th the
Royalists. They were victorious, both in the western and in the northern
counties. They had wrested Bristol, the second city in the kingdom, from
the Parliament. They had won several battles, and had not sustained a
single serious or ignominious defeat. Among the Roundheads adversity had
begun to produce dissension and discontent. The Parliament was kept in
alarm, sometimes by plots and sometimes by riots. It was thought
necessary to fortify London against the royal army, and to hang some
disaffected citizens at their own doors. Several of the most
distinguished peers who had hitherto remained at Westminster fled to
the court at Oxford; nor can it be doubted that if the operations of the
Cavaliers had at this season been directed by a sagacious and powerful
mind, Charles would soon have marched in triumph to Whitehall.

But the King suffered the auspicious moment to pass away; and it never
returned. In August, 1643, he sat down before the city of Gloucester.
That city was defended by the inhabitants and by the garrison, with a
determination such as had not, since the commencement of the war, been
shown by the adherents of the Parliament. The emulation of London was
excited. The train-bands of the city volunteered to march wherever their
services might be required. A great force was speedily collected and
began to move westward. The siege of Gloucester was raised; the
Royalists in every part of the kingdom were disheartened; the spirit of
the Parliamentary party revived; and the apostate lords, who had lately
fled from Westminster to Oxford, hastened back from Oxford to
Westminster.

And now a new and alarming class of symptoms began to appear in the
distempered body politic. There had been, from the first, in the
Parliamentary party, some men whose minds were set on objects from which
the majority of that party would have shrunk with horror. These men
were, in religion Independents. They conceived that every Christian
congregation had, under Christ, supreme jurisdiction in things
spiritual; that appeals to provincial and national synods were scarcely
less unscriptural than appeals to the court of arches or to the Vatican;
and that popery, prelacy, and Presbyterianism were merely three forms of
one great apostasy. In politics, the Independents were, to use the
phrase of their time, root and branch men, or, to use the kindred phrase
of our own time, radicals. Not content with limiting the power of the
monarch, th