as the reward of his services with an importunity, that shows his ambition to have been of the meanest kind. When in the North, he persecuted with the utmost cruelty a Sir David Foulis, who had omitted to pay him some trifling mark of respect.* His conduct to Lord Mountnorris in Ireland was of the same kind. Upon the whole, he was a violent, unprincipled man, destitute of any elevation of soul; for his request to the King to let him die, can hardly be thought sincere; and there can be little doubt, that, till the end of his career, he expected to rise to supreme power, by pressing his foot upon the necks of the people. The intrepidity of his character, his powers of eloquence, the virtues of his private life, and above all, the unjust manner in which he was condemned to death, have rescued his name from that abhorrence, with which every lover of his country would otherwise have regarded it. The execution of Strafford casts a stain upon all parties in the state. The House of Commons were instigated by passion; the House of Lords acted from fear; and Charles, from some motive or other, which, at all events, *Macdiarmid's Lives, vol. ii. p. 121.

was not the right one. The admission of the mob to overawe the deliberation of Parliament was a sure sign that law was about to be subverted.

In a contest between a king who refuses any limitation of his prerogative, and a people who require it, there can be no equitable agreement. The ordinary authority of a limited king, the power of calling out an armed force, of proroguing and dissolving Parliament, cannot be entrusted to a sovereign whose main object it is to destroy, by means of a party, all limitation. William III., Anne, and the first sovereigns of the house of Brunswick, might be safely entrusted with the prerogative, because no party in the nation wished to see arbitrary power in their hands; but Charles I. could not, because the Cavaliers would have been unanimous in repealing the restrictions imposed by Parliament. Hence, when the popular party had provided sufficient checks for the people against a king, they were obliged to devise fresh ones against King Charles. After the plot in the army in favour of the King they were obliged to put part of the executive power in the hands of trustees, and still more when war had actually

commenced, till the proprietor of the crown should have discretion to use it. This forms the only justification of the law respecting the militia, the bill for continuing the Parliament, and the articles of Uxbridge. It was too much to expect that the victorious party should lay down their arms, without securities, quietly permitting the liberties they had wrested from the crown to be again surrendered by a packed Parliament; and their own lives to be at the mercy of a king to whom the power of the sword had been again entrusted. The dif ficulty was inseparable from the case. The King's prerogative is so great, that nothing but the established opinion of the whole nation can prevent his absorbing every other authority in the state.

Much has been said of the insincerity of Charles. A king, who has been accustomed to exercise despotic power, who considers that power as the brightest jewel of his crown, and who esteems every attempt to confine his prerogative as rebellion, must necessarily fall a sacrifice to his obstinacy, when his subjects have determined that arbitrary power shall no longer exist; and his resistance will naturally bear the

character of insincerity. For every concession will be in his mind a concession to power, and not to right; and he will think himself entitled, if he becomes possessed of power, to repossess himself of his right. Charles was not, perhaps, in his character insincere. The entry on the council-book at the time of the treaty of Uxbridge, protesting that the two Houses were not a Parliament, in the face of his own designation of them as such, was at the request of the Council; and his original wish had been not to acknowledge the Parliament at all. When he negociated with the Presbyterians and the army, he was fully entitled to try, by enquiries from each, which of the two would give the best terms. His continuing to treat with both, till it was too late to conclude with either, is a proof of his arrogance, his pride, his conceit, and his folly; but is not of itself a conclusive argument of his insincerity. The story of the saddle, however, with the letter in which he wrote that he should know in due time how to deal with the rogues, who, instead of a silken garter, should be fitted with a hempen cord," is, if genuine, a sufficient proof that his natural sincerity was gone, and that he could no more

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be trusted on any promise or oath that he might make.*

When Charles was defeated by his subjects, a new party had arisen, who went a step beyond the Presbyterians, both in religion and politics. The toleration which the Presbyterians had originally asked, in matters of dress and ceremonial, the Independents wished to extend to faith and doctrine, and were thus the earliest advocates of religious liberty. The political freedom which the Presbyterians hoped to enjoy under the ancient kingly government of England, the Independents thought would best be secured by a republican constitution. Their views, with respect to the King, were tinged by the most erroneous notions, drawn from Scripture. They imagined the Sovereign ought to die, that the sins of the war might be expiated by him, and not by them. Ludlow, in vindication of the King's execution, quotes, with self-applause, a passage from the book of Numbers: "That blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is

* See Herbert's Memoirs, Carte's Life of Ormond, and especially the excellent preface of Baron Maseres prefixed to the Tracts published by him.