their delivery of his person to the English parliament. Perhaps if we place ourselves in their situation, it will not appear deserving of quite such indignant censure. It would have shown more generosity to have offered the king an alternative of retiring to Holland; and from what we now know, he probably would not have neglected the opportunity. But the consequence might have been his solemn deposition from the English throne; and, however we may think such banishment more honourable than the acceptance of degrading conditions, the Scots, we should remember, saw nothing in the king's taking the covenant, and sweeping away prelatic superstitions, but the bounden duty of a christian sovereign, which only the most perverse self-will induced him to set at nought.[322] They had a right also to consider the interests of his family, which the threatened establishment of a republic in England would defeat. To carry him back with their army into Scotland, besides being equally ruinous to the English monarchy, would have exposed their nation to the most serious dangers. To undertake his defence by arms against England, as the ardent royalists desired, and doubtless the determined republicans no less, would have been, as was proved afterwards, a mad and culpable renewal of the miseries of both kingdoms.[323] He had voluntarily come to their camp; no faith was pledged to him; their very right to retain his person, though they had argued for it with the English parliament, seemed open to much doubt. The circumstance, unquestionably, which has always given a character of apparent baseness to this transaction, is the payment of £400,000 made to them so nearly at the same time that it has passed for the price of the king's person. This sum was part of a larger demand on the score of arrears of pay, and had been agreed upon long before we have any proof or reasonable suspicion of a stipulation to deliver up the king.[324] That the parliament would never have actually paid it on any other consideration, there can be, I presume, no kind of doubt; and of this the Scots must have been fully aware. But whether there were any such secret bargain as has been supposed, or whether they would have delivered him up, if there had been no pecuniary expectation in the case, is what I cannot perceive sufficient grounds to pronounce with confidence; though I am much inclined to believe the affirmative of the latter question. And it is deserving of particular observation, that the party in the House of Commons which sought most earnestly to obtain possession of the king's person, and carried all the votes for payment of money to the Scots, was that which had no further aim than an accommodation with him, and a settlement of the government on the basis of its fundamental laws, though doubtless on terms very derogatory to his prerogative; while those who opposed each part of the negotiation were the zealous enemies of the king, and, in some instances, at least, of the monarchy. The Journals bear witness to this.[325]

Growth of the independents and republicans.—Whatever might have been the consequence of the king's accepting the propositions of Newcastle, his chance of restoration upon any terms was now in all appearance very slender. He had to encounter enemies more dangerous and implacable than the presbyterians. That faction, which from small and insensible beginnings had acquired continued strength, through ambition in a few, through fanaticism in many, through a despair in some of reconciling the pretensions of royalty with those of the people, was now rapidly ascending to superiority. Though still weak in the House of Commons, it had spread prodigiously in the army, especially since its new-modelling at the time of the self-denying ordinance.[326] The presbyterians saw with dismay the growth of their own and the constitution's enemies. But the royalists, who had less to fear from confusion than from any settlement that the Commons would be brought to make, rejoiced in the increasing disunion; and fondly believed, like their master, that one or other party must seek assistance at their hands.[327]

Opposition to the presbyterian government.—The independent party comprehended, besides the members of that religious denomination,[328] a countless brood of fanatical sectaries, nursed in the lap of presbyterianism, and fed with the stimulating aliment she furnished, till their intoxicated fancies could neither be restrained within the limits of her creed nor those of her discipline.[329] The presbyterian zealots were systematically intolerant. A common cause made toleration the doctrine of the sectaries. About the beginning of the war, it had been deemed expedient to call together an assembly of divines, nominated by the parliament, and consisting not only of clergymen, but, according to the presbyterian usage, of lay members, peers as well as commoners, by whose advice a general reformation of the church was to be planned.[330] These were chiefly presbyterian; though a small minority of independents, and a few moderate episcopalians, headed by Selden,[331] gave them much trouble. The general imposition of the covenant, and the substitution of the directory for the common prayer (which was forbidden to be used even in any private family, by an ordinance of August 1645), seemed to assure the triumph of presbyterianism; which became complete, in point of law, by an ordinance of February 1646, establishing for three years the Scots model of classes, synods, and general assemblies throughout England.[332] But in this very ordinance there was a reservation which wounded the spiritual arrogance of that party. Their favourite tenet had always been the independency of the church. They had rejected, with as much abhorrence as the catholics themselves, the royal supremacy, so far as it controlled the exercise of spiritual discipline. But the House of Commons were inclined to part with no portion of that prerogative which they had wrested from the Crown. Besides the independents, who were still weak, a party called Erastians,[333] and chiefly composed of the common lawyers, under the guidance of Selden, the sworn foe of every ecclesiastical usurpation, withstood the assembly's pretensions with success. They negatived a declaration of the divine right of presbyterian government. They voted a petition from the assembly, complaining of a recent ordinance as an encroachment on spiritual jurisdiction, to be a breach of privilege. The presbyterian tribunals were made subject to the appellant control of parliament; as those of the Anglican church had been to that of the Crown. The cases wherein spiritual censures could be pronounced, or the sacrament denied, instead of being left to the clergy, were defined by law.[334] Whether from dissatisfaction on this account, or some other reason, the presbyterian discipline was never carried into effect, except to a certain extent in London and in Lancashire. But the beneficed clergy throughout England, till the return of Charles II., were chiefly, though not entirely, of that denomination.[335]

