ilently organized by Hyde, the future Lord
Clarendon. To Hyde and to the men who gathered round him enough seemed
to have been done. They clung to the law, but the law had been
vindicated. They bitterly resented the system of Strafford and of Laud;
but the system was at an end. They believed that English freedom hung on
the assembly of Parliament and on the loyal co-operation of the Crown
with this Great Council of the Realm; but the assembly of Parliaments
was now secured by the Triennial Bill, and the king professed himself
ready to rule according to the counsels of Parliament. On the other
hand they desired to preserve to the Crown the right and power it had
had under the Tudors. They revolted from any attempt to give the Houses
a share in the actual work of administration. On both political and
religious grounds they were resolute to suffer no change in the
relations of the Church to the State, or to weaken the prerogative of
the Crown by the establishment of a Presbyterianism which asserted any
sort of spiritual independence. More complex impulses told on the course
of Lord Falkland. Falkland was a man learned and accomplished, the
centre of a circle which embraced the most liberal thinkers of his day.
He was a keen reasoner and an able speaker. But he was the centre of
that Latitudinarian party which was slowly growing up in the reaction
from the dogmatism of the time, and his most passionate longing was for
liberty of religious thought. Such a liberty the system of the Stuarts
had little burdened; what Laud pressed for was uniformity, not of
speculation, but of practice and ritual. But the temper of Puritanism
was a dogmatic temper, and the tone of the Parliament already threatened
a narrowing of the terms of speculative belief for the Church of
England. While this fear estranged Falkland from the Parliament, his
dread of a conflict with the Crown, his passionate longing for peace,
his sympathy for the fallen, led him to struggle for a king whom he
distrusted, and to die in a cause that was not his own. Behind Falkland
and Hyde soon gathered a strong force of supporters; chivalrous soldiers
like Sir Edmund Verney ("I have eaten the king's bread and served him
near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him"),
as well as men frightened at the rapid march of change, or by the
dangers which threatened Episcopacy and the Church. And with these stood
the few but ardent partizans of the Court; and th