March 7. urges the seizure of March 19. Charles at For some time the impatient Queen had been urging her husband to gain possession of the seaport on which her hopes were fixed. "When you come to Hull," she wrote, The Queen "if you find the country well affected, Hull must absolutely be had. If you cannot, you must go to Hull. Newcastle, and if you find that is not safe, go to Berwick, for it is necessary to have a seaport." Charles did not find it easy to seize Hull, especially after the disclosure of the scheme for introducing Danish troops into England. On the 19th he rode into York,2 and did his best to curry favour with his subjects by ordering the execuYork. tion of the laws against the Catholics. The feeling in Yorkshire was not as hostile to him as that in London. In York itself, the common people, dissatisfied with the suppression of the Council of the North, placed themselves on his side. A proposal to petition the King to return to his Parliament found but little support, and those who advocated it were compared to the Gadarenes who besought Christ to depart from their coasts. But there was little enthusiasm for the King, and no inclination to plunge into civil war. The address sent up to him suggested, under respectful forms, that it April 5. would be well for him to come to an understanding with Parliament. Charles in his answer expressed him-. quotation from Barberini at p. 55, note 2. At a later time, after Charles had abandoned these projects, Rossetti writes that having made particular inquiry, he had discovered 'che il pensiero del Rè d'Inghilterra è di restituirsi in autorità et abassare anzi distruggere, se potrà, il partito Parlamentario, ma per ciò effettuare non vede luogo di poter prevalersi di mezzi forestieri.' This was on the ground that France was engaged in a war of its own, that Spain was weak, and so forth. Of the Prince of Orange 'se bene il Padre Filippo dice che esso Principe non habbia danari, si crede pero sia per somministrarne segretamente per non crescere la gelosia agli Stati causata dal matrimonio del figliuolo. Circa à Bavari si credono meri discorsi. In Danimarca si potrebbe havere maggior speranza di gente se bene sino adesso non si scopre veramente che vi sia passata trattatione,' -Rossetti to Barberini, July R. O. Transcripts. 1 The Queen to the King, March 2, Letters of Henrietta Maria, 52. 2 Iter Carolinum in Gutch, Coll. Curiosa, ii. 427. self ready to do so, if only Parliament would acknowledge its errors. If Charles thought it expedient to abandon for a time his. projects upon Hull, it was with no thought of acknowledging the authority of the Parliament at Westminster. He wished to show that the centre of the State was to be found wherever his person was. On March 23 he summoned Essex and Holland, with two other lords, to attend him at York, on the pretext that he wished to keep state at Easter and at the Feast of St. George. The House of Lords at once ordered its members to remain in attendance on their Parliamentary duties.2 March 23. Essex and Holland sent for. March 28. Charles's efforts to shake the resolution of the Houses had hitherto been singularly ineffectual. Intrigue and argument in turn had been employed in vain. The ramparts of Charles's apparent Hull were still manned by Hotham's trained bands. helplessness. Hyde's lengthy state papers were answered by others as lengthy, and apparently more convincing than his own. Νο man was prepared to draw sword merely to give the King the mastery over his Parliament; and if Parliament had really represented the nation in 1642 as it had represented it in 1640, Charles would have been powerless. For some time, however, there had been signs that it was no longer so, and those signs had lately been increasing rapidly. March 25. Most valuable as an indication of the distracted condition of the country was the Kentish petition, drawn up on March 25 by the grand jury at the assizes held at Maidstone. The Kentish It is true that, as afterwards appeared, the grand petition. jury had been selected not in the usual way by the sheriff, but under the direction of Justice Mallett, who presided over the court; and that of the nineteen gentlemen who composed it, a bare majority of ten supported the petition. But the importance of the petition lies not in its official character, but in the language in which it was couched. It began by thanking Parliament for the excellent laws which 'by His 'Stockdale to Lord Fairfax, March 25, April 1. Fairfax Correspon. ii. 389. Yorkshire Petition, April 5. L. 7. iv. 710. 2 L. F. iv. 675. *** Majesty's grace and goodness' had been obtained, and by asking for the full execution of the laws against the Catholics. It then proceeded to request 'that the solemn liturgy of the Church' might be freed from interruptions, scorns, profanations, threats, and force of such men who daily do deprave it, and neglect the use of it in divers churches, in despite of the laws established; that episcopal government might be preserved, and that all differences concerning religion might be submitted to a synod chosen by the clergy, and means taken to provide against the scandal of schismatical and seditious sermons and pamphlets, and some severe law made against laymen for daring to arrogate to themselves and to exercise the holy function of the ministry-to the advancing of heresy, schism, profaneness, libertinism, anabaptism, atheism.' Coer cive jurisdiction must be restored for the repression of moral and ecclesiastical offences. Ireland must be relieved. The militia must be settled by law with His Majesty's consent, and no order of