Chapter X (2)

From these various causes the House of Commons was unpopular. It was also divided against itself. It contained three chief political parties. First, the Presbyterians, eager to recover their former ascendancy by making a treaty with the king; secondly, the Republicans, who aimed at getting rid of king and House of Lords; thirdly, Independents, still true to the cause of liberty of conscience: besides these were the lawyers and the waverers, who voted with the Republicans, either through dread of Presbyterian ascendancy, or because, after long enjoying the sweets of power, they were loath to see the present Parliament dissolved. Outside the Commons’ House was an army of between 20,000 and 30,000 men, at this time the real power in the land. The officers’ views of settlement differed from those of the Republicans principally in the following point, that while the Republicans wished the army to act as an obedient servant in establishing their Republican ideal, the officers cared little about the form of the civil power as long as it carried out their own views of reform. The two parties, however, were closely allied, and, in fact, intermingled. A standing army had never before been known in England, and was as little loved by the people as the perpetual Parliament itself. Thus the officers, unable to rule in their own names, hoped to rule by coalescing with the Republicans. The Republicans, in their anxiety to found their own form of government, mistook the character and aims of their only and necessary supporters. The ranks of the army were really filled with sectarians and Levellers. The reforms these demanded were not theoretical, but practical and popular--the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the lessening of lawyers’ fees, an adjustment of seats to population, the meeting of new parliaments every year, and the reform of the Church.

A Leveller has given us a picture of a meeting of officers, Republicans, Independents, and some of his own party, held during the autumn months, while the Presbyterians were treating with the king. “We intend,” said the officers, “to cut off the king’s head, and purge, if not dissolve, the Parliament.” “We know,” replied Lilburne, as the spokesman of the Levellers, “that the king is a bad man, but the army deceived us last year, and is not to be trusted. It is our interest to keep up one tyrant against the other, until we can know which tyrant will give more freedom. For we do not wish the government to develop into the wills and swords of the army, and we [be] dealt with as the slavish peasants of France, who can call nothing their own. An agreement must be drawn up before anything else is done.” “There is no time,” objected an officer; “the treaty between the king and the Parliament will be concluded, and then you will be destroyed as well as we.” “We must dissolve the Parliament,” said Ireton for the officers, “for how else are we to get rid of it? It will never dissolve itself.” On the other hand, Republican and Independent members of the House opposed a dissolution, thinking a purge of their Presbyterian companions a far more desirable remedy, and by no means objecting to concentrating all civil power in their own hands.

%NEGOTIATIONS AT NEWPORT.%

When such were the counsels of the men in power, the negotiations begun at Newport in September appear little better than a farce. There Charles was himself receiving, disputing, and answering the propositions of the Parliament, which were the same as those offered at Newcastle. Two of the commissioners on their knees implored him to waste no time, but to grant on the first day all that he could on the last. It probably mattered less than they thought whether he yielded on the first or last day, for where in either case was to be found the means to resist the will of the army, which was opposed to all compromise? At last, after protracting the negotiations over six weeks, Charles agreed to grant to Parliament the command of the militia and the government of Ireland for twenty years; to suspend the power of bishops for three years, until a form of Church government should be agreed upon by himself and the two Houses; and to allow seven of his friends to be excepted from pardon. How far, however, he was sincere in making these concessions may be judged from his own letters. “Be not startled,” he wrote to Ormond, “at my great concessions about Ireland, for that they will come to nothing.”

For some time past Charles’ mind had been occupied with thoughts of escape. He was beginning at last to realize that it was possible for subjects to take the life of an anointed king. Still he hardly dared leave the country without first obtaining the consent of his wife. The Prince of Wales might have sailed from Holland with the revolted ships to attempt his father’s release, but he made no effort. One day Charles told Sir John Bowring, who frequently pressed him to escape, that he had received a letter from beyond seas, advising him not to go out of the island, for it was not in the power of the army to touch a hair of his head. “So,” he continued, “as I have made concessions, and the treaty has had a fair end, and especially since I have received this advice (you guess from whence it comes), I am resolved to stay here, and God’s will be done.” It was in fact his wife’s will which was still to be done, till her fatal influence had finally ruined him. The will of the army was soon shown. Regiment after regiment presented petitions to Fairfax demanding ‘that the same fault may have the same punishment in a king or lord as in the poorest commoner.’ A united Army Remonstrance was read in Parliament, requiring the House to set aside the treaty and ‘proceed against the king in a way of justice.’ By a majority of ninety, the Commons decided not to take the Army Remonstrance into consideration.

