X. 1642-49. in this kingdom entertained less narrow opinions, the parliamen- CHAP. tary commissioners thought the king ought rather to concede such a point than themselves, especially as his former consent to the Charles I. abolition of episcopacy in Scotland weakened a good deal the force of his plea of conscience; while the royalists, even could they have persuaded their master, thought episcopacy, though not absolutely of divine right (a notion which they left to the churchmen) yet so highly beneficial to religion, and so important to the monarchy, that nothing less than extreme necessity, or at least the prospect of a signal advantage, could justify its abandonment. They offered, however, what in an earlier stage of their dissensions would have satisfied almost every man, that limited scheme of episcopal hierarchy, above-mentioned as approved by Usher, rendering the bishop among his presbyters much like the king in parliament, not free to exercise his jurisdiction, nor to confer orders without their consent, and offered to leave all ceremonies to the minister's discretion. Such a compromise would probably have pleased the English nation, averse to nothing in their established church, except its abuses; but the parliamentary negotiators would not so much as enter into discussion upon it *. They were hardly less unyielding on the subject of the militia. They began with a demand of naming all the commanders by sea and land, including the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and all governors of garrisons, for an unlimited time. The king, though not very willingly, proposed that the command should be vested in twenty persons, half to be named by himself, half by the parlia presbytery was so. Whitelock, 132. These churchmen should have been locked up like a jury, without food or fire, till they agreed. If we may believe Clarendon, the earl of Loudon offered in the name of the Scots, that if the king would give up episcopacy, they would not press any of the other demands. It is certain, however, that they would never have suffered him to become the master of the English parliament; and if this offer was sincerely made, it must have VOL. II, been from a conviction that he could not * Rushworth, Whitelock, Clarendon. E X. Charles I. 1642-49. CHAP. ment, for the term of three years, which he afterwards extended to seven; at the expiration of which time it should revert to the crown. But the utmost concession that could be obtained from the other side was to limit their exclusive possession of this power to seven years, leaving the matter open for an ulterior arrangement by act of parliament at their termination *. Even if this treaty had been conducted between two belligerent states, whom rivalry or ambition often excite to press every demand which superior power can extort from weakness, there yet was nothing in the condition of the king's affairs which should compel him thus to pass under the yoke, and enter his capital as a prisoner. But we may also remark, that, according to the great principle, that the English constitution, in all its component parts, was to be maintained by both sides in this contest, the question for parliament was not what their military advantages or resources for war entitled them to ask, but what was required for the due balance of power under a limited monarchy. They could rightly demand no further concession from the king, than was indispensable for their own and the people's security; and I leave any one who is tolerably acquainted with the state of England at the beginning of 1645, to decide, whether their privileges and the public liberties incurred a greater risk, by such an equal partition of power over the sword, as the king proposed, than his prerogative and personal freedom would have encountered by abandoning it altogether to their discretion. I am far from thinking that the acceptance of the king's propositions at Uxbridge would have restored tranquillity to England. He would still have repined at the limitations of monarchy, and others would have conspired against its existence. But of the various consequences which we may picture to ourselves as capable of resulting from a pacification, that which appears to me the least likely is, that Charles should have re-established that arbitrary power which he had * Whitelock, 133. X. 1642-49. exercised in the earlier period of his reign. Whither, in fact, was CHAP, he to look for assistance? Was it with such creatures of a court as Jermyn or Ashburnham, or with a worn out veteran of office, Charles I. like Cottington, or a rash adventurer, like Digby, that he could outwit Vane, or overawe Cromwell, or silence the press and the pulpit, or strike with panic the stern puritan and the confident fanatic? Some there were beyond question, both soldiers and courtiers, who hated the very name of a limited monarchy, and murmured at the constitutional language which the king, from the time he made use of the pens of Hyde and Falkland, had systematically employed in his public declarations *. But it is as certain, that the great majority of his Oxford parliament, and of those upon whom he must have depended, either in the field or in council, were apprehensive of any victory that might render him absolute, as that Essex and Manchester were unwilling to conquer at the expense of the constitution †. The catholics indeed, generally speaking, would have gone great lengths in asserting his authority. Nor is this any reproach to that body, by no means naturally less attached to their country and its liberties than other Englishmen, but driven by an unjust persecution to *The creed of this party is set forth