shall
be still one of our chiefest studies how to rectify and establish the
government of that church aright, and to repair your losses, which we
desire you to be most confident of." And in another place, "You may
rest secure, that though perhaps we may give way for the present to that
which will be prejudicial both to the church and our own government, yet
we shall not leave thinking in time how to remedy both." But does the
king say that he will arbitrarily revoke his concessions? Does not
candor require us rather to suppose, that he hoped his authority would
so far recover as to enable him to obtain the national consent to
reestablish Episcopacy, which he believed so material a part of religion
as well as of government? It is not easy indeed to think how he could
hope to effect this purpose in any other way than his father had
taken, that is, by consent of parliament. 3. There is a passage in Lord
Clarendon, where it is said, that the king assented the more easily to
the bill which excluded the bishops from the house of peers, because he
thought that that law, being enacted by force, could not be valid. But
the king certainly reasoned right in that conclusion. Three fourths of
the temporal peers were at that time banished by the violence of the
populace. Twelve bishops were unjustly thrown into the Tower by the
commons. Great numbers of the commons themselves were kept away by fear
or violence. The king himself was chased from London. If all this be not
force, there is no such thing. But this scruple of the king's
affects only the bishops' bill, and that against pressing. The other
constitutional laws had passed without the least appearance of violence,
as did indeed all the bills passed during the first year, except
Strafford's attainder, which could not be recalled. The parliament,
therefore, even if they had known the king's sentiments in this
particular, could not, on that account, have had any just foundation of
jealousy. 4. The king's letter intercepted at Naseby has been the source
of much clamor. We have spoken of it already in chapter lviii. Nothing
is more usual in all public transactions than such distinctions. Alter
the death of Charles II. of Spain, King William's ambassadors gave the
duke of Anjou the title of King of Spain; yet at that very time, King
William was secretly forming alliances to dethrone him and soon after he
refused him that title, and insisted (as he had reason) that he had
not acknowle