This party was still so far predominant, having the strong support of the city of London and its corporation,[336] with almost all the peers who remained in their house, that the independents and other sectaries neither opposed this ordinance for its temporary establishment, nor sought anything farther than a toleration for their own worship. The question, as Neal well observes, was not between presbytery and independency, but between presbytery with a toleration, and without one.[337] Not merely from their own exclusive bigotry, but from a political alarm by no means ungrounded, the presbyterians stood firmly against all liberty of conscience. But in this again they could not influence the House of Commons to suppress the sectaries, though no open declaration in favour of indulgence was as yet made. It is still the boast of the independents that they first brought forward the great principles of religious toleration (I mean as distinguished from maxims of political expediency) which had been confined to a few philosophical minds; to Sir Thomas More, in those days of his better judgment when he planned his republic of Utopia, to Thuanus, or L'Hospital. Such principles are indeed naturally congenial to the persecuted; and it is by the alternate oppression of so many different sects, that they have now obtained their universal reception. But the independents also assert that they first maintained them while in power; a far higher praise, which however can only be allowed them by comparison. Without invidiously glancing at their early conduct in New England,[338] it must be admitted that the continuance of the penal laws against catholics, the prohibition of the episcopalian worship, and the punishment of one or two anti-trinitarians under Cromwell, are proofs that the tolerant principle had not yet acquired perfect vigour. If the independent sectaries were its earliest advocates, it was the Anglican writers, the latitudinarian school of Chillingworth, Hales, Taylor, Locke, and Hoadley, that rendered it victorious.[339]

The king, as I have said, and his party cherished too sanguine hopes from the disunion of their opponents.[340] Though warned of it by the parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge, though in fact it was quite notorious and undisguised, they seem never to have comprehended that many active spirits looked to the entire subversion of the monarchy. The king in particular was haunted by a prejudice, natural to his obstinate and undiscerning mind, that he was necessary to the settlement of the nation; so that, if he remained firm, the whole parliament and army must be at his feet. Yet during the negotiations at Newcastle there was daily an imminent danger that the majority of parliament, irritated by his delays, would come to some vote excluding him from the throne. The Scots presbyterians, whatever we may think of their behaviour, were sincerely attached, if not by loyal affection, yet by national pride, to the blood of their ancient kings. They thought and spoke of Charles as of a headstrong child, to be restrained and chastised, but never cast off.[341] But in England he had absolutely no friends among the prevailing party; many there were who thought monarchy best for the nation, but none who cared for the king.

This schism nevertheless between the parliament and the army was at least in appearance very desirable for Charles, and seemed to afford him an opportunity which a discreet prince might improve to great advantage, though it unfortunately deluded him with chimerical expectations.[342] At the conclusion of the war, which the useless obstinacy of the royalists had protracted till the beginning of 1647,[343] the Commons began to take measures for breaking the force of their remaining enemy. They resolved to disband a part of the army, and to send the rest into Ireland.[344] They formed schemes for getting rid of Cromwell, and even made some demur about continuing Fairfax in command.[345] But in all measures that exact promptitude and energy, treachery and timidity are apt to enfeeble the resolutions of a popular assembly. Their demonstrations of enmity were however so alarming to the army, who knew themselves disliked by the people, and dependent for their pay on the parliament, that as early as April, 1647, an overture was secretly made to the king, that they would replace him in his power and dignity. He cautiously answered, that he would not involve the kingdom in a fresh war, but should ever feel the strongest sense of this offer from the army.[346] Whether they were discontented at the coldness of this reply, or, as is more probable, the offer had only proceeded from a minority of the officers, no further overture was made, till not long afterwards the bold manœuvre of Joyce had placed the king's person in their power.

The parliament yield to the army.—The first effect of this military violence was to display the parliament's deficiency in political courage. It contained, we well know, a store of energetic spirits, not apt to swerve from their attachments. But, where two parties are almost equally balanced, the defection, which external circumstances must produce among those timid and feeble men from whom no assembly can be free, even though they should form but a small minority, will of course give a character of cowardice and vacillation to counsels, which is imputed to the whole. They immediately expunged, by a majority of 96 to 79, a vote of reprehension passed some weeks before, upon a remonstrance from the army which the presbyterians had highly resented, and gave other proofs of retracing their steps. But the army was not inclined to accept their submission in full discharge of the provocation. It had schemes of its own for the reformation and settlement of the kingdom, more extensive than those of the presbyterian faction. It had its own wrongs also to revenge. Advancing towards London, the general and council of war sent up charges of treason against eleven principal members of that party, who obtained leave to retire beyond sea. Here may be said to have fallen the legislative power and civil government of England; which from this hour till that of the restoration had never more than a momentary and precarious gleam of existence, perpetually interrupted by the sword.

