Lords; concurrently with many signs of treachery in the Commons themselves, were seen evidences elsewhere as dangerous of the return of an unreasoning confidence in the King; even in the city, the stronghold of liberal councils, a noted royalist had been able to carry his election as lord mayor; and the patriots could not hope that their power, or their opportunities, would survive any real abatement of zeal or enthusiasm in the people. It is more wearing to the patience to wait for the redress that is really near, than for what is wholly uncertain and remote; and those who had bravely and silently endured the wrongs of fifteen years without a parliament, were ready to resent a delay of half as many months in the reliefs which parliament had promised them.' With such a semblance of amended administration, therefore, and such pretences of half popular measures, as the ingenuity of Hyde could furnish, if Charles could be brought to concede even so much, there was yet the means of striking a heavy blow for recovery of the old prerogative. though not yet taken away, whereby a great party whose livelihood and "fortunes depended on them, and "far more whose hopes of prefer 'ment looked that way (most of the "Clergy, and both the Universities), 'began to be daily more disaffected "to the Parliament; complaining "that all rewards of learning would "be taken away. Which wrought "deeply in the hearts of the young " and most ambitious of that coat." This point is admirably touched by the historian May. "Some are "taken off" (weaned from Parliament, he means) "by time and their own "inconstancy, when they have looked "for quicker redress of grievances "than the great concurrence of so 'many weighty businesses can pos66 sibly admit in a long discontinued "and reforming Parliament, how "industrious soever they be, dis"tracted with so great a variety. "Those people, after some time spent, "" grew weary again of what before they had so long wished to see; "not considering that a prince, if he "be averse from such a Parliament, 'can find power enough to retard "their proceedings, and keep off for a long time the cure of the State. "When that happens, the people, "tired with expectation of such a "cure, do usually by degrees forget "the sharpness of those diseases "which before required it; or else"in the redressing of so many and "long disorders, and to secure them "for the future, there being for the "most part a necessity of laying heavy taxes, and draining of much 'money from the people-they grow "extremely sensible of that present "smart; feeling more pain by the cure, for a time, than they did by "the lingering disease before; and "not considering that the causes of "all which they now endure were "precèdent, and their present suffer"ing is for their future security."— Lib. i. cap. ix. 115. Nor were nearer dangers wanting. Pym's life had been aimed at repeatedly; and more than one attempt had been tried to overawe deliberation by the display of force. Something was in peril beyond the abstract freedom of parliament or debate; nor was it more to secure the permanence of provisions already achieved for the public liberty, than to guard against sudden substitution of a naked despotism, that the parliamentary chiefs were now called to defend their position, or to abandon it for ever. way They were not men to hesitate, and they resolved upon an Appeal to the People in a more direct form than had ever yet been attempted. Within a week after the House first met, a committee had been moved for by Lord Digby, in a most passionate speech, to "draw up such a Remon"strance to the King as should be a faithful and lively representation of the deplorable state of the kingdom, and "such as might discover the pernicious authors of it," and the proposal had been adopted in a modified and more moderate form, wherein it will be found on the Journals (ii. 25), of some such of Declaration as may be a "faithful representation to this House of the estate of the "kingdom;" all the leading men of the house being members of the committee, and Lord Digby its chairman. This design, superseded for the time by matters of more pressing moment, and whose originator had in the interval become the hottest partizan of the King, was now revived. Charles received warning of it before he departed for Scotland, on that mission which has since been shown to have had no object so eagerly desired as to gather supposed proofs on which to build a charge of treason against Pym and Hampden. Archbishop Williams, for purposes of his own, had intercourse with a servant of Pym's, and did not scruple to tell the King how that he had learned, from this worthy, what had been going on in his master's house. Some of the Commons were preparing a Declaration to make the actions of his Majesty's government odious, and he had better try to conciliate them before he went. this pains of the Archbishop, however, might have been All spared. There was, from the first, no attempt to conceal the revival of the Declaration, or, as Lord Digby had suggested it should be called, the Remonstrance. It stood among the orders of the House, as part of the business to be done. Portions of it had certainly been under discussion before the members rose for the recess. We have evidence that at the close of July, during the excitements of the enquiry into the army plot, the committee to whom it