V. Impeachment of Thirteen Bishops-Preparations for a Recess-- Six Weeks of Lull, and View of the State of Parties-The After the Recess, or Five Months of Abortive Reaction (Oct. 1641 -March 1641-2) :-The Grand Remonstrance-Tumults in London, and Archbishop Williams's Blunder-Charles's Coup d'Etat, or attempted Arrest of the Five Members-His Departure from London-Bishops' Exclusion Bill passed. . 315 VII. Two more Anti-Episcopal Pamphlets of Milton .. VIII. Drifting into War-Choosing of Sides-Raising of the King's HISTORY:-COMMENCEMENT OF THE CIVIL WAR: THE LONG PARLIA- I. Statistics of the Two Sides-The Two Armies and their Officers First Actions of the War: Battle of Edgehill and the II. Milton not in the Army: His Turnham Green Sonnet, and BOOK I. APRIL 1638-NOVEMBER 1640. HISTORY: -THE SCOTTISH PRESBYTERIAN REVOLT, AND ITS EFFECTS ON ENGLAND. BIOGRAPHY:-MILTON BACK IN ENGLAND: HIS EPITAPHIUM DAMONIS, AND LITERARY PROJECTS. THE LIFE OF JOHN MILTON, WITH THE HISTORY OF HIS TIME. CHAPTER I. THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS-THE MARQUIS OF HAMILTON'S MISSIONTHE GLASGOW ASSEMBLY OF 1638-THE FIRST BELLUM EPISCOPALE, OR "BISHOPS' WAR" WITH THE SCOTS. MILTON's return to England, after his fifteen months, more or less, of Continental travel, took place, as he himself tells us, "almost exactly at that time when Charles, the Peace with "the Scots having been broken, was commencing with them. "the Second Bishops' War, as they call it in which when the Royal forces had been routed in the first conflict, and the King saw all the English likewise, and that deservedly, "most ill-disposed towards him, he, on the compulsion of misfortune, and not spontaneously, not very long afterwards 'called a Parliament." The date, more precisely, was July or August 1639. 1 Before resuming our narrative at this date, it is necessary, for the general purposes of our History, that we should take a retrospect of the course of British events during that First Bishops' War, or first war between the Scots and Charles concerning Bishops, to which Milton's words point back as having been begun and concluded during his absence abroad. 1 Defensio Secunda: Works, VI. 289. For the general purposes of our History, I say, such a retrospect is necessary. As it was in Scotland that the policy of despotism which Charles had been pursuing in all the three kingdoms first sustained any efficient check, so, in the general revolution of the three kingdoms which was approaching, much was to depend on the fact that the initiative of revolt had come from Scotland. Much was to depend on the fact that it was on the impulse of a movement completed by the northern part of the island for itself, and then let loose southwards, that the great English people, or the Puritans among them, began, and for some time continued, the larger movement of which England was the theatre. I do not consider that this portion of Scottish History has been adequately represented in its English connexions. THE SCOTTISH COVENANTERS. By the end of April 1638 all Scotland, with some fastwaning exceptions, was pledged to the Covenant. The exceptions may be enumerated. First, there were the Lords of the Privy Council and other officials, whose position obliged them to hold out for the King's measures as long as they could; next, there were the actual adherents of Episcopacy, of whom, in addition to the Bishops themselves, and several powerful Lowland houses, there was a sprinkling in some of the chief towns, and a mass in the town and shire of Aberdeen ; next, there were some of the Highland clans of the Aberdeenshire borders, and the remoter north, not much exercised in theological controversy, but ready to go with their chiefs; and, lastly, there were the Scottish Papists, to the number of about six hundred persons in all, lodged also principally in Aberdeenshire and the adjacent Highlands, under the protection of the Marquis of Huntley. With the fullest allowance, however, for these outstanding elements, there can be no 1 For a more detailed enumeration of the elements in Scottish society then opposed to the Covenant, see "Hist. of Scots Affairs from 1637 to 1641, by James Gordon, Parson of Rothiemay' |