Those who have once bowed their knee to force, must expect that force will be for ever their master. In a few weeks after this submission of the Commons to the army, they were insulted by an unruly, tumultuous mob of apprentices, engaged in the presbyterian politics of the city, who compelled them by actual violence to rescind several of their late votes.[347] Trampled upon by either side, the two speakers, several peers, and a great number of the lower house, deemed it somewhat less ignominious, and certainly more politic, to throw themselves on the protection of the army. They were accordingly soon restored to their places, at the price of a more complete and irretrievable subjection to the military power than they had already undergone. Though the presbyterians maintained a pertinacious resistance within the walls of the house, it was evident that the real power of command was gone from them, and that Cromwell with the army must either become arbiters between the king and parliament, or crush the remaining authority of both.[348]

Mysterious conduct of Cromwell.—There are few circumstances in our history which have caused more perplexity to inquirers than the conduct of Cromwell and his friends towards the king in the year 1647. Those who look only at the ambitious and dissembling character of that leader, or at the fierce republicanism imputed to Ireton, will hardly believe that either of them could harbour anything like sincere designs of restoring him even to that remnant of sovereignty which the parliament would have spared. Yet, when we consider attentively the public documents and private memoirs of that period, it does appear probable that their first intentions towards the king were not unfavourable, and so far sincere that it was their project to make use of his name rather than totally to set him aside. But whether by gratifying Cromwell and his associates with honours, and throwing the whole administration into their hands, Charles would have long contrived to keep a tarnished crown on his head, must be very problematical.

Imprudent hopes of the king.—The new gaolers of this unfortunate prince began by treating him with unusual indulgence, especially in permitting his episcopal chaplains to attend him. This was deemed a pledge of what he thought an invaluable advantage in dealing with the army, that they would not insist upon the covenant, which in fact was nearly as odious to them as to the royalists, though for very different reasons. Charles, naturally sanguine, and utterly incapable in every part of his life of taking a just view of affairs, was extravagantly elated by these equivocal testimonies of good-will. He blindly listened to private insinuations from rash or treacherous friends, that the soldiers were with him, just after his seizure by Joyce. "I would have you to know, sir," he said to Fairfax, "that I have as good an interest in the army as yourself;" an opinion as injudiciously uttered as it was absurdly conceived.[349] These strange expectations account for the ill reception which in the hasty irritation of disappointment he gave to the proposals of the army, when they were actually tendered to him at Hampton Court, and which seems to have eventually cost him his life. These proposals appear to have been drawn up by Ireton, a lawyer by education, and a man of much courage and capacity. He had been supposed, like a large proportion of the officers, to aim at a settlement of the nation under a democratical polity. But the army, even if their wishes in general went so far, which is hardly evident, were not yet so decidedly masters as to dictate a form of government uncongenial to the ancient laws and fixed prejudices of the people. Something of this tendency is discoverable in the propositions made to the king, which had never appeared in those of the parliament. It was proposed that parliaments should be biennial; that they should never sit less than a hundred and twenty days, nor more than two hundred and forty; that the representation of the Commons should be reformed, by abolishing small boroughs and increasing the number of members for counties, so as to render the House of Commons, as near as might be, an equal representation of the whole. In respect of the militia and some other points, they either followed the parliamentary propositions of Newcastle, or modified them favourably for the king. They excepted a very small number of the king's adherents from the privilege of paying a composition for their estates, and set that of the rest considerably lower than had been fixed by the parliament. They stipulated that the royalists should not sit in the next parliament. As to religion, they provided for liberty of conscience, declared against the imposition of the covenant, and by insisting on the retrenchment of the coercive jurisdiction of bishops and the abrogation of penalties for not reading the common prayer, left it to be implied that both might continue established.[350] The whole tenor of these propositions was in a style far more respectful to the king, and lenient towards his adherents, than had ever been adopted since the beginning of the war. The sincerity indeed of these overtures might be very questionable, if Cromwell had been concerned in them; but they proceeded from those elective tribunes called Agitators, who had been established in every regiment to superintend the interests of the army.[351] And the terms were surely as good as Charles had any reason to hope. The severities against his party were mitigated. The grand obstacles to all accommodation, the covenant and presbyterian establishment, were at once removed; or, if some difficulty might occur as to the latter, in consequence of the actual possession of benefices by the presbyterian clergy, it seemed not absolutely insuperable. For the changes projected in the constitution of parliament, they were not necessarily injurious to the monarchy. That parliament should not be dissolved until it had sat a certain time, was so salutary a provision, that the triennial act was hardly complete without it.

