I. CHAS. I. A.D. 1642. derstood. Assisted by the ablest members of his CHAPTER council, by Hyde (better known to us as lord Clarendon, the historian of these eventful times), and lord Falkland, Charles drew up and dispersed through the whole kingdom a series of manifestoes, which seemed, for a time, to revive the devotion of his subjects and to threaten the cause of the parliament with utter ruin. These were the more implicitly received, because Charles had now no recent acts of tyranny to justify, or even to excuse.* Since the death of his favourite minister, lord Strafford, more than a year before, he had in fact ceased to govern; his power had been transferred to the parliament; and the generosity of the English character induced thousands to forgive the past in consideration of his fallen and altered fortunes. He protested that he contended for the antient laws of England, and for the rights of the sovereign as the sovereign had enjoyed them ever since the conquest. He was the representative of the antient monarchy, and of the English constitution as it stood beneath the Tudors and Plantagenets; and he summoned his people, in the name of all their venerable institutions, to rally round their king. The parliament found it far more easy to denounce the royal manifestoes than to answer them. As far as they went they scarcely admitted of an answer. For in truth the great fault of the king lay not in demanding more than his predecessors but in conceding less. In states in which the monarchy acts without control, or where the control is irresolute * Guizot, Hist. Eng. Revol. i. p. 241. I. A.D. 1642. CHAPTER and feeble, the personal character of the sovereign decides the character of his government. The same CHAS. I. institutions are made either to crush or to protect the people, as the hand that wields them is unfeeling and capricious or wise and patriotic. Charles had been a bad imitator of great examples; and he had made the common mistake of feeble minds, that in order to be strong it is necessary to be violent. He had copied the severity of former sovereigns with great exactness; but he had seldom had their pretexts, and never their successes. The worst points in his career have a singular parallel in the events of the reign of the most popular of English monarchs. In those instances in which he has been most severely blamed he could have pleaded the example of Elizabeth herself. He had brought on a revolution and thrown the kingdom into the wildest uproar by attempting what she had done with perfect impunity. He had gone down to the house of commons to seize five members on a charge of treason they escaped, and he apologized; but his kingdom was in flames. Elizabeth had threatened the house, had silenced the speaker, had seized an obnoxious member on the benches, and hurried him without pretence of trial to prison; he was confined for several years, and scarcely a murmur arose. Charles had employed the star-chamber and the court of high commission to oppress his subjects; but the star-chamber was no new device of recent tyranny; nor had the court of high commission much exceeded the boundaries of its time * * In 1587, the case of Morrice, see Hist. Early Puritans, p. 200. I. A.D. 1642. honoured cruelties. Even ship money was but, under CHAPTER another name, a repetition of those aids and benevolences which the kings of England had often im- CHAS. I. posed by their own authority. Laud again, it was true, had been severe against the puritans; but Whitgift had consigned them to the gallows. If Charles had married a papist, Elizabeth had at least contemplated a union with the duke of Anjou. But unhappily the king understood neither his people nor himself. He did not perceive that the circumstances of the nation had undergone a marvellous change, and in consequence the relation of king and people to each other. He wished to govern as his ancestors had governed, but it was impossible; he might as reasonably have attempted the revival of the crusades, and imposed a tax for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. He would have no innovations; forgetting the wise observation of lord Bacon, that he who resists all change is himself y the greatest of all innovators. Still his case as he presented it to the world was clear; and it was free from violent inconsistencies. He thought himself a good man, and he wished to be an absolute, if not an arbitrary, sovereign. The true cause of the war may be explained in one word; it was the king's inveterate duplicity. The parliament felt that it was never safe. The popular leaders had to treat with an enemy whose word, whose oath, it was impossible to trust. Whatever the pretext that glossed it over, the war was, on the side of the puritans, a war of self-defence. Of late years, public opinion has inclined more and CHAPTER more to the popular cause. We do not attribute I. this to the increase of democratic opinions, or to a CHAS. I. A.D. 1642. growing indifference to the horrors of civil war. It is sufficiently explained by the more intimate acquaintance we have gained with the character of Charles I. The publication of innumerable papers, pamphlets, and diaries of that restless age, enables us to form a judgment in many respects more comprehensive and more correct than the decisions of those who were actors in the scene. And all that has come down to us from republican or royalist, from the court of Charles or the camp of Cromwell, confirms the suspicion which the parliament entertained, that the king was not only indifferent to truth, but that he habitually held its sacred obligations in profound contempt. Dissimulation is too mild a word; there was in him the utter want of the kingly virtues of integrity and honour. Charles had lately passed all their bills, and conceded some of their most unreasonable demands (for they had begun, as desperate men, to be most unreasonable); but now the very facility of his concessions excited their distrust. What he gave up without a struggle he might one day reclaim with vengeance. Every day his tone changed with his circumstances. Slowly retiring from London, he professed his anxiety to conciliate the parliament at whatever cost. Arrived at York and now surrounded by his friends, "he resolved," says lord Clarendon, the wisest of all his advisers, and the greatest of his chroniclers, "to treat them in another manner than he had done." In fact, "he would now have nothing extorted from I. CHAS. I. A.D. 1642. him that he was not very well inclined to consent CHAPTER to."* On the 15th June he published a declaration, countersigned by thirty-five peers, besides the commoners of his privy council, in which he affirmed that he was basely slandered by those who charged him with the design of making war upon the parliament. "He professed before God, and declared to all the world, that he always had, and did still abhor all such designs." At the same time another proclamation was addressed to the people in which he again protested, "before Almighty God and his Redeemer, that he had no more thought of making war against the parliament than he had against his children."+ Yet the queen was then in Holland selling and pawning the crown jewels and raising the munitions of war; he himself was busied with military preparations; and on the 23rd of August,‡ being now equipped for a campaign, he set up his standard, and in due form proclaimed war upon the parliament! Such falsehoods could proceed only from the weakest counsels or the most infatuated mind. They probably deceived none, but they irritated thousands. And the men of virtue began already to retire from a cause which, whether good or bad, was content to call in the succours of deceit and falsehood.§ * Clarendon, i. p. 459. + Clarendon, i. p. 456. Clarendon says the 25th; Whitelocke, the 22nd; several others, the 23rd; Ludlow, the 24th: a strange discrepancy on a point of such importance. § I spare my readers and myself the pain of multiplying instances of Charles's confirmed duplicity, and of the ruin he thus brought upon himself. I intended to have enlarged the dark catalogue in justice to historical truth; but it is unnecessary, and therefore it would be ungenerous. I quote one instance only from the memoirs of col. Hutchinson. "The king, who had received money, arms, and ammunition, which the queen |