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(Dec. 23) that he shall be brought to trial, as guilty of treason against the people.

The king is removed from Hurst Castle, Dec. 18, and brought to St. James's. Thence he is taken to Windsor Castle, Dec. 22, where the customary respect to royalty is denied him.

A.D. 1649.

The Commons vote that the king of England making war against his parliament is guilty of treason; and also that a high court of justice shall be erected to try "Charles Stuart, king of England," on that charge, Jan. 1. The Peers refuse to concur, and adjourn their house, Jan. 2. The Commons then vote that the supreme authority resides in themselves, Jan. 4; and pass the ordinance for the king's trial, Jan. 6.

Cromwell professes to oppose the proceedings against the king, and Fairfax positively refuses to join in them. The Scottish commissioners protest, but are disregarded.

The officers of the army draw up a proposed new constitution, called "An Agreement of the People,” which is presented to the parliament, Jan. 20.

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The king is brought to Whitehall, Jan. 19. The high court of justice assembles, Jan. 20. The king is brought before it, three different days (Jan. 20, 22, 23), but refuses to acknowledge its jurisdiction. Some formal evidence of his appearing in arms against the parliament is heard, Jan. 26; the king is again brought forward, and demands a conference with the parliament, which is refused. Judgment of death is pronounced against him, Jan. 27.

Ambassadors from Holland arrive to intercede for the king, Jan. 26. They bring a sheet of paper signed and sealed by the prince of Wales, for the heads of the army to fill up with their own terms for sparing the king's life.

The king takes leave of his children (the Princess Elizabeth and the duke of Gloucester), declines to see his nephew (Prince Charles Louis") and other friends, and with the assistance of Dr. Juxon, bishop of London, prepares for death.

The king is brought on foot from St. James's to Whitehall, at ten in the morning. He is allowed to rest awhile, and at 2 in the afternoon is beheaded, Jan. 30. His body is removed to Windsor, and there buried, Feb. 8.

NOTE.

THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE.

MOST writers agree that this court was the mere tool of the army, but Mrs. Hutchinson maintains the direct contrary, in a passage which deserves attention :

"The gentlemen that were appointed his (the king's) judges, and divers others, saw in him a disposition so bent on the ruin of all that opposed him, and of all the righteous and just things that they had contended for, that it was upon the consciences of many of them, that if they did not execute justice upon him, God would require at their hands all the blood and desolation which should arise by their suffering him to escape, when God had brought him into their hands. Although the malice of the malignant party and their apostate brethren seemed to threaten them, yet they thought they ought to cast themselves upon God, while they acted with a good conscience for Him and for their country. Some of them afterwards, for excuse, belied themselves, and said they were under the

He had for some years been an associate of the parliamentarians, and had taken the Covenant.

The delay is believed to have been occasioned

awe of the army, and were persuaded by Cromwell, and the like; but it is certain that all men herein suaded nor compelled, and as there were some were left to their free liberty of acting, neither pernominated in the commission who never sat, and others who sat at first, but durst not hold on, so all the rest might have declined it if they would, when it is apparent they would have suffered nothing by so doing. For those who then declined were afterwards, when they offered themselves, received in again, and had places of more trust and benefit than those who ran the utmost hazard; which they deserved not, for I know, upon certain knowledge, that many, yea, the most of them, retreated, not for conscience, but from fear and worldly prudence, foreseeing that the insolency of the army might grow to that height as to ruin the cause, and reduce the kingdom into the hands of the enemy, and then those who had been most courageous in their country's cause would be given up as victims. These poor men did privately animate those who appeared most publicly, and I knew several of them in whom

by a discussion of the offer of the prince of Wales, but the principal actors doubtless felt that they had already proceeded too far to recede with safety.