It is, however, probable, from the king's extreme tenaciousness of his prerogative, that these were the conditions that he found it most difficult to endure. Having obtained, through Sir John Berkley, a sight of the propositions before they were openly made, he expressed much displeasure; and said that, if the army were inclined to close with him, they would never have demanded such hard terms. He seems to have principally objected, at least in words, to the exception of seven unnamed persons from pardon, to the exclusion of his party from the next parliament, and to the want of any articles in favour of the church. Berkley endeavoured to show him that it was not likely that the army, if meaning sincerely, should ask less than this. But the king, still tampering with the Scots, and keeping his eyes fixed on the city and parliament, at that moment came to an open breach with the army, disdainfully refused the propositions when publicly tendered to him, with such expressions of misplaced resentment and preposterous confidence as convinced the officers that they could neither conciliate nor trust him.[352] This unexpected haughtiness lost him all chance with those proud and republican spirits; and, as they succeeded about the same time in bridling the presbyterian party in parliament, there seemed no necessity for an agreement with the king, and their former determinations of altering the frame of government returned with more revengeful fury against his person.[353]

Charles's flight from Hampton Court.—Charles's continuance at Hampton Court, there can be little doubt, would have exposed him to such imminent risk that, in escaping from thence, he acted on a reasonable principle of self-preservation. He might probably, with due precautions, have reached France or Jersey. But the hastiness of his retreat from Hampton Court giving no time, he fell again into the toils, through the helplessness of his situation, and the unfortunate counsels of one whom he trusted.[354] The fortitude of his own mind sustained him in this state of captivity and entire seclusion from his friends. No one, however sensible to the infirmities of Charles's disposition, and the defects of his understanding, can refuse admiration to that patient firmness and unaided acuteness which he displayed throughout the last and most melancholy year of his life. He had now abandoned all expectation of obtaining any present terms for the church or Crown. He proposed, therefore, what he had privately empowered Murray to offer the year before, to confirm the presbyterian government for three years, and to give up the militia during his whole life, with other concessions of importance.[355] To preserve the church lands from sale, to shield his friends from proscription, to obtain a legal security for the restoration of the monarchy in his son, were from henceforth the main objects of all his efforts. It was, however, far too late, even for these moderate conditions of peace. Upon his declining to pass four bills, tendered to him as preliminaries of a treaty, which on that very account, besides his objections to part of their contents, he justly considered as unfair, the parliament voted that no more addresses should be made to him, and that they would receive no more messages.[356] He was placed in close and solitary confinement; and at a meeting of the principal officers at Windsor it was concluded to bring him to trial, and avenge the blood shed in the war by an awful example of punishment; Cromwell and Ireton, if either of them had been ever favourable to the king, acceding at this time to the severity of the rest.

Yet in the midst of this peril and seeming abandonment, his affairs were really less desperate than they had been; and a few rays of light broke for a time through the clouds that enveloped him. From the hour that the Scots delivered him up at Newcastle, they seem to have felt the discredit of such an action, and longed for the opportunity of redeeming their public name. They perceived more and more that a well-disciplined army, under a subtle chief inveterately hostile to them, were rapidly becoming masters of England. Instead of that covenanted alliance, that unity in church and state they had expected, they were to look for all the jealousy and dissension that a complete discordance in civil and spiritual polity could inspire. Their commissioners, therefore, in England, Lanerk, always a moderate royalist, and Lauderdale, a warm presbyterian, had kept up a secret intercourse with the king at Hampton Court. After his detention at Carisbrook, they openly declared themselves against the four bills proposed by the English parliament; and at length concluded a private treaty with him, by which, on certain terms quite as favourable as he could justly expect, they bound themselves to enter England with an army, in order to restore him to his freedom and dignity.[357] This invasion was to be combined with risings in various parts of the country; the presbyterian and royalist, though still retaining much of animosity towards each other, concurring at least in abhorrence of military usurpation; and the common people having very generally returned to that affectionate respect for the king's person, which sympathy for his sufferings, and a sense how little they had been gainers by the change of government, must naturally have excited.[358]

The presbyterians regain the ascendant.—The unfortunate issue of the Scots expedition under the Duke of Hamilton, and of the various insurrections throughout England, quelled by the vigilance and good conduct of Fairfax and Cromwell, is well known. But these formidable manifestations of the public sentiment in favour of peace with the king on honourable conditions, wherein the city of London, ruled by the presbyterian ministers, took a share, compelled the House of Commons to retract its measures. They came to a vote, by 165 to 99, that they would not alter the fundamental government by King, Lords, and Commons;[359] they abandoned their impeachment against seven peers, the most moderate of the upper house, and the most obnoxious to the army,[360] they restored the eleven members to their seats:[361] they revoked their resolution against a personal treaty with the king, and even that which required his assent by certain preliminary articles.[362] In a word, the party for distinction's sake called Presbyterian, but now rather to be denominated constitutional, regained its ascendancy. This change in the counsels of parliament brought on the treaty of Newport.

Treaty of Newport.—The treaty of Newport was set on foot and managed by those politicians of the House of Lords, who, having long suspected no danger to themselves but from the power of the king, had discovered, somewhat of the latest, that the Crown itself was at stake, and that their own privileges were set on the same cast. Nothing was more remote from the intentions of the Earl of Northumberland or Lord Say, than to see themselves pushed from their seats by such upstarts as Ireton and Harrison; and their present mortification afforded a proof how men reckoned wise in their generation become the dupes of their own selfish, crafty, and pusillanimous policy. They now grew anxious to see a treaty concluded with the king. Sensible that it was necessary to anticipate, if possible, the return of Cromwell from the north, they implored him to comply at once with all the propositions of parliament, or at least to yield in the first instance as far as he meant to go.[363] They had not, however, mitigated in any degree the rigorous conditions so often proposed; nor did the king during this treaty obtain any reciprocal concession worth mentioning in return for his surrender of almost all that could be demanded. Did the positive adherence of the parliament to all these propositions, in circumstances so perilous to themselves, display less unreasonable pertinacity than that so often imputed to Charles? Or if, as was the fact, the majority which the presbyterians had obtained was so precarious that they dared not hazard it by suggesting any more moderate counsels, what rational security would the treaty have afforded him, had he even come at once into all their requisitions? His real error was to have entered upon any treaty, and still more to have drawn it out by tardy and ineffectual capitulations. There had long been only one course either for safety or for honour, the abdication of his royal office; now probably too late to preserve his life, but still more honourable than the treaty of Newport. Yet though he was desirous to make his escape to France, I have not observed any hint that he had thoughts of resigning the crown; whether from any mistaken sense of obligation, or from an apprehension that it might affect the succession of his son.

