devotion of his followers; and that, in the world to come, will confute the worst accusations of his enemies. Unhappy in his time, his reign, his circumstances, his friends, his enemies, he was still more unhappy in that which gave evil power to them all, the fatal facility and weakness so often and pertinaciously misconstrued into perfidy and crime.

The cavalier was ever distinguished by his brave cheerfulness or giddy gaiety; the puritan by his sour looks and ungracious demeanour.

The cavaliers were reproached by the roundheads with the vices of their basest comrades-such as Goring and Lunsford; while the puritans claimed for themselves the exclusive worship and protection of Heaven. Pym was as fond of wine and its concomitants as the freest cavalier amongst them all; and his intrigue with lady Carlisle was notorious. Henry Martin was a freethinker and a libertine; Warwick, Wharton, and Pembroke were notorious evil livers; and Holland and others were little better. No wonder that the cavaliers refused to accept the monopoly of vice, faction, and irreligion. Those among them who had not belonged to the patriot side, had been suppressed and cautious as long as the parliament preserved its purity and nobleness; when the ruling portion of the commons sank into a party, contracting all the vices and meanness that follow upon falsehood, they left the parliament for the least tyrannical party of the two. Or, if they had always belonged to it, they then held up their heads and triumphed in their former principles. With the blood of the old barons of Runnymede still flowing in their veins; with the chivalry of the " Arcadia" still kindling in their imaginations; with all the proud prejudices of their ancestors now strengthened by their own, concerning the ancient monarchy of England, the noble cavaliers were in no mood to bow their proud heads at the footstool of "King Pym." Among them were many earnest and devout men to whom their church was as dear as ever conventicle was to puritan, and these cavaliers were by no means content to see their venerable cathedrals* demolished or profaned, their churches deseerated, their hierarchy reviled and outcast, their clergy replaced by ferocious and ignorant divines. They were proud of their country, even as she stood then among the nations; they were not willing to sacrifice the gentle and chivalric principles that had made her so, to a democratic spirit abhorring every quality that rose above its own low level. Moreover, there was little to conciliate or attract in the gloomy and severe deportment of the puritans. They held toleration to be "soul murder," and they looked upon Roman Catholics as in a far worse state than Mahometans: and with all this stern and repellant profession and demeanour there was something so ludicrous combined, as utterly to destroy its solemnity to the outward sense. "The ostentatious simplicity of their dress," said the ablest of their defenders, long ago, "their sour aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff posture, their long graces, their Hebrew names, the scriptural phrases which they introduced on every occasion, their contempt of human learning, their detestation of public amusements, were indeed fair game for the laughers."

Among those awaiting the king's arrival at Nottingham, and forming his council there, were grave and thoughtful men, who contemplated the raising of the

* Already many painted windows and much exquisite architecture had been destroyed by fanaticism we soon find the roundheads at Litchfield and elsewhere, hunting cats through cathedrals with hounds to mimic the choristers, stabling their horses and defiling the venerable walls with the utmost degree of brutal ingenuity. Among the bishops and clergy of this time were Usher, Jeremy Taylor, Hall, Prideaux, and other still venerated names. Milton says of the puritanical divines: "They who so lately preached and cried down with great show of zeal the avarice and pluralities of bishops and prelates, now set sail to all the winds that may blow gain into their covetous bosoms."-Prose Works, vi. 896.

standard with very different feelings. Such men as Falkland, Southampton, Sunderland, and probably even Mr. Hyde, at that period looked upon the king's cause only as a less bitter alternative than that of the parliament. They still clung to the hope that the prospects appalling in the eyes of each party, might be resolved into one, hopeful for both; and so, no doubt they might have been, had the Parliamentary leaders been temperate, dispassionate, honest, and patriotic. As regards the lords, the king's party, might well compare with the moral, intellectual, and heroic natures of those we have just mentioned together with those of Richmond, Hertford, and Northampton, as contrasted with the debauched and sanctimonious Warwick, the coxcomb Holland, the coward Wharton, and the lukewarm Northumberland and Bedford.*

