The Parliamentary government by its demands for aid had at this time certainly aroused considerable opposition in the capital. We are assured that at one time seventy merchants were in prison for refusing to contribute their means for arms to be used against the King. In great assemblies of the citizens Royalist principles were eloquently expressed, and received with approbation. This could not however have any practical effect, so long as in the Common Council the opinions before adopted maintained the preponderance. There John Pym well knew how to stop all opposition by his usual persuasive eloquence; and the assembly swore afresh to live and die with Parliament.
The Parliament however could not prevent every sort of A.D. 1643. negotiation: in February 1643 it again made proposals to the King. These not only repeat the contents of the nineteen propositions in respect to the militia; but also in relation to religion, in conformity with a resolution passed in the interval, demand in express terms that the King should sanction the abolition of the old church organisation from archbishops down to sacristans, and assent to the bill for a new church government to be agreed on between the two Houses and an assembly of divines. When these proposals were laid before the King at Oxford in the garden of Christ Church, he remarked that those who made them were not in earnest in seeking peace. There is a tradition widely spread and often repeated, that in the personal negotiations which ensued the King professed himself ready to give way on one material point, but that next day, under the influence of his immediate attendants, he made a contrary declaration[357]. We can scarcely believe however that this decided the question. Between the views of Parliament and the King’s claims there was a contradiction so thorough, that no effectual approximation from which an end to the quarrel might be expected could be imagined. More was now asked of the King than before the war: through it he had attained a far better position, and had no reason for yielding: he might hope in a new campaign to win a still more favourable position.
The Queen was already come back to England to take part in the war. The results of the events in England had necessarily been felt in the Netherlands also. A commissioner from the Parliament went over, and complained bitterly of the support which Charles I found in the Netherlands: and his representations were by no means slighted by the Estates of Holland, the strongest of the United Provinces. That Province declared that it desired no breach with the Parliament, but the maintenance of neutrality, a necessary condition of which was the supplying neither of the contending parties with munitions of war. The States-General also listened to the complaints. The commissioner recalled the great interests of religion and liberty common to the two A.D. 1643. countries, and the support which the republic had formerly received from England. The Queen’s friends replied that the republic of the Netherlands owed its independence not to the English Parliament but rather to the English Crown, to Queen Elizabeth and King James I, the predecessors of her husband, adding the remark that it might some day be dangerous for them if a Parliament alone ruled in England[358]. No one in the States-General ventured to dispute the principles on which the English Parliament and the republic of Holland alike rested, but it was not deemed advisable to be very earnest in their cause. Vessels laden with arms, which had been detained, were again set free: English soldiers who wished to go to the King were allowed to depart, not indeed in companies, but singly. As at the first moment, so now again, the Queen found it in her power to strengthen the forces of her husband. She had not been deceived in the Prince of Orange, who assisted her at least underhand, for he saw his own advantage in the maintenance of the Stuart dynasty. How her heart swelled when events had taken such a turn that she might hope, as she said, in spite of traitors to return to England and rejoin her husband. That she had contributed somewhat to this result satisfied her self-love: it was her pride and good fortune, especially as her husband recognised it. She reminded him incessantly in her letters of his promise to conclude no treaty without having taken her advice upon it. If he gave up the control of the militia to Parliament only for a single year, as she heard that he was inclined to do, he would render both himself and her miserable, there would be nothing left to her but to retire into a convent. If only she instead of her son had been with Hotham on the walls of Hull, she would have seized the traitor and thrown him over the walls, or he should have done the like to her. The tidings of a treaty containing concessions, which was under negotiation, so excited her A.D. 1643. that she burned the letter in which the news was conveyed: she should like, she said, a reconciliation, but only an honourable one. Towards the end of the year she had again collected a supply of military stores, which she now resolved to convey in person to the King. After many hindrances, and being more than once driven back by wind and weather, she landed at last on February 22 at Burlington, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. But what a welcome did she receive in England! A couple of English ships arrived immediately after her, and their crews did not hesitate to fire on the house in which their Queen had taken up her abode. The balls broke the windows of her bedchamber, and flew about her bed. Amidst the whistling of the shot she quitted the house and the village, and fled to shelter in the open field with the ladies of her suite: the men stayed behind to take charge of the vessel in which were the military stores; had it been necessary she would have placed herself at their head. It did not however come to this, as the ebbing tide compelled the ships to quit the bay. Attended by a long train of cannon, mortars, and powder waggons, the chivalrous Queen entered York, where she was received in triumph.
