1651, August.
The last words of Christopher Love to his brave, loving Mary were: "Farewell, I will call thee wife no more—I shall see thy face no more; yet I am not much troubled, for I am going to meet the bridegroom, the Lord Jesus Christ, to whom I shall be eternally married."[42]
Love's Execution.
Love met his fate on Tower Hill, on the 22nd of August (together with Mr. Gibbon), and made a long speech, maintaining that he had been convicted upon insufficient evidence, and that certain charges affecting his moral and political character were utterly untrue. He protested against the Engagement, and the invasion of Scotland by an English army; he avowed his preference to die as a Covenant keeper, rather than to live as a Covenant breaker; and ended his words with spiritual counsels and appeals. Ash, Calamy, and Manton, attended their brother on the scaffold; and Baxter says "he died with as great alacrity, and fearless quietude, and freedom of speech, as if he had gone to bed." Manton preached in St. Lawrence church, where Love had been incumbent, a funeral sermon, published under the title of "The Saint's Triumph in Death." The title indicates the preacher's opinion; and in harmony with it is a statement in the discourse, that the departed was a "pattern most worthy of imitation—a man eminent in grace—a man of a singular life and conversation." Christopher Love stood on the scaffold—where so many in like awful circumstances had stood before—under a bright August sky; but soon after the shedding of his blood the heavens became overcast, and thunder and lightning raged all night. At a time when Nature was interpreted by each contending faction as being on its side, no wonder royalist Presbyterians said "God is angry at what has been done," and no wonder republican Independents replied, "It is a mark of Divine judgment against implacable apostasy."
CHAPTER III.
In 1653 the Long Parliament had worn itself out, and its dissolution had become an inevitable necessity. The last gleams of its expiring light emanated from Sir Harry Vane, whose character and genius chiefly, if not entirely, gave to its latest debates whatever of power and brilliancy they possessed. A true estimate of this previously illustrious senate, in the period of its decadence, must rest upon a full consideration of the opinions and conduct of its remaining members regarded in general, and not upon the exceptional views and virtues of a single distinguished individual. There can be little or no doubt that the effect of the later proceedings of this Parliament was likely to be the ruin of the cause for which it had fought in its earlier years; and even the policy of Vane—who was a sincere champion of the rights of conscience, and the toleration of all religious opinions—from being associated with impracticable republican theories, was not calculated to prevent that deplorable result.
Little Parliament.