%CHARLES AT HURST CASTLE.%

On the 2nd of December they were debating whether the king’s concessions were sufficient to serve as a basis of peace. Meanwhile the soldiers were taking up their quarters in the City, and Fairfax was establishing himself at Whitehall. “The debate ought to be laid aside,” said Prynne, “until we are a free Parliament. Our debates cannot be with liberty now we are environed by the army.” On Monday (Dec. 4th) the news came that Charles had been carried off by a party of soldiers from Carisbrooke to Hurst Castle, a gloomy fortress on the Hampshire coast. The Presbyterians, more indignant than alarmed, declared the honour of Parliament at stake, for it had voted that the king should treat in honour, safety, and freedom. Prynne appeared as the King’s champion, so vastly had times changed within the last eight years. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “all the royal favour I ever yet received from his Majesty was the slitting off my ears in a most barbarous manner; the setting me upon three several pillories for two hours at a time; the burning of my books by the hand of the hangman; the imposing two fines upon me of £5000 a piece; expulsion from the University of Oxford; above eight years’ imprisonment without pens, ink, paper, or books except my Bible. If any member envy me for such royal favour, I only wish him the same badges of favour, and then he will no more asperse me for a royal favourite or apostate from the public cause.” For hours he continued speaking, showing that there was no danger to liberty in accepting the king’s concessions, and calling on the House not to sacrifice its freedom to fear of the army. “If the king and we shall happily close upon this treaty, I hope we shall have not such great need of their future service; however, _fiat justitia, ruat cœlum_--let us do our duty and leave the issue to God.”

%PRIDE’S PURGE.%

It was five o’clock on Tuesday morning before the House divided, when a resolution was carried by 140 to 104, that the answers of the king were a sufficient ground to proceed upon for a settlement of the kingdom. The next day (6th Dec.) was memorable as that of Pride’s Purge. A party of officers, headed by Ireton, had determined to put an end to what they considered Presbyterian dictation. Cromwell was on his way from Scotland, and did not reach London till the next day; and Fairfax was in ignorance of the designs of his officers. But by seven o’clock in the morning every approach to the Commons’ House was barred by soldiers. At the door stood their officer, Colonel Pride, with a list of the proscribed in his hand. When a leading Presbyterian came up the staircase, Lord Grey of Groby pointed him out to Pride, and if the member refused to go away of his own accord, the soldiers forced him down the staircase. Forty Presbyterians were thus excluded, while several others were frightened and kept away of themselves. As the House refused to proceed to business until its absent members should be restored, the next morning the same scene was repeated, and forty more members were excluded (Dec. 7). A minority of twenty-six withdrew of their own accord; the remainder, nicknamed the Rump, formed a House of fifty-three members, all bound to work in accordance with their friends in the army.

♦Ordinance for High Court of Justice.♦ First, in order to have a law by which to convict Charles of treason, the Commons voted that it was treason in the King of England to levy war against the Parliament and kingdom; next, in order to have a court by which to try him, they framed an ordinance for making a special or High Court of Justice, composed of men of their own party. As the House of Lords, though it had now dwindled down to twelve members, still had spirit enough to reject the ordinance unanimously, the Commons resolved, that whatever is enacted by the Commons has the force of law without the consent of king or House of Peers, and then passed the ordinance in their own name alone (Jan. 6th).

%TRIAL OF THE KING.%

The court first met in private in order to make preparations for the trial. 135 judges were named on the ordinance, but many refused to attend the sittings. Algernon Sidney came once, and interrupted the debate by saying, “The king can be tried by no court, and no man by this court.” “I tell you,” said Cromwell, “we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.” “You may take your course, I cannot stop you,” replied Algernon; “but I will keep myself clean from having any hand in the business.”[148] He then left the room and never returned. Sir Henry Vane retired into the country; Fairfax attended the first meeting only.

