their consideration. This clever contrivance-it was almost too clever to succeed-was adopted without much difficulty. D'Ewes reminded the House that the bishops, who had no votes as judges, would have votes on the passing of a Bill; and the Bill of Attainder was set aside, at least for the present.1

Ill-feeling in the Upper House.

The expectation which Pym probably entertained, that the Lords would be thrown off their balance by the sight of that portion of Vane's notes which bore upon Strafford's case, was soon realised. They were irritated by the conduct of the other House in interrupting the trial, and still more irritated at the mere mention of a Bill of Attainder. "It is an unnatural motion," said one angry peer, "for the head to be governed by the tail. We hate rebellion as much as treason. We will never suffer ourselves to be suppressed by a popular faction." 2

defence.

On the following day, therefore, Strafford was called on for his defence, as if nothing extraordinary had intervened. He knew well how to catch the ear of the peers. "None April 13. Strafford's but you," he said, "can be my judges." Not the Commons, not even the King himself, could take that function from them. After running over the articles one by one, he asked how that could be treason as a whole which was not treason in any separate part. It was hard to be punished for a crime against which no law could be quoted. "If I pass down the Thames in a boat," he said, “and run and split myself upon an anchor, if there be not a buoy to give me warning, the party shall give me damages; but if it be marked out, then it is at my own peril. It is now full 240 years since any man was touched to that height, upon this crime, before myself.3 . . . Do not, my lords, put greater difficulty upon the Ministers of State than that with cheerfulness they may

'D'Ewes's Diary, Harl. MSS. clxiv. fol. 165. The debate is printed in Sanford, 329, but with many omissions of which no warning is given. 2 Brief and Perfect Relation, 58.

Strafford, no doubt, referred to the case of Tresilian, who was executed by the Merciless Parliament in 1388-not 240, but 252 years before. Tresilian, like Strafford, was charged with misleading the King and alienating his subjects from him.

V

serve the King and the State; for if you will examine them by every grain or every little weight, it will be so heavy that the public affairs of the kingdom will be laid waste, and no man will meddle with them that hath wisdom, and honour, and fortune to lose.

"Were it not for the interest of those pledges that a saint in heaven left me, I would be loth, my lords; "-for the moment he could say no more.1 The strong, iron-hearted man burst into tears. After a little while he recovered himself. "Now, my lords," he ended by saying, "I thank God I have been, by His good blessing towards me, taught that the afflictions of this present life are not to be compared with that eternal weight of glory that shall be revealed for us hereafter; and so, my lords, even so, with all humility, and with all tranquillity of mind, I do submit myself clearly and freely to your judgments, and whether that righteous judgment shall be life or death,

Glyn's

Te Deum laudamus, te Dominum confitemur." 2

After a short interval Glyn rose to reply. The prisoner, he urged, was not charged with a number of separate acts, but with one settled purpose to overthrow the law reply. The separate acts were but cited in order that the purpose might be revealed. Glyn's strongest point was his refutation of Strafford's plea that he had counselled the assumption of special powers in the face of special necessity. He showed that for years the government had been conducted on the plea of special necessity. "My lords," he said, "for many years past, your lordships know, an evil spirit hath moved among us, which in truth hath been made the author and ground of all our distractions, and that is necessity and danger. This was the bulwark and the battery that serves to defend all exorbitant actions; the ground and foundation of this great invasion of our liberties and estates, the judgment in the ship

1 For a specimen of the way in which scandal grows, see Baillie's remarks on this incident, i. 347.

2

Rushworth, Strafford's Trial, 633. It is here misdated as spoken on April 12.

1

1641

STRAFFORD AND PYM.

