The little handful of Independent peers that now formed the House of Lords refused to agree to this; but the Commons declared that, as representatives of the people, they had power to act alone. Every legal and constitutional obstacle was brushed aside by Cromwell, who, when he had made up his mind how to act, had a supreme contempt for forms. "I tell you," he now declared, "we will cut off the king's head with the crown upon it." On 19th Jan., Charles was brought before the High Court of Justice, on which, however, barely half of the appointed members consented to act. Fairfax himself was among the absentees. With the quiet dignity that seldom failed him, Charles refused to plead before the unlawful tribunal, urging that no subject had a right to sit in judgment on his sovereign. After a mockery of a trial, he was condemned to death as a murderer and traitor to the Commonwealth. On 27th Jan., the President, John Bradshaw, pronounced the sentence in Westminster Hall. On 30th Jan., Charles was led out to die on a scaffold that was erected in front of Inigo Jones's noble Banqueting House at Whitehall. He had taken a touching farewell of his two youngest children, and of his nephew the Elector Palatine, who alone of his kinsfolk were with him at the last. The holy Bishop Juxon gave him the last consolations of religion. The great throng of sympathetic spectators were kept far from the scaffold by a strong force of soldiers. Charles in a brief speech declared that Parliament, and not he, was guilty of the Civil War, and set forth his views of government. "For the people," said he, "I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whatsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists of their having those laws by which their lives and their goods are most their own. It is not their having a share in the government; that is nothing appertaining unto them." He then lay down, resting his head on a low block. A masked executioner then did his work, and holding the head on high, cried, "Behold the head of a traitor." The troops dispersed the angry and horrorstricken crowd. The patience and meekness of the king made a lasting impression. His errors were forgotten in his tragic death. He was regarded as a martyr to the Church and Constitution, and his memory was reverenced with almost religious worship.

CHAPTER IV.

The Commonwealth, 1649-1653 and 1659-1660, and the Protectorate, 1653-1659.

Establishment of the Commonwealth, 1649.

1. After the death of Charles I. the real power was in the hands of the army, whose leaders had already on 15th January drawn up and presented to Parliament a scheme for the future constitution of England, called the Agreement of the People. The Agreement of the People provided: That the existing Parliament should be dissolved. 2. Future Parliaments should be biennial and consist of four hundred persons, chosen by the different shires and boroughs according to population, the smaller boroughs being disfranchised. 3. The executive power should be in the hands of a Council of State appointed by Parliament. 4. There should be a State church reformed in a way "according to the Word of God," but with religious liberty to all but " Papists and Prelatists." 5. Monarchy and the House

The Agreement of the People, Jan. 1649.

of Lords should be abolished.

Few Englishmen as yet fully realised that the Revolution, which was to bring liberty and progress, had ended in the rule of the sword. The nominal guidance of the nation rested with the Rump of the Long Parliament, which speedily made provision for the immediate carrying on of the government by voting the establishment of a Commonwealth, and by abolishing both the monarchy and the House of Lords. It also set up a Council of State of forty-one persons to carry on the executive government, as had been done of old by the king's Privy Council. But the Rump, though seldom more than fifty strong, continued to discharge the whole work of Parliament. It quietly ignored the demand of the officers, that it should dissolve and give way to a new popularly elected Parliament, such as was provided for in the Agreement of the People. It clung to power, not only from love of rule, but because it knew that a free Parliament, elected by a wide constituency, would soon make short work of the new constitution, and bring back Church and king. The political ideal of the Rump was, that England should be ruled by a republican aristocracy, such as the States General of the United Provinces or the Great Council of Venice. In Church as in State, it aimed at making England a mere Amsterdam" by setting up that religious toleration which

Anglican and Presbyterian alike regarded as the encouragement of error. The result of this was that the rigid Presbyterian system, which had been formally set up in 1646, never became general throughout England: though in some parts, and particularly in London and Lancashire, it had become completely established.

