This was not true, for though "our whole army made the most shameful and confounding flight that was ever heard of," they had no chance of taking revenge with such a commander, being only about four thousand five hundred altogether, horse and foot, while the Scots were twenty-six thousand strong. Moreover, the English had no heart for the work, while the Scots were resolute as one man, and commanded by officers who had grown grey in the service of the victorious Swede, the great Gustavus Adolphus. When the English forces reached Newcastle, they did not feel able to defend it against such an army, and they fled on to Durham. The Scots could scarcely believe their eyes when they found Newcastle evacuated.
The retreating English army, under the panic-stricken Conway, meantime dared not even stop at Durham, but continued their flight to Darlington, where they met Strafford coming up with reinforcements. He was suffering from gout and stone, and in a marvellously bad humour at the late scandalous disaster; and he must have seen enough of the demoralisation of Conway's troops, for he turned back with him to Northallerton, where Charles was lying with the bulk of his army. Altogether, Charles had now twenty thousand men and sixty pieces of cannon wherewith to face the Scots; but the disaffection became so manifest, the desertions so frequent, and the whole condition of the force so unsatisfactory, that though Strafford professed to speak with contempt of the Scots, he assured Charles that it would require two months to put his army into fighting order. They therefore fell back upon York, intending to entrench a camp under its walls, and to send the cavalry to Richmond or Cleveland to guard the passes of the Tees.
The Scots had meanwhile taken unopposed possession of Newcastle, Durham, Shields, Tynemouth, and other towns, and were masters of the four northern counties of England, without having lost twenty men. In this position it has been matter of wonder that they did not still advance, and drive the king before them; but those writers who have thus imagined have greatly mistaken the whole business. The object of the Scots was not, as of old, to annoy and devastate, much less to conquer England; it was simply to force from the king and his evil ministers the recognition and the guarantee of their just national rights. They had advanced into England with this plain declaration; they had attempted not to fight except so far as to force their way to the king's presence. To this they were, in fact, now come. They had achieved a vantage-ground from which to treat, and, though strongly posted, and possessed of the whole country north of the Tees, they had refrained from all ravages and impositions on the people with whom they had no quarrel, paying for whatever they needed. To have done otherwise, would have broken faith with the people of England, who were seeking the same redress of grievances as themselves, and have at once roused the jealousy of the English public, who would have regarded them as invaders instead of friends, and thus strengthened the hands of the king. The Scots knew perfectly well what they were about, and how best to obtain their just demands. They now therefore sent Lord Lanark, Secretary of State for Scotland, and brother of the Marquis of Hamilton, to present the petition of the Covenanters to the king, who was plainly in a strait and therefore compelled to listen to it. They respectfully repeated their pacific designs, and implored the king to assemble a Parliament, and by its wisdom to settle peace between the two kingdoms. This was precisely what the people of England were earnestly seeking, and demonstrates the perfect concert between the leaders of the two nations. To assemble a Parliament was of all things the last which Charles was disposed to consent to, but he was in no condition to refuse altogether. He therefore took three days to consider their request, and on the 5th of September returned to Lord Lanark the answer, that he would assemble a great council of English Peers in York to settle the matters in dispute between them, and that he had already summoned this Assembly for the 24th of that month. By this means Charles endeavoured to escape the necessity of calling a Parliament, but his hesitation did not avail him. All parties were too much interested to let this opportunity slip. Twelve peers—Bedford, Essex, Hertford, Warwick, Bristol, Mulgrave, Say and Sele, Howard, Bolingbroke, Mandeville, Brooke, and Paget—presented a petition, urgently representing the necessity of a Parliament, and describing the sufferings of the nation from the lawlessness of the soldiers, the damage done to trade by the arbitrary levies on merchants, and the danger of bringing in wild Irish troops. The citizens of London prepared a similar one, which Laud endeavoured to quash, but in vain; they obtained ten thousand signatures, and despatched some of the Aldermen and members of the Common Council to present it at York. The gentry of Yorkshire presented another, detailing their sufferings from the support of the army, and their cry, too, was for a Parliament. Strafford, who was desired to present it, endeavoured to persuade them to leave the prayer for a Parliament out, on pretence that he knew the king meant to call one; but they would on no account omit it. Thus pressed on all sides, Charles was reluctantly compelled to promise, and on the meeting of the great council of Peers on the 24th, announced to them that he had issued the writs for the meeting of a Parliament on the 3rd of November.
