nivance. When the law, hateful as it was, was asserted, and the priests were left to the Commons, their lives were safe-safer, as Clarendon peevishly says, than if they had been pardoned under the great seal. Pym declared expressly that he did not desire any new laws against Popery, or any rigorous courses in the execution of those already in force: he was far from seeking the ruin of their persons or estates; only he wished they might be kept in such a condition as to restrain them from doing hurt. To restrain them from doing hurt was unhappily in those days part of a statesman's duty. They were liegemen and soldiers of that successor of the apostles whose confederates were Philip II. and Charles IX., and who struck a medal in honour of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.

And now, all these reforms having been accomplished, all these offenders punished, all these securities for lawful government provided, the king having even assented to the act which, in clear contradiction to his prerogative, forbade the dissolution of the then parliament without its own consent, was it not time to bring the movement to a close, and to replace the sovereign power, which the parliament had virtually

seized, in the king's hands? So thought many who had up to this point been zealous reformers, and some, at all events, whose opinions we are bound to treat with respect. So thought not Pym and Hampden. To them it seemed that the king could not be trusted; that the last day of the parliament would be the last of his good faith; that they must go on till they had left him no power to undo the work which had been done. They remembered the double answer to the Petition of Right. They remembered, as they showed on all occasions, the fate of Sir John Eliot. We have good reason, they perhaps had better reason, to believe that the court was still hostile, still intriguing, still aiming at a counter revolution; and Clarendon owns that Charles had been persuaded to consent to measures which he abhorred, on the ground that they might be afterwards revoked on the plea of duress. To the last it proved hard to bind this anointed king. But let us not forget to say emphatically, that the leaders of the Commons needed all this to justify them in giving the word for revolution.

They prepared a great appeal to the nation, which took the shape of the Grand Remon

strance. Charles now went to Scotland, ostensibly to settle matters there and disband the armies, really to make himself a party, and provide himself with weapons against the leaders of the opposition. Episcopacy being at this time threatened with abolition, he assured its friends that if they could keep the church safe during his absence, he would undertake for its safety on his return. Hampden went, with other delegates of the parliament, to watch him, while Pym remained at the centre of affairs, one proof among many that able, powerful, and revered as Hampden was, Pym, not Hampden, was the real chief. The higher social position of Hampden is perhaps the main source of the contrary impression. King Pym was the name given to Pym by the lampooners, and though in jest they spoke the truth. "The most popular man," says Clarendon, "and the most able to do hurt, that hath lived in any time." The most able to do hurt, that is the phrase: how can a leader of the people use his power for good? And now came the sinister news of the attempt to make away with or kidnap the covenanting chiefs in Scotland; and close upon it, at once terrible and maddening to Protestant hearts, the tidings

of the rising of the Catholics and of the massacre of the Protestants in Ireland. The king was innocent of the Irish rebellion; it was simply a natural episode in the Irish land question. But he wrote to Secretary Nicholas, "I hope this ill news of Ireland will hinder some of those follies in England."

It did not hinder the preparation of the Grand Remonstrance. But a chivalrous royalist tried to hinder all the follies in a more practical way. A letter was one day delivered to Pym in the house by a messenger who had received it from a horseman in gray. When it was opened, there dropt from it a rag which had been taken from a plague sore, and was of course full of infection. The writer intimated that, if this did not do the business, a surer weapon would be tried. surer weapon, it seems, was tried, but it struck the wrong man. The world improves, though slowly. Then it was the stab of the assassin's dagger; now it is only the stab of the assassin's tongue.

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And now the Grand Remonstrance was ready. Manifestly drawn by Pym, it recites through a long series of clauses, but with monumental gravity and terseness, the grievances for which

parliament had extorted redress, and concludes, in effect, by calling on the nation to support its leaders in making the work good against evil counsellors and reaction. On the morning of the 23rd of November, 1641, it lay engrossed upon the table of the House of Commons; not the present House of Commons, as Mr. Forster reminds us, but the narrow, ill-lighted, dingy room in which for centuries some of the world's most important work was done. And never, perhaps, did that old room, never did any hall of debate, witness such an oratoric struggle as the debate on the Grand Remonstrance. The speakers were Pym, Hampden, Falkland, Hyde, Culpepper, Orlando Bridgman, Denzil Hollis, Waller, Glyn, Maynard, others of name. The stake was the Revolution and the fortunes of all who were embarked in it. Cromwell said that if they had lost he would have left England. The forces were by this time evenly balanced, for secession to the court had made great gaps in the patriot array, and in the royalist ranks were now seen not only Digby, Hyde, Culpepper, but Falkland-Falkland, in whose house, the free resort of all learning, a college, as his friend calls it, situated in a purer