With respect to the commons, we have, unfortunately, little means of comparison, as those who went over to the king were not, it seems, with the exception of Hyde and Culpepper, of sufficient rank to approach his person or his councils. But the men who belonged to the peace party in the parliament at Westminster may proudly challenge a comparison with any of their "root and branch" antagonists: the wise and eloquent Sir Benjamin Rudyard, the venerable Selden, whose name is identified with constitutional iaw, the impetuous but honest Hollis; add to these Pierpoint, Philips, and the candid Whitelock. These men might oppose and refute the reasonings of Pym and Vane, and their associates who had opposed him before they became his supporters, and who were ready to do so again if the occasion required.† It is my task to speak of the royal party as men of common sense, at least; but it seems necessary to account for their dislike and opposition to those who claimed to themselves all championship of religion, patriotism, and law. I shall guard myself, however, from the charge of adopting their biassed views by quoting only from their own authorities as to the light in which the characters of their chief leaders might be made to appear even to this day. I do not speak of the great and heroic efforts by which the constitution was restored and strengthened; the men who undertook and accomplished that task have a fame that will live for ever, and that even their after errors can scarcely darken. But when they made themselves an absolute oligarchy, possessed of an all-grasping power until they chose to abdicate it; when they proceeded to prostitute the name of freedom to the most tyrannical and arbitrary acts, and that of religion to the most cruel intolerance; ‡-when we consider these manifold offences, it is not as whig, tory, loyalist, or roundhead, but as men and as Englishmen, that we denounce their pretensions and their guilt.

66

*Essex, Kimbolton, Brooke, and Fielding, it is true, were better men; the first two recoiled from their party; the third did not live to see their real character, and the last deplored it. Even Pym lived to hear the very voices he had once welcomed, when he spoke of vengeance on the king, come howling for his own sacrifice. A number of the wives of substantial citizens came clamouring to the door of the house of commons with an oft-repeated petition for peace. "Give us the traitor Pym," shouted the revolution-taught viragoes, give us the traitor Pym, that we may tear him to pieces."-Rushworth. "He was then on his death bed."—Forster, II., 294. But it was kingship, not the king, that the roundheads were about to fight against. Henry Martin, himself a regicide, declared that, "if he must have a king, he had as lief have the last gentleman as anyone he knew.'

"Witness, says Mr. Hallam, "the ordinance for disarming recusants passed by both houses in August, 1641, and that in November, authorising the earl of Leicester to raise men for the defence of Ireland without warrant under the great seal, both manifest encroachments on the executive power; and the enormous extension of privilege, under which every person accused on the slightest testimony of disparaging their proceedings, or even introducing new-fangled ceremonies in the church, a matter wholly out of their cognizance, was dragged before them as a delinquent and lodged in their prison."-See further, Hallam's Const. Hist., Vol. I., p. 551.

ON THE DEATH AND CHARACTER OF CHARLES I.

H. HALLAM.

It was about the end of 1647, as I have said, that the principal officers took the determination, which had been already menaced by some of the agitators, of bringing the king, as the first and greatest delinquent to public justice.* Too stern and haughty, too confident of the righteousness of their actions, to think of private assassination, they sought to gratify their pride by the solemnity and notoriousness, by the very infamy and eventual danger, of an act unprecedented in the history of nations. Throughout the year 1648, this design, though suspended, became familiar to the people's expectation. The commonwealth's men and the levellers, the various sectaries (admitting a few exceptions) grew clamorous for the king's death. Petitions were presented to the commons, praying for justice on all delinquents, from the highest to the lowest. And not long afterwards the general officers of the army came forward with a long remonstrance against any treaty, and insisting that the capital and grand author of their troubles be speedily brought to justice, for the treason, blood, and mischief, whereof he had been guilty.§ This was soon followed by a vote of the presbyterian party, that the answers of the king to the propositions of both houses are a ground for the house to proceed upon for the settlement of the

Clarendon says that there were many consultations among the officers about the best mode of disposing of the king; some were for deposing him, others for poison or assassination, which, he fancies, would have been put in practice, if they could have prevailed on Hammond. But this is not warranted by our better authorities.

