and were defiantly flying the old colours. In the days when Oliver was marching with his Ironsides to drive back the invasion that would have destroyed them all, the Lords regaled themselves by a fierce attack made upon the absent Cromwell by one who had been a major of his and enjoyed his confidence. The major's version of the things that Oliver had said would have made a plausible foundation for an impeachment, and at the same moment Holles, his bitterest enemy, came back to Westminster and took the presbyterian lead. So in the reckless intensity of party hatred the parliament were preparing for the destruction of the only man who could save them from the uncovenanted king. They were as heated as ever against the odious idea of toleration. On the day after the departure of Oliver they passed an ordinance actually punishing with death any one who should hold or publish not only atheism, but Arianism or Socinianism, and even the leading doctrines of Arminians, Baptists, and harmless Quakers were made penal. Death was the punishment for denying any of the mysteries of the Trinity, or that any of the canonical books of Old Testament or New is the word of God; and a dungeon was the punishment for holding that the baptism of infants is unlawful and void, or that man is bound to believe no more than his reason can comprehend. Our heroic puritan age is not without atrocious blots.

Nevertheless the parliamentary persecutors were well aware that no ordinance of theirs, however savoury or drastic, would be of any avail unless new power were added to their right arm, and this power, as things then stood, they could only draw from alliance with the king. If they could bring him off from the Isle of Wight to London before Oliver and his men could return from the north, they might still have a chance. They assumed that Charles would see that here too was a chance for him. They failed to discern that they had no alter

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native between surrendering on any terms to the king, whose moral authority they could not do without, and yielding to the army, whose military authority was ready to break them. So little insight had they into the heart of the situation, that they took a course that exasperated the army, while they persisted in trying to impose such terms upon the king as nobody who knew him could possibly expect him to keep. Political incompetency could go no further, and the same failure inevitably awaited their designs as had befallen Cromwell when, a year before, he had made a similar attempt.

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On the day after the news of Oliver's success at Warrington the parliamentary majority repealed the vote against further addresses to the king, and then hurried on their proposals for a treaty. The negotiations opened at Newport in the Isle of Wight on September the 18th, and were spun out until near the end of November. They who had not seen the king," says Clarendon, for near two years found his countenance extremely altered. From the time that his own servants had been taken from him he would never suffer his hair to be cut, nor cared to have any new clothes, so that his aspect and appearance was very different from what it had used to be; otherwise his health was good, and he was much more cheerful in his discourses toward all men, than could have been imagined after such mortification of all kinds. He was not at all dejected in his spirits, but carried himself with the same majesty he had used to do. His hair was all grey, which, making all others very sad, made it thought that he had sorrow in his countenance, which appeared only by that shadow." There he sat at the head of the council-table, the fifteen commissioners of the parliament, including Vane and Fiennes, the only two men of the independent wing, seated at a little distance below him. Charles showed his usual power of acute dialectic, and he conducted the

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proceedings with all the cheerfulness, ease, and courtly gravity of a fine actor in an ironic play. The old ground of the propositions at Uxbridge, at Newcastle, at Oxford, at Hampton Court, was once more trodden, with one or two new interludes. Charles, even when retreating, fought every inch with a tenacity that was the despair of men who each hour seemed to hear approaching nearer and nearer the clatter of the Cromwellian troopers.

Church government was now as ever the rock on which Charles chose that the thing should break off. Day after day he insisted on the partition of the apostolic office between bishops and presbyters, cited the array of texts from the Epistles, and demonstrated that Timothy and Titus were episcopi pastorum, bishops over presbyters, and not episcopi gregis, shepherds over sheep. In all this Charles was in his element, for he defended tenets that he sincerely counted sacred. At length after the distracted parliament had more than once extended the allotted time, the end came (November 27). Charles would agree that episcopacy should be suspended for three years, and that it might be limited, but he would not assent to its abolition, and he would not assent to an alienation of the fee of the church lands.

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A modern student, if he reads the Newport treaty as a settlement upon paper, may think that it falls little short of the justice of the case. tainly if the parties to it had been acting in good faith, this or almost any of the proposed agreements might have been workable. As it was, any treaty now made at Newport must be the symbol of a new working coalition between royalist and presbyterian, and any such coalition was a declaration of war against independents and army. It was to undo the work of Preston and Colchester, to prepare a third sinister outbreak of violence and confusion, and to put Cromwell and his allies back again upon

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that sharp and perilous razor-edge of fortune from which they had just saved themselves.

It was their own fault again if the parliament did not know that Charles, from the first day of the negotiations to the last, was busily contriving plans for his escape from the island. He seems to have nursed a wild idea that if he could only find his way to Ireland he might, in conjunction with the ships from Holland under the command of Rupert, place himself at the head of an Irish invasion, with better fortune than had attended the recent invasion of the Scots. "The great concession I have made to-day," he wrote to a secret correspondent, merely in order to my escape." While publicly forbidding Ormonde to go on in Ireland, privately he writes to him not to heed any open commands until he has word that the king is free from restraint; Ormonde should pursue the way he is in with all possible vigour, and must not be astonished at any published concessions, for "they would come to nothing."

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Watching the proceedings with fierce impatience, at last the army with startling rapidity brought the elusive conflict to a crisis. A week before the close of negotiations at Newport, a deputation from Fairfax and his general council of officers came up to the House as bearers of a great remonstrance. Like all that came from the pen of Ireton, it is powerfully argued, and it is also marked by his gift of inordinate length. It fills nearly fifty pages of the parliamentary history, and could not have been read by a clerk at the table in much less than three hours. The points are simple enough. First, it would be stupidity rather than charity to suppose that the king's concessions arose from inward remorse or conviction, and therefore to continue to treat with him was both danger and folly. Second, he had been guilty of moral and civil acts judged capital in his predecessors, and therefore he ought

to be brought to trial. Other delinquents besides the king in both wars ought to be executed, and the soldiers ought to have their arrears paid. This was the upshot of the document that the body of officers, some of whom had capital sentence executed upon themselves in days to come, now in respectful form presented to the House of Commons.

The majority in the Commons, with a high spirit that was out of all proportion to their power, insisted on postponing the consideration of the demands of " a council of sectaries in arms. In fact they never would or did consider them, and the giant remonstrance of the army went into the limbo of all the other documents in which those times were so marvellously fertile. As a presentation of the difficulties of the hour, it is both just and penetrating; but these after all were quite as easy to see as they were hard to overcome. We usually find a certain amount of practical reason even at the bottom of what passes for political fanaticism. What Harrison and his allies saw was, that if king and parliament agreed, the army would be disbanded. If that happened, its leaders would be destroyed for what they had done already. If not, they would be proclaimed traitors and hinderers of the public peace, and destroyed for what they might be expected to do.