formed the closest combination between all the liberal lords and commoners of note, who could be kept in town; he drew the cords of friendship closer between themselves and the Scotch commissioners; he corresponded with every absent patriot who could serve the cause; the seats of Lord Say and Sir Richard Knightly (son-in-law to Hampden), were fixed upon as convenient places in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire for frequent consultations; a private press was established at the latter spot, and worked wonders; whilst precisely as Pym had predicted, the disastrous course of the Scotch war was dragging Charles Stuart to the feet of his indignant subjects. A council of peers had been summoned at York, as a last resource; of which Pym no sooner heard, than he prepared a petition for a parliament, with the names of Bedford, Hertford, Essex, and Warwick at its head; and with which he repaired to York forthwith to present it in person. Eight more lords were there persuaded to sign it; and meanwhile a similar document, set in motion by himself before his departure from London, now reached his hands with 10,000 signatures subscribed to it of metropolitan citizens. The effect turned out irresistible; for other petitions now fast flowed in from different quarters, to the same purport; so that the king, hunted through all the sinuosities of those tendencies to treachery, which had descended to him from his father, once again yielded to stern necessity, and issued writs for a new parliament to meet on the third of the ensuing November.

And now again, without the pause of an instant, Pym and Hampden were seen in the discharge of their duty, as the chiefs and advisers of the people. It is stated in several books of the time, and repeated by many of the historians, that between the interval of the issue of the writs and the elections, they rode as before through every county in England, urging the electors to their duty. Warwick, Brooke, and Bedford, Lord Kimbolton (the Earl of Manchester's son), Fiennes, second son to Lord Say, and the younger Vane, exerted themselves meanwhile in their respective districts; and Warwick soon wrote to his Essex friends from York, so recently the head quarters of the king, that the game was well begun. The party of the king were not less active, but they were less successful. In the opinion of the great mass of the people, Pym was the author of this parliament; and by the common consent of all he was to be placed in the position of its leader. Preparing himself for that great office, he well knew that the highest duty of his life, and the most fatal there awaited him. He was to keep his old appointment with Wentworth, now the Earl of Strafford.' -pp. 128, 129.

Twelve weary years had now elapsed since Pym had threatened his apostate friend with a visionary doom. Wentworth, although falling in at last with the designs of Charles towards Scotland,

could not fail, any more than Laud or the Earl of Northumberland then Lord Admiral, to perceive that clouds of danger were rapidly gathering round the throne. The second Scotch campaign proved analogous to the first. A route at Newburn had brought the Covenanters to Newcastle; where by the treaty of Ripon, good quarters were secured for them, with an allowance of £850 per diem. Exasperation increased on all sides. The recent convocation of the clergy had fared no better than the recent parliament. Their new canons, as well as the infamous et cetera oath, shocked all reasonable persons with the established church and its hierarchy. Mitres, coronets, and the crown crowded nearer and nearer together, like fowls anticipating a tempest. Henrietta coquetted with her Catholics; and troops were to be enlisted in the Low Countries, if Spain would permit. Cardinal Richelieu had afforded some small yet seasonable assistance to the Scotch before they crossed the Tweed. Even Strafford felt the shadow of his destiny, and wished to remain absent. His health, never strong, was breaking down through an accumulation of cares as well as diseases, which perhaps never man before had sustained under such painful circumstances. As if the mark of the axe had been on his forehead, he implored his ruthless and deceitful master that he might return to Ireland. The royal sign-manual assured him that not a hair of his head should be hurt, though it detained him in London nevertheless; for who could abide so well the approaching storm? It burst with a clap of thunder. The member for Tavistock on the eleventh of November, moved that the strangers' room should be cleared, the doors being shut, and the key laid upon the table. After an interval of four hours, spent by multitudes outside in various and intense anxiety, John Pym issued from the House of Commons, followed by upwards of three hundred representatives of the people, with whom, proceeding to the bar of the Peers, he there impeached Thomas Earl of Strafford, adding also all his other titles, of high treason against his majesty and the liberties of England!

