Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/89

 the war there, and eventually of securing the aid of a body of ten thousand Irish Celts. The cessation was agreed to on 15 Sept. 1643, and several English regiments were shipped from Ireland for service in England. The native Irish were not to be had as yet.

The campaign of 1644 was conducted upon a different plan from that of 1643. This time, instead of converging upon London, the royalist armies were to make full use of their central position at Oxford. Sending Rupert to assist Newcastle to defeat the Scots and their English allies, Charles was to remain on the defensive, unless he was able to throw himself alternatively on the armies of Essex and Waller, which were for the moment combined against him, but which might at any time rate, as their commanders were known not to be on good terms with one another. If Rupert had been a good tactician, the plan might have succeeded, but he suffered himself to be overwhelmed—principally by the conduct of Cromwell—at Marston Moor, on 2 July; and though Charles inflicted a check on Waller at Cropredy Bridge on 29 June, and subsequently compelled the surrender of Essex’s infantry at Lostwithiel on 2 Sept., his wish to avoid unnecessary bloodshed prevented him from insisting, as he might easily have done, upon more than the delivery of the arms and stores of the force which he had overpowered. He had consequently to meet the arm of Essex again in combination with that of Waller and Manchester, at the second battle of Newbury, on 27 Oct. Night came on as he was getting the worst, but he slipped away under cover of the darkness, and suceeded in revictualling Donnington Castle and Basing House, so that when he entered Oxford on 23 Nov. he had baffled all the efforts of his adversaries, so far as his own part of the campaign was concerned.

The negotiations at Uxbridge, which were carried on in January and February 1645, failed from the same causes as those which had produced the failure of the negotiations at Oxford in 1643. Charles's real efforts were thrown into an attempt to check the advance of the Scots by procuring money and arms, and if possible an army from the Duke of Lorraine, and by inducing the Irish to lend him the ten thousand men of whom mention has already been made. The Irish would, however, only grant the soldiers on condition of the concession of the independence of the Irish parliament, and of the Roman catholic church in Ireland, and though Charles was prepared to go a very long way to meet them, he refused to comply with the whole of their demands. All the external aid which he was able to command was that of a small body of Irish and of Scottish highlanders under Montrose, which won astonishing victories in the north of Scotland. In the meanwhile the parliamentary army had been remodelled, and against the new model, filled with religious enthusiasm and submitting to the strictest discipline, Charles dashed himself at Naseby on 14 June, to meet only with a disastrous overthrow.

The defeat at Naseby was decisive. For some months parliamentary victories were won over royalist detachments, and royalist fortresses stormed or reduced by famine. Charles never was in a position to fight a pitched battle again. All sober men on his own side longed for peace. Charles fancied that to submit would be to betray God’s cause as well as his own. ‘I confess,' he wrote to Rupert on 3 Aug., ‘that, speaking either as to mere soldier or statesman, I must say there is no probability but of my ruin; but as a christian, I must tell you that God will not suffer rebels to prosper, or his cause to be overthrown, and whatsoever personal punishment it shall please them to inflict upon me must not make me repine, much less to give over this quarrel, which, by the grace of God, I am resolved against, whatsoever it cost me; for I know my obligations to be both in conscience and honour neither to abandon God's cause, injure my successors, nor forsake my friends.'

There would have been something approaching to the sublime in Charles's refusal to recognise a settlement which he honestly believed to be abhorrent to God, if only he had been content to possess his soul in patience. During that winter and the following summer he plunged from one intrigue into another. No help in whatever quarter came amiss to him, and while the queen was pleading for a foreign army to be levied, with the help of the queen regent of France he was himself negotiating through Ormonde for ten thousand Irish Celts. Whether he actually authorised the notorious Glamorgan treaty or not [see ], the authenticated negotiation carried on by the lord-lieutenant of Ireland was quite sufficient to ruin Charles (Carte MSS. Bodleian Library). Letters, bringing to light his secret negotiations with foreign courts, had come into the possession of the parliamentary army at Naseby, and now a copy of the Glamorgan treaty fell into the hands of his enemies, with the result of shocking the public opinion of the day even more than it had been shocked before. Then, too, he proposed to treat with the parliament at Westminstsr, not because he expected them to grant his demands, but because he expected