arch than faithful to the people; yet the king, offended by its firmness, disregarded the wishes of his more prudent friends, and capriciously dissolved a parliament more favorable to the crown than any which he could again hope for.

The exercise of absolute power became more and more difficult. There were those who refused to take the oath never to consent to alterations in the church of England. "Send for the chief leaders," wrote Strafford, "and lay them by the heels; no other satisfaction is to be thought of." But Strafford was not without his enemies among the royalists. During the suspension of parliament, two parties in the cabinet had disputed with each other for the emoluments of despotism. The ministers and the council of state were envied by the queen and the courtiers; and Strafford and Laud had as bitter rivals in the palace as they had enemies in the nation. There was no unity among the upholders of absolutism.

The expedient of a council of peers, convened in 1640 at York, could not satisfy a people that venerated representative government as the most valuable bequest of its ancestors; and a few weeks showed clearly that concession was necessary. The advisers of Charles hesitated from rivalries and the want of plan; while the popular leaders were full of energy and united in the distinct purpose of limiting the royal authority. The summons of a new parliament was, on the part of the monarch, a surrender at discretion. But, by the English constitution, the royal prerogative was in some cases the bulwark of popular liberty; the subversion of the royal authority made a way for the despotism of parliament.

The Long Parliament, which met on the third of November, 1640, was not originally homogeneous. The usurpations of the monarch threatened the privileges of the nobility not less than the liberties of the people. The movement in the public mind, though it derived its vigor as well as its origin from the influence of the Puritans, aimed only at raising an impassable barrier against the encroachments of royalty. This object met with favor from a majority of the peerage, and from royalists among the commons; and the past arbitrary measures of the court found opponents in Hyde, the faithful counsellor of the Stuarts; in the more scrupulous Falkland,

who inclined to the popular side, till he began to dread innovations from its leaders more than from the king; and even in Capel, afterward one of the bravest of the cavaliers, and a martyr on the scaffold for his obstinate fidelity. When the highest authority in England began to belong to the majority in parliament, no republican party as yet existed; the first division ensued between the ultra royalists and the undivided friends of constitutional monarchy; and, though the house was in a great measure filled with members of the aristocracy, the moderate royalists united with the friends of the people. On the choice of speaker, an immense majority appeared in favor of the constitution.

The earl of Strafford anticipated danger, and he desired to remain in Ireland. "As I am king of England," said Charles, "the parliament shall not touch one hair of your head;" and the reiterated urgency of the king compelled his attendance. His arraignment, within eight days of the commencement of the session, marks the spirit of the commons; his attainder was the sign of their ascendency. "On the honor of a king," wrote Charles, in April, 1641, to the prisoner, "you shall not be harmed in life, fortune, or honor;" and, the fourth day after the passage of the bill of attainder, the king sent his adhesion to the commons, adding: "If Strafford must die, it were charity to reprieve him till Saturday." Men dreaded the service of a sovereign whose love was so worthless, and whose prerogative was so weak; and the parliament proceeded without control to its work of reform. Its earliest acts were worthy of all praise. The liberties of the people were recovered and strengthened by appropriate safeguards; the arbitrary courts of high commission and the court of wards were broken up; the star-chamber, doubly hated by the aristocracy, as "ever a great eclipse to the whole nobility," was with one voice abolished; the administration of justice was rescued from the paramount influence of the crown; and taxation, except by consent, was forbidden. The principle of the writ of habeas corpus was introduced; and the kingdom of England was lifted out of the bondage of feudalism by a series of reforms, which were afterward renewed, and which, when successfully embodied among the statutes, the commentator on English law

esteemed above Magna Charta itself. These measures were adopted almost without opposition, and received the nearly unanimous assent of the nation. They were truly English measures, directed in part against abuses introduced at the Norman conquest, in part against the encroachments of the sovereign. They wiped away the traces that England had been governed as a conquered country; they were in harmony with the intelligence and the pride, the prejudices and the wants, of England. Public opinion was the ally of the parliament.

But an act declaring that the parliament should neither be prorogued nor dissolved, unless with its own consent, had been urged with pertinacity, till it received the royal concurrence. Parliament, in its turn, set aside the constitution, by establishing its own paramount authority, and making itself virtually irresponsible to its constituents. The usurpation foreboded the overthrow of the throne and the subjection of the people.