It is hard to say at what time the first bold man dared to talk of bringing the king to justice. But in a letter of Baillie to Alexander Henderson, May 19, 1646, he says, "If God have hardened him, so far as I can perceive, this people will strive to have him in their power, and make an example of him; I abhor to think what they speak of execution !" ii. 20. published also in Dalrymple's Memorials of Charles I., p. 166. Proofs may also be brought from pamphlets by Lilburne and others in 1647, especially towards the end of that year; and the remonstrance of the Scots parliament, dated Aug. 13, alludes to such language. Rush. vi. 245. Berkley indeed positively assures us, that the resolution was taken at Windsor in a council of officers, soon after the king's confinement at Carisbrook; and this with so much particularity of circumstance that, if we reject his account, we must set aside the whole of his memoirs at the same time. Maseres's Tracts, i. 383. But it is fully confirmed by an independent testimony, William Allen, himself one of the council of officers and adjutant-general of the army, who, in a letter addressed to Fleetwood, and published in 1659, declares that after much consultation and prayer at Windsor Castle, in the beginning of 1648, they had " come to a very clear and joint resolution that it was their duty to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed, and mischief he had done to his utmost, against the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations." This is to be found in Somers Tracts, vi., 499. The only discrepancy, if it is one, between him and Berkley, is as to the precise time, which the other seems to place in the end of 1647. But this might be lapse of memory in either party; nor is it clear, on looking attentively at Berkley's narration, that he determines the time. Ashburnham says, 66 For some days before

the king's remove from Hampton Court, there was scarcely a day in which several alarms were not brought him by and from several considerable persons, both well affected to him and likely to know much of what was then in agitation, of the resolution which a violent party in the army had to take away his life. And that such a design there was, there were strong insinuations to persuade."

+ Somers Tracts, v. 160, 162.

Sept. 11. Parl. Hist. 1077. May's Breviate in Maseres's Tracts, vol. i., p. 127. Whitelock, 335.

§ Nov. 17. Parl. Hist. 1077. Whitelock, p. 355. A motion, Nov. 30, that the house do now proceed on the remonstrance of the army, was lost by 125 to 5, (printed 53, in Parl. Hist.). Commons' Journals. So weak was still the republican party. It is indeed remarkable that this remonstrance itself is rather against the king, than absolutely against all monarchy; for one of the proposals contained in it is that kings should be chosen by the people, and have no negative voice.

peace of the kingdom,* by the violent expulsion, or, as it was called, seclusion of all the presbyterian members from the house, and the ordinance of a wretched minority, commonly called the Rump, constituting the high court of justice for the trial of the king.t

"I

A very small number among those who sat in this strange tribunal upon Charles I.. were undoubtedly capable of taking statesmanlike views of the interests of their party, and might consider his death a politic expedient for consolidating the new settlement. It seemed to involve the army, which had openly abetted the act, and even the nation by its passive consent, in such inexpiable guilt towards the royal family, that neither common prudence nor a sense of shame wonld permit them to suffer its restoration. But by the far greater part of the regicides such considerations were either overlooked or kept in the background. Their more powerful motive was that fierce fanatical hatred of the king, the natural fruit of long civil dissension, inflamed by preachers more dark and sanguinary than those they addressed, and by a perverted study of the Jewish scriptures. They had been wrought to believe, not that his execution would be justified by state-necessity, or any such feeble grounds of human reasoning, but that it was a bounden duty, which with a safe conscience they could not neglect. Such was the persuasion of Ludlow and Hutchinson, the most respectable names among the regicides; both of them free from all suspicion of interestedness or hypocrisy, and less intoxicated than the rest by fanaticism. was fully persuaded," says the former, "that an accommodation with the king was unsafe to the people of England, and unjust and wicked in the nature of it. The former, besides that it was obvious to all men, the king himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the parliament, which manifestly appeared in his own papers, taken at the battle of Naseby and elsewhere. Of the latter I was convinced by the express words of 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.' (Numbers, c. xxxv. v. 33.) And therefore I could not consent to leave the guilt of so much blood on the nation, and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all, when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights, and open breach of our laws and constitution on the king's part." (Ludlow, i. 667.) "As for Mr. Hutchinson," says his high-souled consort, "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 or false opinion in those great transactions, he would open his eyes, and not suffer him to proceed, but that he would confirm his spirit in the truth, and lead him by a right-enlightened conscience; and finding no check, but a confirmation in his conscience, that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright, unbiased persons, 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 the oath of God, into the hands of God's and their enemies; and therefore he cast himself upon God's protection, acting according to the dictates of a conscience which he had sought the Lord to guide; and accordingly the Lord did signalise his favour afterwards to him." (Hutchinson, p. 303.) The execution of Charles I. has been mentioned in later ages by a few with unlimited praise, by some with faint and ambiguous censure, by most with vehement *The division was on the previous question, which was lost by 129 to 83. + No division took place on any of the votes respecting the king's trial.

