petually to interfere in matters of which they | collects round it a vast retinue, composed of were incompetent to judge. This policy se- people who thrive by its custom, or are amused cured them against military usurpation, but by its display, who may be sometimes reckonplaced them under great disadvantages in war. ed, in an ostentatious enumeration, as forming The uncontrolled power which the king of a part of it, but who give no aid to its operaFrance exercised over his troops enabled him tions, and take but a languid interest in its to conquer his enemies, but enabled him also success: who relax its discipline and disho to oppress his people. Was there any interme- nour its flag, by their irregularities; and who, diate course? None, we confess, altogether after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut the free from objection. But, on the whole, we throats and rifle the baggage of their com conceive that the best measure would have panions. been that which the Parliament over and over proposed; that for a limited time the power of the sword should be left to the two Houses, and that it should revert to the crown when the constitution should be firmly established; when the new securities of freedom should be so far strengthened by prescription, that it would be difficult to employ even a standing army for the purpose of subverting them.

Mr. Hallam thinks that the dispute might easily have been compromised, by enacting that the king should have no power to keep a standing army on foot without the consent of Parliament. He reasons as if the question had been merely theoretical-as if at that time no army had been wanted. "The kingdom," he says, "might have well dispensed, in that age, with any military organization." Now, we think that Mr. Hallam overlooks the most important circumstance in the whole case. Ireland was at that moment in rebellion; and a great expedition would obviously be necessary to reduce that kingdom to obedience. The Houses had, therefore, to consider, not an abstract question of law, but an urgent practical question, directly involving the safety of the state. They had to consider the expediency of immediately giving a great army to a king, who was at least as desirous to put down the Parliament of England as to conquer the insurgents of Ireland.

Thus it is in every great division: and thus it was in our civil war. On both sides there was, undoubtedly, enough of crime and enough of error, to disgust any man who did not reflect that the whole history of the species is nothing but a comparison of crimes and errors. Misanthropy is not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to judge of

them.

"Of the Parliament," says Mr. Hallam," it may be said, I think, with not greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom or courage, are recorded of them, from their quarrel with the king to their expulsion by Cromwell." Those who may agree with us in the opinion which we have expressed as to the original demands of the Parliament, will scarcely concur in this strong censure. The propositions which the Houses made at Oxford, at Uxbridge, and at Newcastle, were in strict accordance with these demands. In the darkest period of the war, they showed no disposition to concede any vital principle. In the fulness of their success, they showed no disposition to encroach beyond these limits. In this respect we cannot but think that they showed justice and generosity, as well as political wisdom and courage.

The Parliament was certainly far from faultOf course, we do not mean to defend all their less. We fully agree with Mr. Hallam in remeasures. Far from it. There never was a probating their treatment of Laud. For the perfect man; it would, therefore, be the height individual, indeed, we entertain a more unmiof absurdity to expect a perfect party or a per-tigated contempt than for any other character fect assembly. For large bodies are far more in our history. The fondness with which a likely to err than individuals. The passions portion of the church regards his memory, can are inflamed by sympathy; the fear of punish-be compared only to that perversity of affection ment and the sense of shame are diminished which sometimes leads a mother to select the by partition. Every day we see men do for monster or the idiot of the family as the object their faction what they would die rather than of her especial favour. Mr. Hallam has inci do for themselves. dentally observed, that in the correspondence No private quarrel ever happens, in which of Laud with Strafford, there are no indicathe right and wrong are so exquisitely divid- tions of a sense of duty towards God or man. ed, that all the right lies on one side, and all The admirers of the archbishop have, in conthe wrong on the other. But here was a schism sequence, inflicted upon the public a crowd of which separated a great nation into two parties. extracts, designed to prove the contrary. Now, Of these parties, each was composed of many in all those passages, we see nothing which a smaller parties. Each contained many mem- prelate as wicked as Pope Alexander or Carbers, who differed far less from their moderate dinal Dubois might not have written. They opponents than from their violent allies. Each indicate no sense of duty to God or man; but reckoned among its supporters many who simply a strong interest in the prosperity and were determined in their choice, by some acci- dignity of the order to which the writer be dent of birth, of connection, or of local situa- longed; an interest which, when kept within tion. Each of them attracted to itself in multi- certain limits, does not deserve censure, but tudes those fierce and turbid spirits, to whom which can never be considered as a virtue. the clouds and whirlwinds of the political hur-Laud is anxious to accommodate satisfactorily ricane are the atmosphere of life. A party, the disputes in the University of Dublin. Ho like a camp, has its sutlers and camp-follow-regrets to hear that a church is used as a stable, ers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it and that the benefices of Ireland are very poor;