As the demands of the commons advanced, stormy debates ensued. In November, 1641, the remonstrance on the state of the kingdom, an uncompromising manifesto against the arbitrary measures of Charles, proposed no specific reform, but was rather a general and passionate appeal to popular opinion. The English mind was as restless as the waves of the ocean by which the isle is environed; the remonstrance was designed to increase that restlessness; in a house of more than five hundred members, it was adopted by the meagre majority of eleven. "Had it not been carried," said Cromwell to Falkland, "I should have sold all I possess, and left the kingdom; many honest men were of the same resolution." From the contest for "English liberties," men advanced to the discussion of natural rights; with the expansion of their views, their purposes ceased to be definite; reform was changing into a revolution; and it was observable that religious faith was on the side of innovation, while incredulity abounded among the supporters of the established church and the divine right.

The king had yielded where he should have been firm; moderation and sincerity would have restored his influence. But when, in January, 1642, attended by armed men, he repaired in person to the house of commons, with the intent of seizing six of the leaders of the patriot party, the attempt, so

bloody in its purpose and so illegal in its course, could only justify for the time every diminution of his prerogative, and drive the leaders of the popular party to a gloomy inflexibility. A change of dynasty was not then proposed; and England languished of a disease for which no cure had been discovered. It was evident that force must decide the struggle. The parliament demanded the control of the national militia with the possession of the fortified towns; to Charles no alternative remained but resistance or the surrender of all power; and, unfurling the royal standard, he began a civil war.

The contest was between a permanent parliament and an arbitrary king. The people had no mode of intervention except by serving in the armies; they could not act as mediators or as masters. The parliament was become a body, of which the duration depended on its own will, unchecked by a supreme executive or by an independent co-ordinate branch of legislation; and, therefore, of necessity, a multitudinous despot, unbalanced and irresponsible; levying taxes, enlisting soldiers, commanding the navy and the army, enacting laws, and changing at its will the forms of the English constitution. The issue was certain. Every representative assembly is swayed by the public interests, the pretensions of its own body, and the personal interests of its respective members; and never was the successive predominance of each of these sets of motives more clear than in the Long Parliament. Its first acts were mainly for its constituents, whose rights it vindicated and whose liberties it increased; its corporate ambition next asserted itself against the throne and the peerage, both of which it was hurried forward to subvert; individual selfishness at last prevailed.

In 1644, after one hundred and eighteen royalist members, obeying the summons of the king, repaired to Oxford, the friends of royalty and of the church of England were unrepresented in the national legislature. The commons at once divided into two imposing parties-the Presbyterians and the Independents; the friends of a revolution which should yet preserve a nobility, a limited monarchy, and a national church, and the friends of a revolution on the principle of equality.

The Presbyterians represented a powerful branch of the

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aristocracy of England; they had a majority in the commons; the exclusive possession of what remained of the house of lords; the command of the army; and numerous and active adherents among the clergy. The English people favored them; Scotland was devoted to them; and they were at all times prepared to make peace with the king, if he would but accept Presbyterianism as the religion of the state.

The Independents could hope for superior influence only by rising above the commons, the peers, the commanders of the army, all Scotland, and the mass of the English people. They had no omen of success but the tendency of revolu tions to go forward, the enthusiasm of converts for the newly accepted ideas, the inclination of the human mind to push principles to their remoter consequences. They gradually became the advocates of religious liberty and the power of the people; and the glorious vision of emancipating the commons of England from feudal oppression, from intellectual servitude, and from royalty itself, kindled a zeal which would not be rebuked by the inconsistency of their schemes with the opinions, habits, and institutions of the nation.

The Presbyterian nobility were unwilling that innovation should go so far as to impair their rank or diminish their grandeur; the Independents, as new men, who had their fortunes to make, were ready not only to subvert the throne, but to contend for equality against privilege. "The Presbyterian earl of Manchester," said Cromwell, "shall be content with being no more than plain Montague." The men who broke away from the forms of society, and venerated nothing but truth; others who, in the folly of their pride, claimed for their opinions the sanctity and the rights of truth; they who longed for a more equal diffusion of social benefits; the friends of entire liberty of conscience; the friends of a reform in the law and a diminution of the profits of the lawyers; the men, like Milton and Sidney, whose imagination delighted in pictures of Roman liberty; the less educated, who indulged in visions of a restoration of that happy Anglo-Saxon system which had been invented in the woods in days of Anglo-Saxon simplicity; the republicans, the levellers, the fanatics-all ranged themselves on the side of the new ideas.