[242] Clarendon has several remarkable passages, chiefly towards the end of the fifth book of his History, on the slowness and timidity of the royalist party before the commencement of the civil war. The peers at York, forming, in fact, a majority of the upper house, for there were nearly forty of them, displayed much of this. Want of political courage was a characteristic of our aristocracy at this period, bravely as many behaved in the field. But I have no doubt that a real jealousy of the king's intentions had a considerable effect.
They put forth a declaration, signed by all their hands, on the 15th of June 1642, professing before God their full persuasion that the king had no design to make war on the parliament, and that they saw no colour of preparations or counsels that might reasonably beget a belief of any such designs; but that all his endeavours tended to the settlement of the protestant religion, the just privileges of parliament, the liberty of the subject, etc. This was an ill-judged, and even absurd piece of hypocrisy, calculated to degrade the subscribers; since the design of raising troops was hardly concealed, and every part of the king's conduct since his arrival at York manifested it. The commission of array, authorising certain persons in each county to raise troops, was in fact issued immediately after this declaration. It is rather mortifying to find Lord Falkland's name, not to mention others, in this list; but he probably felt it impossible to refuse his signature, without throwing discredit on the king; and no man engaged in a party ever did, or ever can, act with absolute sincerity; or at least he can be of no use to his friends, if he does adhere to this uncompromising principle.
The commission of array was ill-received by many of the king's friends, as not being conformable to law. Clarendon, iii. 91. Certainly it was not so; but it was justifiable as the means of opposing the parliament's ordinance for the militia, at least equally illegal. This, however, shows very strongly the cautious and constitutional temper of many of the royalists, who could demur about the legality of a measure of necessity, since no other method of raising an army would have been free from similar exception. The same reluctance to enter on the war was displayed in the propositions for peace, which the king, in consequence of his council's importunity, sent to the two houses through the Earl of Southampton, just before he raised his standard at Nottingham.
[243] According to a list made by the House of Lords, May 25, 1642, the peers with the king at York were thirty-two; those who remained at Westminster, forty-two. But of the latter, more than ten joined the others before the commencement of the war, and five or six afterwards; two or three of those at York returned. During the war there were at the outside thirty peers who sat in the parliament.
[244] Life of Clarendon, p. 56.
[245] May, p. 165.
[246] Both sides claimed the victory. May, who thinks that Essex, by his injudicious conduct after the battle, lost the advantage he had gained in it, admits that the effect was to strengthen the king's side. "Those who thought his success impossible began to look upon him as one who might be a conqueror, and many neuters joined him."—P. 176. Ludlow is of the same opinion as to Essex's behaviour and its consequences: "Our army, after some refreshment at Warwick, returned to London, not like men that had obtained a victory, but as if they had been beaten."—P. 52. This shows that they had not in fact obtained much of a victory; and Lord Wharton's report to parliament almost leads us to think the advantage, upon the whole, to have been with the king. Parl. Hist. ii. 1495.
[247] May, 212; Baillie, 373, 391.
[248] May, Baillie, Mrs. Hutchinson, are as much of this opinion as Sir Philip Warwick and other royalist writers. It is certain that there was a prodigious alarm, and almost despondency, among the parliamentarians. They immediately began to make entrenchments about London, which were finished in a month. May, p. 214. In the Somers Tracts, iv. 534, is an interesting letter from a Scotsman then in London, giving an account of these fortifications, which, considering the short time employed about them, seem to have been very respectable, and such as the king's army, with its weak cavalry and bad artillery, could not easily have carried. Lord Sunderland, four days before the battle of Newbury wherein he was killed, wrote to his wife, that the king's affairs had never been in a more prosperous condition; that sitting down before Gloscester had prevented their finishing the war that year, "which nothing could keep us from doing, if we had a month's more time." Sidney Letters, ii. 671. He alludes in the same letters to the divisions in the royal party.
[249] Parl. Hist. iii. 45, 48. It seems natural to think that, if the moderate party were able to contend so well against their opponents, after the desertion of a great many royalist members who had joined the king, they would have maintained a decisive majority, had these continued in their places. But it is to be considered, on the other hand, that the king could never have raised an army, if he had not been able to rally the peers and gentry round his banner, and that in his army lay the real secret of the temporary strength of the pacific party.