overawe the capital (doubtfully Presbyterian), Cromwell marched towards Wales, and began what has been called the "Second Civil War." It was but of brief continuance. At the head of his veterans he attacked and took Pembroke Castle, and speedily subdued Wales. He then hurried northwards to encounter the Scotch under Hamilton. The battle of Preston, in the month of August, may be said to finish the campaign. Nothing could be more complete than the disaster which he inflicted on the immense and disorderly mass of the Scotch army, but imperfectly hearty in the cause for which they fought. His success was again everywhere complete. The Kirk party in Scotland, headed by Argyle, lent their influence to aid his designs. The conqueror advanced into Edinburgh, took up his abode in the "Earl of Murrie's house in the Cannigate" there; accepted a great banquet from the submissive Covenanters; and, having put things in order to his mind, returned southwards. He was again in England, busy with renewed negotiations about the King before the close of the year.

The Royalist interests were now everywhere crushed. The Presbyterians, still nominally a majority in Parliament, were in reality defeated. The army had entirely broken with them, and its leaders were already the true masters of England. They knew their power, and waited their opportunity. While Cromwell tarried in the north, extinguishing the last embers of Royalist disaffection, Parliament made one more last effort to come to an understanding with the King, and so arrest the power of the Revolution, which it felt was fast sweeping towards itself. It was in vain. The forty days' treaty of Newport came to

nothing, like all its predecessors. Charles was hopeless; long-practised craft had poisoned the very fountains of trust in him, and treaty with him was no longer possible. The Parliament had ceased to be powerful; the force which it had evoked in its own defence had risen up against it; its creature had grown to be its master. While other interests had suffered from the continuance of the war, the army had risen on their weakness or ruins, and it now stood the only governing power in England.

On the 20th of November we find Oliver at Knottingley, writing to Fairfax as to the grievances of the army, and his quiet determination to support them. All the regiments had petitioned against the treaty of Newport, and "for justice and a settlement of the kingdom"-a sufficiently ominous petition! Cromwell expresses his sympathy with them, and is persuaded that the cause is a good cause-nay, a divine one. "I find," he says, "in the officers of the regiments a very great sense of the sufferings of this poor kingdom; and in them all a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders. And I must confess I do in all, from my heart, concur with them; and I verily think, and am persuaded, that they are things which God puts into our hearts."

At the same time, only a few days later, he writes to Colonel Hammond, who was in charge of the King in the Isle of Wight, one of his most remarkable letters:* We can read in it the struggling depths of his spirit, and the stern though confused strength of his convictions. Undivine as these convictions may seem to us, they seemed to him to rest on an eternal foundation. Hypocrisy is about the very last CARLYLE, i. 393.

word we should think of applying to them. It is not a double mind, but a too intense and absorbed mind, out of which they come. It is the madness of a fixed idea, and not the treachery of a false nature, of which they are born. The fearful duty towards which he points, is obviously no pretence of language, but the overmastering impress of a diseased faith, which has taken up into its supposed divine warrant all human scruples and personal interests, and sublimated them till they seem celestial in the consecrating halo through which he views them. "If the Lord have in any measure persuaded His people of the lawfulness-nay, of the duty-this persuasion prevailing upon the heart is faith and acting thereupon, is acting in faith; and the more the difficulties are, the more the faith." Out of such a faith, it is not. difficult to see what duties-nay, what crimes-might grow.

This letter to young Hammond never reached its destination. He had been wavering for some time in his trust, puzzled and awestruck, as well he might be, by the dire crisis gathering around him. With his scruples, "dear Robin" was not to be trusted, even to the force of such arguments as Cromwell's letter contained; and, accordingly, a more imperative argument is served upon him in the shape of an order to remove to headquarters at Windsor, while a less scrupulous Colonel Ewer, who had already distinguished himself by his forwardness in the presentation of the army remonstrance to the Parliament, beset the royal lodgings at Newport, and removed the King to a more solitary and secure confinement in Hurst Castle.

Things now rapidly approached the end which Cromwell and others had foreseen and prepared for

some time. The Commons refused to entertain the remonstrance of the army by a large majority. The news rekindled the military devotion which we have already seen so ominous in its results. After a day spent in prayer, the army resolved to march upon London. This was on the 2d of December. On the 4th, Parliament had not only dismissed the army remonstrance, but decided, by a majority of forty-six, that his Majesty's concessions in the treaty of Newport were a ground of settlement. On the 6th, two regiments-one of cavalry, and one of foot-were marched into Palace Yard, and into Westminster Hall; and Colonel Pride, with a paper in his hand, containing a list of the obstinate majority, purged the Parliament of refractory Presbyterians, and left the Independents victors on the floor of St Stephen's as in the ranks of the army.

Man

The result is well known. The House of Commons, thinned in numbers-reduced to a mere fraction of its numbers-resolved to impeach the King, and bring him to trial. The Lords tried to interpose some obstacles when the ordinance instituting a high court to try the King came before them. chester, Denbigh, and Pembroke declared they would have nothing to do with it. "I would be torn to pieces, rather than take part in so infamous a business," said Denbigh. The Commons, however, determined to proceed without them, and the High Court of Justice, with John Bradshaw at its head, began its proceedings on the 8th of January. After three weeks' sitting, and many strange and exciting incidents, the King was condemned on the 27th. His lofty and quiet mien, in contrast with that of his rude.

* Carlyle's picture of this famous event is very graphic--p. 399.

and stormy accusers, has stamped itself indelibly on the historical imagination. It is an impressive and touching picture. Charles appeared the hero at last, when the long web of his craft had run out, and he was thrown back upon the simple dignity of his kingly temper.

On the 29th, the warrant for the execution was signed and sealed; and on the following day, in "the open street before Whitehall," Charles Stuart, "king of England," was beheaded amid the tears of his attendants and the wonder of the multitude.

Cromwell apparently took no special share in these proceedings. There is no reason whatever to believe, as has been represented, that he had the King's life in his hands; and the stories as to the visit of his cousin, and other interpositions made with him on the King's behalf, are in the main mere exaggerations. What credit is due to the other and less worthy stories as to his strange, mad levity-his smearing Henry Martin's face with ink, after his signing the death-warrant, and Martin in turn smearing his, it is difficult to say. He had such a mad turn with him, beyond doubt. The terrible workings of his inner life, the tumult of principle and aspiration which often raged within him, sometimes broke out in this ungovernable manner, showing, yet hiding, the wild surging of passion within in an unintelligible uproar and folly of external manner. It is a sufficiently awful contrast-the buffoonery of the triumphant soldier, and the pathetic dignity of the fallen monarch; but even if that traditionary imagination, which is always tender to suffering and severe to successful principle, has not given much of the contrasted colouring to the two pictures, we must remember that the character of a great historical event is not to be decided