thing, was obsolete, that Laud and Strafford proceeded to perpetrate that series of enormities which finally consigned them

to the block.

Charles, like his father, favored popery more than Puritanism; and for the same reason, because it was the friend of arbitrary power. The Puritans, of course, hated it; yet not more than that illustrious band among the commons who were styled the Patriots, though probably for different reasons; the latter opposing it chiefly on political, the former on religious grounds, although the line between them can scarcely be drawn with such distinctness as to place the individuals of the two parties on one side or the other. In all probability there were many in both parties, and those perhaps the most enlightened too, who carried on the war against it on both accounts. We think the following remarks, as applying to the two parties, are much to the purpose.

Now the circumstances which were peculiar to England-and among the very most important of these must be classed that already mentioned, of a portion of the aristocracy being amalgamated with the burgesses by sitting together in the same chamber-joined to those above specified, which were common to her with other European countries, had, about the commencement of this period of our history, added much boldness not only to the thoughts, but to the bearing of the Commons of England. For we may here remark, in passing, that for a long time after the English Commons had assumed considerable boldness of ideas and firmness of purpose, their demeanor was characterized by an extreme deference and timidity. The bearing, again, of the high aristocracy in the upper house was marked by a corresponding haughtiness. There is one leading trait in the aspect of this age that we must notice before we quit this part of our subject. We have already alluded to the probable effect of putting the Bible into the hands of the body of the people. They were commanded to be, they professed to be, Christians. They diligently read, and much pondered on, the precepts of the Christian morality. In being ordered to be Christians, they were ordered to take these as their rule of life. They did so take them, to the best (that is to say) of their comprehension and knowledge of them. They then turned their eyes to those who were their worldly superiors-whose power and wealth made them be looked up to as the great ones of the earth. They looked, as far as they were permitted, into the palaces of their princes and the halls of their nobles; and they beheld many things there which were hard to reconcile with the commands of that book which, they believed, was no respecter of persons, but which was intended alike for the rich and the poor, for the prince in his palace and the peasant in his hut. They were convinced that a court which acted in a manner so contrary to the precepts of their cherished religion, and a church which was the tool of that court, must be bad, and ought to be put down. And they went about the work of putting them down with a mixture

of enthusiasm and coolness, of ability, energy, and courage, which has never yet been displayed in an equal degree by any body of men in any age and any country. Yet for all this, the revolution which we are about to trace must not be regarded merely as a religious one. was also a political revolution, but accomplished in the midst of a religious people, in a religious age.'-Ib. pp. 499, 500.

It

We direct attention to the above remarks for the twofold purpose of showing, first, the causes which produced the men of what Clarendon, &c., call the grand rebellion;' and, secondly, the utter hopelessness of putting down such men as these by vaunts of high prerogative, or by cajolery and fraud.

The alternations of violence and chicanery by which the king endeavored to carry through his own designs, or to defeat the measures of his parliament, sufficiently mark the character of the man, and the kind of judicial blindness to which he was delivered. Never was the maxim of the heathen poet, 'Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat,' more fully exemplified. It has been said, and with some degree of truth, that he suffered for the faults of others, and that the sins of his predecessors were visited on him. Yet it is equally true, that had he met the spirit of his times in a manly, ingenuous, and confiding temper, the turn and color of his fate would have been widely different. If, as it has been said, the wisdom of a king is shown by the selection of wise counsellors, it argues little in favor of Charles the First that he surrounded the throne with such men as Buckingham, Laud, and Strafford. The violent proceedings of the two latter, the one in political, the other in ecclesiastical affairs, disgusted and alarmed all classes. Ireland, it is true, was partially quieted for the time by the tyrannical government of Strafford; but Scotland, on the other hand, was driven into general insurrection by the intolerance of Laud; while the best men in England, seeing that civil and religious liberty were rapidly disappearing, were beginning to seek in the new world for the freedom which was denied to them in this; till, with a refinement of despotism worthy of the worst governments of the east, they were forbidden to leave the country lest they should escape their tyrants.

With the meeting of the Long Parliament the halcyon days of prerogative were ended, and the struggle between the king and the nation commenced in earnest. We must restrict ourselves to the citation of a few facts as exemplifying the faint outline of the character of Charles which we have endeavored to portray.

Not satisfied with assuming unlimited prerogative for himself, he determined that no one acting under his orders should be called to account for their misdeeds; and told the house that

none of his servants should be responsible to any but himself, and that the bold proceedings of the last parliament should never be submitted to again.

The judges had denied the right of Habeas Corpus to persons imprisoned by the king, so that he might seize and imprison any who displeased him for as long a term as he pleased. The flagrant case of Sir John Eliot had shown in what manner this power might be used, and of what Charles was capable. Not satisfied with committing Sir John to the Tower for words spoken in parliament, he detained him there, notwithstanding the inroad which his imprisonment in an unhealthy atmosphere was making on his constitution, till he died; and still unsatiated with this revenge, he had the barbarity to refuse the petition of Lady Eliot, begging that the body of Sir John might be buried with his ancestors in Cornwall; and as if to convey his refusal with every possible circumstance of offensive cruelty, he wrote on the petition with his own hand, 'Let the body of Sir John Eliot be buried in the church of the parish in which 'he died—and it was so buried. The atrocities which he countenanced in Laud and Strafford need not be enumerated.

