THE ARMY AND THE PARLIAMENT
1646-1649
[Sidenote: The new struggle.]
With the close of the Civil War we enter on a time of confused
struggles, a time tedious and uninteresting in its outer details, but of
higher interest than even the war itself in its bearing on our after
history. Modern England, the England among whose thoughts and sentiments
we actually live, began, however dimly and darkly, with the triumph of
Naseby. Old things passed silently away. When Astley gave up his sword
the "work" of the generations which had struggled for Protestantism
against Catholicism, for public liberty against absolute rule, in his
own emphatic phrase, was "done." So far as these contests were
concerned, however the later Stuarts might strive to revive them,
England could safely "go to play." English religion was never to be more
in danger. English liberty was never to be really in peril from the
efforts of kings after a personal rule. Whatever reaction might come
about, it would never bring into question the great constitutional
results that the Long Parliament had wrought. But with the end of this
older work a new work began. The constitutional and ecclesiastical
problems which still in one shape or another beset us started to the
front as subjects of national debate in the years between the close of
the Civil War and the death of the king. The great parties which have
ever since divided the social, the political, and the religious life of
England, whether as Independents and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tories,
as Conservatives and Liberals, sprang into organized existence in the
contest between the Army and the Parliament. Then for the first time
began a struggle which is far from having ended yet, the struggle
between political tradition and political progress, between the
principle of religious conformity and the principle of religious
freedom.
[Sidenote: Religious liberty.]
It was the religious struggle which drew the political in its train. The
victory of Naseby raised a wider question than that of mere toleration.
"Honest men served you faithfully in this action," Cromwell wrote to the
Speaker of the House of Commons from the field. "Sir, they are trusty: I
beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. He that ventures
his life for the liberty of his country, I wish he trust God for the
liberty of his conscience." The storm of Bristol encouraged him to
proclaim the new principle yet more distinctly. "Presbyterians,
Independents, all here have the same spirit of faith and prayer, the
same presence and answer. They agree here, have no names of difference;
pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the
real unity, which is the most glorious, being the inward and spiritual,
in the body and in the head. For being united in forms (commonly called
uniformity), every Christian will for peace' sake study and do as far as
conscience will permit. And from brethren in things of the mind we look
for no compulsion but that of light and reason." The increasing firmness
of Cromwell's language was due to the growing irritation of his
opponents. The two parties became every day more clearly defined. The
Presbyterian ministers complained bitterly of the increase of the
Sectaries, and denounced the toleration which had come into practical
existence without sanction from the law. Scotland, whose army was still
before Newark, pressed for the execution of the Covenant and the
universal enforcement of a religious uniformity. Sir Harry Vane, on the
other hand, who now headed the party which advocated religious freedom
in the Commons, strove to bring the Parliament round to less rigid
courses by the introduction of two hundred and thirty new members, who
filled the seats left vacant by the withdrawal of Royalist members, and
the more eminent of whom, such as Ireton and Algernon Sidney, were
inclined to support the Independents. But the majority in both Houses
still clung to the Tudor tradition of religious uniformity; and it was
only the pressure of the New Model, and the remonstrances of Cromwell as
its mouthpiece, that hindered any effective movement towards
persecution.
[Sidenote: Charles in the Scotch camp.]
Amidst the wreck of his fortunes Charles seized on the growing discord
among his opponents as a means of retrieving all. He trusted that the
dread of revolution would at last rally the whole body of conservative
Englishmen round the royal standard; and it is likely enough that had he
frankly flung himself on the side of the Parliament at this juncture he
might have regained much of his older power. But, beaten and hunted as
he was from place to place, he was determined to regain not much but
all. The terms which the Houses offered were still severe; and Charles
believed that a little kingcraft would free him from the need of
accepting any terms whatever. He intrigued therefore busily with both
parties, and promised liberty of worship to Vane and the Independents at
the moment when he was negotiating with the Parliament and with the
Scots. His negotiations were quickened by the march of Fairfax upon
Oxford. Driven from his last refuge at the close of April 1646, the king
had to choose between a flight from the realm or a surrender to one of
the armies about him. Charles had no mind to forsake England when all
seemed working for his success; and after some aimless wanderings he
made his appearance in May in the camp of the Scots. The choice was
dexterous enough. The Parliament and the Army were still left face to
face. On the other hand the Scots were indignant at what they regarded
as a breach of faith in the toleration which existed in England, and
Charles believed that his presence would at once rekindle their loyalty
to a king of Scottish blood. But the results of his surrender were other
than he had hoped. To the world at large his action seemed simply the
prelude to an accommodation with his opponents on the ground of
religious uniformity. This new aspect of affairs threatened the party of
religious freedom with ruin. Hated as they were by the Scots, by the
Lords, by the City of London, the apparent junction of Charles with
their enemies destroyed their growing hopes in the Commons, where the
prospects of a speedy peace on Presbyterian terms at once swelled the
majority of their opponents. The two Houses laid their conditions of
peace before the king without a dream of resistance from one who seemed
to have placed himself at their mercy. They required for the Parliament
the command of the army and fleet for twenty years; the exclusion of all
"Malignants," or Royalists who had taken part in the war, from civil and
military office; the abolition of Episcopacy; and the establishment of
a Presbyterian Church. Of toleration or liberty of conscience they said
not a word.
