ported the bill of attainder. It is almost cerlain that Hyde voted for it. It is quite certain that Falkland both voted and spoke for it. The opinion of Hampden, as far as it can be collected from a very obscure note of one of his speeches, seems to have been, that the proceeding by bill was unnecessary, and that it would be a better course to obtain judgment on the impeachment.

During this year the court opened a negotiation with the leaders of the Opposition. The Earl of Bedford was invited to form an administration on popular principles. St. John was made solicitor-general. Hollis was to have been secretary of state, and Pym chancellor of the exchequer. The post of tutor to the Prince of Wales was designed for Hampden. The death of the Earl of Bedford prevented this arrangement from being carried into effect; and it may be doubted whether, even if that nobleman's life had been prolonged, Charles would ever have consented to surround himself with counsellors whom he could not but hate and fear.

Lord Clarendon admits that the conduct of Hampden during this year was mild and temperate; that he seemed disposed rather to soothe than to excite the public mind; and that, when violent and unreasonable motions were made by his followers, he generally left the House before the division, lest he should seem to give countenance to their extravagance. His temper was moderate. He sincerely loved peace. He felt also great fear lest too precipitate a movement should produce a reaction. The events which took place early in the next session clearly showed that this fear was not unfounded.

During the autumn the Parliament adjourned for a few weeks. Before the recess, Hampden was despatched to Scotland by the House of Commons, nominally as a commissioner, to obtain security for a debt which the Scots had contracted during the late invasion; but in truth that he might keep watch over the king, who had now repaired to Edinburgh, for the purpose of finally adjusting the points of difference which remained between him and his northern subjects. It was the business of Hampden to dissuade the Covenanters from making their peace with the court at the expense of the popular party in England.

While the king was in Scotland, the Irish rebellion broke out. The suddenness and violence of this terrible explosion excited a strange suspicion in the public mind. The queen was a professed Papist. The king and the Archbishop of Canterbury had not indeed been reconciled to the See of Rome; but they had, while acting towards the Puritan party with the utmost rigour, and speaking of that party with the utmost contempt, shown great tenderness and respect towards the Catholic religion and its professors. In spite of the wishes of successive Parliaments, the Protestant separatists had been cruelly persecuted. And at the same time, in spite of the wishes of those very Parliaments, the laws-the unjust and wicked laws-which were in force against the Papists, had not been carried into execution. The Protestant nonconformists had not yet learned

toleration in the school of suffering. They reprobated the partial lenity which the govern ment showed towards idolaters; and, with some show of reason, ascribed to bad mctives conduct which, in such a king as Charles, and such a prelate as Laud, could not possibly be ascribed to humanity or to liberality of senti ment. The violent Arminianism of the arch. bishop, his childish attachment to ceremonies, his superstitious veneration for altars, vestments, and painted windows, his bigoted zeal for the constitution and the privileges of his order, his known opinions respecting the celibacy of the clergy, had excited great disgust throughout that large party which was every day be coming more and more hostile to Rome, and more and more inclined to the doctrines and the discipline of Geneva. It was believed by many, that the Irish rebellion had been se cretly encouraged by the court; and when the Parliament met again in November, after a short recess, the Puritans were more intracta. ble than ever.

But that which Hampden had feared had come to pass. A reaction had taken place. A large body of moderate and well-meaning men, who had heartily concurred in the strong mea sures adopted during the preceding year, were inclined to pause. Their opinion was, that during many years, the country had been griev ously misgoverned, and that a great reform had been necessary; but, that a great reform had been made, that the grievances of the nation had been fully redressed, that sufficient vengeance had been exacted for the past, and sufficient security provided for the future; that it would, therefore, be both ungrateful and unwise to make any further attacks on the royal prerogative. In support of this opinion many plausible arguments have been used. But to all these arguments there is one short answer: the king could not be trusted.

At the head of those who may be called the Constitutional Royalists, were Falkland, Hyde, and Culpeper. All these eminent men had, during the former year, been in very decided opposition to the court. In some of those very proceedings with which their admirers reproach Hampden, they had taken at least as great a part as Hampden. They had all been concerned in the impeachment of Strafford. They had all, there is reason to believe, voted for the Bill of Attainder. Certainly none of them voted against it. They had all agreed to the act which made the consent of the Parliament necessary to its own dissolution or prorogation. Hyde had been among the most active of those who attacked the Council of York. Falkland had voted for the exclusion of the bishops from the Upper House. They were now inclined to halt in the path of reform; perhaps to retrace a few of their steps.

A direct collision soon took place between the two parties, into which the House of Commons, lately at almost perfect unity with itself, was now divided. The opponents of the govern ment moved that celebrated address to the king which is known by the name of the Grand Remonstrance. In this address all the oppressive acts of the preceding fifteen years were set forth with great energy of language

citizens resolved to bring back the champions of liberty in triumph before the windows of Whitehall. Vast preparations were made both by land and water for this great festival.