in the Behemoth of Hobbes, which is, in other words, the application of those principles of government which are laid down in the Leviathan, to the constitution and state of England in the civil war. It is republished in Baron Maseres's Tracts, ii. 565, 567. Sir Philip Warwick, in his Memoirs, 198, hints something of the same kind. + Warburton, in the notes subjoined to the late edition of Clarendon, vii. 563, mentions a conversation he had with the duke of Argyle and lord Cobham, (both soldiers, and the first a distinguished one), as to the conduct of the king and the earl of Essex after the battle of Edgehill. They agreed it was inexplicable on both sides by any military principle. Warburton explained it by the unwillingness to be too victorious, felt by Essex himself, and by those whom the king was forced to consult. Father Orleans, in a passage with which the bishop, X. 1642-49. CHAP. see their only hope of emancipation in the nation's servitude. They could not be expected to sympathize in that patriotism of Charles I. the seventeenth century, which, if it poured warmth and radiance on the protestant, was to them as a devouring fire. But the king could have made no use of the catholics, as a distinct body, for any political purpose, without uniting all other parties against him. He had already given so much offence, at the commencement of the war, by accepting the services which the catholic gentry were forward to offer, that instead of a more manly justification, which the temper of the times, he thought, did not permit, he had recourse to the useless subterfuges of denying or extenuating the facts, and even to a strangely improbable recrimination; asserting, on several occasions, that the number of papists in the parliament's army was much greater than in his It may still indeed be questioned, whether, admitting the propositions tendered to the king to have been unreasonable and insecure, it might not yet have been expedient, in the perilous condition of his affairs, rather to have tried the chances of peace than those of war. If he could have determined frankly and without reserve to have relinquished the church, and called the leaders of the presbyterian party in both houses to his councils, it is impossible to prove that he might not both have regained his power over the militia in no long course of time, and prevailed on the Rushworth Abr. iv. 550. At the very time that he was publicly denying his employment of papists, he wrote to Newcastle, commanding him to make use of all his subjects' services, without examining their consciences, except as to loyalty. Ellis's Letters, iii. 291, from an original in the Museum. No one can rationally blame Charles for any thing in this, but his inveterate and useless habit of falsehood. See Clarendon, iii. 610. It is probable that some foreign catholics were in the parliament's service. But Dodd says, with great appearance of truth, that no one English gentleman of that per suasion was in arms on their side. Church History of Engl. iii. 28. He reports as a matter of hearsay, that out of about five hundred gentlemen who lost their lives for Charles in the civil war, one hundred and ninety-four were catholics. They were doubtless a very powerful faction in the court and army. Lord Spencer, (afterwards earl of Sunderland), in some remarkable letters to his wife from the king's quarters at Shrewsbury, in September, 1642, speaks of the insolency of the papists with great dissatisfaction. Sidney Papers, ii. 667. X. 1642-49. parliament to consent to its own dissolution. The dread that party CHAP. felt of the republican spirit rising amongst the independents, would have induced them to place in the hands of any sovereign Charles I. they could trust, full as much authority as our constitution permits. But no one who has paid attention to the history of that period, will conclude that they could have secured the king against their common enemy, had he even gone wholly into their own measures *. And this were to suppose such an entire change in his character, and ways of thinking, as no external circumstances could produce. Yet his prospects from a continuance of hostilities were so unpromising, that most of the royalists would probably have hailed his almost unconditional submission at Uxbridge. Even the steady Richmond and Southampton, it is said, implored him to yield, and deprecated his misjudging confidence in pro- mises of foreign aid, or in the successes of Montrose. The more lukewarm or discontented of his adherents took this opportunity of abandoning an almost hopeless cause; between the breach of the treaty of Uxbridge and the battle of Naseby, several of the Oxford peers came over to the parliament, and took an engagement never to bear arms against it. A few instances of such defection had occurred before. It remained only, after the rupture of the treaty at Uxbridge, to try once more the fortune of war. The people, both in the king's and parliament's quarters, but especially the former, heard with dismay that peace could not be attained. Many of the per * It cannot be doubted, and is admitted in a remarkable conversation of Hollis and Whitelock with the king at Oxford in November, 1644, that the exorbitant terms demanded at Uxbridge were carried by the violent party, who disliked all pacification. Whitelock, 113. † Baillie, ii. 91. He adds, "That which has been the great snare to the king, is the unhappy success of Montrose in Scotland." There seems indeed great reason to think, that Charles, always sanguine, and incapable of calculating probabilities, was unreasonably elated by victories from which Whitelock, 109. 137. 142. Rushw |