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But these arguments, however well urged, had little effect in pacifying the minds of the people. Petitions from various. parts of the country were sent up to the Commons, promising to live and die in defence of the privileges of Parliament. The very women were seized with the same rage. brewer's wife, followed by many thousands of her sex, brought a petition to the House; in which the petitioners expressed their terror of the Papists and prelates, and their dread of like massacres, rapes, and outrages, with those which had been exercised upon their sex in Ireland. They had been necessitated, they said, to imitate the women of Tekoah; and they asserted equal right with the men, of declaring, by petition, their sense of the public cause; because Christ had purchased them at as dear a rate, and in the free enjoyment of Christ consists equally the happiness of both sexes. Pym came to the door of the House; and having told the female zealots, that their petition was thankfully accepted, and was presented in a seasonable time, he begged that their prayers for the success of the Commons might follow their petition*. Such low arts of popularity were affected, and by such illiberal cant were the unhappy people incited to civil discord and convulsions.

The King at this period retired from Whitehall, where his person was in danger, and both parties began to prepare seri

*The Parisian females, at the commencement of the French revolution, took a similar part in the atrocious disorders of that metropolis, and even proceeded to more horrid excesses. When the royal family were brought from Versailles, their carriage was surrounded by troops of diabolical females, uttering the most dreadful imprecations, and accusing the Queen of whatever the lowest and most virulent malice could suggest. When the Princess Lambelle was murdered, the common women of Paris were amongst the most forward in the perpetration of that tragedy, and even outstripped the men in the refinement of their cruelty.

ously for an appeal to arms. The nation was now divided between the King, and the remnant of the two Houses that remained at Westminster. The greater part of the old nobility and ancient families in the kingdom, who valued themselves upon the loyalty and virtue of their ancestors, adhered to the cause of their sovereign, which was also sustained by all who wished well to the ancient constitution and hierarchy. All in general whom nature had endowed with generosity and benevolence of disposition, whose manners were polished by social and elegant intercourse, and whose minds were enlarged by a liberal education, glowed with ardour in the cause of injured loyalty, upon which nothing reflected more lustre than the approbation and attachment of the learned, loyal, and venerable university of Oxford. The opposite faction was composed of those whom the court had personally disobliged; of men of turbulent spirits and ambitious views, who wished for agitated times in order to mend their fortunes; of republicans and protestant dissenters, comprehending a great number of corporations, manufacturers, and the lower class of people, inflamed with the spirit of fanaticism. The traders were generally averse to the King, partly from the discouragements to which commerce had been subjected during this reign; partly from a spirit of independence become licentious and insolent; and partly from hatred and emulation of the ancient families which adhered to the interest of their sovereign.

The numerical strength of the Parliament party, from the very commencement of the contest, was superior to that of the King's; but their strength did not so much lie in the numbers of their party, as in the materials of which it was composed. Men of energy and vigour, equal to the task of controling the events of stormy times, are not always to be found in the upper walks of life; and a variety of causes had tended to lessen the nobility of England in the estimation of the people at the time when Charles had the most essential calls for their service. It had been the policy of the sovereigns of the house

of Tudor to diminish the influence of the nobility, and to extend that of the Commons. The reformation had gone a great way to effect this purpose; but what, perhaps, had contributed most to bring the nobility into disrepute, was the conduct of James I. who, conferring the highest titles of nobility on his worthless favorites, and making honours vendible, had degraded the whole order of nobility.

At the breaking out of the first dispute between Charles and the Commons, the upper house showed a degree of tameness in regard to the King's interest, which augured unfavorably for their future exertions. The execution of the Earl of Strafford, and the deprivation of the Bishops of their seats, were acts which had much lessened the weight of the House of Peers, and few could rely on, or have much veneration for, a body of men who could so miserably betray their own cause.