There can be no more erroneous opinion than that of such as believe that the desire of overturning the monarchy produced the civil war, rather than that the civil war brought on the former. In a peaceful and ancient kingdom like England, the thought of change could not spontaneously arise. A very few speculative men, by the study of antiquity, or by observation of the prosperity of Venice and Holland, might be led to an abstract preference of republican politics; some fanatics might aspire to a Jewish theocracy; but at the meeting of the Long Parliament, we have not the slightest cause to suppose that any party, or any number of persons among its members, had formed what must then have appeared so extravagant a conception.[364] The insuperable distrust of the king's designs, the irritation excited by the sufferings of the war, the impracticability, which every attempt at negotiation displayed, of obtaining his acquiescence to terms deemed indispensable, gradually created a powerful faction, whose chief bond of union was a determination to set him aside.[365] What further scheme they had planned is uncertain; none probably in which any number were agreed: some looked to the Prince of Wales, others perhaps, at one time, to the elector palatine;[366] but necessity itself must have suggested to many the idea of a republican settlement. In the new-modelled army of 1645, composed of independents and enthusiasts of every denomination, a fervid eagerness for changes in the civil polity, as well as in religion, was soon found to predominate. Not checked, like the two houses, by attachment to forms, and by the influence of lawyers, they launched forth into varied projects of reform, sometimes judicious, or at least plausible, sometimes wildly fanatical. They reckoned the king a tyrant whom, as they might fight against, they might also put to death, and whom it were folly to provoke, if he were again to become their master. Elated with their victories, they began already in imagination to carve out the kingdom for themselves; and remembered that saying so congenial to a revolutionary army, that the first of monarchs was a successful leader, the first of nobles were his followers.[367]

Gradual progress of a republican party.—The knowledge of this innovating spirit in the army gave confidence to the violent party in parliament, and increased its numbers by the accession of some of those to whom nature has given a fine sense for discerning their own advantage. It was doubtless swollen through the king's letters, and his pertinacity in clinging to his prerogative. And the complexion of the House of Commons was materially altered by the introduction at once of a large body of fresh members. They had at the beginning abstained from issuing writs to replace those whose death or expulsion had left their seats vacant. These vacancies, by the disabling votes against all the king's party,[368] became so numerous that it seemed a glaring violation of the popular principles to which they appealed, to carry on the public business with so maimed a representation of the people. It was however plainly impossible to have elections in many parts of the kingdom, while the royal army was in strength; and the change, by filling up nearly two hundred vacancies at once, was likely to become so important that some feared that the cavaliers, others that the independents and republicans, might find their advantage in it.[369] The latter party were generally earnest for new elections; and carried their point against the presbyterians in September 1645, when new writs were ordered for all the places which were left deficient of one or both representatives.[370] The result of these elections, though a few persons rather friendly to the king came into the house, was on the whole very favourable to the army. The self-denying ordinance no longer being in operation, the principal officers were elected on every side; and, with not many exceptions, recruited the ranks of that small body, which had already been marked by implacable dislike of the king, and by zeal for a total new-modelling of the government.[371] In the summer of 1646, this party had so far obtained the upper hand that, according to one of our best authorities, the Scots commissioners had all imaginable difficulty to prevent his deposition. In the course of the year 1647, more overt proofs of a design to change the established constitution were given by a party out of doors. A petition was addressed "to the supreme authority of this nation, the Commons assembled in parliament." It was voted upon a division, that the house dislikes this petition, and cannot approve of its being delivered; and afterwards, by a majority of only 94 to 86, that it was seditious and insolent, and should be burned by the hangman.[372] Yet the first decisive proof, perhaps, which the journals of parliament afford of the existence of a republican party, was the vote of 22nd Sept. 1647, that they would once again make application to the king for those things which they judged necessary for the welfare and safety of the kingdom. This was carried by 70 to 23.[373] Their subsequent resolution of Jan. 4, 1648, against any further addresses to the king, which passed by a majority of 141 to 91, was a virtual renunciation of allegiance. The Lords, after a warm debate, concurred in this vote. And the army had in November 1647, before the king's escape from Hampton Court published a declaration of their design for the settlement of the nation under a sovereign representative assembly, which should possess authority to make or repeal laws, and to call magistrates to account.