The Scots, whose army had fallen back with its royal prize to Newcastle,
pressed these terms on the king "with tears." His friends, and even the
queen, urged their acceptance. But the aim of Charles was simply delay.
His surrender had not brought about the results he had hoped for; but he
believed that time and the dissensions of his enemies were fighting for
him. "I am not without hope," he wrote coolly, "that I shall be able to
draw either the Presbyterians or the Independents to side with me for
extirpating one another, so that I shall be really king again." With
this end he refused the terms offered by the Houses. His refusal was a
crushing defeat for the Presbyterians. "What will become of us," asked
one of them, "now that the king has rejected our proposals?" "What would
have become of us," retorted an Independent, "had he accepted them?" The
vigour of Holles and the Conservative leaders in the Parliament rallied
however to a bolder effort. It was plain that the king's game lay in
balancing the Army against the Parliament, and that the Houses could
hope for no submission to these terms so long as the New Model was on
foot. Nor could they venture in its presence to enforce religious
uniformity, or to deal as they would have wished to deal with the
theories of religious freedom which were every day becoming more
popular. But while the Scotch army lay at Newcastle, and while it held
the king in its hands, they could not insist on dismissing their own
soldiers. It was only a withdrawal of the Scots from England and their
transfer of the king's person into the hands of the Houses that would
enable them to free themselves from the pressure of their own soldiers
by disbanding the New Model.
[Sidenote: Surrender of the king.]
In his endeavour to bring these two measures about Holles met with an
unexpected success. Hopeless of success in the projects of accommodation
which they laid before the king, and unable to bring him into Scotland
in face of the refusal of the General Assembly to receive a sovereign
who would not swear to the Covenant, the Scottish army in January 1647
accepted £400,000 in discharge of its claims, handed Charles over to a
Committee of the Houses, and marched back over the Border. The success
of their diplomacy restored the confidence of the Houses. The
Presbyterian leaders looked on themselves as masters of the king, and
they resolved to assert their mastery over the New Model and the
Sectaries. They voted that the army should be disbanded, and that a new
army should be raised for the suppression of the Irish rebellion with
Presbyterian officers at its head. It was in vain that the men protested
against being severed from "officers that we love," and that the Council
of Officers strove to gain time by pressing on the Parliament the
danger of mutiny. Holles and his fellow-leaders were resolute, and their
ecclesiastical legislation showed the end at which their resolution
aimed. Direct enforcement of conformity was impossible till the New
Model was disbanded; but the Parliament pressed on in the work of
providing the machinery for enforcing it as soon as the army was gone.
Vote after vote ordered the setting up of Presbyteries throughout the
country, and the first-fruits of these efforts were seen in the
Presbyterian organization of London, and in the first meeting of its
Synod at St. Paul's. Even the officers on Fairfax's staff were ordered
to take the Covenant.
[Sidenote: Temper of the New Model.]