Charles had already been removed from Hurst Castle to Windsor, and after a few days was taken on to London. The trial was held in Westminster Hall. The judges, about eighty in number, sat upon benches, which rose one above another at the upper end of the hall. Bradshaw, Cromwell’s cousin, sat on a chair of state as Lord President of the Court. Below the President’s chair was a table, on which lay the sword and mace of the House of Commons. Twenty-one gentlemen, bearing ‘partisans,’ were ranged on either side in front of the judges. At the other end of the table, opposite the President’s seat, was placed a red velvet chair for the prisoner; within a bar on the right-hand side of the prisoner’s chair stood the three solicitors for the Commonwealth. Ladies and others were seated in galleries. The body of the hall was filled with a tearful, expectant crowd, separated from the soldiers by scaffoldings. The king was conducted up the centre of the hall by a guard of soldiers. He did not raise his hat or show any sign of respect to the court, but after regarding his judges severely for some moments, turned round and inspected the crowds behind. Cook, the solicitor of the Commonwealth, read the charge, in which Charles Stuart was accused of having endeavoured to overturn the liberties of the people, and of being guilty of all the murders and spoils under which the nation had suffered, “wherefore the people of England impeached Charles Stuart as a tyrant, traitor, and murderer.” The king smiled visibly when he heard the words, “tyrant, traitor, murderer.” He persistently refused to answer to the charge, asserting that the court had no lawful authority derived from the people of England by which to try him, and that therefore in refusing to plead “he stood more for the liberties of the people than did his pretended judges.” Cook accordingly demanded that sentence might be pronounced against the prisoner, in accordance with the rule of law, that if the accused refuses to plead guilty or not guilty, his silence be taken as a confession of guilt. The king was brought before the court for the fourth and last time to hear his sentence read. The President had changed his black for a scarlet gown. He spoke as follows: ‘Gentlemen, it is well known to all, or most of you here present, that the prisoner at the bar hath been several times brought before the court to make answer to a charge of high treason, exhibited against him in the name of the people of England----’

‘It’s a lie! not one half of them. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!’ shouted a voice from one of the galleries.

A violent commotion arose in the hall; murmurs of indignation amongst the soldiers, of applause amongst the crowd. The speaker was found to be no less a person than Lady Fairfax, and order with some difficulty having been restored, Bradshaw offered the prisoner for the last time leave to answer to his charge, before sentence was pronounced. “I desire,” said the king, “to make a proposal to the Lords and Commons in the Painted Chamber, touching the peace of the kingdom and the liberty of the subject.” The judges withdrew for half an hour, and on their return Bradshaw first informed the king that his proposal was rejected, and then made a long speech to justify the conduct of the Parliament, charging the king with having ruled as a tyrant, and thereby rendered resistance both a duty and necessity. “A great necessity,” he said, “occasioned the calling of the Parliament, and what your designs and plots and endeavours all along have been for the crushing and confounding of this Parliament hath been very notorious to the whole kingdom; it makes me call to mind that that we read of a great Roman emperor--by-the-way, let us call him a great Roman tyrant--Caligula, that wished that the people of Rome had had but one neck, that at one blow he might cut it off. And your proceedings have been somewhat like to this, for the body of the people of England hath been represented but in the Parliament, and could but have confounded that, you had at one blow cut off the neck of England. But God hath reserved better things for us, and hath pleased for to confound your designs and to break your forces, and to bring your person into custody that you might be responsible to justice.”

The whole court stood up in sign of assent, while the clerk read the sentence, that Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, and murderer, should be put to death by the severance of the head from the body.

The king appeared deeply agitated and now tried to speak, but as he had refused to plead before the sentence was given, he was not allowed to speak after, and the judges rose and retired. The king, in the midst of vain endeavours to make himself heard, was forced down the hall by the soldiers, who shouted in his ears, ‘Justice! justice!’ ‘Execution!’ As he passed in his chair from Westminster to Whitehall, the windows, the shops, the streets, were crowded with people weeping and praying ‘God to bless the king’[149] (Jan. 27th).

%EXECUTION OF THE KING.%

On taking leave of his two youngest children, who were still in England, Charles bade the Lady Elizabeth, a girl of twelve years old, tell her brother James it was his father’s last desire that he should no longer look on Charles as his eldest brother only, but be obedient to him as his sovereign. Then taking the little Duke of Gloucester on his knee, he said to him, ‘Sweet heart, now they’ll cut off thy father’s head; mark, child, what I say, they’ll cut off my head, and perhaps make thee a king; but mark what I say, you must not be king so long as your brothers Charles and James live; for they’ll cut off your brothers’ heads when they can catch them, and cut off thy head too at last; and, therefore, I charge you not to be made a king by them.’ ‘I will be torn in pieces first,’ said the child weeping.[150] Charles kissed them both, and bade Bishop Juxon have them taken away, while he turned to the window to hide his own emotion. The next morning the king walked from St. James’s to Whitehall amidst a guard of soldiers, with Juxon on one side and Col. Tomlinson on the other, talking to them on the way calmly and cheerfully. About noon he was conducted through a passage, made in the wall of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, on to the scaffold, which had been erected in the open street. Men and women who had forced their way into the hall uttered prayers in his behalf as he passed by. The soldiers throughout the whole occasion kept a deep silence, awed by the solemnity of their own act. On the scaffold, which was hung with black, stood two executioners disguised in masks. Soldiers filled the space immediately below, so that the crowded spectators beyond could hear no word the king uttered. Charles died in the firm belief in which he had lived, that in the quarrel between himself and his subjects he had been always in the right, they always in the wrong. He addressed a short, cold speech to the few assembled on the scaffold, in which he asserted this belief, and then prepared calmly to die. “Hurt not the axe,” he said to a gentlemen who touched its edge while he was speaking; “that may hurt me.” In the words of Marvell:

“He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right;
But bow’d his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.”

“I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown,” he said to the bishop, “where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.” Then putting his head upon the block, he said to the executioner, “When I put out my hands this way, then--; stay for the sign.” Within a few moments the sign was given, and the executioner, holding the head up in his hand, cried to the people, “Behold the head of a traitor.”

%INSTANCES OF DEPOSITION.%

By Charles’ trial two issues were decided, the king’s deposition and his execution. The two issues are distinct. That a king holds office for the good of his people, and, if he perverts his power to their injury, may justly be deprived of it by their representatives, is a constitutional principle, which has been acted on in the later as well as in the earlier years of history. Forty years after the trial and execution of Charles I., Parliament resolved that his son, King James II., having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between king and people, and having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, had abdicated the government, that the throne had thereby become vacant. The crown which the House of Stuart thus for a second time forfeited, they proceeded to bestow upon William and Mary of Orange. For a hundred years, in fact till the death of Charles Edward in 1788, that the kings ruled by a Parliamentary title was not merely a theoretical principle, but the actual basis of the settlement of the crown. It was also one of the original principles of the nation. The Saxon kings were, in fact, elected, and the principle was partly recognized that what the nation gave, it could take away; Sigeberht, Æthelred, Harthacnut were all deposed by the Witenagemot, or great council of the nation. Hereditary succession was not established as the rule in practice till the accession of Edward I. The sanction of the nation was added in doubtful cases. Nor did the Great Council, when transformed into the two Houses of Parliament, forget the use of its ultimate power of deposition. In 1327 the moral sense of the nation revolted at the conduct of its king. A bill, charging him with immorality, incapacity, cruelty, and oppression was read and admitted as a sufficient ground of deposition. By this, Parliament declared that Edward II. had ceased to reign, and bestowed the crown on his son. In 1399 thirty-three charges were read in Parliament against Richard II. The king was declared guilty on every charge, and his deposition pronounced. The scene was one which the great dramatist had made familiar to the nation. When, therefore, the court told Charles that he was responsible to the Commons of England, and was tried in the name of the people of England, they were introducing no new principle into the constitution. In such cases, the fictions of lawyers, which in ordinary times may often be useful as preventives against revolutions, are cast aside like gossamer threads, and the king, “who can do no wrong,” stands arraigned as a common criminal.

If Charles then had been merely deposed by Parliament, he would never have gained the reputation he has had as a martyr. The justice and legality of the course taken to compass his death is, however, a distinct question. His trial and execution was the work, not of a full Parliament, but of a small minority which could make no pretence of representing the people of England. To carry out their end, this minority proceeded to violent measures which only circumstances of extreme necessity could justify. They excluded members by violence from the House of Commons;[151] they virtually abolished the House of Lords; they passed a retrospective ordinance; and, instead of exercising their function in Parliament according to precedent, they erected a new and arbitrary court of justice.

It must, indeed, be said that a great advance had been made in the treatment of deposed kings since the fourteenth century. An arbitrary court and an _ex post facto_ law are better than the secret murder which was the lot of Edward and Richard. The light of day and the presence of the chief men of the nation gave the semblance of a fair trial. Even this semblance is less debasing to the morality of the community than the sanction of murder by government. Compared with this, informalities were but a slight evil; indeed it could scarcely be expected that a constitution could provide special legal forms for the trial of the chief of the State, who could never be tried except after a revolution.

