Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/302

288 recall all the proclamations, oaths, &c., against parliament; should disqualify all peers made since the renewal of the great seal from sitting in the house of peers; and should pass a bill for the adjournment of parliament being placed in the power of the houses themselves. These bills were sent by commissioners to Carisbrook, but the Scottish commissioners, who dreaded the acceptance of these bills, as rendering the English parliament independent of the league and covenant, hastened there, too, with a modified treaty of their own. Charles, thus encouraged, refused the four bills; the commissioners kissed hands and returned, and Charles signed the proposals of the Scots, which guaranteed the independence of their own religion, on condition of finding an army of forty thousand men for the restoration of the king.

Carisbrook, Isle of Wight.

Charles was not left long in ignorance of the effect of his refusal of the parliamentary proposals, and of the discovery of his secret treaty with the Scots. Colonel Hammond received orders to take every measure for the safe keeping of the king, and for preventing the lurking of suspicious vessels in Southampton Water, as it was known that a vessel was engaged by the queen to carry away Charles and land him at Berwick, in readiness to co-operate with the Scottish movement. Hammond at once dismissed Ashburnham, Legge, and Berkeley, with all other royalists, from the island, sent away a vessel supposed to be the very one engaged by the queen, and put the king under close surveillance and a double guard. He was no longer an apparently free guest, but a close prisoner.