All hung however on the disbanding of the New Model, and the New Model
showed no will to disband itself. Its attitude can only fairly be judged
by remembering what the conquerors of Naseby really were. They were
soldiers of a different class and of a different temper from the
soldiers of any other army that the world has seen. Their ranks were
filled for the most part with young farmers and tradesmen of the lower
sort, maintaining themselves, for their pay was twelve months in arrear,
mainly at their own cost. They had been specially picked as "honest," or
religious men, and, whatever enthusiasm or fanaticism they may have
shown, their very enemies acknowledged the order and piety of their
camp. They looked on themselves not as swordsmen, to be caught up and
flung away at the will of a paymaster, but as men who had left farm and
merchandise at a direct call from God. A great work had been given them
to do, and the call bound them till it was done. Kingcraft, as Charles
was hoping, might yet restore tyranny to the throne. A more immediate
danger threatened that liberty of conscience which was to them "the
ground of the quarrel, and for which so many of their friends' lives had
been lost, and so much of their own blood had been spilt." They would
wait before disbanding till these liberties were secured, and if need
came they would again act to secure them. But their resolve sprang from
no pride in the brute force of the sword they wielded. On the contrary,
as they pleaded passionately at the bar of the Commons, "on becoming
soldiers we have not ceased to be citizens." Their aims and proposals
throughout were purely those of citizens, and of citizens who were ready
the moment their aim was won to return peacefully to their homes.
Thought and discussion had turned the army into a vast Parliament, a
Parliament which regarded itself as a representative of "godly" men in
as high a degree as the Parliament at Westminster, and which must have
become every day more conscious of its superiority in political capacity
to its rival. Ireton, the moving spirit of the New Model, had no equal
as a statesman in St. Stephen's: nor is it possible to compare the
large and far-sighted proposals of the Army with the blind and narrow
policy of the two Houses. Whatever we may think of the means by which
the New Model sought its aims, we must in justice remember that, so far
as those aims went, the New Model was in the right. For the last two
hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out in a
slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform
which the army propounded at the close of the Civil War.
[Sidenote: Its seizure of the king.]
It was not till the rejection of the officers' proposals had left little
hope of conciliation that the army acted, but its action was quick and
decisive. It set aside for all political purposes the Council of
Officers, by which its action had hitherto been directed, and elected a
new Council of Agitators or Agents, two members being named by each
regiment, which summoned a general meeting of the army at Triploe Heath,
where the proposals of pay and disbanding made by the Parliament were
rejected with cries of "Justice." While the army was gathering, in fact,
the Agitators had taken a step which put submission out of the question.
A rumour that the king was to be removed to London, a new army raised by
the Parliament in his name, and a new civil war begun, roused the
soldiers to madness. Five hundred troopers appeared on the fourth of
June before Holmby House, where the king was residing in charge of
Parliamentary Commissioners, and displaced its guards. "Where is your
commission for this act?" Charles asked the cornet who commanded them.
"It is behind me," said Joyce, pointing to his soldiers. "It is written
in very fine and legible characters," laughed the king. The seizure had
in fact been previously concerted between Charles and the Agitators. "I
will part willingly," he told Joyce, "if the soldiers confirm all that
you have promised me. You will exact from me nothing that offends my
conscience or my honour." "It is not our maxim," replied the cornet, "to
constrain the conscience of any one, still less that of our king." After
a first burst of terror at the news, the Parliament fell furiously on
Cromwell, who had relinquished his command and quitted the army before
the close of the war, and had ever since been employed as a mediator
between the two parties. The charge of having incited the mutiny fell
before his vehement protest, but he was driven to seek refuge with the
army, and on the twenty-fifth of June it was in full march upon London.
Its demands were expressed with perfect clearness in an "Humble
Representation" which it addressed to the Houses. "We desire a
settlement of the Peace of the kingdom and of the liberties of the
subject according to the votes and declarations of Parliament. We desire
no alteration in the civil government: as little do we desire to
interrupt or in the least to intermeddle with the settling of the
Presbyterial government." What they demanded in religious matters was
toleration; but "not to open a way to licentious living under pretence
of obtaining ease for tender consciences, we profess, as ever, in these
things when the State has made a settlement we have nothing to say, but
to submit or suffer." It was with a view to such a settlement that they
demanded the expulsion of eleven members from the Commons, with Holles
at their head, whom the soldiers charged with stirring up strife between
the Army and the Parliament, and with a design of renewing the civil
war. After fruitless negotiations the New Model drew close upon London;
the terror of the Londoners forced the eleven to withdraw; and the
Houses named Commissioners to treat on the questions at issue.
[Sidenote: The Army negotiates with the King.]