We are not certainly to conclude that all who, in 1648, had made up their minds against the king's restoration, were equally averse to all regal government. The Prince of Wales had taken so active, and, for a moment, so successful a share in the war of that year, that his father's enemies were become his own. Meetings however were held, where the military and parliamentary chiefs discussed the schemes of raising the Duke of York, or his younger brother the Duke of Glocester, to the throne. Cromwell especially wavered, or pretended to waver, as to the settlement of the nation; nor is there any evidence, so far as I know, that he had ever professed himself adverse to monarchy, till, dexterously mounting on the wave which he could not stem, he led on those zealots who had resolved to celebrate the inauguration of their new commonwealth with the blood of a victim king.[374]

Scheme among the officers of bringing Charles to trial.—It was about the end of 1647, as I have said, that the principal officers took the determination, which had been already menaced by some of the agitators, of bringing the king, as the first and greatest delinquent, to public justice.[375] Too stern and haughty, too confident of the rightfulness of their actions, to think of private assassination, they sought to gratify their pride by the solemnity and notoriousness, by the very infamy and eventual danger, of an act unprecedented in the history of nations. Throughout the year 1648, this design, though suspended, became familiar to the people's expectation.[376] The commonwealth's men and the levellers, the various sectaries (admitting a few exceptions) grew clamorous for the king's death. Petitions were presented to the Commons, praying for justice on all delinquents, from the highest to the lowest.[377] And not long afterwards, the general officers of the army came forward with a long remonstrance against any treaty, and insisting that the capital and grand author of their troubles be speedily brought to justice, for the treason, blood, and mischief, whereof he had been guilty.[378] This was soon followed by the vote of the presbyterian party, that the answers of the king to the propositions of both houses are a ground for the house to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom,[379] by the violent expulsion, or as it was called, seclusion of all the presbyterian members from the house, and the ordinance of a wretched minority, commonly called the Rump, constituting the high court of justice for the trial of the king.[380]

A very small number among those who sat in this strange tribunal upon Charles the First were undoubtedly capable of taking statesman-like views of the interests of their party, and might consider his death a politic expedient for consolidating the new settlement. It seemed to involve the army, which had openly abetted the act, and even the nation by its passive consent, in such inexpiable guilt towards the royal family, that neither common prudence nor a sense of shame would permit them to suffer its restoration. But by far the greater part of the regicides such considerations were either overlooked or kept in the background. Their more powerful motive was that fierce fanatical hatred of the king, the natural fruit of long civil dissension, inflamed by preachers more dark and sanguinary than those they addressed, and by a perverted study of the Jewish scriptures. They had been wrought to believe, not that his execution would be justified by state-necessity or any such feeble grounds of human reasoning, but that it was a bounden duty, which with a safe conscience they could not neglect. Such was the persuasion of Ludlow and Hutchinson, the most respectable names among the regicides; both of them free from all suspicion of interestedness or hypocrisy, and less intoxicated than the rest by fanaticism. "I was fully persuaded," says the former, "that an accommodation with the king was unsafe to the people of England, and unjust and wicked in the nature of it. The former, besides that it was obvious to all men, the king himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the parliament, which manifestly appeared in his own papers, taken at the battle of Naseby and elsewhere. Of the latter I was convinced by the express words of God's law; 'that blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.' (Numbers, c. xxxv. v. 33.) And therefore I could not consent to leave the guilt of so much blood on the nation, and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all, when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights and open breach of our laws and constitution on the king's part."[381] "As for Mr. Hutchinson," says his high-souled consort, "although he was very much confirmed in his judgment concerning the cause, yet being here called to an extraordinary action, whereof many were of several minds, he addressed himself to God by prayer, desiring the Lord, that, if through any human frailty, he were led into any error or false opinion in those great transactions, he would open his eyes, and not suffer him to proceed, but that he would confirm his spirit in the truth, and lead him by a right-enlightened conscience; and finding no check, but a confirmation in his conscience, that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright, unbiassed persons, proceeded to sign the sentence against the king. Although he did not then believe but it might one day come to be again disputed among men, yet both he and others thought they could not refuse it without giving up the people of God, whom they had led forth and engaged themselves unto by the oath of God, into the hands of God's and their enemies; and therefore he cast himself upon God's protection, acting according to the dictates of a conscience which he had sought the Lord to guide; and accordingly the Lord did signalise his favour afterward to him."[382]

