se of Lords, expressive
of their intention to preserve inviolate the rights of the peerage. Of the
latter no notice is taken in the journals of the house.--Journ. v. Jan. 11.
Parl. Hist. vi. 835.]

[Sidenote a: A.D. 1648. Jan. 3 and Jan. 15.]
[Sidenote b: A.D. 1648. Jan. 17.]

treaty of evacuation, and announced their intention of returning
immediately to their own parliament.[1]

The king appeared to submit with patience to the[a] new restraints imposed
on his freedom; and even affected an air of cheerfulness, to disguise the
design which he still cherished of making his escape. The immediate charge
of his person had been intrusted to four warders of approved fidelity, who,
two at a time, undertook the task in rotation. They accompanied the
captive wherever he was, at his meals, at his public devotions, during his
recreation on the bowling-green, and during his walks round the walls of
the castle. He was never permitted to be alone, unless it were in the
retirement of his bedchamber; and then one of the two warders was
continually stationed at each of the doors which led from that apartment.
Yet in defiance of these precautions (such was the ingenuity of the king,
so generous the devotion of those who sought to serve him) he found the
means of maintaining a correspondence with his friends on the coast of
Hampshire, and through them with the English royalists, the Scottish
commissioners in Edinburgh, the queen at Paris, and the duke of York at St.
James's, who soon afterwards, in obedience to the command of[b] his father,
escaped in the disguise of a female to Holland.[2]

[Footnote 1: The vote of non-addresses passed by a majority of 141 to 92.
Journals, v. Jan. 3. See also Jan. 11, 15, 1648; Lords' Journals, ix. 640,
662; Rushworth, vii. 953, 961, 965; Leicester's Journal, 30.]

[Footnote 2: Journals, x. 35, 76, 220. Rushworth, vii. 984, 1002, 1067,
1109. Clarendon, iii. 129. One of those through whom Charles corresponded
with his friends was Firebrace, who tells us that he was occasionally
employed by one of the warders to watch for him at the door of the king's
bedchamber, and on such occasions gave and received papers through a small
crevice in the boards. See his account in the additions to Herbert's
Memoirs, p. 187. The manner of the duke's escape is related in his Life, i.
33, and Ellis, 2nd series, iii. 329.]

[Sidenote a: A.D. 1648. Feb. 2.]
[Sidenote b: A.D. 1648. April. 17.]

In the mean while an ext