Though Fairfax and Cromwell had been forced from their position as
mediators into a hearty co-operation with the army, its political
direction rested at this moment with Cromwell's son-in-law, Henry
Ireton, and Ireton looked for a real settlement, not to the Parliament,
but to the king. "There must be some difference," he urged bluntly,
"between conquerors and conquered"; but the terms which he laid before
Charles were terms of studied moderation. The vindictive spirit which
the Parliament had shown against the Royalists and the Church
disappeared in the terms exacted by the New Model; and the Army
contented itself with the banishment of seven leading "delinquents," a
general Act of Oblivion for the rest, the withdrawal of all coercive
power from the clergy, the control of Parliament over the military and
naval forces for ten years, and its nomination of the great officers of
State. Behind these demands however came a masterly and comprehensive
plan of political reform which had already been sketched by the army in
the "Humble Representation," with which it had begun its march on
London. Belief and worship were to be free to all. Acts enforcing the
use of the Prayer-Book, or attendance at Church, or the enforcement of
the Covenant were to be repealed. Even Catholics, whatever other
restraints might be imposed, were to be freed from the bondage of
compulsory worship. Parliaments were to be triennial, and the House of
Commons to be reformed by a fairer distribution of seats and of
electoral rights; taxation was to be readjusted; legal procedure
simplified; a crowd of political, commercial, and judicial privileges
abolished. Ireton believed that Charles could be "so managed" (says Mrs.
Hutchinson) "as to comply with the public good of his people after he
could no longer uphold his violent will." But Charles was equally dead
to the moderation and to the wisdom of this great Act of Settlement. He
saw in the crisis nothing but an opportunity of balancing one party
against another; and believed that the Army had more need of his aid
than he of the Army's. "You cannot do without me--you are lost if I do
not support you," he said to Ireton as he pressed his proposals. "You
have an intention to be the arbitrator between us and the Parliament,"
Ireton quietly replied, "and we mean to be so between the Parliament and
your Majesty."
[Sidenote: Flight of the king.]
But the king's tone was soon explained. If London had been
panic-stricken at the approach of the army, its panic soon disappeared.
The great city was goaded to action by the humiliation of the
Parliament, and still more by the triumph of religious liberty which
seemed to be approaching through the negotiations of the Army with the
king. A mob of Londoners broke into the House of Commons and forced its
members to recall the eleven. The bulk of Vane's party, some fourteen
peers and a hundred commoners, fled to the army; while those who
remained at Westminster prepared for an open struggle with it and
invited Charles to return to London. But the news no sooner reached the
camp than the army was again on the march. "In two days," Cromwell said
coolly, "the city will be in our hands." On the sixth of August the
soldiers entered London in triumph and restored the fugitive members;
the eleven were once more expelled; and the army leaders resumed their
negotiations with the king. The indignation of the soldiers at his
delays and intrigues made their task hourly more difficult: but
Cromwell, who now threw his whole weight on Ireton's side, clung to the
hope of accommodation with a passionate tenacity. His mind, conservative
by tradition, and above all practical in temper, saw the political
difficulties which would follow on the abolition of Monarchy, and in
spite of the king's evasions he persisted in negotiating with him. But
Cromwell stood almost alone. The Parliament refused to accept Ireton's
proposals as a basis of peace; Charles still evaded; and the army grew
restless and suspicious. There were cries for a wide reform, for the
abolition of the House of Peers, for a new House of Commons; and the
Agitators called on the Council of Officers to discuss the question of
abolishing Royalty itself. Cromwell was never braver than when he faced
the gathering storm, forbade the discussion, adjourned the Council, and
sent the officers to their regiments. But the strain was too great to
last long, and Charles was still resolute to "play his game." He was in
fact so far from being in earnest in his negotiation with Cromwell and
Ireton that at the moment they were risking their lives for him he was
conducting another and equally delusive negotiation with the Parliament,
fomenting the discontent in London, and preparing for a fresh Royalist
rising. What he still more counted on was aid from the North. The
intervention of the Scots had ruined his cause, but their intervention
might again restore it. The practical suspension of the Covenant and the
triumph of the party of religious liberty in England had produced a
violent reaction across the Tweed. Argyle and the zealous Presbyterians
still clung to the alliance between the two countries, though it
disappointed their hopes; but Hamilton, who had now become a Duke, put
himself at the head of the more moderate religionists, and carried the
elections for a new Parliament. Charles at once saw the results of the
Duke's success. "The two nations," he wrote joyously, "will soon be at
war." All that was needed for the success of these schemes was his own
liberty: and in November 1647, in the midst of their hopes of an
accommodation, the army leaders learned that they had been duped
throughout, and that the king had fled.
