Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/146

132 beleaguering their town, and the most terrible fate awaited them if they were thus deceived and abandoned. Charles gave them comfortable words, and entered into a solemn engagement to stand by them so long as their forts could resist the enemy, and to make no peace without the guarantee of all their ancient liberties.

But how were these grandiloquous words to be redeemed? He had exhausted all the resources of his arbitrary exactions, and had incurred an additional amount of unpopularity by seizing and imprisoning numbers of those who refused to submit to a forced loan; and when they demanded a fair hearing through the exercise of the habeas corpus, they were told that the king's command superseded that. The crown lawyers, in fact, vaunted the royal will as the supreme law, whilst Selden, Coke, and the constitutional lawyers referred them to Magna Charta, which had been thirty times confirmed by the kings, and thus aroused a wonderful feeling of popular right in the kingdom.



Whilst such was the state of public feeling, the usual pressure for money rendered it necessary to adopt some means of raising it. Besides the requirements of the home government, the proposed aid to the people of Rochelle made immediate funds necessary. To attempt extorting supplies by the modes which had so exasperated the public, was a course which all reasonable men regarded with repugnance and apprehension. Charles himself would have braved any danger rather than that of meeting parliament, with all its remonstrances and demands of redress of public grievances; but his council urged him to make another trial of the commons, and he consented. The writs were issued on the 29th of January, for the assembling of parliament on the 17th of March. Yet in the course of that very week the king