Treaty of Newport-Concessions of the King-Remonstrance of the Army-Cromwell's Letter to Hammond-The king carried to Hurst Castle-Members ejected from the Commons' House-The king removed to Windsor-Ordinance for the king's trial-The High Court of Justice appointed-The king before the High Court-The king sentenced to death- The king after his condemnation-The king's execution.

WHEN the news of Cromwell's victory at Preston came to the Isle of Wight, "the king said to the governor that it was the worst news that ever came to England." Colonel Hammond replied, that if Hamilton had beaten the English he would have possessed himself of the thrones of England and Scotland. "You are mistaken," said the king; "I could have commanded him back with a wave of my hand." * It was evil news to the king that the last appeal to arms had failed. The Parliament now looked with as much alarm as the king might entertain at the approaching return of that victorious Army of the North. The Lords, especially, saw that their own power was imperilled by the dangers that beset the Crown; and they united with those who now constituted a majority in the Commons, to conclude a treaty with the king. There were violent debates; but it was at length agreed that commissioners should proceed to the Isle of Wight. The discussions were to take place in Newport. The commissioners for the treaty arrived there on the 15th of September. Clarendon says that those who wished ill to the treaty interposed every delay to prevent it being concluded during the

* Ludlow, vol. i. p. 261.

VOL. IV.

H

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TREATY OF NEWPORT.

[1648.

absence of Cromwell; and that those who wished well to it pressed it forward for the same reason. Yet there were men left behind who had formed as strong resolutions against the restoration of Charles to power as Cromwell himself. Ludlow had been to Fairfax at Colchester whilst the treaty was debated in Parliament, to urge upon him that it was not intended by those who pressed it on most vehemently, that the king should be bound to the performance of it; but that it was designed principally to use his authority to destroy the Army. Fairfax was irresolute. Ireton agreed with Ludlow that it was necessary for the Army to interpose; but did not think that the time was come for such a demonstration. With an Army ready to step in to break through the meshes of any agreement disapproved by them—with a king who in the midst of the negotiation was secretly writing, "my great concession this morning was made only to facilitate my approaching escape ". the Treaty of Newport can scarcely be regarded as more than "a piece of Dramaturgy which must be handsomely done." For the opening of the last Act of this tragic history, the scene on the bank of the Medina is as impressive as any pageant, "full of state and woe," that the imagination could devise to precede a solemn catastrophe.

*

A house has been prepared in Newport for the king's reception; and its hall has been fitted up for this great negotiation, which might extend to forty days. The first day was the 18th of September. The king is seated under a canopy at the upper end of the hall. The parliamentary commissioners are placed round a table in advance of the royal chair. These are fifteen in number, five peers, and ten members of the Lower House. Behind the king are ranged many of his most confidential friends and advisers; of whom there are four peers, two bishops and other divines; five civilians; and four of his trusted attendants. Sir Philip Warwick, who was one of the privileged number, says :-" But if at any time the king found himself in need to ask a question, or any of his lords thought fit to advise him in his ear to hesitate before he answered, he himself would retire into his own chamber; or one of us penmen, who stood at his chair, prayed him from the lords to do so." The king was in a position favourable to the display of his talent for discussion; and he left upon the assembly during these tedious debates, a deep impression of his abilities, his knowledge, and his presence of mind. Nor could the sympathies of even the most prejudiced of his auditors on this occasion be withheld from his general appearance and deportment. His hair had become gray; his face was care-worn; "he was not dejected," writes Clarendon, "but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do." Certainly if it be held somewhat an unequal trial to place one man to contend alone against fifteen disputants, some of extraordinary ability, such as Vane; on the other hand the rank of him who was thus pleading for what he believed to be his inalienable rights-his misfortunes-his display of mental powers, for which few had given him credit-would produce impressions far deeper than if the advisers around his canopy had been allowed to argue and harangue, each after his own fashion. "One day," says Warwick, "whilst I turned the king's chair when he was about to rise, the earl of Salisbury came suddenly upon me, and said, "The king is wonderfully improved:' to which I as sud

* Carlyle.

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CONCESSIONS OF THE KING.

