those professions were meant to produce. Let the King's connexion with the Irish Rebellion be construed in the most favourable way, and it is still dreadful to think of the solemn protestations he made concerning it. Even Lord Clarendon seems to have felt some little doubts and compunctious_ visitings with regard to the King's part in Irish affairs. " I must tell you," says he, writing to Sir Edward Nicholas, "I care not how little I say in that business of Ireland, since those strange powers and instructions given to your favourite Glamorgan, which appear to me so inexcusable to justice, piety, and prudence. And I fear there is much in that transaction of Ireland, both before and since, that you and I were never thought wise enough to be advised with in. Oh, Mr. Secretary, 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 *.” On the first of May, he said to the Parliament, with reference to Strafford,"To satisfy my people I would do great matters; but this of conscience, no fear, no respect whatever, shall make me go against itt." On the tenth he passed the Bill of Attainder; on the twelfth the earl was beheaded; " and the next day," says Mr. Godwin, "when his blood was hardly yet cold, Charles voluntarily came down to meet and to face those who had extorted from him his unwilling fiat." The King negotiates with commissioners from the Parliament in 1642, and professes to be anxious for a peace; he writes to the Queen to beg her to believe that he had" a little more wit than to place confidence in the fidelity of perfidious rebels§." A little less of this wit might have saved him his head and his crown. The King calls a Parliament at Oxford in 1644, and refuses to style the Lords and Commons at Westminster a Parliament. He writes to the Queen that "he feared to be pressed to make mean overtures, and was anxious to be freed from the place of base and mutinous motions, that is, from his mongrel Parliament." So much for his own friends, who were shedding their blood for him! In 1644 the King, previously to the treaty of Uxbridge, consents, after many evasions, to the acknowledging of the Parliament at Westminster as such, and makes the Duke of Richmond and the Earl of Southampton his ambassadors to it. He writes to the Queen," As to my calling those at London a Parliament, if there had been two, besides myself, of my opinion, I had not done it; and the argument that prevailed with me was, that the * State Papers, ii. p. 337. † Rush. iv. p. 239. $ Charles's Letters, Feb. 19. Commonwealth, c. iii. || Letters, March 12, 1645. calling did no wise acknowledge them to be a Parliament; upon which condition and construction I did it, and no otherwise; and accordingly it is registered in the council books, with the council's unanimous approbation *." All these proofs of double dealing, it is true, together with fifty more, were not known to all the world till after the battle of Naseby in 1645; but the Parliament had abundant testimony long before this of the impossibility of trusting themselves to the King without arms in their hands. Hence arose the necessary policy of the act for rendering the Parliament indissoluble except with its own consent; hence the ordinance for the militia; hence the impeachment of Strafford in the first instance, and the single justification, if it be admitted to be one, of the Bill of Attainder at last. With regard to this action there has been a difference of opinion. Mr. Godwin defends it on grounds of general expediency, that "law is made for man, and not man for the law; that whenever we can be sure that the most valuable interests of a nation require that we should decide one way, that way we ought to decide; that Strafford was at that day the most dangerous man to the liberties of England then present, and to come, that could livet." This is obviously inconclusive. The question still is upon these very terms, whether the most valuable interests of a country are better served by the death of a criminal, or by the inviolability of the law. The precaution of the Parliament, that it should not be drawn into a precedent, is at once a severe condemnation, and a manifest absurdity. You neither can, nor have a right to do that which shall not be drawn into a precedent. It is more for the good of mankind that laws should not be broken, than that ten Straffords should be brought to the block. Mr. Fox says more wisely; "when once a man is in a situation to be tried, and his person in the power of his accusers and his judges, he can no longer be formidable in that degree which alone can justify (if any thing can) the violation of the substantial rules of criminal proceedings." It is worthy of remark, that when Laud was made away with four years afterwards, when Mr. Godwin himself will not contend that public necessity called for the execution, the same clause was inserted in the Bill of Attainder as in that of Strafford; "that no judge or judges shall interpret any act or thing to be treason, in other manner than they should or ought to have done if this ordinance had never 4 *Letters, Jan. 2. This is admirably consistent with the word of a King, and shews how compatible a certain kind of Protestantism may be made with the philosophy of a Jesuit. History, p. 10. Commonwealth, c. iii. been made." The friends of liberty and justice ought not to weaken a good cause by a sophistical attempt to defend these actions. I beseech you, Wrest once the law to your authority, To do a great right, do a little wrong It must not be; there is no power in Venice 'Twill be recorded as a precedent, And many an error by the same example If the foregoing observations on the state of affairs at that time be founded on fact, or if a tenth part of them are so, then the Parliament was justified upon the admitted principles of the Revolution in resisting the King by force of arms; and when once hostilities had commenced, it is quite clear there could be no safety for a flux and transitory body against the superior advantages of a permanent authority, except in effectually limiting its powers and opportunities of taking vengeance on its opponents. There can be no doubt with any person, that if Charles had been ultimately victorious in the field, he would have considered himself bound, in justification of his own conduct, to annihilate the Parliament, and declare all its proceedings null and void; and would, as certainly, have seized the favourable hour to model the state according to his own taste, and to rivet for ever the chains which