I lived to see that saying of Christ fulfilled, He that will save his life shall lose it, and he that for wards it fell out that all their prudent declensions saved not the lives of some nor the estates of

My sake will lose his life shall save it,' when after

others.

therefore did forbear to name me, though
I was then in so great an employment
under them;" and he was not only con-
tinued in his post, but was almost imme-
of State.
diately after appointed one of the Council

"As for Mr. Hutchinson, although he was very much confirmed in his judgment concerning the ause, yet herein being called to an extraordinary On the other hand, however, we have the action, whereof many were of several minds, he statement of Thomas Waite, one of the addressed himself to God by prayer, desiring the regicides, made after his surrender, and Lord that if, through any human frailty, he were led into any error or false opinion in these great now remaining in the Public Record Office. transactions, He would open his eyes, and not suf- He alleges that he was sent for to parliafer him to proceed, but that He would confirm his ment by menacing letters, and was amazed spirit in the truth, and lead him by a right enlight-when he found himself named as a member ened conscience; and finding no check, but a confirmation in his conscience that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately, and in his addresses to God, and in conferences with conscientious, upright, unbiassed persons, proceeded to sign the sentence against the king."

Mrs. Hutchinson's statement, that men were "neither persuaded nor compelled" to take part in the proceedings, is, in substance, made also by Whitelock. He was, he says, named one of the committee of thirty-eight to draw up the charge, but he never attended, and when his advice was requested by the rest, withdrew into the country, taking his fellow-commissioner of the great seal (Sir Thomas Widdrington) with him; in consequence he was left out of the ordinance, which named the commissioners: "I having declared my judgment in the house against this proceeding ...... so that they knew my mind, and

of the court. That he attended on the first day only, but that eight or ten days after he was forced by Cromwell to subscribe his name; and that he was always after looked on suspiciously, from his known unwillingness. The plea, however, did not avail him, and he remained in the Tower till the year 1664, when he and several others were delivered to one Capt. Lambert "for transportation," but where they were sent, or what became of them, does not appear.

One hundred and fifty persons were named in the ordinance as commissioners of the court, but many of them never sat; others withdrew at different stages of the proceedings, and only fifty-eight signed the death-warrant, the first three names being those of John Bradshaw, Thomas Grey, and Oliver Cromwell

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⚫ Tower Records, in Thirtieth Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, App., P. 342.

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THE government of England might | have been with propriety styled a Commonwealth from the 4th of January, 1649, when the Lower House of Parliament voted that the supreme authority resided in themselves alone as the representatives of the people, but the title was not formally assumed until the day of the murder of King Charles.

The House of Peers, reduced to less than twenty sitting members, was in a few days after voted useless, and all power appeared to reside in the Com

The members of the first council were, the earls of Denbigh, Mulgrave, Pembroke, Salisbury, lords Grey of Werke and Grey of Groby; Sir Thomas Fairfax, Cromwell, Skippon, Ludlow, and Hutchinson, soldiers; Bradshaw, Rolles, St. John, Whitelock, and Wilde, lawyers; Sir Arthur Hasilrigge, Sir Harry Vane, Pennington (formerly lord mayor), and 22 others of less note. The palace of Whitehall was assigned to them; they were to hold office for one year only. They divided themselves into five committees, for the army, navy, Ireland, foreign affairs, and law, and the minutes of their proceedings are preserved in the Public Record Office;

mons, and a Council of State which they had created. They were, however, in reality, but the puppets of the "grandees of the army," and of these, one man was so conspicuously the chief, that the ensuing ten years may be correctly described as the reign of Oliver Cromwell.

This remarkable man, born at Huntingdon, April 25, 1599, was the son of Robert Cromwell, and the grandson of Sir Henry Williams (or Cromwell), of Hinchinbrook, who claimed descent from the ancient princes of Wales.

Walter Frost was their general secretary, and John Milton their secretary for foreign tongues. With some changes in the men, effected by ballot, this was the executive until Cromwell dispersed the parliament, but that event had been preceded by fierce dissensions between the civilians and the military members.

b Such seems to have been the view of his contemporaries; as Whitelock mentions, under date of Dec. 18, 1649, the seizure of "a packet of scandalous books," one of which was named "The Character of King Cromwell."

Oliver was in 1616 sent to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and subsequently professed to study the law in London, but was not distinguished for orderly conduct or application in either. He soon retired to the country, and married; obtained, by bequest from an uncle, a considerable addition to his property; and held largely as a lessee from the bishop of Ely. He had now become a Puritan, but was named a justice of the peace for his native town in a new charter granted in 1630. He was member for Huntingdon in the first three parliaments of Charles I., and was a person of sufficient consequence to greatly impede the drainage of the Fen district, which had been granted to the earl of Bedford, with powers that were generally regarded as too extensive. On the failure of his kinsman Hampden's attempt to resist the payment of shipmoney, many Puritan families (Hampden's and Cromwell's among them) attempted to retire to New England, but were obliged to disembark from their ships.