[Sidenote: The second Civil War.]
The flight fanned the excitement of the New Model into frenzy, and only
the courage of Cromwell averted an open mutiny in its gathering at Ware.
But even Cromwell was powerless to break the spirit which now pervaded
the soldiers, and the king's perfidy left him without resources. "The
king is a man of great parts and great understanding," he said, "but so
great a dissembler and so false a man that he is not to be trusted." The
danger from his escape indeed soon passed away. By a strange error
Charles had ridden from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight, perhaps
with some hope from the sympathy of Colonel Hammond, the Governor of
Carisbrook Castle, and again found himself a prisoner. But the wider
perils remained. Foiled in his effort to put himself at the head of the
new civil war, the king set himself to organize it from his prison; and
while again opening delusive negotiations with the two Houses he signed
a secret treaty with the Scots for the invasion of the realm. All that
Hamilton needed to bring the new Scotch Parliament to an active support
of the king was his assent to a stipulation for the re-establishment of
Presbytery in England. This Charles at last brought himself to give in
the spring of 1648, and the Scots at once ordered an army to be levied
for his support. In England the whole of the conservative party, with
many of the most conspicuous members of the Long Parliament at its head,
was drifting in its horror of the religious and political changes which
seemed impending towards the king; and at the close of May the news from
Scotland gave the signal for fitful insurrections in almost every
quarter. London was only held down by main force, old officers of the
Parliament unfurled the royal flag in South Wales, and surprised
Pembroke. The seizure of Berwick and Carlisle opened a way for the
Scotch invasion. Kent, Essex, and Hertford broke out in revolt. The
fleet in the Downs sent their captains on shore, hoisted the king's
pennon, and blockaded the Thames.
[Sidenote: The Houses and the Army.]
"The hour is come," cried Cromwell, "for the Parliament to save the
kingdom and to govern alone." But the Parliament showed no will to
"govern alone." It looked on the rising and the intervention of the
Scots as means of freeing it from the control under which it had been
writhing since the expulsion of the eleven. It took advantage of the
crisis to profess its adherence to Monarchy, to reopen the negotiations
it had broken off with the king, and to deal the fiercest blow at
religious freedom which it had ever received. The Presbyterians flocked
back to their seats; and an "Ordinance for the Suppression of
Blasphemies and Heresies," which Vane and Cromwell had long held at bay,
was passed by triumphant majorities. Any man--ran this terrible
statute--denying the doctrine of the Trinity or of the Divinity of
Christ, or that the books of Scripture are "the Word of God," or the
resurrection of the body, or a future day of judgement, and refusing on
trial to abjure his heresy, "shall suffer the pain of death." Any man
declaring (amidst a long list of other errors) "that man by nature hath
free will to turn to God," that there is a Purgatory, that images are
lawful, that infant baptism is unlawful; any one denying the obligation
of observing the Lord's day, or asserting "that the Church government by
Presbytery is antichristian or unlawful," shall, on a refusal to
renounce his errors, "be commanded to prison." It was plain that the
Presbyterians counted on the king's success to resume their policy of
conformity, and had Charles been free, or the New Model disbanded, their
hopes would probably have been realized.
[Sidenote: The Scotch Invasion.]
But Charles was still safe at Carisbrook; and the New Model was facing
fiercely the danger which surrounded it. The wanton renewal of the war
at a moment when all tended to peace swept from the mind of Fairfax and
Cromwell, as from that of the army at large, every thought of
reconciliation with the king. Soldiers and generals were at last bound
together again in a stern resolve. On the eve of their march against the
revolt all gathered in a solemn prayer-meeting, and came "to a very
clear and joint resolution, 'That it was our duty, if ever the Lord
brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of
blood, to account for the blood he has shed and mischief he has done to
his utmost against the Lord's cause and people in this poor nation.'"
