His long misgovernment, his innumerable perfidies, were forgotten. His memory was, in the minds of the great majority of his subjects, associated with those free institutions which he had during many years labored to destroy; for those free institutions had perished with him, and, amid the mournful silence of a community kept down by arms, had been defended by his voice alone. From that day began a reaction in favor of monarchy and of the exiled house, a reaction which never ceased till the throne had again been set up in all its old dignity.
CHARLES KNIGHT
The drawbridge of Hurst castle[39] is lowered during the night, December 17, 1648, and the tramp of a troop of horse is heard by the wakeful prisoner. He calls for his attendant Herbert, who is sent to ascertain the cause of this midnight commotion. Major Harrison is arrived. The King is agitated. He has been warned that Harrison is a man chosen to assassinate him. He is reassured in the morning, in being informed that the major and his troop are to conduct him to Windsor. Two days after, the King sets out, under the escort of Lieutenant-Colonel Cobbett. At Winchester he is received in state by the mayor and aldermen; but they retire alarmed on being told that the House has voted all to be traitors who should address the King.
The troop commanded by Cobbett has been relieved on the route by another troop, of which Harrison has the command. They rest at Farnham. Charles expresses to Harrison, with whose soldierly appearance he is struck, the suspicions which had been hinted regarding him. The major, in his new buff coat and fringed scarf of crimson silk, told the King "that he needed not to entertain any such imagination or apprehension; that the Parliament had too much honor and justice to cherish so foul an intention; and assured him that whatever the Parliament resolved to do would be very public, and in a way of justice to which the world should be witness, and would never endure a thought of secret violence." This, adds Clarendon, "his majesty could not persuade himself to believe; nor did imagine that they durst ever produce him in the sight of the people, under any form whatsoever of a public trial."
The next day the journey was pursued toward Windsor. The King urged his desire to stop at Bagshot, and dine in the forest at the house of Lord Newburgh. He had been apprised that his friend would have ready for him a horse of extraordinary fleetness, with which he might make one more effort to escape. The horse had been kicked by another horse the day before and was useless. That last faint hope was gone. On the night of December 23d the King slept, a prisoner surrounded with hostile guards, in the noble castle which in the days of his youth had rung with Jonson's lyrics and ribaldry; and the "Gipsy of the Masque" had prophesied that his "name in peace or wars, nought should bound."
But even here he continued to cherish some of the delusions which he had indulged in situations of far less danger. He was still surrounded with something of regal pomp. He dined, as the ancient sovereigns had dined, in public—as Elizabeth, and his father, and he himself had dined—seated under a canopy, the cup presented to him on the knee, the dishes solemnly tasted before he ate. These manifestations of respect he held to be indicative of an altered feeling. But he also had an undoubting confidence that he should be righted, by aid from Ireland, from Denmark, from other kingdoms—"I have three more cards to play, the worst of which will give me back everything." After three weeks of comparative comfort, the etiquette observed toward him was laid aside; and with a fearful sense of approaching calamity in the absence of "respect and honor, according to the ancient practice," is there anything more contemptible than a despised prince?
During the month in which Charles had remained at Windsor there had been proceedings in Parliament of which he was imperfectly informed. On the day he arrived there it was resolved by the Commons that he should be brought to trial. On January 2, 1649, it was voted that, in making war against the Parliament, he had been guilty of treason; and a high court was appointed to try him. One hundred fifty commissioners were to compose the court—peers, members of the Commons, aldermen of London. The ordinance was sent to the Upper House and was rejected. On the 6th a fresh ordinance, declaring that the people being, after God, the source of all just power, the representatives of the people are the supreme power in the nation; and that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament hath the force of a law, and the people are concluded thereby, though the consent of king or peers be not had thereto.
Asserting this power, so utterly opposed either to the ancient constitution of the monarchy or to the possible working of a republic, there was no hesitation in constituting the high court of justice in the name of the Commons alone. The number of members of the court was now reduced to one hundred thirty-five. They had seven preparatory meetings, at which only fifty-eight members attended. "All men," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "were left to their free liberty of acting, neither persuaded nor compelled; and as there were some nominated in the commission who never sat, and others who sat at first but durst not hold on, so all the rest might have declined it if they would when it is apparent they should have suffered nothing by so doing."
Algernon Sidney, although bent upon a republic, opposed the trial, apprehending that the project of a commonwealth would fail if the King's life were touched. It is related that Cromwell, irritated by these scruples, exclaimed: "No one will stir. I tell you, we will cut his head off with the crown upon it." Such daring may appear the result of ambition or fear or revenge or innate cruelty in a few men who had obtained a temporary ascendency. These men were, on the contrary, the organs of a widespread determination among thousands throughout the country, who had long preached and argued and prophesied about vengeance on "the great delinquent"; and who had ever in their mouths the text that "blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it."[40] They had visions of a theocracy, and were impatient of an earthly king.
Do we believe, as some, not without reasonable grounds, may believe, that the members of the high court of justice expressed such convictions upon a simulated religious confidence? Do we think that, in the clear line of action which Cromwell especially had laid down for his guidance, he cloaked his worldly ambition under the guise of being moved by some higher impulse than that of taking the lead in a political revolution? Certainly we do not. The infinite mischiefs of assuming that the finger of God directly points out the way to believers when they are walking in dangerous and devious paths may be perfectly clear to us who calmly look back upon the instant events which followed upon Cromwell's confidence in his solemn call to a fearful duty. But we are not the more to believe, because the events have a character of guilt in the views of most persons, that such a declared conviction was altogether, or in any degree, a lie.