ADVANCE OF THE COVENANTERS ACROSS THE BORDER INTO ENGLAND. (See p. [587].)
The Scots had comprised their demands under seven heads, the chief of which were the full and free exercise of their religion; the total abolition of episcopacy; the restoration of their ships and goods; the recall of the offensive epithet of traitors; and the punishment of the evil counsellors who had created all these troubles. The Lords, delighted at the prospect of a Parliament, saw no difficulty in coming to terms with the Scots. They named sixteen of their own body to meet with eight Commissioners of the Covenanters at Ripon, to negotiate the terms of a peace, and sent a deputation of six other lords to London, to raise for the king a loan of two hundred thousand pounds, on their own securities. Charles would have drawn the Conference from Ripon to York, where his army lay, but the Scots were too cautious to be caught in such a snare. They represented the danger of their putting their Commissioners into the power of an army commanded by Strafford, one of the very incendiaries against whom they were complaining, and who termed them rebels and traitors in the Parliament in Ireland, and had recommended the king to subdue and destroy them. The Conference was opened at Ripon, but got no further from the 1st to the 16th of October, than the settlement of the question of the maintenance of the Scottish army till all was concluded. Charles offered to leave them at liberty to make assessments for themselves, but this they declined, as looking too much like plundering; and it was finally agreed that they should retain their position in the four northern counties, and receive eight hundred and eighty pounds for two months, binding themselves to commit no depredations on any party; and the time for the meeting of Parliament approaching, the Conference was adjourned to London on the 24th.
The last Parliament had been called the Short Parliament; this was destined to acquire the name of the Long Parliament, never to be dissolved till it had dissolved the monarchy—the most memorable Parliament that ever sat. "The Parliament," says Clarendon, "met on the 3rd of November, 1640. It had a sad and a melancholie aspect upon the first entrance, which presaged some unusual and unnatural events. The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipages, nor in his usual majesty to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the Parliament stairs, and so to the church, as if it had been a return of a prorogued or adjourned Parliament. There was likewise an untoward, and, in truth, an unheard of accident, which broke many of the king's measures, and infinitely disordered his service beyond a capacity of reparation."
This was the defeat in the City of the man on whom he had fixed as Speaker of the Commons, Sir Thomas Gardiner, the Recorder of London, a lawyer on whom Charles greatly calculated for managing the House. But that very morning he learned that Gardiner had been thrown out as one of the four members, and he was so confounded that it was afternoon before he could go to the House. There Lenthall, a bencher of Lincoln's Inn, was immediately elected Speaker, and Charles, believing him well affected to the Church and State, when two days afterwards he was, according to custom, presented to him, confirmed the choice, which he afterwards most bitterly repented. But it was not only in the case of the Speaker that the king was doomed to see himself disappointed. The whole body of the House was of a new character and spirit. "There was," says Clarendon, "observed a marvellous elated countenance in most of the members of Parliament before they met together in the House. The same men, who six months before were observed to be of very moderate tempers, and to wish that gentle remedies might be applied without opening the wound too wide and exposing it to the air, and rather to excuse what was amiss than too strictly make inquisition into the causes and origin of the malady, talked now in another dialect both of things and persons. Mr. Hyde, who was returned to serve for a borough in Cornwall, met Mr. Pym in Westminster Hall some days before the Parliament, and conferring together on the state of affairs, Pym told Hyde that 'they now must be of another temper than they were the last Parliament; that they must not only sweep the house clean below, but must pull down the cobwebs which hung on the tops and corners, that they might not breed dust, and so make a foul house hereafter. That they had now an opportunity to make their country happy by removing all grievances, and pulling up the causes of them by the roots, if all men would do their duties;' and used much other sharp discourse to the same purpose, by which it was discerned that the warmest and boldest counsels and overtures would find a much better reception than those of a more temperate allay, which fell out accordingly."