of
this assembly has been highly extolled by the most distinguished
royalists, and seems to have caused no small vexation and disappointment
to the chiefs of the opposition; but it was the uniform practice of
Charles--a practice equally impolitic and ungenerous--to refuse all
compliances with the desires of his people, till those desires were
expressed in a menacing tone. As soon as the Commons showed a
disposition to take into consideration the grievances under which the
country had suffered during eleven years, the King dissolved the
Parliament with every mark of displeasure.

Between the dissolution of this short-lived assembly and the meeting of
that ever-memorable body known by the name of the Long Parliament,
intervened a few months, during which the yoke was pressed down more
severely than ever on the nation, while the spirit of the nation rose up
more angrily than ever against the yoke. Members of the House of Commons
were questioned by the privy council touching their parliamentary
conduct, and thrown into prison for refusing to reply. Ship-money was
levied with increased rigor. The lord mayor and the sheriffs of London
were threatened with imprisonment for remissness in collecting the
payments. Soldiers were enlisted by force. Money for their support was
exacted from their counties. Torture, which had always been illegal, and
which had recently been declared illegal even by the servile judges of
that age, was inflicted for the last time in England in the month of
May, 1640.

Everything now depended on the event of the King's military operations
against the Scots. Among his troops there was little of that feeling
which separates professional soldiers from the mass of a nation and
attaches them to their leaders. His army, composed for the most part of
recruits, who regretted the plough from which they had been violently
taken, and who were imbued with the religious and political sentiments
then prevalent throughout the country, was more formidable to himself
than to the enemy. The Scots, encouraged by the heads of the English
opposition, and feebly resisted by the English forces, marched across
the Tweed and the Tyne, and encamped on the borders of Yorkshire. And
now the murmurs of discontent swelled into an uproar by which all
spirits save one were overawed. But the voice of Strafford was still for
Thorough; and he even, in this extremity, showed a nature so cruel and
despotic that his own pikemen were ready