hardly be thought sincere; and there can be little doubt that, till the end of his career, he expected to rise to supreme power by pressing his foot upon the necks of the people. The intrepidity of his character, his powers of eloquence, the virtues of his private life, and, above all, the unjust manner in which he was condemned to death, have rescued his name from that abhorrence with which every lover of his country would otherwise have regarded it. The execution of Strafford casts a stain upon all parties in the State. The House of Commons were instigated by passion; the House of Lords acted. from fear; and Charles, from some motive or other, which, at all events, was not the right one. The admission of the mob to overawe the deliberation of Parliament was a sure sign that law was about to be subverted.

In a contest between a king who refuses any limitation of his prerogative and a people who require it, there can be no equitable agreement. The ordinary authority of a limited king, the power of calling out an armed force, of proroguing and dissolving Parliament, cannot be entrusted to a sovereign whose main object it is to destroy, by means of a party, all limitation. William III., Anne, and the first sovereigns of the House of Brunswick, might be safely entrusted with the prerogative, because no party in the nation wished to see arbitrary power in their hands; but Charles I. could not, because the Cavaliers would have been unanimous in repealing the restrictions imposed by Parliament. Hence, when the popular party had provided sufficient checks for the people against a king, they were obliged to devise fresh ones against King Charles. After the plot of the royalists in the army, and still more when war had actually commenced, they were forced to ask for securities unnecessary and improper in ordinary times. This forms the only justification of the law respect

ing the militia, the bill for continuing the Parliament, and the articles of Uxbridge. It was too much to expect that the victorious party should lay down their arms, quietly permitting the liberties they had wrested from the Crown to be again surrendered by a packed Parliament; and their own lives to be at the mercy of a king to whom the power of the sword had been again entrusted. The difficulty was inseparable from the case. The king's prerogative is so great, that nothing but the established opinion of the whole nation can prevent his absorbing every other authority in the State.

The events of the reign of Charles, if we apply the principle I have laid down, are not difficult to account for. The King commenced by quarrelling with Parliaments, and by an attempt to raise money without their authority, punishing at the same time in an arbitrary manner all who ventured to speak or write in behalf of the ancient liberties of their country. In this career he found, in high stations, and even on the bench of judges, willing and unprincipled instruments. At length he was obliged to call a Parliament. They reformed abuses, punished the tools of tyranny, and insisted upon keeping in their own hands the armed force of the country, lest the King should use the first moment after the dissolution of Parliament to re-establish his illegal power. Charles preferred trying the chance of war to agreeing to these conditions. In the course of the war, his papers, taken at the battle of Naseby, convinced the Parliamentary party that any concessions he might make would be, in his mind, concessions to power and not to right, and that he would think himself entitled, if he should ever have the means, to repossess himself of his former authority. It there came to light, that, at the time when he treated with the two Houses, he entered a protest in the council book declaring that they were not a Parliament, in the face of his own designation

of them as such. Hence it appeared clear, that he thought himself at liberty to use any means to reacquire that absolute power which he considered his birthright. And here, in my mind, was the error of Lord Clarendon and the constitutional Royalists. Literally their proclamations and proposals were more conformable to the Constitution than those of their adversaries; it is evident that the Parliament. went, in their proposed terms of peace, beyond the limits of the ancient laws of the kingdom, and that they proposed to bind the prerogative of Charles more closely than precedent, and example, and legal rule would justify. But if we pass from the letter to the spirit of the controversy, we shall see that the Parliament were endeavouring, by new restrictions on royal power, to obtain a necessary security for the performance of the old, and that the King was attempting, by the offer of plausible terms, to get into his hands the power of destroying all opponents, and breaking down every barrier to his will. The very conscience of Charles ordered him to deceive his enemies and make himself absolute.

In the course of the contest the period arrived when, in the opinion of Hyde and Falkland, the King had conceded enough, and the Parliament could not without danger to the monarchy insist upon more. Their views and their conduct have received the high sanction of Mr. Hallam. After quoting the words of Lord Chatham, ascribed to him by Mr. Grattan and recorded in the motto of this chapter, Mr. Hallam says, 'But as I know (and the history of eighteen years is my witness), how little there was on one side of such liberty as a wise man would hold dear, so I am not yet convinced that the great body of the Royalists, the peers and gentry of England, were combating for the cause of tyranny.'

*

*Hallam's Const. Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 146, ed. 1854.

E

The question, however, was not whether the peers and gentry of England who followed Charles I. were combating for the cause of tyranny. The question for Hampden and Pym to consider was, whether, if they trusted to Charles I., they had any security against tyranny? Charles V. of Germany had in the preceding century put down liberty and established tyranny in Castile, Aragon, and Tuscany; Charles VIII. of France had put down the representative States of France, by which act, says De Comines, he laid a heavy burthen on his soul. Let us admit to the great historical sagacity of Mr. Hallam that the Grand Remonstrance was hardly capable of answering any other purpose than that of reanimating discontents almost appeased, and guarding the people against the confidence they were beginning to place in the King's sincerity."* Still the question for Hampden and Pym to consider was, whether they could advise or allow the people to place confidence in the King's sincerity; and whether, if they did so, the English Government would not be reduced to the form which the French Government had assumed under Louis XIII., and the Spanish under Philip II. There can be no doubt, I think, that, in the Grand Remonstrance, the majority of the Commons went beyond the limits which constitutional statesmen in ordinary times are bound to respect. But the King, it is clear, never intended to observe the promises he made, or to keep within the boundaries of any law which he swore to observe. In his opinion breach of faith was wise policy, arbitrary government just prerogative, and the punishment of any of his subjects who resisted his will a rightful exercise of sovereignty. The popular party had to defend not only their liberties but their lives; to wrestle with the violence and treachery of Charles in order to preserve their own heads from the block

* Hallam's Const. Hist. of England, vol. v. p. 121.

and their country from the slavery of France and Spain.*

Let us for a few moments, by way of illustration, contemplate the King's conduct in the attempt to arrest the Five Members.

He had recently made Falkland his secretary of state. That excellent man had been most reluctant to accept the office, and had only yielded to the urgent solicitations of his friend Mr. Hyde. He thus became the person chiefly responsible in the King's Council. Lord Clarendon, in a passage which has been omitted in the earlier editions of the History, and which has been placed in an Appendix by later editors, says, in reference to the plan for seizing the Five Members: In this restraint, the King, considering rather what was just than what was expedient, without communicating it to any of his Council, and so not sufficiently weighing the circumstances and way of doing it, as well as the matter itself, resolved,' &c. and so on the third day of January, about two of the clock in the afternoon, he sent for Sir Edward Herbert, his attorney-general, and delivered a paper to him in writing, which contained a charge against those he meant to accuse; and commanded him forthwith to go to the House, and in his name to accuse those persons to the House of Peers of high treason. The attorney accordingly went, and standing up told their lordships, that he did in his Majesty's name and by his especial command, accuse the Lord Kimbolton, a member of that House, Mr. Pym, Mr. Denziel Hollis, Mr. John Hampden, Mr. William Strode, and Sir Arthur Haslerig, of high treason and other misdemeanours,' &c. This is very explicit. But Lord Clarendon goes further, and after saying who did not counsel the King, mentions ex

*See especially Forster's 'Essays on the Grand Remonstrance' and on the 'Arrest of the Five

Members,' who, by the way, never were arrested.

Hist. App. vol. ii. p. 604.