Question of Charles's execution discussed.—The execution of Charles the First has been mentioned in later ages by a few with unlimited praise, by some with faint and ambiguous censure, by most with vehement reprobation. My own judgment will possibly be anticipated by the reader of the preceding pages. I shall certainly not rest it on the imaginary sacredness and divine origin of royalty, nor even on the irresponsibility with which the law of almost every country invests the person of its sovereign. Far be it from me to contend that no cases may be conceived, that no instances may be found in history, wherein the sympathy of mankind and the sound principles of political justice would approve a public judicial sentence as the due reward of tyranny and perfidiousness. But we may confidently deny that Charles the First was thus to be singled out as a warning to tyrants. His offences were not, in the worst interpretation, of that atrocious character which calls down the vengeance of insulted humanity, regardless of positive law. His government had been very arbitrary; but it may well be doubted whether any, even of his ministers, could have suffered death for their share in it, without introducing a principle of barbarous vindictiveness. Far from the sanguinary misanthropy of some monarchs, or the revengeful fury of others, he had in no instance displayed, nor does the minute scrutiny since made into his character entitle us to suppose, any malevolent dispositions beyond some proneness to anger, and a considerable degree of harshness in his demeanour.[383] As for the charge of having caused the bloodshed of the war, upon which, and not on any former misgovernment, his condemnation was grounded, it was as ill established as it would have been insufficient. Well might the Earl of Northumberland say, when the ordinance for the king's trial was before the Lords, that the greatest part of the people of England were not yet satisfied whether the king levied war first against the houses, or the houses against him.[384] The fact, in my opinion, was entirely otherwise. It is quite another question whether the parliament were justified in their resistance to the king's legal authority. But we may contend that, when Hotham, by their command, shut the gates of Hull against his sovereign, when the militia was called out in different counties by an ordinance of the two houses, both of which preceded by several weeks any levying of forces for the king, the bonds of our constitutional law were by them and their servants snapped asunder; and it would be the mere pedantry and chicane of political casuistry to enquire, even if the fact could be better ascertained, whether at Edgehill, or in the minor skirmishes that preceded, the first carbine was discharged by a cavalier or a roundhead. The aggressor in a war is not the first who uses force, but the first who renders force necessary.

But, whether we may think this war to have originated in the king's or the parliament's aggression, it is still evident that the former had a fair case with the nation, a cause which it was no plain violation of justice to defend. He was supported by the greater part of the Peers, by full one-third of the Commons, by the principal body of the gentry, and a large proportion of other classes. If his adherents did not form, as I think they did not, the majority of the people, they were at least more numerous, beyond comparison, than those who demanded or approved of his death. The steady deliberate perseverance of so considerable a body in any cause takes away the right of punishment from the conquerors, beyond what their own safety or reasonable indemnification may require. The vanquished are to be judged by the rules of national, not of municipal, law. Hence, if Charles, after having by a course of victories or the defection of the people prostrated all opposition, had abused his triumph by the execution of Essex or Hampden, Fairfax or Cromwell, I think that later ages would have disapproved of their deaths as positively, though not quite as vehemently, as they have of his own. The line is not easily drawn, in abstract reasoning, between the treason which is justly punished, and the social schism which is beyond the proper boundaries of law; but the civil war of England seems plainly to fall within the latter description. These objections strike me as unanswerable, even if the trial of Charles had been sanctioned by the voice of the nation through its legitimate representatives, or at least such a fair and full convention as might, in great necessity, supply the place of lawful authority. But it was, as we all know, the act of a bold but very small minority, who having forcibly expelled their colleagues from parliament, had usurped, under the protection of a military force, that power which all England reckoned illegal. I cannot perceive what there was in the imagined solemnity of this proceeding, in that insolent mockery of the forms of justice, accompanied by all unfairness and inhumanity in its circumstances, which can alleviate the guilt of the transaction; and if it be alleged that many of the regicides were firmly persuaded in their consciences of the right and duty of condemning the king, we may surely remember that private murderers have often had the same apology.

The character of Charles.—In discussing each particular transaction in the life of Charles, as of any other sovereign, it is required by the truth of history to spare no just animadversion upon his faults; especially where much art has been employed by the writers most in repute to carry the stream of public prejudice in an opposite direction. But when we come to a general estimate of his character, we should act unfairly not to give their full weight to those peculiar circumstances of his condition in this worldly scene, which tend to account for and extenuate his failings. The station of kings is, in a moral sense, so unfavourable, that those who are least prone to servile admiration should be on their guard against the opposite error of an uncandid severity. There seems no fairer method of estimating the intrinsic worth of a sovereign, than to treat him as a subject, and to judge, so far as the history of his life enables us, what he would have been in that more private and happier condition, from which the chance of birth has excluded him. Tried by this test, we cannot doubt that Charles the First would have been not altogether an amiable man, but one deserving of general esteem; his firm and conscientious virtues the same, his deviations from right far less frequent, than upon the throne. It is to be pleaded for this prince that his youth had breathed but the contaminated air of a profligate and servile court, that he had imbibed the lessons of arbitrary power from all who surrounded him, that he had been betrayed by a father's culpable blindness into the dangerous society of an ambitious, unprincipled favourite. To have maintained so much correctness of morality as his enemies confess, was a proof of Charles's virtuous dispositions; but his advocates are compelled also to own that he did not escape as little injured by the poisonous adulation to which he had listened. Of a temper by nature, and by want of restraint, too passionate, though not vindictive; and, though not cruel, certainly deficient in gentleness and humanity, he was entirely unfit for the very difficult station of royalty, and especially for that of a constitutional king. It is impossible to excuse his violations of liberty on the score of ignorance, especially after the petition of right; because his impatience of opposition from his council made it unsafe to give him any advice that thwarted his determination. His other great fault was want of sincerity—a fault that appeared in all parts of his life, and from which no one who has paid the subject any attention will pretend to exculpate him. Those indeed who know nothing but what they find in Hume may believe, on Hume's authority, that the king's contemporaries never dreamed of imputing to him any deviation from good faith; as if the whole conduct of the parliament had not been evidently founded upon a distrust, which on many occasions they very explicitly declared. But, so far as this insincerity was shown in the course of his troubles, it was a failing which untoward circumstances are apt to produce, and which the extreme hypocrisy of many among his adversaries might sometimes palliate. Few personages in history, we should recollect, have had so much of their actions revealed, and commented upon, as Charles; it is perhaps a mortifying truth that those who have stood highest with posterity, have seldom been those who have been most accurately known.