The Earl was already in the house, according to Clarendon, when Pym appeared at the bar and was even prepared with evidence of a correspondence, between Pym and other popular leaders, and the Scotch, supplied by the perfidy or forgery of Lord Saville, on which he designed that very instant to accuse them of treason. According to the lively and graphic narrative of Baillie, however, Strafford had not yet entered the house, with this view; but after Pym's sudden appearance, the earl's is thus described: the lords began to consult on that strange and unexpected motion. The word goes in haste to the lord lieutenant, where he was with the king; with speed he comes to the house; he calls rudely at the door; James Maxwell, Keeper of the Black Rod, opens; his lordship with a proud glooming countenance,

makes towards his place at the board's head: but at once, many bid him void the house; so he is forced in confusion, to go to the door till he was called. After consultation, being called in, he stands, but is commanded to kneel, and on his knees to hear the sentence. Being on his knees, he is delivered to the Keeper of the Black Rod, to be prisoner till he was cleared of those crimes the House of Commons had charged him with. He offered to speak, but was commanded to be gone without a word. In the outer room, James Maxwell required him, as prisoner, to deliver his sword. When he had got it, he cries with a loud voice for his man to carry my lord lieutenant's sword. This done, he makes through a number of people, towards his coach,— all gazing, no man capping to him, before whom, that morning, the greatest in England would have stood discovered. Coming to the place where he expected his coach, it was not there; so he behoved to return that same way, through a world of gazing people. When, at last, he had found his coach, and was entering, James Maxwell told him, Your lordship is my prisoner, and must go in my coach,' and so he behoved to do. For some days, too many went to visit him but since, the parliament hath commanded his keeping to be straiter.' The result proved this to have been what Pym anticipated, the masterstroke of the time. In whatever view, or in whatever sense, it is regarded, whether of regret or admiration, it cannot be denied to have been, in its practical results, the greatest achievement of this great age of statesmanship. It struck instant terror into every quarter of the court, and left the king for a time powerless and alone.'

-Pym, pp. 137, 138,

Every resolution of the House of Commons from this hour took the shape of action. True to his assumed and terrible character of THE GREAT ACCUSER, Pym then impeached William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury; besides lodging informations against the bishops of Bath and Wells, and Ely, as well as against other profligate ministers and corrupt judges. Sir Robert Berkeley was publicly arrested in his own court, taken off to prison from the very bench of justice, where he was sitting, 'to the great terror of all his profession.' Windebanke the secretary escaped to France; Lord Keeper Finch to Holland. The Puritans who had been whipt, pilloried, or mutilated, were released from their imprisonments, and came up to the capital in triumph amid the plaudits of their friends, and the sore mortification of their enemies. Laud, their persecutor, was in the Tower; and his new canons had been scattered to the winds. Deprived pastors were restored to their churches. Religion, in once again breathing freely, appealed to liberty rather than despotism, for her preservation. The Triennial Act was brought in and passed. Shipmoney was declared illegal. The penalties of a præmunire were denounced against all parties paying or receiving the duties of tonnage or poundage without the sanction of the House of Com

