Roundheads: each party went to extremes, through the spite and fury of
mutual opposition. The Cavaliers affected a recklessness and dissoluteness
greater than they really felt to be right, in order to differ most widely
from those purists who, urged by analogous motives, decried all amusements
as evil. Each party repelled the other to the extreme of opposition.

RELIGIOUS EXTREMES.--Loyalty was opposed by radicalism, and the invectives
of both were bitter in the extreme. The system and ceremonial of a
gorgeous worship restored by Laud, and accused by its opposers of
formalism and idolatry, were attacked by a spirit of excess, which, to
religionize daily life, took the words of Scripture, and especially those
of the Old Testament, as the language of common intercourse, which issued
them from a gloomy countenance, with a nasal twang, and often with a false
interpretation.

As opposed to the genuflections of Laud and the pomp of his ritual, the
land swarmed with unauthorized preachers; then came out from among the
Presbyterians the Independents; the fifth-monarchy men, shouting for King
Jesus; the Seekers, the Antinomians, who, like Trusty Tomkins, were elect
by the fore-knowledge of God, who were not under the law but under grace,
and who might therefore gratify every lust, and give the rein to every
passion, because they were sealed to a certain salvation. Even in the army
sprang up the Levellers, who wished to abolish monarchy and aristocracy,
and to level all ranks to one. To each religious party, there was a
political character, ranging from High Church and the divine right of
kings, to absolute levellers in Church and State. This disintegrating
process threatened not only civil war, with well-defined parties, but
entire anarchy in the realm of England. It was long resisted by the
conservative men of all opinions. At length the issue came: the king was a
prisoner, without a shadow of power.

The parliament was still firm, and would have treated with the king by a
considerable majority; but Colonel Pride surrounded it with two regiments,
excluded more than two hundred of the Presbyterians and moderate men; and
the parliament, thus _purged_, appointed the High Court of Justice to try
the king for treason.

Charles I. fell before the storm. His was a losing cause from the day he
erected his standard at Nottingham, in 1642, to that on which, after his
noble bearing on the scaffold, the masked executioner held up his h