reprobation. My own judgment will possibly be anticipated by the reader of the preceding pages. I shall certainly not rest it on the imaginary sacredness and. divine origin of royalty, nor even on the irresponsibility with which the law of almost every country invests the person of its sovereign. Far be it from me to contend, that no cases may be conceived, that no instances may be found in history, wherein the sympathy of mankind and the sound principles of political justice would approve a public judicial sentence as the due reward of tyaanny and perfidiousness. But we may confidently deny that Charles I. was thus to be singled out as a warning to tyrants. His offences were not, in the worst interpretation, of that atrocious character which calls down the vengeance of insulted humanity, regardless of positive law. His government had been very arbitrary; but it may well be doubted whether any, even of his ministers, could have suffered death for their share in it, without introducing a principle of barbarous vindictiveness. Far from the sanguinary misanthropy of some monarchs, or the revengeful fury of others, he had in no instance displayed, nor does the minutest scrutiny since made into his character entitle us to suppose any malevolent dispositions beyond some proneness to anger, and a considerable degree of harshness in his demeanour.* As for the charge of having caused the bloodshed of the war, upon which, and not on any former misgovernment, his condemnation was grounded, it was as ill established, as it would have been insufficient. Well might the earl of Northumberland say, when the ordinance for the king's trial was before the lords, that the greatest part of the people of England were not yet satisfied whether the king levied war first against the houses or the houses against him. The fact, in my opinion, was entirely otherwise. It is quite another question whether the parliament were justified in their resistance to the king's legal authority. But we may contend that when Hotham, by their command, shut the gates of Hull against his sovereign, when the militia was called out in different counties by an ordinance of the two houses, both of which preceded by several weeks any levying of forces for the king, the bonds of our constitutional law were by them and their servants snapped asunder; and it would be the mere pedantry and chicane of political casuistry to enquire, even if the fact could be better ascertained, whether at Edgehill, or in the minor skirmishes that preceded, the first carbine was discharged by a cavalier or a roundhead. The aggressor in a war is not the first who uses force, but the first who renders force

necessary.

* The king's manners were not good. He spoke and behaved to ladies with indelicacy in public. Warburton's Notes on Clarendon, vii. 629, and a passage in Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, quoted by Harris and Brodie. He once forgot himself so far as to cane sir Henry Vane for coming into a room of the palace reserved for persons of higher rank. Carte's Ormond, i. 356, where other instances are mentioned by that friendly writer. He had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy.

An anecdote, strongly intimating the violence of Charles's temper, has been rejected by his advocates. It is said that Burnet, in searching the Hamilton papers, found that the king, on discovering the celebrated letter of the Scots covenanting lords to the king of France, was so incensed that he sent an order to sir William Balfour, lieutenant-governor of the Tower, to cut off the head of his prisoner, lord Loudon; but that the marquis of Hamilton, to whom Balfour immediately communicated this, urged so strongly on the king that the city would be up in arms on this violence, that with reluctance he withdrew the warrant. This story is told by Oldmixon, Hist. of the Stuarts, p. 140. It was brought forward on Burnet's authority, and also on that of the duke of Hamilton, killed in 1712, by Dr. Birch, no incompetent judge of historical evidence ; it seems confirmed by an intimation given by Burnet himself in his Memoirs of the duke of Hamilton, p. 161. It is said by Laing, iii. 189, to be also mentioned by Scott of Scotstarvet, a contemporary writer. Harris, p. 350, quotes other authorities, earlier than the anecdote told of Burnet; and upon the whole, I think the story deserving credit, and by no means so much to be slighted as the Oxford editor of Burnet has thought fit to do.

+ Clement Walker, Hist. of Independency, Part II. p. 55.