Cromwell sat in the Long Parliament as member for Cambridge, and when the civil war broke out he soon distinguished himself by his courage and address. The compact organization of the eastern counties, known as the Association, was mainly his work, although Lord Kimbolton was the nominal head. Cromwell, however, would not long be his subordinate; quarrels ensued, and the result was the Selfdenying Ordinance, which removed Essex and the Presbyterians, remodelled the army, gained the victory of Naseby, and extinguished the war.

He thus became wealthy enough to be called on to receive knighthood; but he preferred to pay L10 for exemption, April 20, 1631.

See A.D. 1637.

• See A.D. 1645.

The principal of these were Desborough, his brother-in-law; Fleetwood, his son-in-law; Lambert, Ludlow, and Harrison.

Foreign conquests had been so long unknown to England, that these acquisitions greatly strengthened his government. Waller, the poet, who from a royalist (see A.D. 1643) had become the panegyrist of the Protector, exclaims:

Our dying hero from the continent

Fairfax, the lord-general, gave himself up blindly to the bidding of Cromwell, suffered the parliament to be reduced to a mere committee of the army, and saw the king put to death without an effort to save him; but he would not make war on his fellow-Presbyterians of Scotland, and thus resigned his command, which, as a matter of course, became the prize of Cromwell. A short space sufficed for him to overthrow the Irish, the Scots, and the young king himself; when the parliament attempted to reduce the army, they fell also, and Cromwell became lord-protector, and aspired to the higher name of king, but this his own officers would not allow him to assume.

The republicans, whom Cromwell had overthrown, had governed with vigour, and had raised the reputation of the country abroad; the Protector followed a like course. He speedily concluded the Dutch war, on his own terms, saw his alliance sedulously courted by both France and Spain, chastised the insolence of the Barbary corsairs and the petty Italian states, and did much to redeem his declaration that "he would make the name of an Englishman as much feared as that of a Roman had ever been." He turned his arms, on no very evident provocation, against the Spaniards, wrested both Jamaica and Dunkirk from them, and captured or destroyed their treasure-ships. He allied himself with France, and obliged the intriguing Mazarin to consent to exclude the royalist exiles, as the price of his assistance in the Low Countries; he also compelled him to protect the Protestant Vaudois against the cruelty

Nor hath he left us prisoners to our isle;
Under the tropic is our language spoke,
And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.
From civil broils he did us disengage,
Found nobler objects for our martial rage;
And, with wise conduct, to his country show'd.
The ancient way of conquering abroad.”

h Julius Mazarin, of a Sicilian family, was born in 1602, at Piscina, in the Abbruzzi. By a long course of intrigue he attained the direction of affairs in France, trained up Louis XIV. in ideas of encroachment on his neighbours, and prepared the way for his conquests. His views were less grand than those of Richelieu, but he was at least as

Ravish'd whole towns; and forts from Spaniards cruel, and more cunning. Mazarin became a car.

reft,

As his last legacy to Britain left.

The ocean, which so long our hopes confined,
Could give no limits to his vaster mind;
Our bounds' enlargement was his latest toil,

dinal, aggrandised his family, and died in 1661, entitled, as his only commendation, to the praise of a patron of letters.

1 Cromwell interested himself warmly in favour of these people. He offered them lands in Irc

of the Duke of Savoy, whom he could not himself reach.

ful.

At home Cromwell was less successHe called two parliaments, but found neither of them compliant, and was obliged to rule avowedly by the sword. Intended risings against his government and plots against his life were discovered in every quarter; the Levellers, the more moderate republicans, the Presbyterians, and the royalists combined to overthrow him, and he had few other adherents beside his soldiery. Worn out by anxiety and disease, he died at Whitehall, Sept. 3, 1658, in the sixth year of his assumption of government, and was buried in the chapel of Henry VII., at Westminster, shortly after'.

Cromwell had married Elizabeth Bourchier, and left, beside daughters, two sons, Richard and Henry, of whom one was, at the time of his father's death, lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and the other was for a brief period ac

land, gave £2,000 towards a subscription for their relief, which soon amounted to more than £30,000, then a very large sum, and paid the expense of printing a History of their sufferings, drawn up by his agent, Samuel Morland. Milton's noble sonnet relating to them is familiar to all.

