Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/312

298 Instead of the house of commons sitting according to adjournment, on the 11th, the military councils, the select committee, and the general sate, and framed a new scheme of government. It was called "A new representative, or an agreement of the people." The composition was said to be Ireton's, but had probably been framed by Cromwell, Ireton, Peters, Vane, Pride, and the leading republicans. It was but an amplification of the late remonstrance; it proposed that the present parliament, which had now sate eight years, should be finally dissolved in April next, and a new one elected according to this formula. It declared that officers and malignants should be incapable of electing or being elected; that the house of commons should consist of three hundred members, and the representation of the country should be more equal. These propositions, having been sanctioned by the general council of soldiers and inferior officers, were carried to parliament. The commons went the next day and readily voted these measures, as well as that both the commons and lords, by violating the vote of non-addresses, had committed an act most unparliamentary and detrimental to the kingdom, and that the treaty at Newport was a monstrous error, disgrace, and peril to the country. They again restored the order expelling the eleven presbyterian members from the house.

On the 16th a strong party of horse was despatched under colonel Harrison to remove the king thence to Windsor Castle. It was at midnight on the 18th when Harrison arrived, and the king was awoke from his sleep by the trampling of horses and the fall of the drawbridge. He was greatly alarmed at the occurrence in that solitary place, and early woke his servant Herbert, and demanded what it was. Herbert told him that it was the arrival of colonel Harrison which had occasioned the noise. At that name Charles turned pale, for he had been secretly informed that Harrison was appointed to assassinate him. He bade Herbert wait in the ante-room, and hastened into his closet to control his terrors by prayer. He was completely unmanned, and shed tears, saying, "I trust in God, who is my helper, but I would not be surprised; this is a place fit for such a purpose." After an hour he called in Herbert, and bade him go and learn the particulars, and on his return Herbert informed him that Harrison was only come to remove him to Windsor. This greatly relieved him, and on the morrow he set out under a strong escort. No Harrison appeared, for he had withdrawn again in the night, having arranged for the king's departure. At the entrance of Farnham, another body of horse appeared drawn up in good order, and at its head an officer gallantly mounted and armed. He wore a montier cap, a buff coat, and a rich fringed crimson sash about his waist. As the king rode by at an easy pace, as one who delighted in seeing men well mounted and armed, the officer gave the monarch a military obeisance, which Charles politely acknowledged.

On inquiring the name of this officer, it proved to be Harrison, and the king at once declared that he did not look like a murderer. Harrison was the son of a butcher near Nantwich, who had articled him to a lawyer, but at the breaking out of the war, being a decided independent, he took arms, and now was numbered amongst the trustiest officers of the army, and held scarcely inferior to Cromwell or Ireton. At the place where they stopped for the night, Charles took Harrison by the arm, and leading him to a window, told him candidly that he had been informed that he intended to assassinate him; to which Harrison replied, according to Clarendon, that "his majesty need not entertain any such apprehension or imagination—that the parliament had too much honour and justice to cherish so foul an intention; and assured him that whatever the parliament resolved to do, would be very public, and in a way of justice to which the world should be witness, and would never endure a thought of secret violence: which his majesty could not persuade himself to believe, nor did he imagine they durst ever produce him in the sight of the people under any form whatever of a public trial."

As they approached Bagshot, the king desired to stop and dine at lord Newburgh's, who had married the lady Aubigny, whose husband was killed at Edge Hill, to which Harrison reluctantly consented, first sending forward scouts to search the park and environs of the house, to ascertain that there was no force prepared for a suprise. A surprise was, indeed, intended, but of another kind. Lord and lady Newburgh had been corresponding with Charles in cipher, and had concocted the mad scheme of giving Charles a horse of unrivalled fleetness, on which, watching his opportunity, he could escape by dashing off and outriding his guard. He was to complain of his horse being lame or sluggish, and to say at Bagshot he would borrow another. But luckily for himself—as he might have been shot in attempting to escape, and thus have deprived history of one of its greatest lessons—the horse intended for him had received a severe kick, and lord Newburgh had no other horse fleeter than those on which the troopers were mounted. The king, therefore, seeing himself well watched, and every soldier riding with his pistol on cock, gave up the idea. At Windsor, where they arrived on the 23rd of December, Charles seemed to feel himself rather a king again than a prisoner. According to the earl of Leicester's journal in the Sydney Papers, he appeared as merry as usual, and declared that he had no fear. He made a jest of the proceedings in parliament for calling him to trial, saying that "he had yet three games to play, the least of which gave him hope of regaining all." These were probably still some secret plans of escape; the exertions of Holland in his favour, where the prince of Orange, at the instance of the prince of Walas, promised to intercede, and the plottings of Ormond in Ireland, for Sir John Temple says, "he has a strange conceit of Ormond's working for him. He still hangs upon that twig, and by the inquiries which he made after his and Inchiquin's conjunction, I see he will not be beaten off it."

Sir John also notes that the king took no notice of the parliamentary proceedings, but "gave orders very lately for sowing the seed of some Spanish melons which he would have set at Wimbledon."

The strange infatuation of this most extraordinary monarch, has nothing like it short of insanity; still scheming, plotting, unconvinced of his danger to the end. On the very day that he reached Windsor, the house of commons, or the Rump fragment of it, appointed a committee of thirty-eight "to consider of drawing up a charge against the king, and all other delinquents that may be thought fit