The turn of his mind was rather peculiar, and laid him open with some justice to very opposite censures—for an extreme obstinacy in retaining his opinion, and for an excessive facility in adopting that of others. But the apparent incongruity ceases, when we observe that he was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs. His chief talent was an acuteness in dispute; a talent not usually much exercised by kings, but which the strange events of his life called into action. He had, unfortunately for himself, gone into the study most fashionable in that age, of polemical theology; and, though not at all learned, had read enough of the English divines to maintain their side of the current controversies with much dexterity. But this unkingly talent was a poor compensation for the continual mistakes of his judgment in the art of government and the conduct of his affairs.[385]

Icon Basiliké.—It seems natural not to leave untouched in this place, the famous problem of the Icon Basiliké, which has been deemed an irrefragable evidence both of the virtues and the talents of Charles. But the authenticity of this work can hardly be any longer a question among judicious men. We have letters from Gauden and his family, asserting it as his own in the most express terms, and making it the ground of a claim for reward. We know that the king's sons were both convinced that it was not their father's composition, and that Clarendon was satisfied of the same. If Gauden not only set up a false claim to so famous a work, but persuaded those nearest to the king to surrender that precious record, as it had been reckoned, of his dying sentiments, it was an instance of successful impudence which has hardly a parallel. But I should be content to rest the case on that internal evidence, which has been so often alleged for its authenticity. The Icon has to my judgment all the air of a fictitious composition. Cold, stiff, elaborate, without a single allusion that bespeaks the superior knowledge of facts which the king must have possessed, it contains little but those rhetorical common-places which would suggest themselves to any forger. The prejudices of party, which exercise a strange influence in matters of taste, have caused this book to be extravagantly praised. It has doubtless a certain air of grave dignity, and the periods are more artificially constructed than was usual in that age (a circumstance not in favour of its authenticity); but the style is encumbered with frigid metaphors, as is said to be the case in Gauden's acknowledged writings; and the thoughts are neither beautiful, nor always exempt from affectation. The king's letters during his imprisonment, preserved in the Clarendon State Papers, and especially one to his son, from which an extract is given in the History of the Rebellion, are more satisfactory proofs of his integrity than the laboured self-panegyrics of the Icon Basiliké.[386]

Part II

Commonwealth—Abolition of the monarchy, and of the house of lords.—The death of Charles the First was pressed forward rather through personal hatred and superstition, than out of any notion of its necessity to secure a republican administration. That party was still so weak, that the Commons came more slowly, and with more difference of judgment than might be expected, to an absolute renunciation of monarchy. They voted indeed that the people are, under God, the original of all just power; and that whatever is enacted by the Commons in parliament hath the force of law, although the consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be not had thereto; terms manifestly not exclusive of the nominal continuance of the two latter. They altered the public style from the king's name to that of the parliament, and gave other indications of their intentions; but the vote for the abolition of monarchy did not pass till the seventh of February, after a debate, according to Whitelock, but without a division. None of that clamorous fanaticism showed itself, which, within recent memory, produced, from a far more numerous assembly, an instantaneous decision against monarchy. Wise men might easily perceive that the regal power was only suspended through the force of circumstances, not abrogated by any real change in public opinion.

The House of Lords, still less able than the Crown to withstand the inroads of democracy, fell by a vote of the Commons at the same time. It had continued during the whole progress of the war to keep up as much dignity as the state of affairs would permit; tenacious of small privileges, and offering much temporary opposition in higher matters, though always receding in the end from a contention wherein it could not be successful. The Commons, in return, gave them respectful language, and discountenanced the rude innovators who talked against the rights of the peerage. They voted, on occasion of some rumours, that they held themselves obliged, by the fundamental laws of the kingdom and their covenant, to preserve the peerage with the rights and privileges belonging to the House of Peers, equally with their own.[387] Yet this was with a secret reserve that the Lords should be of the same mind as themselves. For, the upper house having resented some words dropped from Sir John Evelyn at a conference concerning the removal of the king to Warwick Castle, importing that the Commons might be compelled to act without them, the Commons vindicating their member as if his words did not bear that interpretation, yet added, in the same breath, a plain hint that it was not beyond their own views of what might be done; "hoping that their lordships did not intend by their inference upon the words, even in the sense they took the same, so to bind up this house to one way of proceeding as that in no case whatsoever, though never so extraordinary, though never so much importing the honour and interest of the kingdom, the Commons of England might not do their duty, for the good and safety of the kingdom, in such a way as they may, if they cannot do it in such a way as they would and most desire."[388]