liament at Westminster having voted an excise on beer, wine, and other commodities, those at Oxford imitated the example and conferred that revenue on the king. And, in order to enable him the better to recruit his army, they granted him the sum of one hundred thousand pounds, to be levied by way of loan upon the subject. The king circulated privy seals, countersigned by the speakers of both houses, requiring the loan of particular sums from such persons as lived within his quarters. Neither party had as yet got above the pedantry of reproaching their antagonists with these illegal measures. The Westminster parliament passed a whimsical ordinance, commanding all the inhabitants of London and the neighborhood to retrench a meal a week, and to pay the value of it for the support of the public cause. It is easily imagined that, provided the money were paid, they troubled themselves but little about the execution of their ordinance. Such was the king's situation, that, in order to restore peace to the nation, he had no occasion to demand any other terms than the restoring of the laws and constitution; the replacing him in the same rights which had ever been enjoyed by his predecessors; and the reëstablishing on its ancient basis the whole frame of government, civil as well as ecclesiastical. And that he might facilitate an end seemingly so desirable, he offered to employ means equally popular, a universal act of oblivion, and a toleration or indulgence to tender consciences. Nothing therefore could contribute more to his interests than every discourse of peace, and every discussion of the conditions upon which that blessing could be obtained. For this reason, he solicited a treaty on all occasions, and desired a conference and mutual examination of pretensions, even when he entertained no hopes that any conclusion could possibly result from it. For like reasons, the parliament prudently avoided, as much as possible, all advances towards negotiation, and were cautious not to expose too easily to censure those high terms which their apprehensions or their ambition made them previously demand of the king. Though their partisans were blinded with the thickest veil of religious prejudices, they dreaded to bring their pretensions to the test, or lay them open before the whole nation. In opposition to the sacred authority of the * Rush. vol. vi. p. 590. † Dugdale, p. 119. Rush. vol. vi. p. 748. laws, to the venerable precedents of many ages, the popular leaders were ashamed to plead nothing but fears and jealousies, which were not avowed by the constitution, and for which neither the personal character of Charles, so full of virtue, nor his situation, so deprived of all independent authority, secmed to afford any reasonable foundation. Grievances which had been fully redressed; powers, either legal or illegal, which had been entirely renounced; it seemed unpopular, and invidious, and ungrateful, any further to insist on. The king, that he might abate the universal veneration paid to the name of parliament, had issued a declaration, in which he set forth all the tumults by which himself and his partisans in both houses had been driven from London; and he thence inferred, that the assembly at Westminster was no longer a free parliament, and, till its liberty were restored, was entitled to no authority. As this declaration was an obstacle to all treaty, some contrivance seemed requisite in order to elude it. A letter was written in the foregoing spring to the earl of Essex, and subscribed by the prince, the duke of York, and forty-three noblemen.* They there exhort him to be an instrument of restoring peace, and to promote that happy end with those by whom he was employed. Essex, though much disgusted with the parliament, though apprehensive of the extremities to which they were driving, though desirous of any reasonable accommodation, yet was still more resolute to preserve an honorable fidelity to the trust reposed in him. He replied, that as the paper sent him neither contained any address to the two houses of parliament, nor any acknowledg ment of their authority, he could not communicate it to them. Like proposals had been reiterated by the king during the ensuing campaign, and still met with a like answer from Essex.t In order to make a new trial for a treaty, the king this spring sent another letter, directed to the lords and commons of parliament assembled at Westminster: but as he also mentioned in the letter the lords and commons of parliament assembled at Oxford, and declared, that his scope and intention was to make provision that all the members of both houses might securely meet in a full and free assembly, the P. 77. * Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 442. Rush. vol vi. p. 566. Whitlocke, † Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 444. Rush. vol. vi. p. 569, 570. Whitlocke, parliament, perceiving the conclusion implied, refused all treaty upon such terms.* And the king, who knew what small hopes toere were of accommodation, would not abandon the pretensions which he had assumed; nor acknowledge the wo houses, more expressly, for a free parliament. This winter the famous Pym died; a man as much hateż by one party as respected by the other. At London, he was considered as the victi. to national liberty, who had abridged his life by incessant labors for the interests of his country: at Oxford, he was believed to have been struck with an uncommon disease, and to have been consumed with vermin, as a mark of divine vengeance, for his multiplied crimes and treasons. He had been so little studious of improving his private fortune in those civil wars, of which he had been one principal author, that the parliament thought themselves obliged from gratitude to pay the debts which he had contracted.