The king had remained in his palace, humbled, dismayed, and bewildered; "feeling," says Clarendon, "the trouble and agony which usually attend generous and magnanimous minds upon their having committed errors;" feeling, we should say, the despicable repentance which attends the bungling villain, who, having attempted to commit a crime, finds that he has only committed a folly. The populace hooted and shouted all day before the gates of the royal residence. The wretched man could not bear to see the triumph of those whom he had destined to the gallows and the quartering block. On the day preceding that which was fixed for their return, he fled, with a few attendants, from that palace, which he was never to see again till he was led through it to the scaffold.

On the 11th of January, the Thames was covered with boats, and its shores with a gazing multitude. Armed vessels decorated with streamers were ranged in two lines from London Bridge to Westminster Hall. The members returned by water in a ship manned by sailors who had volunteered their services. The trainbands of the city, under the command of the sheriffs, marched along the Strand, attended by a vast crowd of spectators, to guard the avenues to the House of Commons; and thus, with shouts and loud discharges of ordnance, the accused patriots were brought back by the people whom they had served, and for whom they had suffered. The restored. members, as soon as they had entered the House, expressed, in the warmest terms, their gratitude to the citizens of London. The sheriffs were warmly thanked by the speaker in the name of the Commons; and orders were given that a guard, selected from the trainbands of the city, should attend daily to watch over the safety of the Parliament.

The excitement had not been confined to London. When intelligence of the danger to which Hampden was exposed reached Buckinghamshire, it excited the alarm and indignation of the people. Four thousand freeholders of that county, each of them wearing in his hat a copy of the protestation in favour of the privileges of Parliament, rode up to London to defend the person of their beloved representative. They came in a body to assure Parliament of their full resolution to defend its privileges. Their petition was couched in the strongest terms. "In respect," said they, "of that latter attempt upon the honourable House of Commons, we are now come to offer our service to that end, and resolved, in their just defence, to live and die."

A great struggle was clearly at hand. Hampden had returned to Westminster much changed. His influence had hitherto been exerted rather to restrain than to moderate the zeal of his party. But the treachery, the contempt of law, the thirst for blood, which the king had now shown, left no hope of a peaceable adjustment. It was clear that Charles must be either a puppet or a tyrant, that no obligation of love

or of honour could bind him, and that the only way to make him harmless was to make him powerless.

The attack which the king had made on the five members was not merely irregular in manner. Even if the charges had been pre ferred legally, if the grand jury of Middlesex had found a true bill, if the accused persons had been arrested under a proper warrant, and at a proper time and place, there would still have been in the proceeding enough of perfidy and injustice to vindicate the strongest mea sures which the Opposition could take. To impeach Pym and Hampden was to impeach the House of Commons. It was notoriously on account of what they had done as members of that House that they were selected as objects of vengeance; and in what they had done as members of that House, the majority had concurred. Most of the charges brought against them were common between them and the Parliament. They were accused, indeed, and it may be with reason, of encouraging the Scotch army to invade England. In doing this, they had committed what was, in strictness of law, a high offence; the same offence which Devonshire and Shrewsbury committed in 1688. But the king had promised pardon and oblivion to those who had been the prin cipals in the Scotch insurrection. Did it then consist with his honour to punish the accessa ries? He had bestowed marks of his favour on the leading Covenanters. He had given the great seal of Scotland to Lord Loudon, the chief of the rebels, a marquisate to the Ear! of Argyle, an earldom to Lesley, who had brought the Presbyterian army across the Tweed. On what principle was Hampden to be attainted for advising what Lesley was en. nobled for doing? In a court of law, of course, no Englishman could plead an amnesty granted to the Scots. But, though not an illegal, it was surely an inconsistent and a most unkingly course, after pardoning the heads of the rebellion in one kingdom, to hang, draw, and quarter their accomplices in another.

The

The proceedings of the king against the five members, or rather against that Par liament which had concurred in almost all the acts of the five members, was the cause of the civil war. It was plain that eithe Charles or the House of Commons must be stripped of all real power in the state. best course which the Commons could have taken would perhaps have been to depose the king; as their ancestors had deposed Edward the Second and Richard the Second, and as their children afterwards deposed James. Had they done this, had they placed on the throne a prince whose character and whose situation would have been a pledge for his good conduct, they might safely have left to that prince all the constitutional prerogatives of the crown; the command of the armies of the state; the power of making peers; the power of appointing ministers; a veto on bills passed by the two Houses. Such a prince, reigning by their choice, would have been under the necessity of acting in contormity with their wishes. But the public mind was not ripe for such a measure. There was no

Duke of Lancaster, no Prince of Orange, no great and eminent person, near in blood to the throne, yet attached to the cause of the people. Charles was then to remain king; and it was therefore necessary that he should be king only in name. A William the Third, or a George the First, whose title to the crown was identical with the title of the people to their liberty, might safely be trusted with extensive powers. But new freedom could not exist in safety under the old tyrant. Since he was not to be deprived of the name of king, the only course which was left was to make him a mere trustee, nominally seised of prerogatives, of which others had the use, a Grand Lama, a Roi Fainéant, a phantom resembling those Dagoberts and Childeberts who wore the badges of royalty, while Ebroin and Charles Martel held the real sovereignty of the state.