That she had escaped so many dangers by land and sea gave her infinite confidence in herself and her cause: had it not been tempting God, she would have gone up to a cannon’s mouth. In the very first letter after her landing she urged her husband to come to no resolution until he had heard further news from her. Writing from York in March, she declared that if he made peace and disbanded his army, without having made an end of the everlasting Parliament, she should be obliged again to quit England, for she would never fall into the hands of those men. Some had expected that she would come with the olive branch and attempt to mediate between the King and Parliament: on the contrary, she exerted all her influence to urge the King to unyielding adherence to his prerogative. Her arrival made a more active plan of operations possible.
The original idea of Charles I had been to open the campaign by a new advance on London. On the other hand the Earl of Essex, at the head of the Parliamentary army, A.D. 1643. formed the plan of attacking the King at Oxford. The first contest must therefore be for Reading, which was as important for one scheme as for the other. Here Essex obtained the advantage; on the twelfth day of the siege he took Reading[359] and fixed his head-quarters there: but when he advanced nearer to Oxford, Prince Rupert proved to be stronger.
In one of the skirmishes of that period, on Chalgrove field, John Hampden was seen to ride to the rear wounded, for the first time in any such encounter, for he was as resolute in the field as in parliamentary and political warfare: a few days later he died, with a presentiment, as it appears, of the dangers impending over the country. The royal troops obtained a decisive advantage over William Waller, who had penetrated into the West, and thence moved towards Oxford: he was surprised by the unexpected approach of the royal cavalry, and when he turned to face them at Roundway Down, was completely defeated. The horsemen of Waller and Haslerig, who looked like moving fortresses, gave way before the lighter horse of the Royalists. In the midland counties also the King’s party had attained a certain strength: the family of Hastings had gained the upper hand in Leicestershire, the Cavendishes in Lincolnshire. The inroads of Prince Rupert kept Essex employed. Under these circumstances there was no longer any difficulty in the Queen’s rejoining her husband. She met him on the field of Edgehill (13 July, 1643), bringing three thousand infantry, thirty squadrons of cavalry, some artillery, and ammunition in plenty in a long train of waggons. She was received in Oxford with endless rejoicings, the more so as the news of Waller’s defeat arrived at the same time. With the Queen all good luck and success seemed to return.
In the same month (July 26) Bristol was taken. At an earlier period Royalist tendencies had shown themselves among the magistrates, but had been repressed: now, when A.D. 1643. the outworks were taken, the garrison despaired of maintaining its ground, and surrendered the place. It was the second city in the country for wealth and population, and full of arms which had been intended for the Irish war. Most of the ships, lying in King’s Road, declared for the King; and this gave scope for the idea of forming a fleet for him, which should command the coasts of Wales and England, and open a communication with Ireland. The hope now was to take Gloucester, and thus become master of the Severn, and so of the inland traffic.
This change of fortune produced various favourable consequences. Hotham, who had been almost the first to rebel openly, now proposed to surrender to the King the fortress, which he had twice defended against other Royalist attacks: he said that he had hardly slept a night without his sword by his side. Lord Digby, who had fallen into his power on his return from Holland, seems to have converted him; and differences which he had with Fairfax and Cromwell strengthened his resolve. In the town however Parliamentarian opinions had through his own influence obtained undisputed predominance; and on the first suspicion an attempt was made to secure his person. He was seized while trying to escape, and his son, already a renowned captain, who had a share in all his affairs, was taken in the town.
More fortunate was Hugh Cholmely, a distinguished member of Parliament, at that time Governor of Scarborough. He took over to the Royalists a body of three hundred men. The fortress remained for the time in the hands of a Parliamentary captain, but he also soon went over, and surrendered the place to the King[360].
In London itself traces were discovered, or at least there was a talk, of a plot to bring royal troops into the city and cause a rising of the King’s adherents: a commission of array had been introduced with great secrecy into the city, and inquiries had been made privately in the different parishes, to find out who and how many could be reckoned on. The intention then was, it seems, to bring about a coalition of A.D. 1643. the Royalists and the friends of peace[361]. Edmund Waller, a member of the Lower House, who gave the name to this conspiracy, and in fact had a great share in it, escaped, on making a full confession, with fine and imprisonment. Tomkyns his brother-in-law, and Challoner, who seem to have been more deeply implicated, forfeited their lives. Their guilt however was not so clear but that the people regarded their execution as a violent act of party justice[362].