easily happen in England, and that if he did not himself call a parliament, one would be held without him.

The calling of the Long Parliament marked for the king his first great humiliation. The depth of the humiliation only made future conflict more certain. Everybody knew that even without any deep-laid or sinister design Charles's own instability of nature, the secret convictions of his conscience, the intrinsic plausibilities of ancestral kingship, and the temptation of accident, would surely draw him on to try his fortune again. What was in appearance a step toward harmonious co-operation for the good government of the three kingdoms, was in truth the set opening of a desperate pitched battle, and it is certain that neither king nor parliament had ever counted up the chances of the future. Some would hold that most of the conspicuous political contests of history have been undertaken upon the like uncalculating terms.

CHAPTER V

THE LONG PARLIAMENT

I

THE elections showed how Charles had failed to gauge the humour of his people. Nearly three hundred of the four hundred and ninety members who had sat in the Short Parliament were chosen over again. Not one of those who had then made a mark in opposition was rejected, and the new members were believed almost to a man to belong in one degree or another to the popular party. Of the five hundred names that made up the roll of the House of Commons at the beginning of the Long Parliament, the counties returned only ninety-one, while the boroughs returned four hundred and five, and it was in the boroughs that hostility to the policy of the court was sharpest. Yet few of the Commons belonged to the trading class. It could not be otherwise when more than four-fifths of the population lived in the country, when there were only four considerable towns outside of London, and when the rural classes were supreme. A glance at the list shows us Widdringtons and Fenwicks from Northumberland; Curzons from Derbyshire; Curwens from Cumberland; Ashtons, Leighs, Shuttleworths, Bridgmans, from Lancashire ; Lyttons and Cecils from Herts; Derings and Knatchbulls from Kent; Ingrams, Wentworths, Cholmeleys, Danbys, Fairfaxes, from the thirty

seats in Yorkshire; Grenvilles, Edgcombes, Bullers, Rolles, Godolphins, Vyvyans, Trevors, Carews, from the four-and-forty seats of Cornwall.

These and many another historic name make the list to-day read like a catalogue of the existing county families, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the House of Lords now contains a smaller proportion of ancient blood than the famous lineages that figure in the roll of the great revolutionary House of Commons. It was essentially an aristocratic and not a popular house, as became only too clear five or six years later, when Levellers and Soldiers came into the field of politics. The Long Parliament was made up of the very flower of the English gentry and the educated laity. A modern conservative writer describes as the great enigma, the question how this phalanx of country gentlemen, of the best blood of England, belonging to a class of strongly conservative instincts and remarkable for their attachment to the crown, should have been for so long the tools of subtle lawyers and republican theorists, and then have ended by acquiescing in the overthrow of the parliamentary constitution, of which they had proclaimed themselves the defenders. It is curious too how many of the leaders came from that ancient seat of learning which was so soon to become and for so long remained the centre of all who held for church and king. Selden was a member for the University of Oxford, and Pym, Fiennes, Marten, Vane, were all of them Oxford men, as well as Hyde, Digby, and others who in time passed over to the royal camp. A student of our day has remarked that these men collectively represented a larger relative proportion of the best intellect of the country, of its energy and talents, than is looked for now in the House of Commons. Whatever may be the reply to the delicate question so stated, it is at any rate true that of Englishmen then alive and of

CHAP. V

THE LONG PARLIAMENT

67

mature powers only two famous names are missing: Milton and Hobbes. When the parliament opened, Dryden was a boy at Westminster School; the future author of Pilgrim's Progress, a lad of twelve, was mending pots and kettles in Bedfordshire; and Locke, the future defender of the emancipating principles that now put on practical shape and power, was a boy of eight. Newton was not born until 1642, a couple of months after the first clash of arms at Edgehill.

In the early days of the Rebellion the peers had work to do not any less important than the Commons, and for a time, though they had none of the spirit of the old barons at Runnymede, they were in tolerable agreement with the views and temper of the lower House. The temporal peers were a hundred and twenty-three, and the lords spiritual twenty-six, of whom, however, when the parliament got really to business, no more than eighteen remained. Alike in public spirit and in attainments the average of the House of Lords was undoubtedly high. Like other aristocracies in the seventeenth century, the English nobles were no friends to high-flying ecclesiastical pretensions, and like other aristocrats they were not without many jealousies and grievances of their own against the power of the crown. Another remark is worth making. Either history or knowledge of human nature might teach us that great nobles often take the popular side without dropping any of the pretensions of class in their hearts, and it is not mere peevishness when the royalist historian says that Lord Saye and Sele was as proud of his quality and as pleased to be distinguished from others by his title as any man alive.

Oliver Cromwell was again returned for the borough of Cambridge. The extraordinary circumstance has been brought out that at the meeting of the Long Parliament Cromwell and Hampden

between them could count no fewer than seventeen relatives and connections; and by 1647 the figure had risen from seventeen to twenty-three. When the day of retribution came eight years later, out of the fifty-nine names on the king's death-warrant, ten were kinsmen of Oliver, and out of the hundred and forty of the king's judges sixteen were more or less closely allied to him. Oliver was now in the middle of his forty-second year, and his days of homely peace had come once for all to an end. Everybody knows the picture of him drawn by a young royalist; how one morning he "perceived a gentleman speaking, very ordinarily apparelled in a plain cloth suit made by an ill country tailor, with plain linen, not very clean, and a speck or two of blood upon his little band; his hat without a hat-band; his stature of a good size; his sword stuck close to his side; his countenance swollen and reddish; his voice sharp and untuneable, his eloquence full of fervour. . I sincerely profess it lessened much my reverence unto that great council, for this gentleman was very much hearkened unto."

Another recorder of the time describes "his body as well compact and strong; his stature of the average height; his head so shaped as you might see in it both a storehouse and shop of a vast treasury of natural parts. His temper exceeding fiery; but the flame of it kept down for the most part, as soon allayed with these moral endowments he had. He was naturally compassionate toward objects in distress, even to an effeminate measure; though God had made him a heart wherein was left little room for any fear but what was due to Himself, of which there was a large proportion, yet did he exceed in tenderness toward sufferers."

"When he delivered his mind in the House," says a third, going beyond the things that catch the visual eye, "it was with a strong and masculine excellence, more able to persuade than to be