Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/367

Rh FUE1TA.N KE VOLUTION.] ENGLAND 347 The Scot ish in- asion. rleetiiij f Lon^ arlia- leut. ittain- jer of traf- ird. ver- BTOW Of rbitrury overn- ueut. )ivision )fthe Souse nto parties. system. Charles thought that it would not be worth while even to conquer Scotland on such terms, and dissolved parliament. A fresh war with Scotland followed. Went- worth, now earl of Strafford, became the leading adviser of the king. With all the energy of his disposition he threw himself into Charles s plans, and left no stone unturned to furnish the new expedition with supplies and money. But no skilfulness of a commander can avail when soldiers are determine.! not to fight. The Scotch crossed the Tweed, and Charles s army was well pleased to fly before them. In a short time the whole of Northumberland and Durham were in the hands of the invaders. Charles was obliged to leave these two counties in their hands as a pledge for the payment of their expenses ; and he was also obliged to summon parliament to grant him the supplies which he needed for that object. When the Long Parliament met in November 1640, they were in a position in which no parliament had been before. Though nominally the Houses did not command a single soldier, they had in reality the whole Scottish army at their back. By refusing supplies they would put it out of the king s power to fulfil his engagements to that army, and it would immediately pursue its onward march to claim its rights. Hence there was scarcely anything which the king could venture t:&amp;gt; deny the Commons. Under Pym s leadership, they began by asking the head of Strafford. Nominally he was accused of a number of acts of oppression in the north of England and in Ireland. His real offence lay in his attempt to make the king absolute, and in the design with which he was credited of intending to bring over an Irish army to crush the liberties of England. If he had been a man of moderate abilities lie might have escaped. But the Commons feared his commanding genius too much to let him go free. They began with an impeachment. Difficulties arose, and the impeachment was turned into a bill of attainder. The king abandoned his minister, and the execution of Strafford left Charles without a single man of supreme ability on his side. Then came rapidly a suc cession of blows at the supports by which the Tudor monarchy had been upheld. The courts of Star Chamber and High Commission and the Council of the North were abolished. The raising of tonnage and poundage without a parliamentary grant was declared illegal. The judges who had given obnoxious decisions were called to answer for their fault, and were taught that they were responsible to the House of Commons as well as the king. Finally, a bill was passed providing that the existing House should not be dissolved without its own consent. It was clearly a revolutionary position which the House had assumed. But it was assumed because it was impossible to expect that a king who had ruled as Charles had ruled could take up a new position as the exponent of the feelings which were represented in the Commons. As long as Charles lived he could not be otherwise than an object of suspicion ; and yet if he were dethroned there was no one available to fill his place. There arose therefore two parties in the House, one ready to trust the king, the other disinclined to put any confidence in him at all. The division was the sharper because it coincided with a difference in matters of religion. Scarcely any one wished to see the Laudian ceremonies upheld. But the members who favoured the king, and who formed a considerable minority, wished to see a certain liberty of religious thought, together with a return under a modified Episcopacy to the forms of worship which prevailed before Laud had taken the church in hand. The other side, which had the majority by a few votes, wished to see the Puritan creed prevail in all its strictness, and were favourable to the establishment of the Presbyterian discipline. The king, by his unwise acii(.&amp;gt;n, tnrew power into the hands of his opponents. He listened with tolerable calmness to their Grand Remonstrance, but his attempt to seize the five members whom he accused of high treason made a good understanding impossible. The Scottish army had been paid off some months before, and civil war was the only means of deciding the quarrel. At first the fortune of war wavered. Edgehill was a The civil drawn battle (1642), and the campaign of 1643, though it war - was on the whole favourable to the king, gave no decisive results. Before the year was at an end parliament invited a new Scottish army to intervene in England. As an in ducement, the Solemn League and Covenant was signed by all Parliamentarian Englishmen, the terms of which were interpreted by the Scotch to bind England to submit to Presbyterianism, though the most important clauses had been purposely left vague, so as to afford a loophole of escape. The battle of Marston Moor, with the defeat of the Presty- Royalist forces in the north, was the result. But the battle terians did not improve the position of the Scots. They had been repulsed, and the victory was justly ascribed to the English contingent. The composition of that contingent was such as to have a special political significance. It leader was Oliver Cromwell. It was formed by men who were fierce Puritan enthusiasts, and who for the very reason that the intensity of their religion separated them from the mass of their countrymen, had learnt to uphold with all the energy of zeal the doctrine that neither church nor state had a right to interfere with the forms of worship which each congregation might select for itself. They were commonly known as Independents, from the communities which had sprung up under the name of Separatists in the reign of Elizabeth, and which maintained the principle of congrega tional independence; though many other sects found a place in their ranks. The principle advocated by the army, and opposed by Compre- the Scotch and the majority of the House of Commons, tension was liberty of sectarian association. Some years earlier, an * under the dominion of Laud, another principle had been proclaimed by Chillingworth and Hales, that of liberty of thought to be maintained within the unity of the church. Both these movements conduced to the ultimate establish ment of toleration, the one by permitting those to worship as they saw fit whose faith was too definite to enable them to be content with outward forms by which their particular belief was not clearly expressed, the other by allowing those whose charity was greater than their polemical zeal to find a common ground to worship side by side with others whose beliefs did not entirely coincide with their own. For the present the Independents were to have their way. Over- The Presbyterian leaders, Essex and Manchester, were throw of not successful leaders. The army was remodelled after ie ing Cromwell s pattern, and the king was finally crushed at Naseby (1645). The next year (1646) he surrendered to the Scots. Then followed two years of fruitless negotiation, in which after the Scotch abandoned the king to the English parliament, the army took him out of the hands of the parliament, whilst each in turn tried to find some basis of arrangement on which he might appear to sit on the throne without again misdirecting the government. Such a basis The could not be found, and when Charles stirred up a fresh second civil war and a Scottish invasion (1643), the leaders of the cmlwar - army vowed that, if victory was theirs, they would bring him to justice. To do this it was necessary to drive out a large number of the members of the House of Commons, by what was known as Pride s Purge, and to obtain from the mutilated Commons the dismissal of the House of Lords, and the establishment of a high court of justice, before which the king was brought to trial, and sentenced