be of the most arbitrary character. Money was collected from the people by force; the influence of the crown was exercised in the most open manner to overawe the judges, in cases in which the liberty of the subject was concerned; the first privilege of parliament itself was violated by the seizure of members of the House of Commons, and their commitment to prison, for words alleged to have been spoken by them in debate. Nor is Charles free from the charge of having resorted to manœuvring and subterfuge to escape from the demands with which he was pressed. He is especially exposed to the charge of such insincerity and indirectness by his conduct in the affair of the Petition of Right, which was passed in the first session of his third parliament, and to which he was eventually compelled to give his assent. This was the greatest, indeed it may be said the only, victory obtained by the popular party in the course of the struggle; and it was rendered ineffectual for the present, by the temporary success of the king in the plan which he at length adopted of governing without parliaments. Immediately before entering on this line of policy, he wisely made peace, first, on the 14th of April, 1629, with France, with which power he had entered (in July, 1626) into a foolish war, every operation in which was a disgraceful failure; and secondly, on the 5th of November, 1630, with Spain, the war with which had not been more creditable to his arms. Meanwhile also, the assassination of Buckingham, on the 23rd of August, 1628, had rid him of that evil adviser.

His principal advisers now were the queen, Bishop Laud, and Wentworth, created Earl of Strafford. The state of things now established, and which may be described as the complete subjugation of the constitution by the prerogative of the crown, lasted for nearly eight years. The only memorable attempt at resistance was that made by IIampden, who refused to pay his assessment of ship-money, and whose case was argued before the twelve judges, in April, 1637, and decided in favour of the crown. Meantime, however, the opposition of

the people of Scotland to the episcopal form of church government, which had for some time been established among them, suddenly burst out into a flame. The first disturbances took place at Edinburgh, in the end of July, 1637; and by the beginning of the following year the whole country was in a state of insurrection against the royal authority. In these circumstances Charles called together his fourth parliament, which met on the 13th of April, 1640. The temper which the members showed, however, induced him to dissolve it on the 5th of May following. But the Scotch army having entered England on the 20th of August, he again found himself forced to have recourse to the representatives of the people. The result was, the meeting, on the 3rd of November, of a fifth parliament, which is generally known under the name of the Long Parliament.

The first proceedings of this assembly amounted to entering into a complete alliance with the Scottish insurgents. By one bill after another, the king was stripped of all the most objectionable of his prerogatives. The commons also voted that no bishop should have any vote in parliament nor bear any sway in temporal affairs, and that no clergyman should be in the commission of the peace. Of his advisers, Laud was sent to the Tower, and Strafford was executed, in conformity with an act of attainder, his assenting to which has always been regarded as one of the greatest stains on the character of Charles. Laud also, as is more particularly related in a subsequent page, was executed after he had remained a prisoner in the Tower more than four years. After having yielded everything else, however, Charles refused his assent to the Militia Bill, which was presented to him in February, 1642, the object of which was to transfer all the military power of the kingdom into the hands of the parliament. The first blood drawn in the civil war which followed was at the indecisive battle of Edgehill, fought on Sunday, the 23rd of October, in that year. After this the war extended itself over the whole kingdom. For some time success seemed to incline to the royal side, and at the beginning of the year

1644, throughout both the west and the north of England, all opposition to the king was nearly subdued. In February of that year, however, another Scottish army crossed the border, and on the 2nd of July, at Marston Moor, the royalists sustained a defeat from the combined Scottish and parliamentary forces, which proved a fatal blow to the king's affairs. The brilliant exploits of the Marquis of Montrose in Scotland, at the end of this year and the beginning of the next, were thrown away in the circumstances in which his royal master now was. At length, on the 14th of June, 1645, was fought the battle of Naseby, which may be said to have finished the war. On the 5th of May, 1646, Charles delivered himself up to the Scotch army encamped before Newark, who, on the 30th of January, 1647, gave him up to the commissioners of the English parliament. On the 3rd of June he was forcibly taken by Cornet Joyce out of the hands of the commissioners, and carried to the army then lying at Triplow Heath, and now in open rebellion against their old masters of the parliament. On the 16th of August he was brought by the army to Hampton Court, from which he made his escape on the 11th of November, and eventually sought refuge with Hammond, the parliamentary governor of the Isle of Wight. Here he was detained a close prisoner in Carisbrook Castle till the 30th of November, 1648, when he was seized by Colonel Ewer, and carried to Hurst Castle, on the opposite coast of Hampshire, by an order of the council of officers in the army. Meanwhile risings in his favour, which had been attempted in various parts of the kingdom, were all suppressed without difficulty by the now dominant army. An army in the Presbyterian interest, which was advancing from Scotland under the conduct of the Duke of Hamilton, was met on the 17th of August, at Langdale, near Preston, by Cromwell, who, after completely routing it, penetrated as far as Edinburgh, and reduced everything to subjection in that quarter. On the 6th of December, Colonel Pride took possession of the House of Commons, with a strong detachment of soldiers, and cleared it by force of all the

members, except the minority of about a hundred and fifty, who were in the Independent interest. On the 23rd the king was brought in custody to Windsor, and on the 15th of January, 1649, to St. James's. On the 20th, he was brought to trial in Westminster Hall, before what was designated the High Court of Justice. Sentence of death was pronounced against him on the 27th, and he was executed by decapitation, on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall,

at two in the afternoon of the 30th.

Charles I. had eight children by Queen Henrietta, of whom six survived him; namely, Charles, Prince of Wales, and James, Duke of York, afterwards Kings of England; Henry, created, in 1659, Duke of Gloucester; Mary, married to William, Prince of Orange, by whom she became mother of William, afterwards King of England; Elizabeth, who died a prisoner in Carisbrook Castle, September 8th, 1650, in her fifteenth year; and Henrietta Maria, who married Philip, Duke of Orleans, from whom, through a daughter, is descended the Royal family of Sardinia.

The literary works attributed to King Charles have been collected and published under the title of ' Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ.' A list of them may be found in Horace Walpole's 'Royal and Noble Authors.' They consist chiefly of letters and a few state papers, and of the famous Eikon Basilike,' which first appeared immediately after the death of the king; but his claim to the authorship of this work has been much disputed, and is now generally considered to have been disproved. His majesty, however, was master of an easy and occasionally forcible English style, and he was a great friend to the fine arts, which he encouraged in the early part of his reign.

The original authorities for the history of the reign of Charles I. are very numerous. Among those of greatest importance may be mentioned Rushworth's 'Historical Collections;' Whitelock's 'Memorials of English Affairs; Clarendon's History of the Grand Rebellion;' and May's History of the (Long) Parliament.' The

general reader will find a sufficiently ample detail of the events of the time in the histories of Rapin, Hume, and Lingard. The most important of the recent works on the reign of Charles I. are those of Brodie, Godwin, and D'Israeli. The subject of the authorship of the 'Eikon Basilike' has been re-agitated of late by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, in a work in which he contends that the book was the production of King Charles.