Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/88

 in which he was asked to concede the appointment of ministers acceptable to both houses of parliament, and the gathering of an assembly of divines to be named by parliament that it might recommend a measure of church reform. The former demand was rendered necessary by the fact that an army would soon have to he sent to Ireland, and that the parliamentary majority would not trust the king with its control, lest it should be used against themselves when the war was over. The second might easily lead to a system of ecclesiastical repression as severe as that of Laud, and when Charles, in a declaration published by him soon afterwards (, Collection of Remonstrances, &c., p. 24), announced himself ready, if exception was taken to certain ceremonies, ‘to comply with the advice of’ his ‘parliament, that some law may be made for the exemption of tender consciences from punishment or prosecution for such ceremonies,' he might, if he had been other than he was, have anticipated the legislation of William and Mary. To the end of his life, however, though he constantly reiterated this offer, he never took the initiative in carrying the proposal into effect.

There can he little doubt that, emboldened by his reception in the city on 25 Nov., when he returned from Scotland, Charles, was already contemplating an appeal to law which was hardly distinguished from an appeal to force. When, at the end of December, a mob appeared at Westminster to terrorise the peers, he seems to have wavered between this plan and an attempt to rest upon the constitutional support of a minority or the commons and a majority of the lords. It was a step in the latter direction that on 2 Jan. 1642 he named to office Culpepper, and Falkland, leading members of the episcopalian-royalist party which had for some time been formed in the commons; but on the following day the attorney-general by his orders impeached five members of the lower house and one member of the upper. On the 4th he came in person with a rout of armed followers to the house of Commons to arrest the five who sat in that house. He did not succeed in securing them, but his attempt sharpened all the suspicions abroad and renders an agreement on the larger questions practically impossible. The city too up the cause of the members, and Charles, finding that force was against him, left Whitehall on 10 Jan. never to return till he came back to die.

The next seven months were occupied by manoeuvres between king and parliament to gain possession of the military forces of the kingdom and to place themselves legally in the right before the nation. On 22 Aug. Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, and the civil war began, After an attempt at negotiation the king removed to Shrewsbury, and on 12 Oct. marched upon London, and, after fighting on the 23rd the indecisive battle of Edgehill, occupied Oxford and pushed as far as Brentford. On 13 Nov. he drew back without combating a parlimentary force drawn up on Turnham Green. He thought that the work of suppressing the enemy should be left to the following summer.

In the campaign of 1643 an attempt was made by Charles, perhaps at the suggestion of his general, the Earl of Forth, to carry out a strategic conception which, if it had been successful, would have put an end to the war. He was himself with his main army to hold Oxford, and if possible Reading while the Earl of Newcastle was to advance from the north and Hopton from the west, to seize respectively the north and south banks of the Thames below London, so as to destroy the commerce of the great city which formed the main strength of his adversaries. In the summer of 1643, after the victories of Adwalton Moor (30 June) and Roundway Down (13 July), the plan seemed in a fair way to succeed, but the Yorkshiremen who followed Newcastle and the Cornishmen who followed Hopton were drawn back by their desire of checking the governors of Hull and Plymouth, and when Charles was left with an insufficient force to march unsupported upon London, he had perhaps no choice but to undertake the siege of Gloucester. After the relief of Gloucester by Essex, he fought the first battle of Newbury, in which he failed to hinder the return of Essex to London. A later attempt to push Hopton with a fresh army through Sussex and Kent to the south of the Thames was frustrated by the defeat of that army at Cheriton on 29 March 1644, while Newcastle was battled by the arrival of a Scottish army in the north as the allies of the English parliament, in consequence of the acceptance by the latter body of the solemn league and covenant.

During this campaign Charles had divided his attention between military affairs and political intrigue. On 1 Feb. propositions or peace were carried to the king at Oxford, and a negotiation was opened which came to nothing, because neither party would admit of anything but complete surrender on the part of the other. Charles followed up the failure of negotiation by an attempt to provoke an insurrection in London in his favour; but his most cherished scheme was one for procuring the assistance of the English army in Ireland by bringing about a cessation of