It was not, however, the active tyranny of Charles, nor the fact of his having governed while he could without law and contrary to justice, that rendered the breach between him and his subjects irremediable. After the deaths of Buckingham, Laud, and Strafford, who in all probability were answerable for the major part of his misdeeds during their lives, and also after he had learned by stern experience that there was a power able and willing to control his own, his former offences would have been forgotten, and he might have been reinstated in all his proper and legitimate authority, had not his own duplicity prevented. Of this the nation and parliament had had frequent proofs-but they had yet to learn that no reverses could 'bind the monarch to a candid and honorable course. When after a hard struggle with his parliament, he had agreed to pass the bill of rights, he endeavored meanly to evade its power by his manner of accepting it; and it was not till he saw that no subsidies would be granted unless the bill was fully passed, that he gave his assent in the binding form of words; and then caused 1500 copies of the bill to be printed and published, with his first evasive reply attached.

Not to multiply instances, at a subsequent period his conduct is thus described by the historian May.

Many good men were sorry that the king's actions agreed no better with his word-that he openly professed before God, with horrid imprecations, that he endeavored nothing so much as the preservation of the protestant religion, and the rooting out of popery; yet, in the meantime, underhand, he promised the Irish rebels an abrogation of

the laws against them, which was contrary to his late expressed promises in these words, 'I will never abrogate the laws against papists.' And again he said, I abhor to think of bringing foreign soldiers into the kingdom;' and yet he solicited the Duke of Lorraine, the French, the Danes, and the very Irish for assistance.'

When the army offered him fair conditions he refused them, thinking to make better by allowing the factions to weaken one another; and during the negotiations he was detected in several intrigues with his partisans in the three kingdoms for the renewal of hostilities. There is reason to believe that a secret compact was at one time entered into between Charles and Cromwell, which was vitiated by the inveterate double dealing of the king.

Seeing, then, that no reliance was to be placed on Charles, that the faith of treaties, his word as a king and a gentleman (his own favorite phrase), and even his most solemn asseverations, backed by appeals to heaven, were not in the least degree to be relied on, and that he would temporize, and turn, and wind, till he should have it in his power to be revenged on his opponents; all of which was known and proved from his papers and letters taken at the battle of Naseby, published by the parliament, and admitted to be authentic by Charles himself,* one of two courses only could be followed by the men whom he had cajoled and insulted, and would have immolated, and who had him in their power, viz., to sacrifice either themselves or him. That they believed the latter course would be for the benefit not only of themselves, but of the country, we see no room to doubt; that Cromwell might have had a view beyond them all perhaps is possible, for before this some golden visions and dim glimmerings of the royal prize which he afterwards achieved might have been floating in his distant prospect, though they had not yet assumed a distinct and definite reality.+

We would not be understood as asserting that every one of the proceedings of the parliament was just and proper; but it has been truly remarked, that the temper of the Commons ought not to be judged of without reference to that of Charles -to his known and proved faithlessness and inveterate enmity to their liberties. Clarendon, indeed, in his specious narrative, has contrived to give the impression that the Commons were always in the wrong; and it is not a little amusing to hear him

*He admitted the genuineness of the published letters, but asserted, that others which the parliament had kept back would have given them a different meaning. Knowing our man, we doubt the truth of this assertion.

We refer the reader to an argument on the death of Charles (in the Pictorial History, vol. iii. p. 514), which we intended to quote, but cannot. Vaughan's History.

in his account of Charles's manifestoes, setting forth how the king complained that the parliament was acting contrary to law, and how he was precluded from retaliating, because forsooth he would then be acting contrary to the laws himself. This man, who all his life had been governing, not only contrary to law, but absolutely without it, no sooner found that others were determined to exert a vigor beyond the law because it was the only way to crush his tyranny, than behold! he is all for law, and denounces those who break it. He had used a two-edged weapon, and it had cut himself.

Of the Lord Protector Cromwell, we feel some diffidence in speaking, not because we have not our opinion-right or wrong -but because to do justice to the subject, and to give the grounds of our conclusions, would require discussion, comparisons of evidence, and statements and deductions, which we have not space to make. Still we must not pass over the subject without a few remarks.

There happened to Cromwell,' says M. Guizot, what perhaps never happened to any other man of his sort. He was sufficient for all the phases of the revolution; he was the man of the first and of the last times: at first the leader of the insurrection, the abettor of anarchy, the most violent revolutionist in England; afterwards the man of the anti-revolutionary reaction, the man of the re-establishent of order, of social re-organization: thus himself alone playing all the parts that, in the course of revolutions, the greatest actors divide amongst them.'-Vol. iii. p. 515.

Though his talents were neither unknown nor unappreciated in parliament, especially by his cousin Hampden (himself one of the most acute and high minded men of his time), it was not till he took upon him the duties of a military commander that his transcendent talents and capacity were developed to the world. As he rose in the army, the successes of the parliament were more decided; till, after the battles of Naseby and Worcester, the former of which annihilated the hopes of Charles the First, and the latter those of his son, he stood forth as the only man by whom the destinies of the kingdom could be decided. Nor was it in all probability till after the defeat of Charles the Second at Worcester, that the first distinct visions of sovereign power flitted before the view of Cromwell. That up to this period he was actuated by the consideration of the public good, we see but little cause to doubt; if afterwards his motives were of a more mixed description, at least they were not wholly selfish, and when they became so, if indeed they ever did, the difficulties of his position, and the impossibility of a secure retreat, should be allowed their proper influence in forming an estimate of the man.