either House, not grounded on existing law, was to be enforced till the Royal assent had converted it into a statute. The Kentish petition may fairly be accepted as embodying the spirit which was soon to animate the King's supporters in Spirit of the the Civil War. Their newly awakened zeal for the petition. prerogative had been quickened by the belief that it would be used to crush the disturbers of ecclesiastical peace. They protested against the assault made upon the Church which had been inspired by the broad and tolerant spirit of Hooker. That Church, they felt instinctively, deserved. better things than to be torn asunder to gratify the ranting outcries of the conventicle. Unhappily they could see nothing in Puritanism but its weakest and lowest side. Still more unhappily they scouted the very idea of toleration for the sects. Milton's "The prelates," as Milton had written a few weeks 66 before, as they would have it thought, are the only jurisdiction. mauls of schism. Forsooth, if they be put down, a deluge of innumerable sects will follow; we shall all be Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists. For the word Puritan seems to be quashed, and all that heretofore were counted such are now argument on ecclesiastical Brownists."1 Milton refused to be led astray by that dread of the sects which was sweeping away the bulk of the English gentry to the King. His inference was precisely the opposite from that which was drawn by the Kentish petitioners. "Jurisdictive power in the Church," he boldly said, "there ought to be none at all. . . . For when the Church without temporal support is able to do her great works upon the unforced obedience of men, it argues a divinity about her; but when she thinks to credit and better her spiritual efficacy, and to win herself respect and dread by strutting in the false vizard of worldly authority, it is evident that God is not there, but that her apostolic virtue is departed from her, and hath left her key-cold; which she perceiving, as in a decayed nature, seeks to the outward fomentations and chafings of worldly help and external flourishes to fetch, if it be possible, some motion into her extreme parts, or to hatch a counterfeit heàt of jurisdiction." 2 It finds no response. It would have been well if the practical men in the House of Commons had bestowed some attention on the strange utterances of this idealist. Milton's time, however, was not yet come. Even Cromwell, who was one day to become the exponent of these thoughts in the field and in council, would now have deemed them, if they reached his ears at all, too unpractical to be worthy of attention. The Kentish petitioners were to be put down, not answered. Four of their March 28. number--Sir Edward Dering and the honest largeHarsh treat minded antiquary Sir Roger Twysden amongst them -were sent for to be examined as offenders. Judge Mallett, who had presided at the assizes, and Bristol, who was charged with having in his hands a copy of the petition without giving information to Parliament, were committed to the Tower; whilst selected extracts from the petition itself were voted to be seditious. ment of the petitioners. The House, in fact, had a plan of its own for the settlement of the Church. Questions at issue were to be determined The Reason of Church Government against Prelaty, i. 6. 2 Ibid. ii. 3. The rival the settle not, as the petitioners proposed, by an assembly of divines chosen by the clergy, many of whom had been instichemes for tuted under Laudian influence, but by an assembly of ment of the divines chosen by Parliament. A Bill condemning Church. the late innovations had already passed the Commons and had been read twice by the Lords. Two absolutely contradictory conceptions of Church worship were face to face. Neither side would give way. Neither side thought it possible to conciliate the other. If any one moment can be selected as that in which the Civil War became inevitable, it is that of the vote of March 28, by which the Kentish petitioners were treated as criminals. From that moment the indignation of hundreds of high-spirited gentlemen came rapidly to a head, and it would not be long before they placed their swords at the services of a king who shared in their prejudices and their resolve." The Civil War now inevitable. the con servatism of It has often been said with truth, that the miseries which France underwent at the close of the last century were in the main owing to the persistency with which Frenchmen followed Its cause in ideals, to the disregard of the historical conditions of their time. English politicians and English writers Englishmen. have never been weary of repeating that our Revolution was conducted after a very different fashion. It has been our glory that our liberties were inherited from our ancestors of old, and that the men of the 17th century claimed no more than a confirmation of the rights which had been won at Runnymede and Lewes, and which were in some sort brought by our remoter progenitors from beyond the sea. Yet this advantage, like every other, has brought with it its attendant disadvantage. In the crisis of the 17th century it produced in both parties a shortsighted conservatism which was fatal to any peaceable solution of the C. F. ii. 502, 507. L. J. iv. 678. "Three days later Salvetti wrote: 'Io credo che se Sua Maestà havrà un poco di pazienza sia per rimettersi, siando impossibile che il Parlamento non si rompa in ultimo fra ai loro; oltre che i Gentilhaomini siando stracchi del suo rigido procedere cominciano ad aderire a Sua Maestà.'—Salvetti's News-Letter, April |