had been referred had it under deliberation; and a peremptory order was made in August,' during the excitement caused by the King's resolute persistence in then departing for Scotland, that by a particular day the Remonstrance of the state of the kingdom and the church' was to be brought in. What its promoters prudently concealed, or, to speak perhaps more correctly, had not yet finally settled, was the particular manner in which they proposed to make use of it. The parliamentary recess, during which Pym sat as chairman of a committee having absolute powers to conduct business in the interval, lasted from the 9th of September, when the House did not rise until nine o'clock at night, to the morning of the 20th of October. On that day the members reassembled; but great gaps were seen in their ranks, and it became obvious, as week followed week without supplying these deficiencies, that the average of attendance had considerably diminished. Lord Clarendon, though he hesitates expressly to say so, would have us assume that the King's party suffered most by this falling off; but the assumption is hardly reconcileable with the strenuous exertions of the patriots to compel a more full attendance. It appears from the D'Ewes manuscript that Strode went even so far, some two months after the recess, as to propose to fine a member £50, or expel him, if he persisted in absence without leave; and when suggestion was made on the King's behalf from Edinburgh, for the issue of a proclamation requiring full attendance of all the members of the house, the Lord Keeper and Chief Justice Bankes were against it, as unseasonable. The truth seems to have been, that the defection comprised generally the class of not very settled opinions which had hitherto sided mostly with the strongest; and that its manifestation at this critical time, bringing new proof of influences at work as well within as without the house, to weaken the power of its leaders, furnished also a more complete justification, if that were needed, of the course on which they had resolved. Nor had they assembled many hours before darker warnings gathered in upon them. Hampden was still in Scotland, nominally as a commissioner on the Scotch debt, but really to watch the King's proceedings there; and Pym, after narrating his discovery of Goring's plot, and the serious evidences existing of another widely spread army conspiracy, handed in letters from the member for Bucks which had reached the committee the previous day by an express, detailing the scheme just discovered at Edinburgh for the assassination of the leaders of the Covenant. The 1 Clarendon says explicitly that Montrose, while professing to be able to satisfy the King of the treason of Argyle and the Hamiltons, advised the more certain and expeditious mode of disposing of them by assassination, which he "frankly under"took to do" (Hist. ii. 17). The noble historian adds that the King "abhor"red that expedient," but unhappily even he is not able to deny that the King continued his regard and confidence to the man who had suggested it. From the manuscript records of these proceedings of the Long Parliament which are before me as I write, I find that Pym, so early as this 30th Oc entire contents of these letters were not divulged: but, on the further statement then made by Pym, resolutions were passed for immediate conference with the Lords on the safety of the parliament and kingdom; instructions were given for occupation, with a strong force, of all the military posts of the city; and the train-bands of London were ordered up to guard the two Houses by night as well as by day. That was on the morning of the 20th of October; and in the evening, Edward Nicholas,' so soon to be knighted and made Secretary of State in place of Windebank, and who now sat for Newton in Hants, keeping the signet during Charles's absence in Edinburgh, wrote to the King that some well-affected parliament men had been with him that day in great trouble, in consequence of news from Scotland, and that he had not been able to calm their anxiety. As the days passed on, and new light was thrown on the equivocal position of the King with the promoters of the league against Argyle and the Hamiltons, this cause for trouble to the "well-affected" did not diminish. In a second letter, his Majesty is told how much his servants in the house are disheartened to be kept so long in darkness. In a third, he has further notification of the great pain which is caused by his silence. Nevertheless, that most significant silence continued. Hampden followed soon after his letters, leaving his "Hertford his Governor, for whom "there were no convenient lodgings "at Oatlands. Then, after a certain break, these remarkable words follow: "That he feared the con"spiracy went round, and was in "Scotland as well as England." 1 An able and a moderate man, who served his master faithfully, and (rarest of qualities in a King's servant then) not unwisely. Clarendon describes him, in one of the suppressed passages of his History, as one of "the Clerks of the Council, who had "been Secretary to the Duke of "Buckingham for the Maritime Af- 2 "The next day after the receipt "of the letters," says Clarendon (ii. 579), "the Earls of Essex and Hol"land sadly told me, that I might "clearly discern the indirect way of "the Court, and how odious all "honest men grew to them." |