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denly replied, 'No, my lord, he was always so; but your lordship too late discerned it." Vane bore testimony to the talent of Charles; but he considered his "great parts and abilities as a reason for very stringent terms. In this manner was the prolonged discussion of Newport conducted, from the 18th of September to the 29th of November, the original term of forty days for the duration of the treaty having been three times extended. All was in vain. Charles had conceded the questions of military command and of nomination to the great offices of state; he had even consented to acknowledge the legitimacy of the resistance to his power. But he had not conceded enough upon the question of religion to satisfy the more violent of the Presbyterians. There was unwise pertinacity on both sides, in the hour of a coming storm that would sweep away this paper-fabric of a Newport treaty like straws in a whirlwind. The commissioners had no absolute power to conclude a Treaty; the Parliament discussed every point with a scrupulosity that foreboded no good result. Warwick records a speech of the king to Mr. Buckley, one of the commissioners, which shows how impracticable was a speedy agreement: "Consider, Mr. Buckley, if you call this a Treaty, whether it be not like the fray in the comedy; where the man comes out, and says, there has been a fray, and no fray; and being asked how that could be, why, says he, there hath been three blows given, and I had them all. Look, therefore, whether this be not a parallel case. Observe, whether I have not granted absolutely most of your propositions, and with great moderation limited only some few of them: nay consider, whether you have made me any one concession, and whether at this present moment you have not confessed to me, that though upon any proposition you were all concurrently satisfied, yet till you had remitted them up to your superiors, you had not authority to concur with me in any one thing." The conferences were broken up, after the most violent demonstrations had been made to Parliament of the temper of the Army. On the 28th of November the commissioners left Newport with the definitive propositions.. In forty-eight hours it had become evident that two months. had been wasted in vain contentions; that an inexorable fate was driving on to a dismal end of the long struggle between king and people.

Warwick has recorded that, during the progress of the Treaty, "every night, when the king was alone about eight of the clock, except when he was writing his own private letters, he commanded me to come to him; and he looked over the notes of that day's treaty, and the reasons upon which it moved; and so dictated the heads of a dispatch, which from time to time he made concerning the treaty, unto his present majesty, then prince." Clarendon drew up his minute account of the negotiation from these papers; and he gives a long and very interesting extract of a letter from the king to prince Charles, which he says, " deserves to be preserved in letters of gold." The sentiments which it breathes are certainly high-minded; but they also proclaim to what an extent the king was a self-deceiver. He writes, " by what hath been said, you see how long we have laboured in search of peace." He had solemnly promised during the negotiations that all hostilities in Ireland for his cause should be put an end to. At the very same time he wrote to the earl of Ormond, "Obey my wife's orders, not mine, until I

100

REMONSTRANCE OF THE ARMY.

[1648.

shall let you know I am free from all restraint; nor trouble yourself about my concessions as to Ireland; they will lead to nothing." Charles goes on to say to his son, "Censure us not for having parted with so much of our own right; the price was great, but the commodity was security to us, peace to our people." In his heart he felt that he had really not parted with anything. "We were confident," he says, "another parliament would remember how useful a king's power is to a people's liberty; of how much thereof we divested ourself, that we and they might meet once again in a due parliamentary way, to agree the bounds of prince and people." The unhappy monarch appears to have forgotten that "the bounds of prince and people" were agreed, "in a due parliamentary way," by the Petition of Right; and that from the day in 1629 when he declared that he would depart from that due way, making the free monarchy of England absolute, the terrible misfortunes that he had endured during seven years of Civil War were the price that he had to pay for eleven previous years of despotism. He draws a true lesson from the tyranny of others: "These men, who have forced laws which they were bound to preserve, will find their triumphs full of troubles." His prayer for his subjects "that the ancient laws, with the interpretation according to the known practice, might once more be a hedge about them," might have been more opportune when the ancient hedge was first broken down by the ministers of his own aggressions. But, with all this forgetfulness of the errors, of the past, its sad lessons are not wholly forgotten, when he says, "Give belief to our experience, never to affect more greatness or prerogative than that which is intrinsically and really for the good of subjects, not the satisfaction of favorites."*

