1 XI. non Sidney opposed, and saw the danger of a counter CHAP. revolution. "No one will stir," cried Cromwell impatiently; "I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown on it." Sidney withdrew; and Charles was abandoned to the sanguinary severity of a sect. To sign the death-warrant was a solemn deed, from which some of his judges were ready to shrink; Cromwell concealed the magnitude of the act under an air of buffoonery; the chamber rung with gayety; he daubed the cheek of one of the judges that sat next him with ink, and, amidst shouts of laughter, compelled another, the wavering Ingoldsby, to sign the paper as a jest. The ambassadors of foreign princes, eager to make purchases when the collections of the unhappy king were sold at auction, presented no remonstrance. Holland alone negotiated. The English people were overawed. Treason against the state, on the part of its highest officers, is the darkest of human offences. Fidelity to the constitution is due from every citizen; in a monarch, the debt of gratitude is enhanced, for the monarch is the hereditary and special favorite of the fundamental laws. The murderer, even where his victim is eminent for genius and virtue, destroys what time will repair ; and, deep as is his guilt, society suffers but transiently from the transgression. But the king who conspires against the liberties of the nation, conspires to subvert the most precious bequest of past ages, the dearest hope of future time; he would destroy genius in its birth, and enterprise in its sources, and sacrifice the prolific causes of intelligence and virtue to his avarice or his vanity, his caprices or his ambition; would rob 1 See Godwin, ii. 669. CHAP. the nation of its nationality, the people of the preroga XI. tives of man; would deprive common life of its sweets, by depriving it of its security, and religion of its power to solace, by subjecting it to supervision and control. His crime would not only enslave a present race of men, but forge chains for unborn generations. There can be no fouler deed. Tried by the standard of his own intentions and his own actions, Charles I., it may be, had little right to complain. Yet when history gives its impartial verdict' on the execution, it remembers that, by the laws of England, the meanest individual could claim a trial by his peers; and that the king was delivered, by a decimated parliament, which had prejudged his case, to a commission composed of his bitter and uncompromising enemies, and erected in defiance of the wishes of the people. His judges were but a military tribunal; and the judgment which assumed to be a solemn exercise of justice on the worst of criminals, arraigned by a great nation, and tried by its representatives, was in truth an act of tyranny. His accusers could have rightfully proceeded only as the agents of the popular sovereignty; and the people disclaimed the deed. An appeal to the people would have reversed the decision. The Churchmen, the Presbyterians, the lawyers, the opulent landholders, the merchants, and the great majority of the English nation, preferred the continuance of a limited monarchy. There could be no republic; there was no republic. Not sufficient advancement had been made in political knowledge. Milton believed himself a friend of popular liberty; and yet his scheme of government, which proposed to sub 1 William Prynne's Protestation, ii. 52-54. So, too, Mayhew of in Walker's Anarchia Anglicana, Boston. Mass. Hist. Coll. ii. 35. XI. ject England to the perpetual executive power of a CHAP. close corporation, was far less favorable to equal freedom and to progress than monarchy itself. Not one of the proposed methods of government was capable of being realized. Lilbourne's was, perhaps, the most consistent, but was equally impracticable. If the execution of Charles be considered by the rule of utility, its effects will be found to have been entirely bad. A free parliament would have saved the king, and reformed church and state; in aiming at the immediate enjoyment of democratic liberty, the statesmen of that day long delayed the actual progress of popular enfranchisements. Nations change their institutions but slowly to attempt to pass abruptly from feudalism and monarchy to democratic equality, was the thought of enthusiasts, who understood neither the. history, the character, nor the condition of the country. It was like laying out into entirely new streets, a city that was already crowded with massive structures, resting on firm foundations. Cromwell alone profited by the death of the king: the deed was his policy, and 'not the policy of the nation. The remaining members of the commons were now by their own act constituted the sole legislature and sovereign of England. The peerage was abolished with monarchy; the connection between state and church rent asunder; but there was no republic. Selfish ambition forbade it; the state of society and the distribution and tenure of property forbade it. The commons usurped not only all powers of ordinary legislation, but even the right of remoulding the constitution. They were a sort of collective, self-constituted, perpetual dictatorship. Like Rome under its decemviri, England was enslaved by its legislators; English XI. CHAP. liberty had become the patrimony and estate of the commons; the forms of government, the courts of justice, peace and war, all executive, all legislative power, rested with them. They were irresponsible, absolute, and apparently never to be dissolved but at their own pleasure. But the commons were not sustained by the public opinion of the nation. They were resisted by the royalists and the Catholics, by the Presbyterians and the fanatics, by the honest republicans and the army. In Ireland, the Catholics dreaded the worst cruelties that Protestant bigotry could inflict. Scotland, almost unanimous in its adhesion to Presbyterianism, regarded with horror the rise of democracy, and the triumph of the Independents; the fall of the Stuarts foreboded the overthrow of its independence; it loved liberty, but it loved its nationality also. It feared the sovereignty of an English parliament, and desired the restoration of monarchy as a guaranty against the danger of being treated as a conquered province. In England, the opulent landholders, who swayed their ignorant dependents, rendered popular institutions impossible; and too little intelligence had as yet been diffused through the mass of the people, to make them capable of taking the lead in the progress of civilization. The fruitful schemes of social and civil equality found no support but in the enthusiasm of the few who fostered them; and the heaviest clouds of discontent gathered sullenly round the nation. The attempt at a counter revolution followed. But the parties by which it was made, though a vast majority of the three nations, were filled with mutual antipathies; the Catholics of Ireland had no faith in the Scottish Presbyterians; and these in their turn XI. were full of distrust and hatred of the English Cava- CHAP. liers. They feared each other as much as they feared the commons. There could therefore be no concert of opposition; the insurrections, which, had they been made unitedly, had probably been successful, were not simultaneous. The Independents were united; their strength lay in a small but well-disciplined army; the celerity and military genius of Cromwell ensured to them unity of counsels and promptness of action; they conquered their adversaries in detail; and the massacre、 of Drogheda, the field of Dunbar, and the victory of Worcester, destroyed the present hopes of the friends of monarchy. The lustre of Cromwell's victories ennobled the crimes of his ambition. When the forces of the insurgents had been beaten down, there remained but two powers in the state, the Long Parliament and the army. To submit to a military despotism was inconsistent with the genius of the people of England; and yet the Long Parliament, now containing but a fraction of its original members, could not be recognized as the rightful sovereign of the country, and possessed only the shadow of executive power. Public confidence rested on Cromwell alone. The few true republicans had no party in the nation; a dissolution of the parliament would have led to anarchy; a reconciliation with Charles II., whose father had just been executed, was impossible; a standing army, it was plausibly argued, required to be balanced by a standing parliament; and the house of commons, the mother of the commonwealth, insisted on nursing the institutions which it had established. But the public mind reasoned differently; the virtual power rested with the army; men dreaded confusion, and sighed for peace; and |