Nothing was wanting to their full possession of power except control over the court and the King’s counsellors. The obvious and immediate aim in all movements of this sort is always a change of the persons who wield executive power, or share the secrets of its deliberations. No one at this time possessed so much influence in both domestic and foreign affairs as the hated Lords Bristol and Digby, father and son. The French ambassador, who hated them as the heads of the Spanish faction, once talked with his friends in Parliament of the necessity for overthrowing them: he asserted that they swore to him to undertake the attack, even though they should perish in it. So it came to pass that formal impeachments against Digby and Bristol were proposed in the Lower House: the father for having advised the King to put the army into effective condition, which could only have been done with views hostile to Parliament: the son for having accused the Commons of encroachments on the liberties of the Lords, and on the rights of subjects, and for having said that Parliament was no longer free. The Lower House had this claim at any rate to supreme power, that it already treated as a crime every expression injurious to it. The matter advanced so far as a conference with the Lords.
A very widely spread idea was to proceed with an impeachment against the Queen, as the personage who gave the most support to Catholic and anti-Parliamentary tendencies.
The danger to the court arising from the influx of the mob to Whitehall evoked counter demonstrations for its protection. A number of officers were assembled, who had served in the old army, or were going to Ireland. One day the court gave them a banquet at Whitehall. Even then the intrusion of the mob could only be repelled by violence and A.D. 1641. even bloodshed[297]. The apprentices threatened to come back and take vengeance. Hereupon guards were posted in Scotland Yard, in Westminster Abbey, in the great reception room at Whitehall. The younger members of the gentry who were completing their studies in the Inns of Court appeared at court, and offered their services. They were admitted to kiss the hands of the Queen and Prince. Never had more of the nobility been seen at court than at this juncture: all were armed, and they went about brandishing their swords, and showing the daggers with which they would defend the King.
But the presence of a company of armed men aroused again in Parliament the fear of an intention to disperse the Houses by force. The Parliament on its side asked for a guard; there was even a talk of transferring the sittings into the city. A state of things had begun which must lead to some violent explosion.
In the middle of December the French ambassador sent information home that the court cabal, which he also described as Spanish, which just then had hoped to triumph, was become weaker than the other[298]. At the end of December he added that affairs were in greater confusion than ever, and that Parliament was in such a position that the one cabal or the other must perish[299].
FOOTNOTES:
[289] ‘And this I will do, if need be, to the hazard of my life and all that is dear unto me.’ Nalson Collection 676.
[290] Cp. Forster, Arrest of the five members 48, 54.
[291] Slingsby to Pennington, 16th December (St. P. O.).
[292] Clarendon iv. 372: ‘By the concurrence and number of the meaner people men of the most active and pragmatical heads should be elected.’ These events in the city would be worth a searching investigation. Some information is given by the (one must admit) party pamphlet of Samuel Butler, A Letter from Mercurius Civicus, etc., in Someis’ Tracts iv. 584.