mons. The courts of Star Chamber, the Welsh Marches, the Northern Presidency, the High Commission, and episcopal jurisdictions, experienced total abolition. Forests were restrained to their known limits; vexatious proceedings with regard to knighthood were extinguished; clergymen were excluded from the Privy Council and commission of the peace; nor could negociations for admitting popular men into office, nor an army-plot countenanced, if not actually originated by Charles himself, rescue the guilty Strafford from his fate, nor the king from his dilemma. Pym had stood forward as prime mover in all these reforms: whilst though he underrated none of them, his whole soul was preparing for the trial of the lord lieutenant. Its history and results must be known to most of our readers; nor need we do more than remind them, that the member for Tavistock was the mighty orator, backed by the voice of the nation, who alone could have encountered with success the eloquence and talents of Wentworth. He was justly described by his contemporaries as the great PARLIAMENT 'MAN!' Westminster Hall presented on that occasion a spectacle only paralleled by a single subsequent scene. Royalty, nobility, patriotism there mingled, as they had never done before. The grand object which the leaders of the Commons had in their minds was to establish against the culprit an attempt to subvert the fundamental laws of the country; and in this they undoubtedly succeeded. Three kingdoms might be said to have been present, through their deputations, and as Baillie avows, it was daily the 'most glorious assembly the isle could afford. Strafford always appeared in deep mourning, wearing his George, with his thick black hair cut short from his ample forehead, over a countenance sternly dark, yet dashed in part with paleness. For not only was he there arraigned for life or death,-but stone, gout, flux, and rheumatism, racked him at the very time all over his person, so that it stooped with its tremendous infirmities, more than with his fearfulness of the trial. He had nothing on his side, but a written promise from his master that his life, honour, and fortune 'should be safe,'-the favour of the clergy, aristocracy, and their ladies, and a mind of overwhelming power. Pym however met, and overthrew him upon his own field. At one particular moment, our biographer has pourtrayed the following scene:

'Strafford had been closely and earnestly watching his accuser, when the latter suddenly turning, met the fixed and wasted features of his early associate. A rush of other feelings, crowding into that look, for an instant dispossessed him. His papers he looked on, says Baillie, but they could not help him to a point or two, so he behoved to pass them. Yet presently Pym's eloquence and dignified command returned. had thoroughly contemplated his commission, and had resolved on its fulfilment. The occasion was not let slip, the energies wound up to

this feat through years of hard endurance were not frozen,-and the cause of the people was gained. In the condemnation of Strafford, they assumed an alienated power, and were reinstated in an ancient freedom. He was condemned. The judges themselves, on a solemn reference by the House of Lords for their opinion, whether some of the articles amounted to treason, answered unanimously that upon all which their lordships had voted to be proved, it was their opinion the Earl of Strafford did deserve to undergo the pains and penalties of high treason by law.'-Strafford, p. 398.

The Commons however before this had altered their course, and introduced a Bill of Attainder, upon which constitutional question we beg to refer to Hallam, who has treated the subject with his usual ability and impartiality. The peers assented: there was no hope for the life of the delinquent: though the king indeed laboured to save him in his clumsy manner, certain as that manner was of making matters worse rather than better. Pym remembered Greenwich, and proved a deaf adder to every supplication, but that of a violated realm. Strafford himself generously released his master from all engagements; probably conceiving that such magnanimity deserved, if it might not experience, something like reciprocal firmness in return. Yet Charles had never really loved his able minister, who was far too great a man to be any thing but feared or used, and then treated ungratefully by so pusillanimous a sovereign. He therefore forfeited his word, although with tears, perhaps many and sincere; for truly, as he observed, 'the condition of Wentworth was happier than his own.' He subscribed also, with the same pen, a Bill to preserve the parliament from dissolution, without its own consent. That assembly had now won its terrible triumph and Put not your trust in 'princes,' was the final murmur of the mighty but disappointed Strafford. With a demeanor, almost suitable to a martyr, he laid his neck on the block; where the executioner struck it off at one blow, in the presence of 100,000 spectators, on Wednesday, the 12th of May, 1641. For the justification of Pym and his confederates, should any be thought necessary, we cannot forbear transcribing a few sentences from an address delivered by the member for Tavistock, in reply to his noble antagonist. The law is the 'boundary, the measure, betwixt the prerogative of the king and 'the liberty of the people. Whilst these move in their own orbs, 'they are a support and security to one another, the prerogative 'a cover and defence to the liberty of the people, and the people 'by their liberty enabled to be a foundation to the prerogative; 'but if these bounds be so removed, that they enter into contes'tation and conflict, one of these mischiefs must ensue;-if the 'prerogative of the king overwhelm the liberty of the people, it 'will be turned into tyranny; if liberty undermine the preroga'tive, it will grow into anarchy.' Strafford had transgressed

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