Charles, finding the forces of the city arrayed against him, left Westminster on January 10. On January 17 the Commons set forth a declaration telling the story from their point of view, and defending their own constitutional position.

85. The Militia Ordinance and Breach between King and Parliament

Though the king absented himself from Westminster, negotiations between him and the Parliament still continued. On February 13 he gave his consent to the last two acts which became law in his reign. The first was the Clerical Disabilities Act, by which the clergy were disabled from exercising temporal jurisdiction and the bishops were deprived of their votes in the House of Lords; the other the Impressment Act, authorizing the impressment of soldiers for the service of Ireland. The fact that an army was being brought into existence for Ireland constituted a danger for whichever of the two parties failed to hold military command, and this last act was soon followed by a claim put forward by Parliament to appoint the lords lieutenant of the counties, who were at the head of the militia or civilian army which was, in time of peace, the only force at the disposal of the king. As Charles, naturally enough, refused to give such power into the hands of those whom he regarded as his enemies, the houses, on March 5, passed a militia ordinance to the effect which they desired. An ordinance was nothing more than a bill which had been accepted by the two houses, but had not received the royal assent, and for some months the houses had claimed the right of acting on such ordinances as if they had the force of law.

For the next few months a long and wordy controversy on the legality of this step arose. In the Nineteen Propositions are set forth as a whole the constitutional changes demanded by the prevailing party at Westminster. They would simply have established government by persons appointed by Parliament in lieu of government by the king, and they may therefore be taken as definitely marking the acceptance by the majority of the House of Commons of the idea that the king's sovereignty must not merely be weakened, but practically set aside. Against this proposed system were enlisted not only the feelings of Charles, but also those of every man who disliked the ecclesiastical or civil policy of the houses. In other words, a question arose whether

the unlimited power of the houses would not be as despotically vexatious as had been the unlimited power of the king, and the solution of diminishing the sphere of government by enlarging the sphere of individual right did not as yet occur to either party. Civil war was the natural result of such a condition of things. On June 12 Charles issued Commissions of Array to summon the militia of the counties to his side, and on July 12 the houses resolved, in addition to their claim to command the militia, to raise an army and place it under the command of the Earl of Essex. On August 22 the king raised his standard at Nottingham, and the Civil War began which was to decide, at least for a time, in whose hands was sovereignty in England.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Gardiner, History of England, 1603–1642, Vol. IX, consult table of contents for topics mentioned in the above extract. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, for the important documents. Ranke, History of England, Vol. II, pp. 215 ff. Hallam, Constitutional History, Vol. I, chaps. viii-ix.

CHAPTER V

CHARLES I AND HIS ACCUSERS

AFTER their triumph in the Civil War, the determined opponents of the king, especially in the revolutionary army, confronted a very difficult situation. Believing from their past experience that the king would not keep faith, they expelled his sympathizers from the House of Commons. The remnant of the House then composed of the army party erected a high court which condemned the king to death, after a semblance of a trial. The events which followed the passage of the sentence are fully narrated by Mr. Gardiner, who then closes the account of this great crisis with one of the most remarkable historical judgments ever rendered.

§ 1. Signing the Death Warrant1

The protests against any attempt to act on the sentence of death against the king were many and loud. The members of the Assembly of Divines joined in supplicating for the king's life, and on the same day two Dutch ambassadors, who had been specially despatched from the Netherlands for the purpose, made a similar request to the House of Commons. It was also reported that Fairfax had urged the Council of Officers in the same direction, whilst it was no secret that the Prince of Wales had sent a blank sheet of paper, signed and sealed by himself, on which the Parliament might inscribe any terms they pleased. That the vast majority of the English people would have accepted this offer gladly was beyond all reasonable doubt.

