to be
attributed to his own faithlessness and contempt of law.

The truth seems to be that he detested both the parties into which the
House of Commons was divided: nor is this strange; for in both those
parties the love of liberty and the love of order were mingled, though
in different proportions. The advisers whom necessity had compelled him
to call round him were by no means after his own heart. They had joined
in condemning his tyranny, in abridging his power, and in punishing his
instruments. They were now indeed prepared to defend in a strictly legal
way his strictly legal prerogative; but they would have recoiled with
horror from the thought of reviving Wentworth's projects of Thorough.
They were, therefore, in the King's opinion, traitors, who differed only
in the degree of their seditious malignity from Pym and Hampden.

He accordingly, a few days after he had promised the chiefs of the
constitutional Royalists that no step of importance should be taken
without their knowledge, formed a resolution the most momentous of his
whole life, carefully concealed that resolution from them, and executed
it in a manner which overwhelmed them with shame and dismay. He sent the
Attorney General to impeach Pym, Hollis, Hampden, and other members of
the House of Commons of high treason at the bar of the House of Lords.
Not content with this flagrant violation of the Great Charter and of the
uninterrupted practice of centuries, he went in person, accompanied by
armed men, to seize the leaders of the opposition within the walls of
Parliament.

The attempt failed. The accused members had left the House a short time
before Charles entered it. A sudden and violent revulsion of feeling,
both in the Parliament and in the country, followed. The most favourable
view that has ever been taken of the King's conduct on this occasion by
his most partial advocates is that he had weakly suffered himself to be
hurried into a gross indiscretion by the evil counsels of his wife and
of his courtiers. But the general voice loudly charged him with far
deeper guilt. At the very moment at which his subjects, after a long
estrangement produced by his maladministration, were returning to him
with feelings of confidence and affection, he had aimed a deadly blow at
all their dearest rights, at the privileges of Parliament, at the very
principle of trial by jury. He had shown that he considered opposition
to his arbitrary designs as a crime to be exp