Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/88

 ment of Charles: by much the most notable of all Parliaments till Charles’s Long Parliament met, which proved his last.

Having sharply, with swift impetuosity and indignation, dismissed two Parliaments, because they would not ‘supply’ him without taking ‘grievances’ along with them; and meanwhile and afterwards, having failed in every operation foreign and domestic, at Cadiz, at Rhé, at Rochelle; and having failed, too, in getting supplies by unparliamentary methods, Charles ‘consulted with Sir Robert Cotton what was to be done’; who answered, Summon a Parliament again. So this celebrated Parliament was summoned. It met, as we said, in March 1628, and continued with one prorogation till March 1629. The two former Parliaments had sat but a few weeks each, till they were indignantly hurled asunder again; this one continued nearly a year. Wentworth (Strafford) was of this Parliament; Hampden too, Selden, Pym, Holles, and others known to us: all these had been of former Parliaments as well; Oliver Cromwell, Member for Huntingdon, sat there for the first time.

It is very evident, King Charles, baffled in all his enterprises, and reduced really to a kind of crisis, wished much this Parliament should succeed; and took what he must have thought incredible pains for that end. The poor King strives visibly throughout to control himself, to be soft and patient; inwardly writhing and rustling with royal rage. Unfortunate King, we see him chafing, stamping,—a very fiery steed, but bridled, check-bitted, by innumerable straps and considerations; struggling much to be composed. Alas, it would not do. This Parliament was more Puritanic, more intent on rigorous Law and divine Gospel, than any other had ever been. As indeed all these Parliaments grow strangely in Puritanism; more and ever more earnest rises from the hearts of them all, ‘O Sacred Majesty, lead us not to Antichrist, to Ilegality, to temporal and eternal Perdition!” The Nobility and Gentry of England were then a very strange body of men. The English Squire of the Seventeenth Century clearly