He is desirous that, however small a congre- themselves in the lower ranks of the party. gation may be, service should be regularly performed. He expresses a wish that the judges of the court before which questions of tithe are generally brought, should be selected with a view to the interest of the clergy. All this may be very proper; and it may be very proper that an alderman should stand up for the tolls of his borough, and an East Indian director for the charter of his company. But it is ridiculous to say that these things indicate piety and benevolence. No primate, though he were the most abandoned of mankind, would wish to see the body, with the consequence of which his own consequence was identical, degraded in the public estimation by internal dissensions, by the ruinous state of its edifices, and the slovenly performance of its rites. We willingly acknowledge that the particular letters in question have very little harm in them; a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the writings or to the actions of Laud.

#honest Englishmen for the defence of the pub- reach them. Here his own case differed widely blic good, of durable tranquillity, of temperate from theirs. Not only was his condemnation freedom, were buried in the grave of Hamp-in itself a measure which only the strongest ⚫den.

necessity could vindicate, but it could not be The self-denying ordinance was passed, and procured without taking several previous the army was remodelled. These measures steps, every one of which would have rewere undoubtedly full of danger. But all that quired the strongest necessity to vindicate it. was left to the Parliament was to take the less It could not be procured without dissolving of two dangers. And we think that, even if the government by military force, without esthey could have accurately foreseen all that tablishing precedents of the most dangerous followed, their decision ought to have been the description, without creating difficulties which same. Under any circumstances, we should the next ten years were spent in removing, have preferred Cromwell to Charles. But without pulling down institutions which it there could be no comparison between Crom- soon became necessary to reconstruct, and well and Charles victorious-Charles restored, setting up others which almost every man was Charles enabled to feed fat all the hungry soon impatient to destroy. It was necessary grudges of his smiling rancour, and his cringing to strike the House of Lords out of the constipride. The next visit of his majesty to his tution, to exclude members of the House of faithful Commons would have been more se- Commons by force, to make a new crime, a rious than that with which he last honoured new tribunal, a new mode of procedure. The them; more serious than that which their own whole legislative and judicial systems were general paid them some years after. The trampled down for the purpose of taking a sinking would scarce have been content with col-gle head. Not only those parts of the constilaring Marten, and praying that the Lord would deliver him from Vane. If, by fatal mismanagement, nothing was left to England but a choice of tyrants, the last tyrant whom she should have chosen was Charles.

tution which the republicans were desirous to destroy, but those which they wished to retain and exalt, were deeply injured by these transactions. High courts of justice began to usurp the functions of juries. The remaining delegates of the people were soon driven from their seats, by the same military violence which had enabled them to exclude their col

From the apprehension of this worst evil the Houses were soon delivered by their new leaders. The armies of Charles were everywhere routed; his fastnesses stormed; his party hum-leagues. bled and subjugated. The king himself fell If Charles had been the last of his line, there into the hands of the Parliament; and both the would have been an intelligible reason for putking and the Parliament soon fell into the ting him to death. But the blow which termihands of the army. The fate of both the cap-nated his life, at once transferred the allegiance tives was the same. Both were treated alter- of every royalist to an heir, and an heir who nately with respect and with insult. At length was at liberty. To kill the individual, was the natural life of the one, and the political truly, under such circumstances, not to delife of the other, were terminated by violence; stroy, but to release the king. and the power for which both had struggled was united in a single hand. Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity. Thus misfortune turned the greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of kings into the Blessed Martyr.

Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execution of Charles; and in all that he says on that subject, we heartily agree. We fully concur with him in thinking that a great social schism, such as the civil war, is not to be confounded with an ordinary treason; and that the vanquished ought to be treated according to the rules, not of municipal, but of international law. In this case the distinction is of the less importance, because both international and municipal law were in favour of Charles. He was a prisoner of war by the former, a king by the latter. By neither was he a traitor. If he had been successful, and had put his leading opponents to death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without reerence to the justice or injustice of his cause. Yet the opponents of Charles, it must be admitted were technically guilty of treason. He might have sent them to the scaffold without violating any established principle of jurisprudence. He would not have been compelled to overturn the whole constitution in order to