On the one hand it has been said that the people had been rent asunder into two great bodies, one engaged for the king, the other for the Parliament, and that, therefore, if Charles was to be put on trial for his life at all, he ought to have been tried, not by the rules of common or statute law, but by those of international law, which obtain between foreign nations. These forbid that the victors should take the lives of the vanquished. It was, in fact, on these principles that the struggle had been maintained. Prisoners on either side had rarely been put to death as traitors, the fellow-feeling of the combatants, as well as the fear of retaliation, having prevented such cruelty. The rules of international law applied as much to the leaders as to their followers. On the other hand, it was undoubtedly true that Charles was guilty in a sense in which no other leader was guilty, and no mere general could have been. For it was his deceptions, followed as they were by the refusal of the necessary Militia Bill, that caused the war. Had he read aright the history of the past, he would have seen that the great Edward’s “pactum serva” contained the whole law for a constitutional king. Charles was not punished as a combatant, but as the cause of the combat, in other words, for his previous actions as a king. As for the rights of war, the Independent leaders could scarcely have doubted that, had the cases been reversed, he would have meted the same measure to them.

The voice of the nation, however, was for clemency in the hour of their king’s fall; they did not think he had committed such sanguinary crimes as justified the violation of law to accomplish his death. Thousands had fought on his side; thousands who had fought against him wished to spare his life. His enemies might plead that they were acting in self-defence; but if they counted on the king’s death stopping the reaction, they greatly miscalculated. When Charles was dead, they had his son to deal with, who had not, as his father, lost the confidence of the nation.

%THE FEELINGS OF THE ACTORS.%

These objections were so strongly felt at the time, that several officers, and several Republicans, stood aloof from the whole proceeding. Fairfax, Skippon, Vane, Algernon Sidney, exerted all their influence to prevent a trial for life, wishing to see the king merely deposed. On the other hand, the mass of sectarians, Republicans, and Levellers pressed for Charles’ execution as a grand and signal display of justice; one that had not its record in history, and might serve as a warning to all crowned heads for the future. Charles, according to them, had broken his coronation oath, in which he swore to govern by the laws of the land, and had thereby been the author of the civil war, and the bloodshed attendant upon it. Any accommodation was alike unsafe and wicked; unsafe, because his duplicity had been proved over and over again; wicked, because of the express words to be found in 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.”[152] “As for Mr. Hutchinson,” says his wife, “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, He would open his eyes and not suffer him to proceed--and finding no check, he 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 oath) into the hands of God and their enemies.”

Cromwell and Ireton placed themselves at the head of the movement they were powerless to prevent. There is no doubt that they sympathized in it. Only once does Cromwell allude to the execution, at least in the letters and speeches that still remain. “They,” he says, “that acted this great business have given a reason of their faith in the action, and some here are ready, further, to do it against all gainsayers.”[153] Such a decision as the Independent leaders had to make in regard to the execution of Charles I., shows what is really terrible in revolutions. It is not that men carry their lives in their hands, the soldier thinks nothing of that. It is that crises come then, when men cannot choose the good, cannot stand aside, but must choose between two evils, and see the evil of what they choose. At such a time many a man would gladly oppose both and fall; but a leader is bound to the helm, though he may see no course but to run his ship on the rocks, and drown some to save many. This is what is most terrible in revolutions; after the fact it is terrible to all; it is terrible at the time only to the weaker or more delicate spirits. These birds of calm are caught by the storm and drowned while doubting. Not so the real leaders of revolutions. They ride upon the storm. They see but as the lightning flashes. To them the lesser evil seems a transcendent good. Charles had hoped by his intrigues to crush Cromwell; he failed; and Cromwell thenceforth looked upon him as hopelessly false; as one who was destitute of that sense of truth between man and man, which was a necessity of political life. Such a man, if a ruler, he held, must be dealt with by banishment or by death, as an incurable evil of the commonwealth. His was a stern mind, and a mind into which an idea of privilege did not enter. There was with him no respect of persons. If he had no mercy on Lilburne’s misguided Leveller, who endangered the fidelity of a regiment, he was as severe to the prince, who endangered the liberty of the country. Such a mind, intensely confident of its own sense of justice, never recoiled from its conclusion. If it could not draw back, still less could it conceal its purpose. As it abhorred secret murder, so it abhorred that lingering murder, which, while it shrinks from taking away life, shrinks not from taking away the means of life. If Charles was to die, it could not be by the lingering death Charles himself had assigned to Eliot. There was no secrecy in Cromwell’s dealing with prince or private; the one was given over to martial law before the eyes of his comrades; the other was given as openly to no less stern inquisitors of blood.

