Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/155

 condemnation: Clean against law! Paint an inch thick, there is, was, or can be, no shadow of law in this. Will you grant us the Militia now; we seem to need it now!—His Majesty’s subsequent stages may be dated with more brevity.

January 10th. The King with his Court quits Whitehall; the Five Members and Parliament purposing to return tomorrow, with the whole City in arms round them. He left Whitehall; never saw it again till he came to lay down his head there.

March 9th. The King has sent away his Queen from Dover, ‘to be in a place of safety,’—and also to pawn the Crown Jewels in Holland, and get him arms. He returns Northward again, avoiding London. Many Messages between the Houses of Parliament and him: ‘Will your Majesty grant us Power of the Militia; accept this list of Lord-Lieutenants?’ On the 9th of March, still advancing Northward without affirmative response, he has got to Newmarket; where another Message overtakes him, earnestly urges itself upon him: Could not your Majesty please to grant us Power of the Militia for a limited time? ‘No, by God! answers his Majesty, ‘not for an hour!’ —On the 19th of March he is at York; where his Hull Magazine, gathered for service against the Scots, is lying near; where a great Earl of Newcastle, and other Northern potentates, will help him; where at least London and its Puritanism, now grown so fierce, is far off.

There we will leave him; attempting Hull Magazine, in vain; exchanging messages with his Parliament; messages, missives, printed and written Papers without limit:—Law-pleadings of both parties before the great tribunal of the English Nation, each party striving to prove itself right, and within the verge of Law: preserved still in acres of typography, once thrillingly alive in every fibre of them; now a mere torpor, readable by few creatures, not rememberable by any. It is too clear his Majesty will have to get himself an army, by Commission of Array, by subscriptions of loyal plate,