‡ We now return to the military operations, which, during the winter, were carried on with vigor in several places, notwith. standing the severity of the season. The forces brought from Ireland were landed at Mostyne, in North Wales; and being put under the command of Lord Biron, they besieged and took the Castles of Hawarden, Bees, ton, Acton, and Deddington House. No place in Cheshire or the neighborhood now adhered to the parliament, except Nantwich; and to this town Biron laid siege during the depth of winter. Sir Thomas Fairfax, alarmed at so considerable a progress of the royalists, assembled an army of four thou sand men in Yorkshire, and having joined Sir William Brereton, was approaching to the camp of the enemy. Biron and his soldiers, elated with successes obtained in Ireland, had entertained the most profound contempt for the parliamentary forces; a disposition which, if confined to the army, may be regarded as a good presage of victory; but if it extend to the general, is the most probable forerunner of a defeat. Fairfax suddenly attacked the camp of the royalists. The swelling of the river by a thaw divided one part of the army from the other. That part exposed to Fairfax, being beaten from their post, retire into the church of Acton, and were all taken prisoners; the other retreated with precipitation.|| And this was dissipated or rendered useless that body of forces which * Clarendon, vol. iii. p. 449. Whitlocke, p. 66. Rush. vol. vi. p. 299.0 Whitlocke, p. 79. Journ. 13th of February, 181â had been drawn from Ireland; and the parliamentary party revived in those north-west counties of England. The invasion from Scotland was attended with consequences of much greater importance. The Scots, having summoned in vain the town of Newcastle, which was fortified by the vigilance of Sir Thomas Glenham, passed the Tyne, and faced the marquis of Newcastle, who lay at Durham with an army of fourteen thousand men.* After some military opera tions, in which that nobleman reduced the enemy to difficulties for forage and provisions, he received intelligence of a great disaster which had befallen his forces in Yorkshire. Colonel Bellasis, whom he had left with a considerable body of troops, was totally routed at Selby by Sir Thomas Fairfax, who had returned from Cheshire with his victorious forces.t Afraid of being enclosed between two armies, Newcastle retreated; and Leven having joined Lcrd Fairfax, they sat down before York, to which the army of the royalists had retired. But as the parliamentary and Cccttish forces were not numerous enough to invest so large a town, divided by a river, they contented themselves with incommoding it by a loose blockade; and affairs remained for some time in suspense between these opposite armies.‡ During this winter and spring, other parts of the kingdom had also been infested with war. Hopton, having assembled an army of fourteen thousand men, endeavored to break into Sussex, Kent, and the southern association, which seemed well disposed to receive him. Waller fell upon him at Cherington, and gave him a defeat of considerable importance. In another quarter, siege being laid to Newark by the parliamentary forces, Prir ce Lupert prepared himself for relieving a town of such consequence, which alone preserved the communication open between the king's southern and northern quarters.§ With a small force, but that animated by his active courage, he broke through the enemy, relieved the town, and totally dissipated that army of the parliament. But though fortune seemed to have divided her favors between the parties, the king found himself, in the main, a considerable loser by this winter campaign; and he prognos ticated a still worse event from the ensuing summer. The preparations of the parliament were great, and much exceeded Rush. vol. vi. p. 615. † Rush. vol. vi. p. 618 the slender resources of which he was possessed. In the easter association they levied fourteen thousand men, under the earl of Manchester, seconded by Cromwell.* An army of ten thousand men, under Essex; another of nearly the same force, under Waller, were assembled in the neighborhood of London. The former was destined to oppose the king the latter was appointed to march into the west, where Prince Maurice, with a small army which went continually to decay, was spending his time in vain before Lyme, an incongiderable town upon the sea-coast. The utmost efforts of the king could not raise above ten thousand men at Oxford; and on their sword chiefly, during the campaign, were these to depend for subsistence. The queen, terrified with the dangers which every way environed her, and afraid of being enclosed in Oxford, in the middle of the kingdom, fled to Exeter, where she hoped to be delivered unmolested of the child with which she was now pregnant, and whence she had the means of an easy escape into France, if pressed by the forces of the enemy. She knew the implacable hatred which the parliament, on account of her religion and her credit with the king, had all along borne her. Last summer, the commons had sent up to the peers an impeachment of high treason against her; because, in his utmost distresses, she had assisted her husband with arms and ammunition which she had bought in Holland.j And had she fallen into their hands, neither her sex, she knew, nor high station, could protect her against insults at least, if not danger, from those haughty republicans, who so little affected to conduct themselves by the maxims of gallantry and politeness. From the beginning of these dissensions, the parliament, it is remarkable, had in all things assumed an extreme ascendant over their sovereign, and had displayed a violence, and arrogated an authority, which, on his side, would not have been compatible either with his temper or his situation. While he spoke perpetually of pardoning all rebels, they talked of nothing but the punishment of delinquents and malignants: while he offered a toleration and indulgence to tender consciences, they threatened the utter extirpation of prelacy: to his professions of lenity they opposed declarations of rigor; and the more the ancient tenor of the laws inculcated a *Rush. vol. vi p. 621. † Rush. vol. vi. p. 221 |