Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/154

 thousands strong, with sword and pistol, out of the City. ‘Slash us now! while we wait on the Honourable House for an answer to our petition!’—and insulted his Majesty’s Guard at Whitehall. What a Christmas of that old London, of that old year! On the 6th of February following, Episcopacy will be voted down, with blaze of ‘bonfires,’ and ‘ringing’ of all the bells,—very audible to poor old Dr. Laud over in the Tower yonder.

January 4th. His Majesty seeing these extremities arrive, and such a conflagration begin to blaze, thought now the time had come for snatching the main livecoals away, and so quenching the same. Such coals of strife he counts to the number of Five in the Commons House, and One in the Lords: Pym, Hampden, Haselrig, with Holles and Strode (who held down the Speaker fourteen years ago), these are the Five Commons; Lord Kimbolton, better known to us as Mandevil, Oliver’s friend, of the ‘Soke of Somersham,’ and Queen’s-Court Committee, he is the Lord. His Majesty flatters himself he has gathered evidence concerning these individual firebrands, That they ‘invited the Scots to invade us’ in 1640: he sends, on Monday 3d January, to demand that they be given up to him as Traitors. Deliberate, slow and, as it were, evasive reply. Whereupon, on the morrow, he rides down to St. Stephen’s himself, with an armed very miscellaneous force, of Five-hundred or of Three-hundred truculent braggadocio persons at his back; enters the House of Commons, the truculent persons looking in after him from the lobby,—with intent to seize the said Five Members, five principal hot coals; and trample them out, for one thing. It was the fatalest step this poor King ever took. The Five Members, timefully warned, were gone into the City; the whole Parliament removed itself into the City, ‘to be safe from armed violence.’ From London City, and from all England, rose one loud voice of lamentation,