Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/87

 bringing that army to London. Of some of these projects Pym received intelligence, and Strafford's impeachment, ultimately carried on under the form of a bill of attainder, was pushed on more vigorously than ever. The most telling charge against Strafford was that he had intended to bring an Irish army to England, and that army, which was still on foot, Charles refused to disband. On 1 May he pleaded with the lords to spare Strafford's life, while rendering him incapable of holding office. On the following day, the day of his daughter's marriage to Prince William of Orange, he made an attempt to get military possession of the Tower. An appeal to constitutional propriety and an appeal to force at the same time were irreconcilable with one another. Wilder rumours were abroad, and Pym on the 5th revealed his knowledge of the army plot. All hesitation among the peers ceased, and the Attainder Bill was passed. On 10 May, under the stress of fear lest the mob which was raging round Whitehall should imperil the life of the queen, Charles signed a commission for giving his assent to the bill.

On the same day Charles agreed to a bill taking from him his right to dissolve the actual parliament without its own consent. Parliament at once proceeded to abolish those courts which had formed a special defence of the Tudor monarchy, and completed the Scottish treaty by which the two armies were to be disbanded. As another act made the payment of customs and duties illegal without consent of parliament, Charles was now reduced to rule in accordance with the decisions of the law courts and the will of parliament, unless he had recourse to force. Unhappily for him, he could not take up the position thus offered him, or contentedly become a cipher where he had once ruled authoritatively. On 10 Aug. he set out for Scotland, hoping by conceding everything on which the Scottish nation had set its heart to win its armed support in England.

Charles perhaps felt the more justified in the course which he was taking as new questions were rising above the parliamentary horizon. The House of Commons was more puritan than the nation, and as early as in February 1641 two parties had developed themselves, one of them striving for the abolition of episcopacy, and for a thorough change in the prayer-book, if not for its entire abandonment; the other for church reform which should render a renewal of the Laudian system impossible for the future. The latter was headed by Bishop Williams, and was strongly supported by the House of Lords. Charles's one chance of regaining authority was in placing himself in harmony with this reforming movement. Charles was an intriguer, but he was not a hypocrite, and as he had no sympathy with any plan such as Williams was likely to sketch out, he did not feign to have it. The want of the king's support was fatal to the project, and many who might have ranged themselves with Williams came to the conclusion that, unless the days of Laud were to return, the government of the church must be taken out of the hands of Charles. Hence a bill for the abolition of episcopacy was being pushed on in the House of Commons, the bishops having been, and being likely to be, the nominees of the crown.

Any one but Charles would have recognised the uselessness of attempting to save the English bishops by an appeal to the presbyterian Scots. Charles was indeed welcomed at Edinburgh, where he listened to presbyterian sermons, but he soon discovered that the Scots would neither abate a jot of their own pretensions nor lend him aid to recover his lost ground in England. His dissatisfaction encouraged persons about him, more unscrupulous than himself, to form a plot for seizing, and even, in case of resistance, for murdering, Argyll, Hamilton, and Lanark, the leaders of the opposition; and when this plot, usually known as ‘The Incident,’ was discovered, Charles found himself suspected of contriving a murder.

Shortly after the discovery of the Incident the Ulster massacre took place, and Charles, who appears to have intrigued with the Irish catholic lords for military assistance in return for concessions made to them, was suspected of connivance with the rebellion in the north.

Such suspicions, based as they were on a succession of intrigues, made it difficult for Charles to obtain acceptance for any definite policy. Yet, while he was still in Scotland, he adopted a line of action which gave him a considerable party in England, and which, if he could have inspired trust in his capacity to treat the question of the day in a conciliatory spirit, might have enabled him to rally the nation round him. He announced his resolution to maintain the discipline and doctrine of the church as established by Elizabeth and James, and if he could have added to this, as he soon afterwards added, an expression of a desire to find a mode of satisfying those who wished for some amount of latitude within its pale, he would be in a good position to command a large following. Unhappily for him, the Incident and the Irish rebellion made it unlikely that he would be trusted, and the answer of the parliamentary leaders was the ‘Grand Remonstrance,’