It is singular that Whitelock, usually so well informed, should have made the mistake of asserting that Cromwell died at Hampton Court, "about two in the afternoon." Clarendon, agreeing with the official account, says correctly, at Whitehall.

His body was buried privately very shortly after his death, but the public funeral did not take place until Nov. 23, and was of the most pompous description. Letters patent were granted Nov. 22, 1659, by "the Keepers of the liberty of England by authority of Parliament," for the payment of £6,929 6s. 5d. to Robert Walton, citizen and draper of London, for "black cloth and bays for the funeral of his late highness."

They were married Aug. 22, 1620, at the church of St. Giles Cripplegate, London.

"Richard went on the Continent just before the Restoration, and remained abroad until about 1680, then returned to England, and lived at Cheshunt antil 1712, under an assumed name. Henry retired to Spinney Abbey, in Cambridgeshire, and lived as a country gentleman to 1674. Elizabeth, married to Mr. Claypole, died Aug. 6, 1658. Bridget, married successively to Ireton and to Fleetwood, died in 1681. Mary, countess Fauconberg, died in 1712; and Frances, Lady Russell, survived till 1721. Cromwell's eldest son, Robert, died in 1639; and another son, Oliver, a captain in the army, was killed in opposing the duke of Hamilton, in 1648.

John Lambert, born in Yorkshire in 1619, was a law student, but joined the parliamentary army as soon as the war broke out. He rose to be general of Cromwell's forces, but refused to acknowledge him as Protector, and resigned his post. He failed in an attempt to establish a military government after the retirement of Richard Cromwell, and was condemned to death. His life, however, was spared. He amused his leisure with painting, and cultivating flowers, his imprisonment being by no means rigorous, for he had shewn kindness when in power to many of the royal party,

knowledged as lord-protector". But the officers of the army, headed by Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough, soon seized on the government, recalled the Long Parliament, then dismissed it and again attempted to govern in their own name; they were, however, circumvented by Monk, and the lawful king was recalled, who entered London amid so great a display of fervent loyalty, that he pleasantly remarked that "it must surely have been his own fault that had kept him so long away from such excellent subjects."

That Oliver Cromwell possessed great talents for war and government is allowed by Clarendon, Ludlow, and other hostile delineators of his charac

ter. They justly charge him with hypocrisy, violence, and boundless ambition; but, on the other hand, are obliged to confess that he had filled the post he had usurped with vigour, and with decent splendour, and re

and this was not forgotten. He died a Romanist, in 1683.

P Edmund Ludlow, born in 1620 at Maiden Bradley, was bred to the law, but took up arms for the parliament, and exhibited much zeal in their cause. He had imbibed the sternest republican principles, and hence he not only sat as one of the king's judges, but was also a resolute opponent of the usurpation of Cromwell. On the Restoration he was committed to the Tower, Sept. 6, 1660, but escaped. He visited England in the three following years in the hope of heading a new revolt. Failing in this, he retired to the Continent, and did not return until after the Revolution. His reception, however, was so unfavourable, that he soon departed, and he died at Vevay in 1693. His Memoirs, written in exile, are devoted to a vindication of "the good old cause," and, though perhaps depicting its opponents in too dark colours, have a high degree of interest and value.

9 Mrs. Hutchinson, who may be considered as speaking the sentiments of the Independents, gives a very unfavourable character of Cromwell and his family. She says,-"Cromwell and his army grew wanton with their power, and invented a thousand tricks of government, which, when nobody opposed, they themselves fell to dislike and vary every day... He weeded in a few months' time above one hundred and fifty godly officers out of the army, with whom many of the religious soldiers went off, and in their room abundance of the king's dissolute soldiers were entertained. . . . His wife and children were setting up for principality, which suited no better on any of them than scarlet on the ape; only, to speak the truth of himself, he had much natural greatness, and well became the place he had usurped. His daughter Fleetwood was humbled, and not exalted with these things, but the rest were insolent fools. Claypole, who married his daughter, and his son Henry, were two debauched, ungodly cavaliers. Richard was a peasant in his nature, yet gentle and virtuous, but became not greatness. His court was full of sin and vanity, and the more abominable, that they had not yet quite cast away the name of God, but profaned it by taking it in vain upon them."

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