%CAUSES OF SYMPATHY.%

The world, however, has not judged as Cromwell did. And, though on grounds of abstract justice, it is hard to say why a king deserves a mercy which he has denied to his subjects, yet many faults will be forgiven to those who have had the difficult task of governing others. Among the causes which have won an excess of sympathy for Charles, we observe the natural pity for the greatness of the fall, a disinclination to judge hardly of the fallen, but, above all, the deep-rooted sentiment of loyalty, which the restriction of prerogative has itself attached to the king, by making his throne the ideal element of the constitution, and thus so raising him above parties, that when his ministers do well, he receives the honour, when ill, he can restore, or even increase, his own popularity by ridding himself of his advisers. Besides these general considerations, it will be remembered that the interpreter of his times for all the generations before our own, has been one who wrote in the full tide of the reaction, and who, as is now known, has not shrunk on occasion from suppressing truth, in his endeavour to palliate the faults of one side or blacken those of the other. The historian has been seconded so ably by the painter and novelist, that a Cavalier has been held the type of all that is noble, and a patriot of all that is mean. It will be noticed that the two classes by whom Charles has been most admired, have been the clergy, who may have been unconsciously biassed by a not unnatural antipathy to the religious theories of his opponents; and those whose lives have brought them least in contact with public interests: these have judged him as one of their own society, and have been carried away by the many virtues of his private life, his courage in the field, his tender nature and his piety, as well as by the noble attitude in which these qualities sustained him at his death. Those, on the other hand, who have interested themselves deeply in the cause of the people, must perforce judge public men by what they have done for the nation. In their roll of martyrs will come not Charles, who died from reluctance to abandon boldly a prerogative which had been proved to be untenable and pernicious, but Eliot, who died in defence of the necessary rights of the Commons’ house, and the ransacking of whose most secret papers has only proved more clearly what was clear before, that the only ends he aimed at were his country’s, his God’s, and truth’s. Those who look to national interests will hold that the first intellectual virtue of a ruler is an insight into the spirit of his time and the first moral virtue, a sympathy with his people’s hopes and fears. As men may be too good fathers, if they use patronage as a vehicle of nepotism, so kings are too good husbands, when they give or withhold their consent to the nation’s wishes according to the tempers or caprices of their wives, and too good churchmen, when they put one half of their subjects without the pale of toleration. This is not the sense in which, with kings, as with others, “England expects every man to do his duty.”

FOOTNOTES:

[137] Rushworth, Abr., vi. 99, 100.

[138] Rushworth, Abr., vi. 113.

[139] Herb. Mem.; Rush. Abr., vi. 140, 144.

[140] Huntingdon in Masères Tracts, 398.

[141] Clar. State Papers, ii. appendix.

[142] See p. 73.

[143] Ashburnham’s Narrative, 94.

[144] Somers, Tracts, vi.

[145] Carl., i. 279-295; Hodgson and Slingsby, Mem.

[146] “Letter of an Ejected Member” (printed 1648).

[147] Memoirs of Col. Birch, 68, 96, 152, 236; Whitelock, Mem; Hollis, Memoirs; ‘Fundamental Liberties of England vindicated,’ in King’s Tracts.

[148] Blencowe, Sidney Papers, i. 237.

[149] Herb., Mem., 168.

[150] Rushworth, vi. 604; Herbert, 180.

[151] This great blot on the proceedings was well hit by a remonstrance addressed to Ireton. “The godly and moral jealousy, I have over you and others related to the lieutenant-general, makes me present these few lines.... Surely of all others the change of laws and government had need to be done in full Parliament. But that it may be as near as possible the act of the whole people, as many as may be should be present, lest it fails of the _esse_ of _magnum consilium_, or that the absence of many by a forced or legal impediment be not judged a just impediment to proceedings. And whether this Parliament be either a free or impartial one will abide disputed at least, and if ever time shall come in which examination may be of things and present transactions in reference to this Parliament, who can tell if it may not be judged beyond the Earl of Strafford’s fault, which was but arbitrary government, which is but a slighting of laws--much of this a total abolition of them?... It may, perhaps, come to be said of your many dangerous ends and extraordinary actings, as the Romans of Pompey the Great, his daughter, it was a fair and happy daughter, brought forth of an ugly and odious mother; I wish it may be so--only thus much, if you save the people of this land in the way you are in, it must be both against their wills and prayers.” “This I delivered to Ireton about a fortnight before the king’s trial. Signed, John Clayton.” See an unpublished pamphlet among Clarendon Papers in Bodleian, entitled, “State Colours and Complections, in which are reasons against the proceedings to try the king.”

[152] Numbers xxxv. 33.

[153] Carl. ii. 210.