Troubles beset the new Commonwealth on every side. The royalist cause had taken a new life with the death of the king. Almost on the same day as Charles's execution, a little book was published called Eikon The Royalist Basilike, the Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty, reaction and in his Solitude and Sufferings. Professing to "Eikon Basilike." contain the prayers and meditations of Charles in his prison, the book at once became extraordinarily popular. Though really put together by a clergyman, John Gauden, it was an article of faith with royalists that it was all written by Charles himself. It rapidly passed through forty-seven editions, and was everywhere eagerly read. The Parliament, unable to stop its circulation, employed the famous John Milton, Latin Secretary to the Council of State, to write an answer to it called Ikonoklastes. So anxious was the government to justify its acts before European public opinion that it also employed Milton to write defences of its action against the attacks of the great scholar Salmasius. Another and opposite danger came from the army, where the fanatical Levellers, who wished for complete demo- The Levellers cracy and equality, arose in revolt against put down, 1649. the politic compromises of the reigning oligarchy, and denounced, with bitter scorn, the half-hearted hesitation of the army leaders, who now strove with all their might to keep their wild followers back. Cromwell was the special object of their scorn. "You shall scarce speak to Cromwell," said Lilburne, the Levellers' leader, "but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep, howl, and repent, even while he doth smite you under the fifth rib." With true instinct, they foresaw that Cromwell might make himself king if he willed. "You have no other way to treat these people," said Cromwell to the Council, "but to break them in pieces. If you do not break them, they will break you." Thus, the leader of the revolutionary party was already posing as the saviour of society and the State from anarchical fanaticism. He put down the mutinies which the Levellers had stirred up among the soldiers. He saw clearly that strong government must be upheld if the infant

Commonwealth were to be preserved. Not only was the great mass of Englishmen sullen and discontented. Ireland and Scotland were bitterly hostile, and foreign powers were rudely contemptuous of the new Government. With his strong practical wisdom Cromwell saw that the Commonwealth must be set up on a firm basis before the question of its ultimate shape could be considered. Thus it was that for nearly five years the Rump was suffered to go on ruling, while the army carried out its proper work of completing the conquest of the three kingdoms and restoring the credit of England abroad.

Ireland, 1641-1649.

2. The Irish Rebellion, which had begun in 1641, soon settled down into a religious war between Catholics and Protestants, in which a common faith united both the old Norman aristocracy and the native Celts against Anglican Royalists and Puritan Roundheads alike. But there were great difficulties on both sides in keeping up such an alliance. The king's lieutenant, James Butler, successively Earl, Marquis, and Duke of Ormonde, the most able, powerful, and popular of Irish nobles, was a strong royalist of the same stamp as his friend Hyde, who tells us how Ormonde "sustained with wonderful courage and conduct and almost miraculous success the rage and fury of the rebels." But in 1642, the outbreak of the Civil War prevented either king or Parliament sending over a sufficient force to uphold the common cause. Thereupon the insurgents held at Kilkenny a General Assembly of the Catholic Confederates. This was in fact, if not in name, a national Parliament of the Irish nation. It set up a Supreme Council to govern the country, and appointed Owen Roe O'Neill its general-in-chief. It was with the Confederate organisation that Charles, in 1643, concluded the Cessation, which left nearly all Ireland in Catholic hands. Hence. forth a thin strip of coast line between the Wicklow Hills and the Belfast Lough, with another district running inland from Cork, and a few scattered garrisons throughout Ireland, alone acknowledged Ormonde as King Charles's lieutenant. The position of the Confederates was still further strengthened when, in 1645, Charles sent the Catholic Earl of Glamorgan to Ireland to win help for his declining cause in England. The Confederates now made large demands, and Glamorgan agreed to whatever they asked for. By the famous Glamorgan Treaty, Charles's agent recognised their right to use the old churches for the Catholic worship, and restored the jurisdiction and revenues of the Church to the Catholic clergy. The treaty was discovered by the Parliament, and Charles disavowed any knowledge of it. But though Charles at Oxford might repudiate such conditions, they were, for the most part, faithfully carried out in Ireland. A Papal Nuncio, named Rinuccini, now came from Rome to restore the Catholic organisation as the best hope of setting up a united Ireland. Ormonde, as an Irish Protestant, was indignant at the prospect of the extirpation of his creed, and in 1647 surrendered Dublin to the able and enterprising Puritan Colonel Michael Jones, and sailed over to England, thus transferring from Royalist to Roundhead hands the almost