an army of his subjects had helped him to forge. Hume himself says, that the King could give no security to the Parliament for the performance of any agreement with them. The nature of his situation would have rendered it difficult, if his character for veracity had been unimpeached; but, with the Naseby letters before the world, it was absolutely impossible. The justice and the prudence of the treatment which the King met with, after he had ceased to resist, may be viewed in very different lights according to the variety of human tempers. But whether it be condemned or approved is a matter of comparative insignificance in our estimation of the merits of the great struggle which agitated the country. We must not be misled by phrases; a King, so long as he is our King, is a sacred object; but when he ceases to protect our liberties, when we cease to render to him allegiance, when he wages war on us, and we draw our swords against him,-the divinity that hedged him round is gone; the propriety of trea son is lost; he is no longer our King; and a Cromwell would be perfectly right and perfectly honest in shooting him in the battle as soon as he would any other nameless and undistinguished foe. The open declaration of Cromwell is said to indicate a brutal and ferocious disposition.-Why? Who would, or could, have complained of the soldier that had shot James at the battle of the Boyne? Yet James was in precisely the same relation to his adversaries that his father was in at Naseby. Charles indeed was still called King, and James was not; does that constitute the difference? Does the verbal addition or subtraction of a title alter the real character of the person? Charles was called King because there was no other; James was not so called, because another was made King in his room: but that is merely accidental and extraneous; for surely no one will say that it was a more decisive act, so far as regards the King's person, to declare the throne vacant of James, than it was to level a pike against the breast of Charles. A man is a King, or he is not; Kingship is an office, and the man is obeyed in virtue of his office; if we do not obey him, if we fight against him, how can it be said that he is really any longer our King? We may be wrong, or we may be right, in ceasing to obey at all; we may be rebels or we may be patriots;-but that must depend on the commencement of the contest, and not on the termination. If Bradshaw was a rebel, Essex was a rebel, and the one not more so than the other. Rebellion admits not of degrees. As for the notion of an inalienable sanctity inherent in the persons of Kings, as abstracted from their office, it may be commended to the protection of those profound lovers of religion and justice, "who believe," as Rumbold said, "that God has made the greater part of mankind with saddles on their backs, and bridles in their mouths; and some few booted and spurred to ride the rest." The fortunes of the parties, into which the opponents of the King separated, constitute the most instructive chapter in the history of England. The resistance was excited at first by a strong love of civil liberty, and a growing aversion from the prelatical form of church-government. Perhaps this latter motive was the more energetic of the two, with the majority. It acted on a more sensitive organ. The necessity of cultivating the good-will of the Scotch paved the way then, and afterwards, for the substitution of presbytery in its room. But the Presbyterians were yet more intolerant than the Bishops; they were persuaded that the Genevan discipline was the very pattern in the Mount, and they pronounced it soul-slaughter to suffer any one to vary a tittle from it. The Assembly of Divines was every whit as infallible as the Pope himself. Persecution begets persecution. But the Church of England had an excuse, which the Presbyterians had not; for these latter, whilst under the lash, had cried for liberty of conscience upon indifferent points; they now refused it themselves, and sealed their own condemnation. "Why," says Mr. Coleridge, "should a clergyman of the present day feel interested in the defence of Laud or Sheldon? Surely it is sufficient for the warmest partisan of our establishment that he can assent with truth, that when our church persecuted, it was on mistaken principles held in common by all Christendom; and, at all events, far less culpable were the Bishops, who were maintaining the existing laws, than the persecuting spirit afterwards shown by their successful opponents, who had no such excuse, and who should have been taught mercy by their own sufferings, and wisdom by the utter failure of the experiment in their own case." From the beginning, however, some of the chief leaders inthe House of Commons had no thoughts of destroying prelacy, for the purpose of substituting in its place the more irksome and less dignified thraldom of presbytery. They aimed at religious as well as civil liberty. Of this party were Hampden, Vane, Cromwell, St. John, Selden, Whitelock, Marten. These great men concurred with the Presbyterians in opposition to the King, so long as such an union was necessary for the main interests of the commonwealth: but, when a permanent establishment began to be urged by the zealots for the discipline, a separation insensibly took place; and, though a minority in point of numbers, yet they formed an opposition at once imposing from the rank, and influential from the talents and character, of its members. The Self-denying Ordinance, which was their master-piece, gave them an ultimate ascendency, and terminated the war. Their general name was Independents; but under this appellation were included many various parties, who, differing from each other in some points, yet equally detested presbytery and prelacy. Amongst these were the proper Independents, Erastians, Fifth-Monarchymen, Millenarians, Anabaptists, Republicans; all these stood for one common point, liberty of conscience and universal toleration of forms of religion. The greatest names which this nation can boast of were enrolled in one or other of these divisions; and they have the immortal honour of being the first body of men in any Christian state, since the time of the Apostles, who made freedom of thought a ground of union, and proclaimed toleration as a principle. We do not forget that the spoliated and prostrate Church of England put forth at the same time a champion for the same cause, who could meet no superior; as long as the English tongue is |