afterwards Primate, took constant occasion to introduce, and which, from their likeness to Popish observances, offended many even of those who were far from belonging to the Puritan party; and, while thus raising a jealousy of his fidelity to the national religion, he excited still deeper and better-founded apprehensions of his inclination to trample on the civil liberties of his subjects.

He raised taxes by his own authority; he imprisoned, prosecuted, and procured the conviction of members of Parliament for opposing this violation of the Constitution in the House of Commons, thus striking a blow at the independence of Parliament, with which the freedom of the whole nation was inseparably linked; and, finally, he dispensed with the Parliament altogether, and for eleven years governed the kingdom by his sole authority, as if he were an absolute sovereign, untrammelled by a single constitutional restraint.

Englishmen were not of a temper to acquiesce long in such a suppression of the freedom which their ancestors had won by their exertions above 400 years before; and, when at last the misguided monarch was compelled once more to summon a Parliament, its leaders showed a resolution to extinguish for ever the abuses which threatened to enslave them. The reluctance which Charles had shown to reassemble them, his manifest inability to dispense with their aid any longer, were sufficient proofs that the power was in their own hands if they asserted it with courage and steadiness. But, unhappily, they were not contented with mere security. The King's encroachments on their rights had begotten a spirit of retaliation, and they in their turn began to encroach on his prerogatives in a manner and degree as fatal to the maintenance of the proper constitu

tional balance of power in the Government as the most despotic of his measures had been.

They were not satisfied with extorting his assent to Bills which should bind him to a constant reassembling of the Parliament at fixed periods, to a renunciation of the power of arbitrary imprisonment, and of the claim to levy taxes by his own authority; they impeached his chief adviser, the Earl of Strafford, and wrung from him a consent to that statesman's execution, though the very mode of proceeding which they adopted, a Bill of Attainder, proved their inability to convict him of any legal offence. They even reduced Charles to renounce his right to dissolve them without their own consent; an act which, at one stroke, transferred the whole power of the State from him to themselves; and to consent to the exclusion of the Bishops from the House of Lords, a measure to which, intended, as it manifestly was, as a blow to the Church, he probably felt a still deeper repugnance.

Their progress was not even arrested by what might have been expected to prove fatal to it, the disunion in their own ranks, which the success that they had hitherto met with brought to light; for one section of the Opposition, to use a modern term, was composed of men who belonged neither to the Established Church nor to the Presbyterian body, but who called themselves Independents, as being opposed to any kind of ecclesiastical government, and who extended their principle, if it could be called one, to an equal hostility to civil government.

Cromwell was a member of this sect, which gradually became as hostile to the Presbyterians as to the Churchmen; for the Presbyterians, under the guidance of Hampden and Pym, limited their views to the imposition of sufficient

restrictions on the sovereign power, but the Independents desired to sweep it away altogether, and some of them probably already meditated the destruction of the King himself.1

But this difference of aim, vital as it was, did not at first prevent the two parties from acting together, Charles himself, by a strange act of illegal violence, even contributing to unite them more closely. In the autumn of 1641 the leaders of the Opposition induced the House of Commons to publish an elaborate document on the state of the nation, to which they gave the name of a Remonstrance, but which was so manifestly a seditious attempt to rekindle and keep alive the discontent which the King's recent concessions had in a great measure allayed, that it has found but few defenders among subsequent students of history. Charles was deeply offended, as was natural;2 and a few weeks afterwards not only impeached the chief authors of the memorial of high treason, but went down in person to the House of Commons to arrest those whom he had accused, the majority of whom, if not all, belonged to the Presbyterian party. He failed, since those whom he sought had been forewarned, and had withdrawn from the House before his arrival; but it could hardly be wondered at that an act

1 Walker, in his " History of Independency," part II., p. 208, admits that they intended from the first to pull down monarchy and set up anarchy, notwithstanding several declarations to the contrary, "which were from time to time extorted from them by the Presbyterians;" but Hallam appears to think that this was true only of a section of the party, saying (II. 270, note, Ed. 1832) that Neal seems to have proved the Independents, as a body, were not systematically adverse to monarchy."

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2 Hallam even thinks that to offend him was a part of their design. His words are, "The promoters of it might also hope from Charles's proud and hasty temper, that he would reply in such a tone as would more exasperate the Commons."

Commencement of Civil War.

7

which struck thus not only at the independence of the Parliament, but at their own individual safety, should have exasperated them: and accordingly we find that Hampden, the man of the highest personal character and influence, and Pym, the most eloquent orator among the Presbyterians, both of whom were among the objects of the King's attempt, were by it embittered to a greater degree of personal hostility to him than they had previously shown. They joined the Independents in carrying a vote to wrest from him the supreme authority over the militia, one of the most essential and inalienable parts of the Royal Prerogative; and, on his refusal to consent to such an encroachment on his unquestionable rights, they led the Parliament by rapid steps to armed resistance and to a formal raising of the standard of civil war.

We need not here recapitulate the melancholy events of the next seven years. The course of the war, which at first was not unfavourable to Charles, gradually turned against him, and that in the most unfortunate manner; the disasters of the Parliamentary army being mostly incurred under the command of Presbyterian officers, while the most important advantages which were gained were attributed to Cromwell and the Independents. The division between the two parties became day by day more clearly pronounced, the Independents constantly bearing down their adversaries, sometimes by chicanery, sometimes by open violence; and the Presbyterians displaying an obstinate incapacity to discern either the signs of the times or the true character of the struggle and of their own position. Cromwell outwitted them by the Self-denying Ordinance: presently he drove their leaders from the House by impeachment; and at last he actually with his soldiers

cleared the House of all who were opposed to his designs, many of whom he threw into prison, reducing that once august body to a miserable remnant of scarcely more than fifty members.1

Meanwhile he had possessed himself of the King's person, and he now brought him to London to murder him with a burlesque of all the forms of law and justice. The House of Peers unanimously refused to concur in his measures, so he proceeded on the vote of the Commons alone; those few members whom he allowed to continue to sit being men on whose fanaticism and unscrupulousness he could safely rely. They first passed a vote that the whole sovereign power of the State belonged to themselves alone; and then appointed a High Court of Justice to try the King on charges of a general course of tyranny and enmity to the Commonwealth, and especially of having levied war against the Parliament. And though scarcely more than half the judges whom they had nominated could be induced to sit, the remainder pronounced him guilty. Cromwell and his troops secured the execution of their sentence, and to the astonishment and indignation of all foreign nations, and to the grief and horror of the vast majority of his own subjects, the unhappy Sovereign was beheaded in front of his own palace.

The next week the House of Commons formally abolished monarchy, and a revolution, the most complete that could possibly have been conceived, was accomplished, the very form and character of the Government being changed. But it had no element of permanence in it.

1 On the 6th and 7th of December, he sent Colonel Pride, with his troopers, to "purge" the House, and after those days the greatest number that ever met, till after the King's murder, was fifty-three.