It was but a small knot of men a bare majority, if they were even that, amongst the sitting members of the High Court of Justice itself who had fixedly determined that there should be

1 Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, Vol. IV, pp. 314 ff. By permission of Longmans, Green, & Company, Publishers.

no relenting; but they had Cromwell amongst them, and Cromwell's will, when once his mind had been made up, was absolutely inflexible. They had, moreover, behind them the greater part of the rank and file of the army, to whom the shortest issue seemed the best.

The first difficulty encountered by those who were bent on carrying out the sentence of the court was that of obtaining signatures to the death warrant in sufficient numbers to give even an appearance of unanimity amongst the judges. On Saturday, January 27, 1649, a few more signatures had been added to those obtained on the 26th, but on the morning of Monday the 29th not only were many still wanting, but there was reason to believe that some of the judges who had already signed would refuse to repeat their signatures if called on to do so. Yet it was impossible to make use of the warrant in its existing condition. It had been, as there is little doubt, dated on the 26th, and it presupposed a sentence passed on that day, whereas it was notorious that no sentence had been passed till the 27th. Under these circumstances the natural course of proceedings would have been to re-copy the warrant with altered dates and to have it signed afresh. What was actually done was to erase the existing date, and to make such other alterations as were requisite to bring the whole document into conformity with actual facts. Of the names of the three officers finally charged with the execution of the sentence, Hacker, Huncks, and Phayre, that of Huncks alone was unaltered. The names over which those of Hacker and Phayre were written are now illegible, but they can hardly fail to have been those of men who shrank from carrying out the grim duty assigned to them. .

Having by this extraordinary means secured the retention of the signatures already given, the managers of the business, whoever they were, applied themselves energetically to increase the number. The testimony of those regicides who pleaded after the Restoration that they had acted under compulsion must, indeed, be received with the utmost caution; but there is no reason to doubt that considerable pressure was put upon those judges who having agreed to the sentence now showed a disinclination to sign the warrant. In all the stories by the regicides on their defence, Cromwell takes a prominent place, and it is easy to understand how meanly he must have thought of men who, after joining in passing the sentence, declined to sign the warrant. When those members of the court who were also members of Parliament took

their places in the House, Cromwell is reported to have called on them to sign without further delay. "Those that are gone in," he said, "shall set their hands. I will have their hands now."

Later in the day, when the warrant lay for signature on a table in the painted chamber, the scene grew animated. It is said that Cromwell, whose pent-up feelings sometimes manifested themselves in horse-play, drew an inky pen across Marten's face, and that Marten inked Cromwell's face in return. According to another story which was for a long time accepted as true, Cromwell dragged Ingoldsby to the table, and forced him to sign by grasping his hand with a pen in it. The firmness of Ingoldsby's signature, however, contradicts the latter part of the assertion, though it is possible that some sort of compulsion was previously used to bring him to the point.

On the whole it will be safe to assume that great pressure was put, sometimes in rough military fashion, on those who hung back. On the other hand, there is no evidence given by any of the regicides, when put upon their trial, of any definite threats being used against those who made difficulties about signing. Downes, indeed, who did not sign at all, described himself as having been frightened into assenting to the judgment, but he had nothing to say about any ill effects resulting to him on account of his refusal to sign.

In one way or another fifty-nine signatures were at last obtained. Nine out of these sixty-seven who had given sentence did not sign; but, on the other hand, Ingoldsby, who signed the warrant, had been absent when the sentence was passed. . . .

§ 2. Mr. Gardiner's Judgment of the Puritan Revolution

Those who brought Charles to the scaffold strengthened the revulsion of feeling in his favor which had begun to set in ever since it had been clearly brought home to the nation that its choice lay between the rule of the king and the rule of the sword. It is indeed true that the feeling hostile to the army was not created by the execution of Charles, but its intensity was greatly strengthened by the horror caused by the spectacle of sufferings so meekly endured.

Charles's own patience, and the gentleness with which he met harshness and insult, together with his own personal dignity, won hearts which might otherwise have been steeled against his pretensions. The often-quoted lines of Andrew Marvell set forth