rear.

intention of falling on the rear of the royalists. He was repulsed, routed, and pursued with considerable loss.* Stunned and disheartened with this blow, his army decayed and melted away by desertion; and the king thought he might safely leave it, and march westward against Essex. That general, having obliged Prince Maurice to raise the siege of Lyme, having taken Weymouth and Taunton, advanced still in his conquests, and met with no equal opposition. The king followed him, and having reënforced his army from all quarters, appeared in the field with an army superior to the enemy. Essex, retreating into Cornwall, informed the parliament of his danger, and desired them to send an army which might fall on the king's General Middleton received a commission to execute that service; but came too late. Essex's army, cooped up in a narrow corner at Lestithiel, deprived of all forage and provisions, and seeing no prospect of succor, was reduced to the last extremity. The king pressed them on one side; Prince Maurice on another; Sir Richard Granville on a third. Essex, Robarts, and some of the principal officers escaped in a boat to Plymouth; Balfour with his horse passed the king's outposts in a thick mist, and got safely to the garrisons of his own party. The foot under Skippon were obliged to surrender their arms, artillery, baggage, and ammunition; and being conducted to the parliament's quarters, were dismissed. By this advantage, which was much boasted of, the king, besides the honor of the enterprise, obtained what he stood extremely in need of the parliament, having preserved the men, lost what they could easily repair.†

No sooner did this intelligence reach London, than the committee of the two kingdoms voted thanks to Essex for his fidelity, courage, and conduct; and this method of proceeding, no less politic than magnanimous, was preserved by the parliament throughout the whole course of the war. Equally indulgent to their friends and rigorous to their enemies, they employed with success these two powerful engines of reward and punishment, in confirmation of their authority.

That the king might have less reason to exult in the advantages which he had obtained in the west, the parliament opposed to him very numerous forces. Having armed anew

* Rush. vol. vi. p. 676. Clarendon, vol. v. p. 497. Sir Ed. Walk er, p. 31.

Rush. vol. vi. p. 699, etc. Whitlocke, p. 98. Clarendon, vol. w p. 524, 525. Sir Edward Walker, p. 69, 70, etc.

Essex's subdued but not disheartened troops, they ordered Manchester and Cromwell to march with their recruited forces from the eastern association; and, joining their armies to those of Waller and Middleton, as well as of Essex, offer battle to the king. Charles chose his post at Newbury, where the parliamentary armies, under the earl of Manchester, attacked him with great vigor; and that town was a second time the scene of the bloody animosities of the English. Essex's soldiers, exhorting one another to repair their broken honor, and revenge the disgrace of Lestithiel, made an impetuous assault on the royalists; and having recovered some of their cannon lost in Cornwall, could not forbear embracing them with tears of joy. Though the king's troops defended themselves with valor, they were overpowered by numbers; and the night came very seasonably to their relief, and prevented a total overthrow. Charles, leaving his baggage and cannon in Dennington Castle, near Newbury, forthwith retreated to Wallingford, and thence to Oxford. There Prince Rupert and the earl of Northampton joined him, with considerable bodies of cavalry. Strengthened by this reënforcement, he ventured to advance towards the enemy, now employed before Dennington Castle. Essex, detained by sickness, had not joined the army since nis misfortune in Cornwall. Manchester, who commanded, though his forces were much superior to those of the king, declined an engagement, and rejected Cromwell's advice, who earnestly pressed him not to neglect so favorable an opportunity of finishing the war. The king's army, by bringing off their cannon from Dennington Castle in the face of the enemy, seemed to have sufficiently repaired the honor which they had lost at Newbury; and Charles, having the satisfaction to excite between Manchester and Cromwell equal animosities with those which formerly took place between Essex and Waller,t distributed his army into winter quarters.

Those contests among the parliamentary generals, which had disturbed their military operations, were renewed in London during the winter season; and each being supported by his own faction, their mutual reproaches and accusations agitated the whole city and parliament. There had long prevailed in that party a secret distinction, which, though the dread of the king's power had hitherto suppressed it, yet, in proportion as the hopes of success became nearer and more

*Rush. vol. vi. p. 21, etc.

† Fush. vol. vii. p. 1.

immediate, began to discover itself with high contest and animosity. The Independents, who had at first taken shelter and concealed themselves under the wings of the Presbyterians, now evidently appeared a distinct party, and betrayed very different views and pretensions. We must here endeavor to explain the genius of this party, and of its leaders, who henceforth occupy the scene of action.

During those times, when the enthusiastic spirit met with such honor and encouragement, and was the immediate means of distinction and preferment, it was impossible to set bounds to these holy fervors, or confine within any natural limits what was directed towards an infinite and a supernatural object. Every man, as prompted by the warmth of his temper, excited by emulation, or supported by his habits of hypocrisy, endeavored to distinguish himself beyond his fellows, and to arrive at a higher pitch of saintship and perfection. In proportion to its degree of fanaticism, each sect became dangerous and destructive; and as the Independents went a note higher than the Presbyterians, they could less be restrained within any bounds of temper and moderation. From this distinction, as from a first principle, were derived, by a necessary consequence, all the other differences of these two sects.

