Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/52

. "For what king's majesty," asks the immortal defender of the regicides, Milton, "sitting on an exalted throne ever shone so brightly as that of the people of England then did, when, shaking off that old superstition which had prevailed a long time, they gave judgment on the king himself, or rather upon an enemy who had been their king, caught, as it were, in a net by his own laws, and scrupled not to inflict on him, being guilty, the same punishment which he would have inflicted on any other? &hellip; This is the God," he continues, "who uses to throw down proud and unruly kings &hellip; and utterly to extirpate them and their family. By his manifest impulse being set at work to recover our almost lost liberty, we went on in no obscure but an illustrious passage pointed out and made plain to us by God himself."

At his trial Charles vainly declined to recognize the authority of the court, on the silly pretext that he himself was "the fountain of all law." "If you are the fountain of all law," curtly observed Bradshaw, "the people are the source of all rights." When the Cromwellian coup d'etat took place. Sir Peter Wentworth was, I think, the last man in the House to protest against the violence offered to the representatives of the people; and Bradshaw afterwards told the military usurper to his face, "We have heard what you did, and all England shall know it. Sir, you are mistaken in thinking Parliament is dissolved. No power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves. Take you notice of that."

One of Sir Peter Wentworth's sisters was married to Bradshaw's brother; while another, Sybil Wentworth, became the wife of Fisher Dilke, from which