d nineteen of his Scottish, together with
all Popish recusants in both kingdoms who had borne arms for him. It was
insisted that forty-eight more, with all the members who had sitten in
either house at Oxford, all lawyers and divines who had embraced the
king's party, should be rendered incapable of any office, be forbidden
the exercise of their profession, be prohibited from coming within
the verge of the court, and forfeit the third of their estates to the
parliament. It was required that whoever had borne arms for the king,
should forfeit the tenth of their estates; or, if that did not suffice,
the sixth, for the payment of public debts. As if royal authority were
not sufficiently annihilated by such terms, it was demanded that the
court of wards should be abolished; that all the considerable officers
of the crown, and all the judges, should be appointed by parliament;
and that the right of peace and war should not be exercised without the
consent of that assembly.[*]

* Rush. vol. vi. p. 850. Dugdale, p. 737.

The Presbyterians, it must be confessed, after insisting on such
conditions, differed only in words from the Independents, who required
the establishment of a pure republic. When the debates had been carried
on to no purpose during twenty days among the commissioners, they
separated, and returned; those of the king to Oxford, those of the
parliament to London.

A little before the commencement of this fruitless treaty, a deed was
executed by the parliament, which proved their determined resolution to
yield nothing, but to proceed in the same violent and imperious manner
with which they had at first entered on these dangerous enterprises.
Archbishop Laud, the most favored minister of the king, was brought to
the scaffold; and in this instance the public might see, that popular
assemblies, as, by their very number, they are in a great measure
exempt from the restraint of shame, so when they also overleap the
bounds of law, naturally break out into acts of the greatest tyranny and
injustice.

From the time that Laud had been committed, the house of commons,
engaged in enterprises of greater moment, had found no leisure to finish
his impeachment, and he had patiently endured so long an imprisonment,
without being brought to any trial. After the union with Scotland, the
bigoted prejudices of that nation revived the like spirit in England;
and the sectaries resolved to gratify their vengeance in the punishm