The Independents rejected all ecclesiastical establishments, and would admit of no spiritual courts, no government among pastors, no interposition of the magistrate in religious concerns, no fixed encouragement annexed to any system of doctrines or opinions. According to their principles, each congregation, united voluntarily and by spiritual ties, composed within itself a separate church, and exercised a jurisdiction, but one destitute of temporal sanctions, over its own pastor and its own members. The election alone of the congregation was sufficient to bestow the sacerdotal character; and as all essential distinction was denied between the laity and the clergy, no ceremony, no institution, no vocation, no imposition of hands was, as in all other churches, supposed requisite to convey a right to holy orders. The enthusiasm of the Presbyterians led them to reject the authority of prelates, to throw off the restraint of liturgies, to retrench ceremonies, to limit the riches and authority of the priestly office: the fanaticism of the Independents, exalted to a higher pitch, abolished ecclesiàstical government, disdained creeds and systems, neglected every ceremony, and confounded all ranks and orders. Tho

soldier, the merchant, the mechanic, indulging the fervors of zeal, and guided by the illapses of the spirit, resigned himself to an inward and superior direction, and was consecrated, in a manner, by an immediate intercourse and communication with heaven.

The Catholics, pretending to an infallible guide, had justified upon that principle their doctrine and practice of persecution : the Presbyterians, imagining that such clear and certain tenets as they themselves adopted could be rejected only from a criminal and pertinacious obstinacy, had hitherto gratified to the full their bigoted zeal, in a like doctrine and practice: the Independents, from the extremity of the same zeal, were led into the milder principles of toleration. Their mind, set afloat in the wide sea of inspiration, could confine itself within no certain limits; and the same variations in which an enthusiast indulged himself, he was apt, by a natural train of thinking, to permit in others. Of all Christian sects, this was the first which, during its prosperity as well as its adversity, always adopted the principle of toleration; and it is remarkable that so reasonable a doctrine owed its origin, not to reasoning, but to the height of extravagance and fanaticism.

Popery and prelacy alone, whose genius seemed to tend towards superstition, were treated by the Independents with rigor. The doctrines too of fate or destiny were deemed by them essential to all religion. In these rigid opinions the whole sectaries, amidst all their other differences, unanimously concurred.

The political system of the Independents kept pace with their religious. Not content with confining to very narrow limits the power of the crown, and reducing the king to the rank of first magistrate, which was the project of the Presbyterians, this sect, more ardent in the pursuit of liberty, aspired to a total abolition of the monarchy, and even of the aristocracy, and projected an entire equality of rank and order, in a republic, quite free and independent. In consequence of this scheme, they were declared enemies to all proposals of peace, except on such terms as they knew it was impossible o obtain; and they adhered to that maxim, which is in the main prudent and political, that whoever draws the sword against his sovereign, should throw away the scabbard. By terrifying others with the fear of vengeance from the offended prince, they had engaged greater numbers into the opposition against peace, than had adopted their other principles with

regard to government and religion. And the great success which had already attended the arms of the parliament, and the greater which was soon expected, confirmed them still further in this obstinacy.

Sir Henry Vane, Oliver Cromwell, Nathaniel Fiennes, and Oliver St. John, the solicitor-general, were regarded as the leaders of the Independents. The earl of Essex, disgusted with a war of which he began to foresee the pernicious consequences, adhered to the Presbyterians, and promoted every reasonable plan of accommodation. The earl of Northumberland, fond of his rank and dignity, regarded with horror a scheme which, if it took place, would confound him and his family with the lowest in the kingdom. The earls of Warwick and Denbigh, Sir Philip Stapleton, Sir William Waller, Hollis, Massey, Whitlocke, Maynard, Glyn, had embraced the same sentiments. In the parliament, a considerable majority, and a much greater in the nation, were attached to the Presbyterian party; and it was only by cunning and deceit at first, and afterwards by military violence, that the Independents could entertain any hopes of success.

The earl of Manchester, provoked at the impeachment which the king had lodged against him, had long forwarded the war with alacrity; but being a man of humanity and good principles, the view of public calamities, and the prospect of a total subversion of government, began to moderate his ardor, and inclined him to promote peace on any safe or honorable terms. He was even suspected in the field not to have pushed to the utmost against the king the advantages obtained by the. arms of the parliament; and Cromwell in the public debates revived the accusation, that this nobleman had wilfully neg lected at Dennington Castle a favorable opportunity of finishing the war by a total defeat of the royalists. "I showed him evidently," said Cromwell, "how this success might be obtained; and only desired leave, with my own brigade of horse, to charge the king's army in their retreat; leaving it in the earl's choice, if he thought proper, to remain neuter with the rest of his forces: but, notwithstanding my importunity, he positively refused his consent; and gave no other reason but that, if we met with a defeat, there was an end of our pretensions: we should all be rebels and traitors, and be executed and forfeited by law."*

* Clarendon, vol. v. p. 561.