with tilt and tournaments, and other gallantries; to make them receive lustre by foreign ambassadors; to make the arts and sciences flourish; to make cities and suburbs shine with goodly structures; to make the country ring with the huntsman's horn, and the shepherd's pipe: how comes it to pass that blood-thirsty discord now usurps thy place, and flings about her snakes in every corner?"

In such a deplorable state of things, notwithstanding all the parade which one side, at least, made of religion, neither unaffected piety nor true morality could flourish. Far from repenting of those sins on account of which divine Providence had permitted the scourge of rebellion and war to ravage the nation, new crimes were introduced. In the midst of prolix details of trivial political occurrences, we met with this naked, unnoted record, "twenty witches executed in Norfolk." The kidnapping of children, probably for sale in the plantations, grew so frequent a practice, that at length the parliament passed an ordinance for its suppression, under the name of "spiriting." Ministers of the gospel habitually perverted the pulpit (to the use of which the public service of God was now wholly restricted) to the purposes of strife and bloodshed: the famous sermon delivered at Uxbridge by Robert Love, on the assembling of the commissioners there, to treat of peace, in which he encouraged the rebels to the slaughter of their opponents as "the Lord's work," was singular, not for its anti-christian spirit, but merely for the audacity implied in the occasion. Respecting the demoralization introduced into families, we have abundance of contemporary testimony. "Alas," exclaims a writer of the time, "in this intestine war of ours we are so desperately wicked and void of all natural affection, that divers gentlemen, of both parties, have looked upon their nearest kinsmen that were wallowing in their own blood, without offering them their aid, or casting a sigh of compassion for them. Nay, some have been so cruel, and deprived of all natural affection, that they and their abettors have ridden twenty miles in a dark night to surprise their father, uncle, or brother, to carry them away to their own garrison, to wring out of their hands some considerable ransom; which being refused, they have deprived them in another night of all their cattle and means, and reduced them (that were knights' fellows) to Job's case, without any compassion or reluctation."

The neglect and ill-treatment to which ordinary prisoners of war were exposed, is another frightful feature of the times. The story of the soldiers and others taken at Cirencester, early in the war, which deeply implicates the king himself in a charge of inhumanity, is, no doubt, a gross exaggeration. But it is too certain, that in the crowded fortresses and other depôts belonging to both parties, humanity was not unfrequently outraged. Yet these deep shadows in the great picture of calamity, are relieved by some touches of light: the struggles and sacrifices made by the friends of captives, in negociating exchanges, and in other methods for their deliverance, present incidents consolatory to the lover of mankind. Nor was beneficence of a more public sort wholly wanting; an instance of which was witnessed in the congregation at Carfax church, Oxford, where a collection was made, every Sunday, for the support of the numerous unhappy victims of the war confined in that city.

A remarkable and ominous circumstance was, the number of executions which marked

the period of the decline of the Presbyterian, and the sudden growth of the Independent influence. Sir Alexander Carew, who in the beginning of the war had distinguished himself by his enmity to the king, but who afterwards became a sincere convert to loyalty, and was detected in an attempt to surrender the fort at Plymouth to the royalists, was beheaded, December the 23rd, on Tower Hill. The Hothams, father and son, whose crime was similar to Carew's, and the elder of whom, by closing the gates of Hull against his sovereign, may be said to have been the immediate cause of commencing the war, suffered upon the fatal spot, the one on the 1st, the other on the 2nd of January. Clarendon strikingly describes the unpitied fall of these persons as "an act of divine justice, executed by those at Westminster." The next victim flung to the devouring Moloch of civil and religious strife, was the brave, the venerable, and learned Laud. More than four years of his advanced age had "shed their snows" upon the prelate's head, since the agonizing day when Strafford, then on his passage to eternity, knelt beneath the grating of that honoured cell, to receive a last blessing from his deeply conscientious, but too zealous, spiritual and political father; a long, and, to the sufferer, harassing suspension of the blow, but arguing no forgetfulness on the part of his executioners, who, in patient confidence of the end, stood all the while uplifting "that two-handed engine at the door." Laud's execution took place January 10th. On the 20th of the month following, occurred that of Macguire, an Irishman of rank, sentenced for his share in his country's rebellion. In the case of this man, there was little to engage sympathy, if we except the persecution which, in common with the archbishop, he encountered on the scaffold. The part acted in Laud's case by the zealous puritan Sir John Clotworthy, was performed in the instance of the Irish baron by Gibbs, sheriff of London, and the Presbyterian minister Sibbald. He persisted in denying that he had acted as an agent in the rebellion, either under a commission from the king, or in reliance on any promise of absolution from the pope; and he declined the attendance of Dr. Sibbald, on the ground of his own religion being the Roman Catholic. The poor fellow sought earnestly to prepare himself for death, in his own way. "Since I am here to die," he said, "I desire to depart with a quiet mind, and with the marks of a good Christian; that is, asking forgiveness first of God, and next of the world. And I do, from the bottom of my heart, forgive all my enemies, even those that have a hand in my death." He concluded with a request, which he had before urged, "I beseech you, gentlemen, let me have a little time to say my prayers." The zeal of his tormentors was, however, inexorable. His beads and crucifix, with some papers containing his confessor's directions for his behaviour on the scaffold, were rudely taken from him, by the hands of those champions of law, liberty, and toleration; and nearly the last words of the wretched man were still the petition, in vain repeated, "For Jesus Christ's sake, I beseech you to give me a little time to prepare myself for death!"

