THE DEBATES ON THE GRAND REMONSTRANCE.

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER, 1641.

IF the question were put to any thoroughly informed student of our Great Civil War, into what single incident of the period before the actual outbreak would appear to have been concentrated the largest amount of party passion, he could hardly fail at once to single out the Grand Remonstrance. And if he were then asked to name, out of all the party encounters of the time, that of which the subject matter and antecedents have been most unaccountably slurred over by historians, he must perforce give the same answer. It follows that the writers of history have in this case thought of small importance what the men whose deeds they record accounted to be of the greatest, and it will be worth inquiring how far the later verdict is just.

Happily, the means exist of forming a judgment as to the particular subject, on grounds not altogether uncertain or unsafe. The Grand Remonstrance itself remains. Under masses of dull and lifeless matter heaped up in Rushworth's ponderous folios, it has lain undisturbed for more than two centuries; but it lives still, even there, for those who care to study its contents, and they who so long have turned away from it unstudied, may at least plead the excuse of the dreary and deterring companionship around it. The truth, however, is, that to the art and disingenuousness of Clarendon it is really due, in this

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instance as in so many others, that those who have written on the conflict of parties before the civil war broke out, have been led off to a false issue. He was too near the time of the Remonstrance when he wrote, and he had played too eager a part in the attempt to obstruct and prevent its publication to the people, not to give it prominence in his History; but he found it easier to falsify and misrepresent the debates concerning it, of which there was no published record, than to pass altogether in silence the statements made in it, diffused as they had been, some score of years earlier, over the length and breadth of the land. Indeed it also better served the purpose he had, so to garble and misquote these; and from the fragment of a summary he gave, filling some six pages of the octavo edition of his book, Hume and the historians of the last century derived manifestly the whole of what they knew of the Grand Remonstrance. But even the more careful and less prejudiced historians of our own century have not shown that they knew much more.

Upon the debate in the house before it was put to the vote, as referred to by Hyde, all writers have dwelt; and of course every one has copied and reproduced those graphic touches of Philip Warwick, the young courtier and follower of Hyde, in which he gives his version of what the Remonstrance was, how it originated, and what an exciting debate it led to. How some leading men in the house, as he says, jealous of the proposed entertainment to be given by the City to the King on his return from Scotland, had got up an entertainment of their own in the shape of a libel (the Remonstrance, that is), than which fouler or blacker could not be imagined, against his person and government; and how it passed so tumultuously, two or three nights before the King came to town, that at three o'clock in that November morning when they voted it, he thought they would all have sat in the Valley of the Shadow of Death; for they would, like Joab's and Abner's young men, all have catched at each other's locks, and sheathed their swords in each other's

bowels, had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it, and led them to defer their angry debate until the next morning.' Doubtless a scene to be remembered, and which naturally has attracted all attentions since; but that, out of the many who have so adopted it, and from the mere reading it felt some share in the excitement it pourtrays, not one should have been moved to make closer inquiry into what the so-called "libel" really was that so had roused and maddened the partizans of the King, may fairly be matter of surprise. Hallam is content to give some eight or nine lines to it, in which its contents are not fairly represented. Lingard disposes of it in something less than a dozen lines. Macaulay has only occasion incidentally to introduce it, and a simple mention of it is all that falls within the plan of Carlyle. Godwin passes over it in silence; and such few lines as Disraeli (in his Commentaries) vouchsafes to it, are an entire mis-statement of its circumstances and falsification of its contents. It is not necessary to advert specifically to other histories and writings connected with the period; but the assertion may be confidently made, that in all the number there is not one, whatever its indications of research and originality in other directions may be, which presents reasonable evidence of any better or more intimate knowledge of the Great Remonstrance than was derivable from the garbled page of Clarendon.

Yet, as I have said, this State Paper remains a fact living and accessible to us: a solid piece of actual history, retaining the form which its authors gave to it, and breathing still some part of the life which animated them. It embodies the case of the Parliament against the Ministers of the King. It is the most authentic statement ever put forth of the wrongs endured by all classes of the English people, during the first fifteen years of the reign of Charles

1 Memoires of the Reign of King Charles I, by Sir Philip Warwick, Knight. Ed. 1702. P. 201-2.

the First; and, for that reason, the most complete justifi cation upon record of the Great Rebellion. It describes the condition of the three kingdoms at the time when the Long Parliament met, and the measures taken thereon to redress still remediable wrongs, and deal out justice on their authors. Enumerating the statutes passed at the same time for the good of the subject, and his safety in future years, it points out what yet waited to be done to complete that necessary work, and the grave obstructions that had arisen, in each of the three kingdoms, to intercept its completion. It warns the people of dangerous and desperate intrigues to recover ascendancy for the court faction; hints not obscurely at serious defections in progress, even from the popular phalanx; accuses the bishops of a design to Romanize the English Church; denounces the effects of ill counsels in Scotland and Ireland; and calls upon the King to dismiss evil counsellors. It is, in brief, an appeal to the country; consisting, on the one hand, of a dignified assertion of the power of the House of Commons in re-establishing the public liberties, and, on the other, of an urgent representation of its powerlessness either to protect the future or save the past, without immediate present support against papists and their favourers in the House of Lords, and their unscrupulous partizans near the throne. There is in it, nevertheless, not a word of disrespect to the person or the just privilege of royalty; and nothing that the fair supporters of a sound Church Establishment might not frankly have approved and accepted. Of all the State Papers of the period, it is in these points much the most remarkable; nor, without very carefully reading it, is it easy to understand rightly, or with any exactness, either the issue challenged by the King when he unfurled his standard, or the objects and desires of the men who led the House of Commons up to the actual breaking out of the war.

Essential as the study of it is, however, to any true comprehension of this eventful time, the difficulty of reproducing it in modern history must doubtless be

admitted. It is not merely that it occupies fifteen of Rushworth's closely printed folio pages, but that, in special portions of its argument, it passes with warmth and rapidity through an extraordinary variety of subjects, of which the connection has ceased to be always immediately apparent. Matters are touched too lightly for easy comprehension now, which but to name, then, was to strike a chord that every breast responded to. Some subjects also have a large place, to which only a near acquaintance with party names and themes can assign their just importance, either as affecting each other, or making stronger the ultimate and wider appeal which by their means was designed. The very heat and urgency of tone, the quick impatience of allusion, the minute subdivision of details, the passionate iteration of topics, everything that made its narrative so intense and powerful once, and gives it in a certain sense its vividness and reality still, constitutes at the same time the difficulty of presenting it in such an abstract, careful and connected yet compressed, as would admit of reproduction here. It will be well worth while, nevertheless, to make the trial; which, however short it may fall of success in the particular matter, may have some historical value independently. For, by the use of manuscript records as yet unemployed by any writer or historian, it will be possible to illustrate the abstract to be given of the Remonstrance, by an account of the Debates respecting it in the House of Commons, and these with relation as well to itself as to its antecedents and consequences, far more interesting, because more minute and faithful, than any heretofore given to the world. And in this there will be the undoubted additional advantage, that thereby will be supplied a not inefficient test for Clarendon's accuracy and honesty of statement in the most critical part of his narrative of these affairs.

But first, to establish for myself the claim it is proposed to dispute in others, it will be necessary to state the authority from which the most part of the