The stern resolve was followed by vigorous action. In a few days Fairfax
had trampled down the Kentish insurgents, and had prisoned those of the
eastern counties within the walls of Colchester, while Cromwell drove
the Welsh insurgents within those of Pembroke. Both towns however held
stubbornly out; and though a rising under Lord Holland in the
neighbourhood of London was easily put down, there was no force left to
stem the inroad of the Scots, who poured over the Border at the opening
of July some twenty thousand strong. Luckily the surrender of Pembroke
at this critical moment set Cromwell free. Pushing rapidly northward
with five thousand men, he called in a force under Lambert which had
been gallantly hanging on the Scottish flank, and pushed over the
Yorkshire hills into the valley of the Ribble, where the Duke of
Hamilton, reinforced by three thousand Royalists of the North, had
advanced as far as Preston. With an army which now numbered ten thousand
men, Cromwell poured down on the flank of the Duke's straggling line of
march, attacked the Scots on the seventeenth of August as they retired
behind the Ribble, passed the river with them, cut their rearguard to
pieces at Wigan, forced the defile at Warrington, where the flying enemy
made a last and desperate stand, and drove their foot to surrender,
while Lambert hunted down Hamilton and the horse. Fresh from its
victory, the New Model pushed over the Border, while the peasants of
Ayrshire and the West rose in a "Whiggamore raid" (notable as the first
event in which we find the name "Whig," which is possibly the same as
our "Whey," and conveys a taunt against the "sour-milk" faces of the
fanatical Ayrshiremen), and, marching upon Edinburgh, in September,
dispersed the Royalist party and again installed Argyle in power.
[Sidenote: Demand of justice on the king.]
Argyle welcomed Cromwell as a deliverer, but the victorious general had
hardly entered Edinburgh when he was recalled by pressing news from the
South. The temper with which the Parliament had met the Royalist revolt
was, as we have seen, widely different from that of the Army. It had
recalled the eleven members, and had passed the Ordinance against
heresy. At the moment of the victory at Preston the Lords were
discussing charges of treason against Cromwell, while in September
commissioners were again sent to the Isle of Wight, in spite of the
resistance of the Independents, to conclude peace with the king.
Royalists and Presbyterians alike pressed Charles to grasp the easy
terms which were now offered him. But if his hopes from Scotland had
utterly broken down, they had given place to hopes of a new war with the
aid of an army from Ireland; and the negotiators of the Houses saw forty
days wasted in useless chicanery. "Nothing," Charles wrote to his
friends, "is changed in my designs." With Ireland and Scotland on his
side, with Royalists still in arms in the eastern counties, with the
Houses at issue with the Army, and as it seemed on the point of yielding
unconditionally to the king in their dread of organic changes, he
believed that the hour of his triumph was at last at hand. But the
surrender of Colchester to Fairfax in August and Cromwell's convention
with Argyle had now set free the Army, and it at once struck fiercely at
its foes. Petitions from its regiments demanded "justice on the king." A
fresh "Remonstrance" from the Council of Officers called for the
election of a new Parliament; for electoral reform; for the recognition
of the supremacy of the Houses "in all things"; for the change of
kingship, should it be retained, into a magistracy elected by the
Parliament, and without veto on its proceedings. Above all they demanded
"that the capital and grand author of our troubles, by whose
commissions, commands, and procurements, and in whose behalf and for
whose interest only, of will and power, all our wars and troubles have
been, with all the miseries attending them, may be specially brought to
justice for the treason, blood, and mischief he is therein guilty of."
[Sidenote: Pride's Purge.]
