ally tending to abolish regal power. The ruin or
death of all the King's adherents was resolved on; and in proof that the
fanatics could not only threaten but act, the venerable Archbishop Laud,
after suffering a long imprisonment, was dragged to the scaffold. Thus
the Parliamentary commissioners set out for Uxbridge with their banners
dipped in the blood of the highest subject in the realm, the head of the
Anglican church, and His Majesty's personal friend.

No true Englishman could have expected, or indeed wished, that the King
should purchase permission to become a state-puppet, shackled in all his
movements, obliged to sanction the cruel and illegal acts of his enemies
by a breach of his coronation-oath, and compelled to abandon the
established church and the lives of his faithful friends to their
inveterate animosity. In vain was it privately suggested by the most
moderate of the Parliamentary commissioners, that it was expedient to
close on any terms, and unite with than to humble a party whose
desperate purposes, supported by the popularity of their pretensions,
threatened destruction to all their opponents. The King determined never
to seem to barter his conscience for personal safety. He at that time
foresaw what he afterwards so affectingly expressed in a letter to his
nephew Prince Rupert, "that he could not flatter himself with an
expectation of success more than to end his days with honour and a good
conscience, which obliged him to continue his endeavours, not despairing
that God would, in due time, avenge his own cause. Yet he owned, that
those who staid with him must expect and resolve either to die for a
good cause, or, which is worse, to live as miserable in the maintaining
it as the violence of insulting rebels could make them." The treaty
terminated without hope of being again renewed. Cromwell carried his
ordinance; the army and the state were governed by his own creatures;
while, by a master-piece of cunning, he contrived to be exempted from
the restrictions of his own decree, and continued to act as general and
legislator without a rival. Afterwards, when his packed representatives
had effected all the purposes for which he kept them together, he put
himself at the head of a file of soldiers, destroyed the engine by which
he had overthrown the constitution, and turned the pantomimic Parliament
out of doors, laden with the odium of his crimes as well as of their
own.

The melancholy presentiments