on the other side, instead of an expected happiness, had been brought under the hatchet. (79) Then no doubt" war had ended,” that massacre and tyranny might begin. These jealousies, however raised, let all men see whether they be diminished or allayed, by the letters of his own cabinet opened. And yet the breach of this treaty is laid all upon the parlia

(79) It seems to be admitted on all hands that such was the hypocrisy and duplicity of Charles the First's character, that no one could trust him. For in 1647, when the Scotch commissioners waited on him at Hampton Court, and many officers of the army seemed desirous of serving his cause, a dread of his jesuitical principles arose, and checked them. "If those who at this time governed the army had any real intention of restoring the king, they certainly were diverted from the duplicity they discovered in the king's character, manifested in this negociation with the Scotch commissioners." (Warburton, Notes on Clarendon, vii. 618, 619.) And again: "The king, by all the accounts of that time, even by some of those wrote by his own servants, acted a double and disingenuous part with those who governed the army. So that Cromwell's complaint below seems not to have been without foundation." What this complaint was is explained by Clarendon. "Cromwell himself expostulated with Mr. Ashburnham, and complained that the king could not be trusted; and that he had no affection or confidence in the army, but was jealous of them, and of all the officers; that he had intrigues in the parliament, and treaties with the Presbyterians of the city, to raise new troubles; that he had a treaty concluded with the Scotch commissioners to engage the nation again in blood; and therefore, he would not be answerable if any thing fell out amiss, and contrary to expectation." (History, v. 485.) Upon which the bishop observes: "All this seems to justify Cromwell in point of honour, and is very consistent with all he said to Huntingdon." (History, &c. vii. 619.) Further on, in answer to Clarendon's invectives against the general, he says: "Of all Cromwell's acts of hypocrisy, this here mentioned to the king is the most questionable. The king was as insincere with him as he could be with the king."

ment and their commissioners, with odious names of" pertinacy, hatred of peace, faction, and covetousness," nay, his own brat "superstition" is laid to their charge; notwithstanding his here professed resolution to continue both the order, maintenance, and authority of prelates, as a truth of God.

280. And who" were most to blame in the unsuccessfulness of that treaty," his appeal is to God's decision; believing to be very excusable at that tribunal. But if ever man gloried in an inflexible stiffness, he came not behind any; and that grand maxim, always to put something into his treaties, which might give colour to refuse all that was in other things granted, and to make them signify nothing, was his own principal maxim and particular instructions to his commissioners. Yet all, by his own verdict, must be construed reason in the king, and depraved temper in the parliament.

281. That the " highest tide of success," with these principles and designs, "set him not above a treaty," no great wonder. And yet if that be spoken to his praise, the parliament therein surpassed him; who, when he was their vanquished and their captive, his forces utterly broken and disbanded, yet offered him three several times no worse proposals or demands, than when he stood fair to be their conqueror. But that imprudent surmise that his lowest ebb could not set him "below a fight," was a presumption that ruined him.

282. He presaged the future "unsuccessfulness of treaties, by the unwillingness of some men to treat ;" and could not see what was present, that

their unwillingness had good cause to proceed from the continual experience of his own obstinacy and breach of word. His prayer, therefore, of forgiveness to the guilty of that treaty's breaking, he had good reason to say heartily over, as including no man in that guilt sooner than himself. As for that protestation following in his prayer," how oft have I entreated for peace, but when I speak thereof they make them ready to war;" unless he thought himself still in that perfidious mist between Colnbrook and Hounslow, and thought that mist could hide him from the eye of heaven as well as of man, after such a bloody recompence given to our first offers of peace, how could this in the sight of heaven without horrors of conscience be uttered?

CHAPTER XIX.

Upon the various Events of the War.

283. It is no new or unwonted thing, for bad men to claim as much part in God as his best servants; to usurp and imitate their words, and appropriate to themselves those properties, which belong only to the good and righteous. This not only in Scripture is familiarly to be found, but here also in this chapter of Apocrypha. He tells us much, why" it pleased God" to send him victory or loss,

(although what in so doing was the intent of God, he might be much mistaken as to his own particular,) but we are yet to learn what real good use he made thereof in his practice.

284. Those numbers, which he grew to "from small beginnings," were not such as out of love came to protect him, for none approved his actions as a king, except courtiers and prelates, but were such as fled to be protected by him from the fear of that reformation which the pravity of their lives would not bear. Such a snowball he might easily gather by rolling through those cold and dark provinces of ignorance and lewdness, where on a sudden he became so numerous. He imputes that to God's "protection" which, to them who persist in a bad cause, is either his long-suffering or his hardening; and that to wholesome "chastisement," which were the gradual beginnings of a severe punishment. For if neither God nor nature put civil power in the hands of any whomsoever, but to a lawful end, and commands our obedience to the authority of law only, not to the tyrannical force of any person; and if the laws of our land have placed the sword in no man's single hand, so much as to unsheath against a foreign enemy, much less upon the native people; but have placed it in that elective body of the parliament, to whom the making, repealing, judging, and interpreting of law itself was also committed, as was fittest, so long as we intended to be a free nation, and not the slaves of one man's will; then was the king himself disobedient and rebellious to that law by which he reigned:

and by authority of parliament to raise arms against him in defence of law and liberty, we do not only think, but believe and know, was justifiable both "by the word of God, the laws of the land, and all lawful oaths;" and they who sided with him, fought against all these.

285. The same allegations, which he uses for himself and his party, may as well fit any tyrant in the world: for let the parliament be called a faction when the king pleases, and that no law must be made or changed, either civil or religious, because no law will content all sides, then must be made or changed no law at all, but what a tyrant, be he Protestant or papist, thinks fit. Which tyrannous assertion forced upon us by the sword, he who fights against, and dies fighting, if his other sins outweigh not, dies a martyr undoubtedly both of the faith and of the commonwealth; and I hold it not as the opinion, but as the full belief and persuasion, of far holier and wiser men than parasitic preachers; who, without their dinner-doctrine, know that neither king, law, civil oaths, nor religion, was ever established without the parliament. And their power is the same to abrogate as to establish; neither is any thing to be thought established, which that house declares to be abolished. Where the parliament sits, there inseparably sits the king, there the laws, there our oaths, and whatsoever can be civil in religion. They who fought for the parliament, in the truest sense, fought for all these; who fought for the king divided from his parliament, fought for the shadow of a king against all