We detest the character of Charles; but a man ought not to be removed by a law ca post facto, even constitutionally procured, merely because he is detestable. He must also be very dangerous. We can scarcely conceive that any danger which a state can apprehend from any individual, could justify the violent measures which were necessary to procure a sentence against Charles. But in fact the danger amounted to nothing. There was indeed danger from the attachment of a large party to his office. But this danger, his execution only increased. His personal influence was little indeed. He had lost the confidence of every party. Churchmen, Catholics, Presbyterians, Independents, his enemies, his friends, his tools, English, Scotch, Irish, all divisions and subdivisions of his people had been de ceived by him. His most attached councillors turned away with shame and anguish from his false and hollow policy; plot intertwined with plot, mine sprung beneath mine, agents disowned, promises evaded, one pledge given in private, another in public.-"Oh, Mr. Secreta ry," says Clarendon, in a letter to Nicholas, "those stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which have befallen the king; and look like the effects of God's anger towards us."

The abilities of Charles were not formida ble. His taste in the fine arts was indeed ex H

quisite. He was as good a writer and speaker | ways taken off his hat when he went into a as any modern sovereign has been. But he church! The character of Charles would was not fit for active life. In negotiation he scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed was always trying to dupe others, and duping that he was pricked in conscience after the only himself. As a soldier, he was feeble, manner of this worthy loyalist; and that, while dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in perso- violating all the first rules of Christian moralinal courage, but in the presence of mind which ty, he was sincerely scrupulous about churchhis station required. His delay at Gloucester government. But we acquit him of such weaksaved the parliamentary party from destruc- ness. In 1641, he deliberately confirmed the tion. At Naseby, in the very crisis of his for- Scotch declaration, which stated that the gotune, his want of self-possession spread a fatal vernment of the church by archbishops and panic through his army. The story which bishops was contrary to the word of God. In Clarendon tells of that affair, reminds us of 1645, he appears to have offered to set up the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil ex- Popery in Ireland. That a king who had esplain their cudgellings. A Scotch nobleman, tablished the Presbyterian religion in one it seems, begged the king not to run upon his kingdom, and who was willing to establish the death, took hold of his bridle, and turned his Catholic religion in another, should have inhorse round. No man who had much value surmountable scruples about the ecclesiastifor his life would have tried to perform the cal constitution of the third, is altogether incresame friendly office on that day for Oliverdible. He himself says in his letters that he Cromwell. looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support One thing, and one alone, could make Charles of monarchical power than even the army. dangerous-a violent death. His tyranny could From causes which we have already consinot break the high spirit of the English people.dered, the Established Church had been, since His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion. Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well. The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour, is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain. In such a situation pride and despair have often been known to nerve the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many other victims of political rage; not more patiently or bravely than his own judges, who were not only killed, but tortured; or than Vane, who had always been considered as a timid man. However, his conduct during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious impression. His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather than from his life.

the Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that by paltering with the Presbyterians he should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood, which still cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January for judgments only to be averted by salt fish and egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.

The death of Charles, and the strong measures which led to it, raised Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant commonwealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent To represent Charles as a martyr in the qualities may easily gain supreme power. The cause of Episcopacy is absurd. Those who defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of put him to death cared as little for the Assem- eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an inbly of Divines as for the Convocation; and dolent senator or a brutal soldier on the throne would in all probability only have hated him of the Roman world. Similar revolutions have the more if he had agreed to set up the Pres- often occurred in the despotic states of Asia. byterian discipline; and, in spite of the opinion But a community which has heard the voice of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberthe attachment of Charles to the Church of ty, in which the merits of statesmen and of England was altogether political. Human na- systems are freely canvassed, in which obeture is indeed so capricious that there may be dience is paid not to persons but to laws, in a single sensitive point in a conscience which which magistrates are regarded not as the everywhere else is callous. A man without lords but as the servants of the public, in truth or humanity may have some strange which the excitement of party is a necessary scruples about a trifle. There was one devout of life, in which political warfare is reduced warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a to a system of tactics;-such a community is great resemblance to that which is ascribed to not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burthe king. We mean Colonel Turner. That den may easily be managed by a new master; gallant cavalier was hanged after the Restora- but will the wild ass submit to the bonds? will tion for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows the unicorn serve and abide by the crib? will he told the crowd that his mind received great leviathan hold out his nostrils to the hook? consolation from one reflection-he had al-The mythological conqueror of the East, whose