hants alike
refused a loan. The London apprentices mobbed Laud at Lambeth, and
broke up the sittings of the High Commission at St. Paul's. The war was
denounced everywhere as "the Bishops' War," and the new levies murdered
officers whom they suspected of Papistry, broke down altar-rails in
every church they passed, and deserted to their homes. To all but
Strafford it was plain that the system of Charles had broken hopelessly
down. Two peers, Lord Wharton and Lord Howard, ventured to lay before
the king himself a petition for peace with the Scots; and though
Strafford arrested and proposed to shoot them as mutineers, the English
Council shrank from desperate courses. But if desperate courses were not
taken, there was nothing for it but to give way. Penniless, without an
army, with a people all but in revolt, the obstinate temper of the king
still strove to escape from the humiliation of calling a Parliament. He
summoned a Great Council of the Peers at York. But his project broke
down before its general repudiation by the nobles; and with wrath and
shame at his heart Charles was driven to summon again the Houses to
Westminster.

CHAPTER VIII

THE LONG PARLIAMENT

1640-1644

[Sidenote: John Pym.]

If Strafford embodied the spirit of tyranny, John Pym, the leader of the
Commons from the first meeting of the new Houses at Westminster, stands
out for all after time as the embodiment of law. A Somersetshire
gentleman of good birth and competent fortune, he entered on public life
in the Parliament of 1614, and was imprisoned for his patriotism at its
close. He had been a leading member in that of 1620, and one of the
"twelve ambassadors" for whom James ordered chairs to be set at
Whitehall. Of the band of patriots with whom he had stood side by side
in the constitutional struggle against the earlier despotism of Charles
he was almost the one survivor. Coke had died of old age; Cotton's heart
was broken by oppression; Eliot had perished in the Tower; Wentworth had
apostatized. But Pym remained, resolute, patient as of old; and as the
sense of his greatness grew silently during the eleven years of
deepening misrule, the hope and faith of better things clung almost
passionately to the man who never doubted of the final triumph of
freedom and the law. At their close, Clarendon tells us, in words all
the more notable for their bitter tone of hate, "he was the most popular
man, and the most able to do hurt, that have l