on his breast. He was followed by the equipages of the principal
courtiers and ministers of state. In his train the crowd recognised
with disgust the arms and liveries of Crewe, Bishop of Durham, and of
Cartwright, Bishop of Chester. [280]

On the following day appeared in the Gazette a proclamation dissolving
that Parliament which of all the fifteen Parliaments held by the Stuarts
had been the most obsequious. [281]

Meanwhile new difficulties had arisen in Westminster Hall. Only a few
months had elapsed since some Judges had been turned out and others put
in for the purpose of obtaining a decision favourable to the crown in
the case of Sir Edward Hales; and already fresh changes were necessary.

The King had scarcely formed that army on which he chiefly depended for
the accomplishing of his designs when he found that he could not himself
control it. When war was actually raging in the kingdom a mutineer or
a deserter might be tried by a military tribunal and executed by the
Provost Marshal. But there was now profound peace. The common law of
England, having sprung up in an age when all men bore arms occasionally
and none constantly, recognised no distinction, in time of peace,
between a soldier and any other subject; nor was there any Act
resembling that by which the authority necessary for the government
of regular troops is now annually confided to the Sovereign. Some old
statutes indeed made desertion felony in certain specified cases. But
those statutes were applicable only to soldiers serving the King in
actual war, and could not without the grossest disingenuousness be so
strained as to include the case of a man who, in a time of profound
tranquillity at home and abroad, should become tired of the camp at
Hounslow and should go back to his native village. The government
appears to have had no hold on such a man, except the hold which master
bakers and master tailors have on their journeymen. He and his officers
were, in the eye of the law, on a level. If he swore at them he might be
fined for an oath. If he struck them he might be prosecuted for assault
and battery. In truth the regular army was under less restraint than the
militia. For the militia was a body established by an Act of Parliament,
and it had been provided by that Act that slight punishments might be
summarily inflicted for breaches of discipline.

It does not appear that, during the reign of Charles the Second, the
practical inconvenience ari