The conditions which the Parliament propounded were hard; but, we are sure, not harder than those which even the Tories in the Convention of 1689 would have imposed on James, if it had been resolved that James should continue to be king. The chief condition was, that the command of the militia and the conduct of the war in Ireland should be left to the Parliament. On this point was that great issue joined whereof the two parties put themselves on God and on the sword.

We think, not only that the Commons were justified in demanding for themselves the power to dispose of the military force, but that it would have been absolute insanity in them to leave that force at the disposal of the king. From the very beginning of his reign, it had evidently been his object to govern by an army. His third Parliament had complained, in the Petition of Right, of his fondness for martia. law, and of the vexatious manner in which he billeted his soldiers on the people. The wish nearest the heart of Strafford was, as his letters prove, that the revenue might be brought into such a state as would enable the king to support a standing military establishment. In 1649, Charles had supported an army in the northern counties by lawless exactions. In 1641, he had engaged in an intrigue, the object of which was to bring that army into London, for the purpose of overawing the Parliament. His late conduct had proved that, if he were suffered to retain even a small bodyguard of his own creatures near his person, the Commons would be in dange, of outrage, pernaps o massacre. The Houses were still deliberating under the protection of the militia of London. Could the command of the whole armed force of the realm have been, under these circumstances, safely confided to the king? Would it not have been frenzy in the Parliament to raise and pay an army of fifteen or twenty thousand men for the Irish war, and to give to Charles the absolute control of this army, and the power of selecting, promoting, and dismissing officers at his pleasure? Was it not possible that this army might become, what it is the nature of armies to become, what so many armies formed under much more favourable circumstances have become, what the army of the English Commonwealth became, what the army of the French Republic

became-an instrument of despotism? Was it not possible that the soldiers might forget that they were also citizens, and might be ready to serve their general against their country? Was it not certain that, on the very first day on which Charles could venture to revoke his concessions, and to punish his opponents, he would establish an arbitrary government, and exact a bloody revenge?

Our own times furnish a parallel case. Suppose that a revolution should take place in Spain, that the Constitution of Cadiz should be re-established, that the Cortes should meet again, that the Spanish Prynnes and Burtons, who are now wandering in rags round Leicester Square, should be restored to ther coun try, Ferdinand the Seventh would, in that case, of course, repeat all the oaths and promises which he made in 1820, and broke in 1823. But would it not be madness in the Cortes, even if they were to leave him the name of king, to leave him more than the name? Would not all Europe scoff at them, if they were to permit him to assemble a large army for an expedition to America, to model that army at his pleasure, to put it under the command of officers chosen by himself? Should we not say, that every member of the constitutional party, who might concur in such a measure, would most richly deserve the fate which he would probably meet-the fate of Riego and of the Empecinado? We are not disposed to pay compliments to Ferdinand; nor do we conceive that we pay him any compliment, when we say, that, of all sovereigns in history, he seems to us most to resemble King Charles the First. Like Charles, he is pious after a certain fashion; like Charles, he has made large concessions to his people after a certain fashion. It is well for him that he has had deal with men who bore very little resem blance to the English Puritans.

The Commons would have the power of the sword, the king would not part with it; and nothing remained but to try the chances of war. Charles still had a strong party in the country. His august office, his dignified manners, his solemn protestations that he would for the time to come respect the liberties of his subjects, pity for fallen greatness, fear of violent innovation, secured to him many adherents. He had the Church, the Universities, a majority of the nobles and of the old landed gentry. The austerity of the Puritan manners drove most of the gay and dissolute youth of that age to the royal standard. Many good, brave, and moderate men, who disliked his former con. duct, and who entertained doubts touching his present sincerity, espoused his cause unwill ingly, and with many painful misgivings; because, though they dreaded his tyranny much, they dreaded democratic violence more.

On the other side was the great body of the middle orders of England-the merchants, the shopkeepers, the yeomanry, headed by a very large and formidable minority of the peerage and of the landed gentry. The Earl of Essex, a man of respectable abilities, and of some military experience, was appointed to the com mand of the parliamentary army.

Hampden spared neither his fortune nor his