The growing vigour of the Independent party was evinced in many other ways. The Assembly of Divines, a copy of the national assembly of the Scottish kirk, though, in the first instance, composed almost exclusively of Presbyterians, rapidly yielded to the lawless impulses which swayed without, and was filled with antinomians, anabaptists, millenarians, with adherents, in short, of almost all those multifarious sects, whom the fanatical

temper of the period, and the nature of the contest in which the country was engaged, had called into existence. These anomalous factions, united however by the common aim of freedom for conscience, readily lent their aid in the work of ecclesiastical ruin; in stripping away copes and surplices, in demolishing and mutilating ancient monuments, in pulling down organs; but to the business of reconstruction, in any shape, they were utterly opposed, and set themselves as earnestly against the proposed government by presbyters, classes, and synods, as both the Presbyterians and their discordant colleagues had before done against the existing authority of archbishops, bishops, and deans. "The opposition between them," writes a modern historian, "grew fierce and obstinate: day after day, week after week, was consumed in unavailing debates. The lords Say and Wharton, Sir Henry Vane, and Mr. St. John, contended warmly in favour of toleration : they were as warmly opposed by the divine eloquence of the chancellor' of Scotland, the commissioners from the kirk, and several eminent members of the English parliament. Eighteen months had elapsed since the assembly was first convened, and yet it had accomplished nothing of importance, except the composition of a Directory for the public worship." The once flourishing church of England had indeed been levelled with the ground, but its root still survived in the affections and habits of the people ;-spurned, trampled, drained of all but its divine vitality, it was yet ready, when the allotted period of its judicial ruin, and the ripened purposes of Providence, should be complete, to raise its stately head, and extend its sheltering branches; while the discipline of the Directory was from the first a thing void of every element of life. At no time more than very partially observed, its authors quickly saw it wholly neglected—a naked and uncouth monument of their presumption.

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CHAPTER XIX.

CAMPAIGN OF 1645-NASE BY.

THE prosecution of the war, as far as the nature of the season allowed, had not been in any degree intermitted during the conference at Uxbridge. In the middle of the treaty the town of Weymouth was surprised, and partly occupied, by the king's troops; on the other side, Shrewsbury, one of Charles's most important garrisons, was betrayed to the parliament on the very day of its expiration. Great exertions were made by the parliament to give effect to their new model, by voting abundant military supplies for the approaching campaign. Nor was the king less anxiously engaged in preparations for the decisive struggle which he foresaw. But the total want of pecuniary resources, to which he was by this time reduced, presented a most embarrassing difficulty. He endeavoured, by means of negotiations conducted through the queen's agency at Paris, to obtain aid from the French king and the Duke of Lorraine; the latter of whom appears to have promised to bring over 10,000 men to his assistance. He also directed the Duke of Ormond to settle, on any terms he chose, the differences in Ireland, that he might be enabled to avail himself of the support of his Roman Catholic subjects in that country.

Apprehensive, in the mean time, that Oxford, towards which the enemy had of late made threatening advances, must, sooner or later, undergo the dangers of a siege, he determined to provide for the security of the Prince of Wales, by sending him into the west, where the royal authority was still paramount. The place chosen for his royal highness's residence, as promising both safety and convenience, was Bristol. Thither accordingly the young prince proceeded, early in the month of March, with two regiments of guards, under the command of Lord Capel and the Marquess of Hertford, attended by Lord Colepepper, Hyde, and others of the king's council.

The establishment of a court for the prince, separate from that of his royal parent, tended to the increase of those feuds among the royalists, which have been, in some degree, described. His majesty's authority at Oxford, already extremely weak, was farther lessened by it, without the least prospect of vigour being communicated to that of his youthful representative. It was Charles's original intention not to invest the prince with a military command, because he foresaw that the necessary delegation of the duties of the office to others, in consequence of his youth, would not fail to aggravate the existing jealousies and disputes. But Rupert, when, in an evil hour, he was offered the chief command of the army, had touched a string in the king's heart which never vibrated without pleasure, by refusing to accept it unless in quality of lieutenant to his cousin. Accordingly, Prince Charles was appointed generalissimo of all the king's armies; and a deputation of noblemen and gentlemen coming at this time to solicit the king's