command of the whole military force, of all the
guards, garrisons, and forts of the kingdom. He issued proclamations
against this manifest usurpation; and, as he professed a resolution
strictly to observe the law himself, so was he determined, he said, to
oblige every other person to pay it a like obedience The name of the
king was so essential to all laws, and so familiar in all acts of
executive authority, that the parliament was afraid, had they totally
omitted it, that the innovation would be too sensible to the people. In
all commands, therefore, which they conferred, they bound the persons to
obey the orders of his majesty signified by both houses of parliament.
And inventing a distinction, hitherto unheard of, between the office and
the person of the king, those very forces which they employed against
him they levied in his name and by his authority.[*]

It is remarkable how much the topics of argument were now reversed
between the parties. The king, while he acknowledged his former error,
of employing a plea of necessity in order to infringe the laws and
constitution, warned the parliament not to imitate an example on which
they threw such violent blame; and the parliament, while they clothed
their personal fears or ambition under the appearance of national and
imminent danger, made unknowingly an apology for the most exceptionable
part of the king's conduct. That the liberties of the people were
no longer exposed to any peril from royal authority, so narrowly
circumscribed, so exactly defined, so much unsupported by revenue and by
military power, might be maintained upon very plausible topics: but that
the danger, allowing it to have any existence, was not of that kind,
great, urgent, inevitable, which dissolves all law and levels
all limitations, seems apparent from the simplest view of these
transactions. So obvious indeed was the king's present inability to
invade the constitution, that the fears and jealousies which operated on
the people, and pushed them so furiously to arms, were undoubtedly not
of a civil, but of a religious nature. The distempered imaginations
of men were agitated with a continual dread of Popery, with a horror
against prelacy, with an antipathy to ceremonies and the liturgy, and
with a violent affection for whatever was most opposite to these objects
of aversion. The fanatical spirit, let loose, confounded all regard
to ease, safety, interest; and dissolved every moral and civil
obliga