But the great advantage which the Parliament party possessed over the King, was in the temper of the nation. The invention of printing, and the Lutheran and Calvinistical reformations, events which trod closely on the heels of each other, had produced a burst of light all over Europe. The tyranny of the Roman see, which for so many ages had held the most potent states of Europe in subjection, had in many parts vanished before the zeal of the reformers of the church; and at no period, from the time of the Greek republics, had the principles of civil government been more freely discussed. The discovery of a new continent, by Christopher Columbus, and the opening of a new route to the East Indies, by the passage round the Cape of Good Hope, had brought a vast influx of wealth into Europe, and given to commerce that honourable estimation which it wanted in preceding times. These materially tended to weaken the royal, and to give strength to the republican party. To the general diffusion of wealth and information, which at this period was so remarkable, and qualified almost the meanest individuals to take a share in the great events then depending, was added a spirit of innovation in civil and reli.

gious matters, which bore down all established authorities, and ended in the total subversion of the civil and ecclesiastical constitution of the realm.

Whether the first opposers of Charles designed the overthrow of the monarchy, is a question which may very well ad mit of a doubt; but none can be entertained, that the measures they took were those which were precisely calculated to produce that catastrophe. Among the popular leaders there were many men of the purest patriotic views, unmixed with any selfish or fanatical motives, who only desired the constitution to be placed on such a footing, that the powers and privileges of each branch of the legislature might be properly defined, and the rights of the subject fixed on an immoveable basis. Nothing could be more glorious than the cause for which these men took up arms; nothing more desirable than the object they sought to accomplish. But it was the misfortune of these high-minded patriots to have enlisted under the same banners with them, a class of men austere and narrow-minded in their principles, and carrying into disputes, which should have been considered purely as of a civil nature, all the sanguinary and ferocious intolerance of religious bigotry. These were the men who, affecting to themselves a superior sanctity of life and conversation, obtained the name of Puritans, and were incessant in their endeavours to destroy the church of England, and to substitute in its place the sour discipline of the Scottish kirk. These were the persons with whom the real civil grievances, under which the nation laboured, were as nothing, the imaginary ecclesiastical grievances every thing. Hence religion, which, in fact, was not the real ground of the quarrel between the King and Parliament, became the ostensible motive to the war, and occasioned all those wild excesses of fanaticism and hypocrisy which the author of Hudibras so justly exposes.

It is not easy for the imagination to figure to itself a sect of men so austere and malignant in their dispositions, so frenetic in their humours, and uncomplying in their demands, as the

Puritans of this period. Howell, a contemporary writer, who was imprisoned by them in the Fleet, speaking of them after the civil war had commenced, says, "Who would have thought poor England would have been brought to this pass? could it ever have entered into the imagination of man that the scheme and whole frame of so ancient and wellmoulded a government should be so suddenly struck off the hinges, quite out of joint, and tumbled into such a horrible confusion? who would have held it possible that to fly from Babylon, we should fall into such a Babel? that to avoid superstition, some people should be brought to belch out such horrid profaneness, as to call the temples of God the tabernacles of Satan; the Lord's supper a two-penny ordinary; to make the communion-table a manger, and the font a trough to water their horses in; to term the white decent robe of the Presbyter the whore's smock; the pipes through which nothing came but anthems and holy hymns, the devil's bag-pipes; the liturgy of the church, though extracted most of it out of the sacred text, called by some another kind of Alcoran, by others raw porridge, by some a piece forged in hell? who would have thought to have seen in England, the churches shut and the shops open on Christmas-day? could any soul have imagined that this isle would have produced such monsters as to rejoice at the Turks' good successes against Christians, and wish he were in the midst of Rome? who would have dreamt ten years before, when Archbishop Laud did ride in state through London streets, accompanied by my Lord of London, to be sworn Lord High Treasurer of England, that the mitre should now have come to such a scorn, and to such a national kind of hatred, as to put the whole island into a combustion.”

In another letter, he says, "For news the world is here turned upside down, and it hath been long going so. You know, a good while since, we have had leather caps and beaver shoes, but now the arms are come to be legs, for bishops' lawn sleeves are worn for boot-hose tops; the waist is come to