from labouring men and women, up to lords and ladies, worked hard
together with heartiness and good will. The most distinguished
leaders on the Parliamentary side were HAMPDEN, SIR THOMAS FAIRFAX,
and, above all, OLIVER CROMWELL, and his son-in-law IRETON.
During the whole of this war, the people, to whom it was very
expensive and irksome, and to whom it was made the more distressing
by almost every family being divided – some of its members
attaching themselves to one side and some to the other – were over
and over again most anxious for peace. So were some of the best
men in each cause. Accordingly, treaties of peace were discussed
between commissioners from the Parliament and the King; at York, at
Oxford (where the King held a little Parliament of his own), and at
Uxbridge. But they came to nothing. In all these negotiations,
and in all his difficulties, the King showed himself at his best.
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He was courageous, cool, self-possessed, and clever; but, the old
taint of his character was always in him, and he was never for one
single moment to be trusted. Lord Clarendon, the historian, one of
his highest admirers, supposes that he had unhappily promised the
Queen never to make peace without her consent, and that this must
often be taken as his excuse. He never kept his word from night to
morning. He signed a cessation of hostilities with the bloodstained
Irish rebels for a sum of money, and invited the Irish
regiments over, to help him against the Parliament. In the battle
of Naseby, his cabinet was seized and was found to contain a
correspondence with the Queen, in which he expressly told her that
he had deceived the Parliament – a mongrel Parliament, he called it
now, as an improvement on his old term of vipers – in pretending to
recognise it and to treat with it; and from which it further
appeared that he had long been in secret treaty with the Duke of
Lorraine for a foreign army of ten thousand men. Disappointed in
this, he sent a most devoted friend of his, the EARL OF GLAMORGAN,
to Ireland, to conclude a secret treaty with the Catholic powers,
to send him an Irish army of ten thousand men; in return for which
he was to bestow great favours on the Catholic religion. And, when
this treaty was discovered in the carriage of a fighting Irish
Archbishop who was killed in one of the many skirmishes of those
days, he basely denied and deserted his attached friend, the Earl,
on his being charged with high treason; and – even worse than this
– had left blanks in the secret instructions he gave him with his
own kingly hand, expressly that he might thus save himself.
At last, on the twenty-seventh day of April, one thousand six
hundred and forty-six, the King found himself in the city of
Oxford, so surrounded by the Parliamentary army who were closing in
upon him on all sides that he felt that if he would escape he must
delay no longer. So, that night, having altered the cut of his
hair and beard, he was dressed up as a servant and put upon a horse
with a cloak strapped behind him, and rode out of the town behind
one of his own faithful followers, with a clergyman of that country
who knew the road well, for a guide. He rode towards London as far
as Harrow, and then altered his plans and resolved, it would seem,
to go to the Scottish camp. The Scottish men had been invited over
to help the Parliamentary army, and had a large force then in
England. The King was so desperately intriguing in everything he
did, that it is doubtful what he exactly meant by this step. He
took it, anyhow, and delivered himself up to the EARL OF LEVEN, the
Scottish general-in-chief, who treated him as an honourable
prisoner. Negotiations between the Parliament on the one hand and
the Scottish authorities on the other, as to what should be done
with him, lasted until the following February. Then, when the King