A week before the termination of the conferences at Newport, the Army from St. Alban's sends a 66 Remonstrance" to the Commons,- -an unmistakeable document,-calling upon the Parliament to bring the king to trial; and to decree that the future king should be elected by the representatives of the people. It was distinctly intimated that if the Parliament neglected the interests of the nation, the Army would take the matter into their own hands. There was naturally a great commotion in the House; and the debate upon this "Remonstrance" was adjourned for a week. At about the end of that time the commissioners from Newport have made their report; and after twenty-four hours of debate it is voted that the king's concessions offered a ground for a future settlement. On the 25th of November the army of Fairfax is at Windsor. Cromwell had returned from Scotland, to the north of England, on the 11th of October. He is busily engaged in military affairs. The royalist governor of Pontefract refuses to surrender. A party from the garrison have sallied out on the 29th of October, and assassinated the parliamentary colonel Rainsborough, in his lodging at Doncaster. The Northern Army is badly off for shoes, stockings, and clothes, as Cromwell writes; but they are all full of zeal, and petition the General of the Army against the Treaty at Newport, which petition Cromwell forwards to Fairfax on the 20th of November, saying, "I find in the officers of the regiments a very great sense of the sufferings of this poor kingdom; and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders." There are nevertheless doubts

Clarendon, vol. vi. p. 189-191.

1648.]

CROMWELL'S LETTER TO HAMMOND.

101

and misgivings in the breasts of some Army men, as we may judge from a letter of Oliver to that "ingenuous young man," his friend colonel Hammond, at Carisbrook, who has expressed his dissatisfaction at the principle that “it is lawful for a lesser part, if in the right, to force a numerical majority." The king told sir Philip Warwick that the Governor was such a rogue that he could not be in worse hands. Though the Governor was faithful to his trust, he yet had a conscientious doubt whether the Army had a right to determine the great question at issue. The letter of Cromwell is dated from Pontefract on the 25th of November. It is altogether so characteristic of this extraordinary man, and moreover so strikingly illustrative of the nature of the principles by which he and many others were driving forward to perpetrate acts of violence and illegality, under a belief that they were moved by holy and just inspirations, that we may not unprofitably peruse one or two of its more striking passages :

Yon say: 'God hath appointed authorities among the nations, to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides, in England, in the Parliament. Therefore active or passive resistance,' &c. Authorities and powers are the ordinance of God. This or that species is of human institution, and limited, some with larger, others with stricter bands, each one according to its constitution. But I do not therefore think that the Authorities may do anything, and yet such obedience be due. All agree that there are cases in which it is lawful to resist. If so, your ground fails, and so likewise the inference. Indeed, dear Robin, not to multiply words, the query is, Whether ours be such a case? This ingenuously is the true question. To this I shall say nothing, though I could say very much: but only desire thee to see what thou findest in thy own heart to two or three plain considerations. First, Whether Salus Populi be a sound position? Secondly, Whether in the way in hand, really and before the Lord, before whom conscience has to stand, this be provided for;-or if the whole fruit of the War is not like to be frustrated, and all most like to turn to what it was, and worse? And this, contrary to Engagements, explicit Covenants with those who ventured their lives upon those Covenants and Engagements, without whom perhaps, in equity, relaxation ought not to be? Thirdly, Whether this Army be not a lawful Power, called by God to oppose and fight against the king upon some stated grounds; and being in power to such ends, may not oppose one Name of Authority, for those ends, as well as another Name, -since it was not the outward Authority summoning them that by its power made the quarrel lawful, but the quarrel was lawful in itself? If so, it may be, acting will be justified in foro humano. But truly this kind of reasonings may be but fleshly, either with or against: only it is good to try what truth may be in them. And the Lord teach us." "We in this Northern Army were in a waiting posture; desiring to see what the Lord would lead us to. And a Declaration [Remonstrance] is put out, at which many are shaken: -although we could perhaps have wished the stay of it till after the treaty, yet seeing it is come out, we trust to rejoice in the will of the Lord, waiting His further pleasure. Dear Robin, beware of men; look up to the Lord. Let Him be free to speak and command in thy heart. Take heed of the things I fear thou hast reasoned thyself into; and thou shalt be able through Him, without consulting flesh and blood, to do valiantly for Him and His