Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/227

] It were hard and ungracious, indeed, to attribute any insincerity or interested motive to a devotion so nobly expressed, had not the author's own deed too plainly justified it. But as Baillie deprives his fine defence of one of its most beautiful effects, that of appealing to the saint in heaven who had left him his children, by assuring us that he actually occasioned the death of this saint by striking her on the breast in his anger when, in a state of pregnancy, she discovered a letter of his mistress, and bringing it to him, upbraided him with it; so we fear, on this occasion, he was but acting this exalted part. Whitelock assures us that the king sent Carleton to him, to inform him that he had been compelled to pass the bill, and adding that he had been the more reconciled to it by his willingness to die. On hearing this, Strafford started up from his chair, lifted up his eyes to heaven, laid his hand upon his heart, and said, "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, for in them there is no salvation." Strafford was a great actor, and had probably been calculating on a similar letter by Goodman three months before, which was supposed to have saved his life.

The night before the day fixed for his execution, archbishop Usher visited the prisoner, who begged him to go to his fellow-prisoner, archbishop Laud, and beg his prayers for him that night, and his blessing when ho should go forth in the morning. He had in vain endeavoured to persuade the lieutenant Balfour to permit him to have an interview with the fallen prelate. In the morning, when let out to the scaffold, on approaching the window of the archbishop's prison, he begged the lieutenant to allow him to make his obeisance towards the prelate's room, though he could not see him himself.

Laud, however, was on the watch, and putting forth his hands from his window, bestowed his blessing. That was all that his weakness and his emotion permitted. He sank, overcome with his grief, to the floor. Strafford made a profound obeisance, and the procession moved on. But after a few steps the earl turned round again, bowed to the ground once more, saying, "Farewell, my lord! God protect your innocence!" Then proceeding again, he assumed a lofty and dignified air, more even than was usual to him. At the Tower-gate the lieutenant requested him to enter a coach, lest the people should wreak their hatred upon him; but he declined, saying, "No, master lieutenant, I dare look death in the face, and I hope the people, too. Have you a care that I do not escape, and I care not how I die, whether by the executioner, or the madness of the people. If that give them better satisfaction, it is all one to me."

He was accompanied to the scaffold by archbishop Usher, the earl of Cleveland, and his brother, Sir George Wentworth, and others of his friends were there to take their leave of him. The crowd assembled to see their great enemy depart was immense, and ho made a speech from notes which he had prepared, still protesting his innocence; declaring that so far from wishing to put an end to parliaments, he had always regarded them, under God, as the best means to make the king and his people happy. His head fell at a single blow, and the astonished people could scarcely believe that they saw the last of their mortal enemy. They retired in quietness, as if overcome by the greatness of the satisfaction; but they testified their joy in the evening by bonfires in the streets.

Strafford was a man of that address, and that communjing intellect, that had he persisted in the noble cause of constitutional liberty with which he began, there was no fame, no gratitude from his country and from posterity, which he might not have earned. But having once sold himself for rank and power, he devoted himself to the mean ambition of carrying out the will of a despotic king, to the task of extinguishing the laws and rights of a great nation, with the same unhesitating and unswerving resolution Yet there is scarcely an historian who does not lament his death, as unwarranted by the nature of his offence Clarendon bewails his fate as the victim of popular rage and royal weakness, yet there is every reason to believe that he voted for his death, for his name is not to be found in the list of the Straffordian dissentients; Hume pronounces his execution an enormity greater than the worst he had himself committed; Lingard thinks the propriety of his punishment has been justly questioned; and even Knight thinks he ought not to have been put to death. We cannot hold that opinion. So long as capital punishment shall be deemed necessary at all, we must believe that of Strafford was most righteously deserved. If treason against a king, who is but a servant to a nation, be a heinous offence, how much more so must be treason against a nation. Treason against a king is treason against an individual or family, treason against a nation is treason against millions and against all their posterity. The tendency of statesmen is to flatter and serve kings at the expense of the people; therefore the more strictly should their offences against the people be denounced and punished For Straftbrd's monstrous and unmitigated popular treason, we have only to look at his actions and read his own avowal in the Strafford papers. He had told Charles that he "would make him as absolute a king as any prince in the world could be." He set about to corrupt, intimidate, and mould the Irish parliament into his obsequious tool. He seized on vast estates in the province of Connaught, on pretence that they had been forfeited to the crown. He summoned juries to decide on the king's right to them, telling them that if they brought in any other verdict, "he would fine them at a sound rate; " and when they were not conformable, he dragged them into his star-chamber—the castle-chamber—fined them four thousand pounds apiece, and marched troops into Galway to seize on the estates of such as resisted the king's will. Having by these means raised a revenue, with that he raised an army to keep them down, and offered to carry that army to crush the liberty and religion of the Scots; nor did he mean to stop there, but, as he said, to carry the same process to England, and make the king absolute. All this time he was encouraging Laud in his like work in England, and Laud encouraging him in what they called their "Thorough;" thorough extinction of all law but the royal will. He told the king that having got from the judges a declaration of the lawfulness of ship-money, he had got a great thing; but that still the crown would only stand on one leg unless he got the like power declared for raising a standing army; and asked, "What should deter a king from a path which so manifestly, so