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hour before him in an unofficial box by the side of the queen. "It was daily," says Baillie the covenanter, "the most glorious assembly the isle can afford; yet the gravity not such as I expected; oft great clamour without about the doors; in the intervals while Strafford was making ready for answers, the Lords got always to their feet, walked and clattered; the Lower House men too loud clattering; after ten hours, much public eating, not only of confections but of flesh and bread, bottles of beer and wine going thick from mouth to mouth without cups, and all this in the king's

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With the impeachment of Strafford the whole position comes directly into view. He divided universal hatred with his confederate the archbishop, who had been impeached a few days after himself. He was the symbol and impersonation of all that the realm had for many years suffered under. In England the name of Strafford stood for lawless exactions, arbitrary courts, the free quartering of troops, and the standing menace of a papist enemy from the other side of St. George's Channel. The Scots execrated him as the instigator of energetic war against their country and their church. Ireland in all its ranks and classes having through its parliament applauded him as a benefactor, now with strange versatility cursed him as a tyrant. It was the weight of all these converging animosities that destroyed him. "Three whole kingdoms," says a historian of the time, "were his accusers, and eagerly sought in one death a recompense of all their sufferings."

Viewed as a strictly judicial proceeding, the trial of Strafford was as hollow as the yet more memorable trial in the same historic hall eight years later. The expedients for a conviction that satisfied our Lords and Commons were little better than the expedients

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of the revolutionary tribunal in Jacobin Paris at the close of the next century. The charges were vague, general, and saturated with questionable inference. The evidence, on any rational interpretation of the facts, was defective at almost every point. That Strafford had been guilty of treason in any sense in which a sound tribunal going upon strict law could have convicted him, nobody now maintains or perhaps even then maintained. Oliver St. John, in ing the attainder before the Lords, put the real point. Why should he have law himself who would not that others should have any ? We indeed give laws to hares and deer, because they are beasts of chase; but we give none to wolves and foxes, but knock them on the head wherever they are found, because they are beasts of prey. This was the whole issue-not law, but My head or thy head. In revolutions it has often been that there is nothing else for it; and there was nothing else for it here. But the revolutionary axe is double-edged, and so men found it when the Restoration came.

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Meanwhile, the one thing for Pym was to make That Strafford designed to subvert what, in the opinion of the vast majority of Englishmen, were the fundamental liberties of the realm, there was no moral doubt though there was little legal proof. That he had earned the title of a public enemy; that his continued eligibility for a place in the councils of the king would have been a public danger, and his escape from punishment a public disaster; and that if he had not been himself struck down, he would have been the first to strike down the champions of free government against military monarchy, these are the propositions that make the political justification of the step taken by the Commons when, after fourteen sittings, they began to fear that impeachment might fail them. They resorted to the more drastic proceeding of a bill of attainder. They were surrounded by imminent

danger. They knew of plots to bring the royal army down upon the parliament. They heard whispers of the intention of the French king to send over a force to help his sister, and of money coming from the Prince of Orange, the king's new son-in-law. Tales came of designs for Strafford's escape from the Tower. Above all was the peril that the king, in his desperation and in spite of the new difficulties in which such a step would land him, might suddenly dissolve them. It was this pressure that carried the bill of attainder through parliament, though Pym and Hampden at first opposed it, and though Selden, going beyond Hyde and Falkland who abstained, actually voted against it. Men's apprehensions were on their sharpest edge. Then it was that the Earl of Essex, rejecting Hyde's arguments for merely banishing Strafford, gave him the pithy reply," Stone-dead hath no fellow."

Only one man could defeat the bill, and this was Strafford's master. The king's assent was as necessary for a bill of attainder as for any other bill, and if there was one man who might have been expected to refuse assent, it was the king. The bill was passed on a Saturday (May 8). Charles took a day to consider. He sent for various advisers, lay and episcopal. Archbishop Usher and Juxon told him, like honest men, that if his conscience did not consent, he ought not to act, and that he knew Strafford to be innocent. In truth Charles a few days before had appealed to the Lords not to press upon his conscience, and told them that on his conscience he could not condemn his minister of treason. Williams, sharper than his two brother prelates, invented a distinction between the king's public conscience and his private conscience, not unlike that which was pressed upon George III. on the famous occasion in 1800. He urged that though the king's private conscience might acquit Strafford, his public conscience ought to yield to the opinion of the judges.

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Strafford had written to him a week before, and begged him to pass the bill. "Sir, my consent shall more acquit you herein to God than all the world can do besides. To a willing man there is no injury done; and as by God's grace I forgive all the world with calmness and meekness of infinite contentment to my dislodging soul, so, sir, to you I can give the life of this world with all the cheerfulness imaginable, in the just acknowledgment of your exceeding favours.' Little worthy was Charles of so magnanimous a servant. Attempts have been made at palliation. The queen, it is said, might have been in danger from the anger of the multitude. "Let him," it is gravely enjoined upon us, "who has seen wife and child and all that he holds dear exposed to imminent peril, and has refused to save them by an act of baseness, cast the first stone at Charles." The equity of history is both a noble and a scientific doctrine, but its decrees are not to be settled by the domestic affections. Time has stamped the abandonment of Strafford with an ignominy that cannot be washed out. It is the one act of his life for which Charles himself professed remorse. "Put not your trust in princes," exclaimed Strafford when he learned the facts. "I dare look death in the face," he said stoically, as he passed out of the Tower gate to the block; I thank God I am not afraid of death, but do as cheerfully put off my doublet at this time as ever I did when I went to my bed." "His mishaps," said his confederate, Laud, were that he groaned under the public envy of the nobles, and served a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be nor to be made great."

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CHAPTER VI

THE EVE OF THE WAR

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WHEN Mary Stuart in 1567 rode away a captive from Carberry Hill, she seized the hand of Lord Lindsay, her foe, and holding it aloft in her grasp, she swore by it, "I will have your head for this, so assure you. This was in Guise-Tudor blood, and her grandson's passion for revenge if less loud was not less deep. The destruction of Strafford and the humiliation that his own share in that bitter deed had left in the heart of the king darkened whatever prospect there might at any time have been of peace between Charles and the parliamentary leaders. He was one of the men vindictive in proportion to their impotence, who are never beaten with impunity. His thirst for retaliation was unquenchable, as the popular leaders were well aware, as they were well aware too of the rising sources of weakness in their own ranks. Seeing no means of escape, the king assented to a series of reforming bills that swept away the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the assumed right to levy ship-money, and the other more flagrant civil grievances of the reign. The verdicts of Hallam have grown pale in the flash and glitter of later historians, yet there is much to be said for his judgment that all the useful and enduring part of the reforming work of the Long Parliament was mainly completed within the first

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