Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/150

 Apprentices’ (Miscellaneous Persons and City Shopmen, as we should now call them), who rolled about there ‘all day,’ bellowing to every Lord as he went in or came out, ‘with a loud and hideous voice’: ‘Justice on Strafford! Justice on Traitors!’ —which seemed ominous to the Rev. Mr. Baillie.

In which same hours, amid such echoes from without, the honourable House of Commons within doors, all in great tremor about Army-Plots, Treasons, Death-perils, was busy redacting a ‘Protestation’; a kind of solemn Vow, or miniature Scotch Covenant, the first of a good many such in those earnest agitated times,—to the effect: ‘We take the Supreme to witness that we will stand by one another to the death in prosecution of our just objects here; in defence of Law, Loyalty and Gospel here.’ To this effect; but couched in very mild language, and with a ‘Preamble,’ in which our Terror of Army-Plots, the moving principle of the affair, is discreetly almost shaded out of sight; it being our object that the House should be ‘unanimous’ in the Protestation. As accordingly the House was; the House, and to a great extent the Nation. Hundreds of honourable Members, Mr. Cromwell one of them, sign the Protestation this day; the others on the following days: their names all registered in due succession in the Books. Nay, it is ordered that the whole Nation be invited to sign it; that each honourable Member send it down to his constituents, and invite them to sign it. Which, as we say, the constituents, all the reforming part of them, everywhere in England, did; with a feeling of solemnity very strange to the modern mind. Striking terror into all Traitors; quashing down Army-Plots for the present, and the hopes of poor Strafford for ever. A Protestation held really sacred; appealed to, henceforth, as a thing from which there was no departing. Cavalcades of Freeholders, coming up from the country to petition the Honourable House,—for instance, the Four-thousand Petitioners from Buckinghamshire, about ten