9.

SECRET HISTORY OF CHARLES THE FIRST AND HIS FIRST PARLIAMENTS.

The reign of Charles the First, succeeded by the Commonwealth of
England, forms a period unparalleled by any preceding one in the annals
of mankind. It was for the English nation the great result of all former
attempts to ascertain and to secure the just freedom of the subject. The
prerogative of the sovereign and the rights of the people were often
imagined to be mutual encroachments, and were long involved in
contradiction, in an age of unsettled opinions and disputed principles.
At length the conflicting parties of monarchy and democracy, in the
weakness of their passions, discovered how much each required the other
for its protector. This age offers the finest speculations in human
nature; it opens a protracted scene of glory and of infamy; all that
elevates, and all that humiliates our kind, wrestling together, and
expiring in a career of glorious deeds, of revolting crimes, and even of
ludicrous infirmities!

The French Revolution is the commentary of the English; and a commentary
at times more important than the text which it elucidates. It has thrown
a freshness over the antiquity of our own history; and, on returning to
it, we seem to possess the feelings, and to be agitated by the
interests, of contemporaries. The circumstances and the persons which so
many imagine had passed away, have been reproduced under our own eyes.
In other histories we accept the knowledge of the characters and the
incidents on the evidence of the historian; but here we may take them
from our own conviction, since to extinct names and to past events we
can apply the reality which we ourselves have witnessed.

Charles the First had scarcely ascended the throne ere he discovered
that in his new parliament he was married to a sullen bride: the
youthful monarch, with the impatience of a lover, warm with hope and
glory, was ungraciously repulsed even in the first favours! The
prediction of his father remained, like the handwriting on the wall;
but, seated on the throne, Hope was more congenial to youth than
Prophecy.

As soon as Charles the First could assemble a parliament, he addressed
them with an earnestness, in which the simplicity of words and thoughts
strongly contrasted with the oratorical harangues of the late monarch.
It cannot be alleged against Charles the First, that he preceded the
parliament in the war of words. He courted their affections; and e