The demand drove the Houses to despair. That the king should be forced
back into legal courses, and if need be forced by stress of arms, seemed
to the bulk of the English gentry who were ranged on the Parliament side
a necessity, though a hard necessity. But the tradition of loyalty, of
reverence for the Crown, was strong even in the men who had fought
hardest against Charles. They shrank with horror from the sight of a
king at the bar of a court of justice, or yet more on the scaffold. The
demand for a new Parliament was hardly less horrible. A new Parliament
meant the rule of the Sectaries, a revolution in the whole political and
religious system of the realm. To give way to Charles altogether, to
surrender all that the war had gained, seemed better than this. Their
reply to the Remonstrance was to accept the king's concessions,
unimportant as they were, as a basis of peace. The calculations of
Charles were verified by the surrender of his old opponents; but the
surrender came too late to save either Parliament or king. The step was
accepted by the soldiers as a defiance. On the thirtieth of November
Charles was again seized by a troop of horse, and carried off to Hurst
Castle, while a letter from Fairfax announced the march of his army upon
London. "We shall know now," said Vane, as the troops took their post
round the Houses of Parliament, "who is on the side of the king, and who
on the side of the people." But the terror of the army proved weaker
among the members than the agonized loyalty which strove to save the
monarchy and the Church; and a large majority in both Houses still voted
for the acceptance of the terms which Charles had offered. The next
morning, that of the sixth of December, saw Colonel Pride at the door of
the House of Commons with a list of forty members of the majority in his
hands. The Council of Officers had resolved to exclude them, and as each
member made his appearance he was arrested, and put in confinement. "By
what right do you act?" a member asked. "By the right of the sword,"
Hugh Peters is said to have replied. The House was still resolute, but
on the following morning forty more members were excluded, and the rest
gave way.
[Sidenote: Ruin of the Parliament.]
The sword had fallen; and the old system of English government sank
helplessly beneath the blow. The two great powers which had waged this
bitter conflict, the Parliament and the Monarchy, suddenly disappeared.
The expulsion of one hundred and forty members, in a word of the
majority of the existing House, reduced the Commons to a name. The
remnant who remained to co-operate with the army were, in the coarse
imagery of popular speech, but the "rump" of a Parliament. Their will
was no longer representative of the will of the country; their acts were
no longer national acts. They were simply the acts of a body of
partizans who had the luck to find themselves on the side of the sword.
While the House of Commons dwindled to a sham, the House of Lords passed
away altogether. The effect of Pride's Purge was seen in a resolution of
the Rump for the trial of Charles, and the nomination on the first of
January 1649 of a Court of one hundred and fifty Commissioners to
conduct it, with John Bradshaw, a lawyer of eminence, at their head. The
rejection of this Ordinance by the few peers who remained brought about
a fresh resolution from the members who remained in the Lower House,
"that the People are, under God, the original of all just power; that
the Commons of England in Parliament assembled--being chosen by, and
representing, the People--have the supreme power in this nation; and
that whatsoever is enacted and declared for law by the Commons in
Parliament assembled hath the force of a law, and all the people of this
nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of
the king or House of Peers be not had hereunto."
[Sidenote: Death of the king.]
And with the ruin of the Parliament went the ruin of the Monarchy. On
the twentieth of January Charles appeared before Bradshaw's Court only
to deny its competence and to refuse to plead; but thirty-two witnesses
were examined to satisfy the consciences of his judges, and it was not
till the fifth day of the trial that he was condemned to death as a
tyrant, traitor, murderer, and enemy of his country. The popular
excitement vented itself in cries of "Justice," or "God save your
Majesty," as the trial went on, but all save the loud outcries of the
soldiers was hushed as, on the 30th of January 1649, Charles passed to
his doom. The dignity which he had failed to preserve in his long
jangling with Bradshaw and the judges returned at the call of death.
Whatever had been the faults and follies of his life, "he nothing
common did, nor mean, upon that memorable scene." Two masked
executioners awaited the king as he mounted the scaffold, which had been
erected outside one of the windows of the Banqueting House at Whitehall;
the streets and roofs were thronged with spectators; and a strong body
of soldiers stood drawn up beneath. His head fell at the first blow, and
as the executioner lifted it to the sight of all a groan of pity and
horror burst from the silent crowd.
[Sidenote: Abolition of Monarchy.]
The delays and hesitation which marked the action of the Commons on the
king's death showed how stunned they were by the revolution which they
were driven to bring about. To replace Charles by a new king was
impossible. His son alone would be owned as sovereign by the bulk of the
nation; and no friendship was possible between the men who now held
England in their grasp and the son of the man they had sent to the
block. But it was only slowly that they bowed to necessity. It was not
till the seventeenth of March that Monarchy was formally abolished; and
two months more elapsed before the passing of that memorable Act of the
nineteenth of May which declared "that the People of England and of all
the dominions and territories thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and
are hereby constituted, made, established, and confirmed, to be a
Commonwealth and Free State, and shall henceforth be governed as a
Commonwealth and Free State by the supreme authority of this nation, the
representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall
appoint and constitute officers and ministers for the good of the
People, and that without any king or House of Lords."