333

money; and the ground of the counsel given of late to do anything, and to persuade the King that he was absolved from all rules of government." " 1

Pym followed Glyn. Taking as proved the attempt to substitute arbitrary will for law, he painted with a firm hand Pym's a picture of the misery which would follow on the speech. substitution. Under the appearance of bringing the King to strength and honour, it brought him to weakness and dishonour. Reward and punishment, Strafford had once said, were the great motives by which men were led. Pym had a more excellent way to show. "Those," he said, "that live so much under the whip and the pillory and such servile engines as were frequently used by the Earl of Strafford, they may have the dregs of valour, sullenness, and stubbornness, which may make them prone to mutinies and discontents; but those noble and gallant affections, which put men to brave designs and attempts for the preservation or enlargement of a kingdom, they are hardly capable of. Shall it be treason to embase the King's coin, though but a piece of twelve pence or six pence, and must it not needs be the effect of a greater treason to embase the spirits of his subjects, and to set a stamp and character of servitude upon them, whereby they shall be disabled to do anything for the service of the King and Commonwealth ?"

On this theme Pym had much to say. It was the old political faith of Elizabeth and Bacon revived in another form. The King, he held, could not act outside the nation as if he were separate from it. "The King and his people are obliged to one another in the nearest relations. He is a father, and a child is called in law pars patris. He is the husband of the Commonwealth; they have the same interests; they are inseparable in their condition, be it good or evil. He is their head. They are the body. There is such an incorporation as cannot be dissolved without the destruction of both."

To have done as much as in him lay to break up this harmonious unity was Strafford's crime. Pym's solemn voice

1 Glyn's speech, Rushworth, Strafford's Trial, 706.

66

thrust the accusing charge home. Once indeed he faltered, and sought in vain amongst his notes. Then after a brief interval he recovered himself.1 " he concluded, Nothing,' can be more equal than that he should perish by the justice of the law which he would have subverted; neither will this be a new way of blood. There are marks enough to trace this law to the very original of this kingdom; and if it hath not been put in execution, as he allegeth, this 240 years, it was not for want of law, but that all time hath not bred a man bold enough to commit such crimes as these, which is a circumstance much aggravating his offence, and making him no whit less liable to punishment, because he is the only man that, in so long a time, had ventured upon such a treason as this."

Charles un

Strafford.

"2

Pym's noble exposition of constitutional right had been directed as much to the ear of Charles, who was listening eagerly to every word, as to the peers who were sitable to help ting in judgment. "I believe," wrote Baillie, "the King never heard a lecture of so free language against that his idolised prerogative."3 It may be that if Charles, with heroic self-abasement, had stepped forward to take upon his own head the blame of the past, he might even yet have saved Strafford. Elizabeth might have done it. He could not do it. He could not even give his subjects reason to believe that he had done with the theories of Strafford for ever. On the very next day he intimated to the Houses that he hoped to see a general disarmament; but that, as for

April 14. He will not dissolve the Irish army.

"To humble the man God let his memory fail him to a point or two, so he behoved to pass them."—Baillie, i. 348. Out of this Mr. Forster constructed a romance about Pym's catching sight of Strafford's face and breaking down. Another account is :-"It was sport to see how Master Pym in his speech was fearfully out, and constrained to pull out his papers, and read with a great deal of confusion and disorder, before he could re-collect himself; which failing of memory was no small advantage to the Lord-Lieutenant, because by this means the House perceived it was a premeditated flash, not grounded upon the Lieutenant's last answer, but resolved on before, whatsoever he should say for his own justification.”. Brief and Perfect Relation, 63. The contrast between Pym speaking from notes, and Strafford who spoke as the thoughts rose within him, is striking. Pym's speech, Rushworth Strafford's Trial, 661. 3 Baillie, i. 348.

1641

WAS PYM RIGHT?

335

any mere dismissal of the Irish army, he must defer his answer till after these great businesses now in agitation are over."1 The Commons now knew that they were to grope their way forward with that sword still suspended over their heads.

Three separate questions were involved in Pym's charge against Strafford. In the first place, Was Strafford's system of government of such a nature as to be destructive of the involved in free constitution of England? In the second place,

Questions

Pym's charge.

Did the prisoner deliberately purpose to overthrow. that constitution? In the third place, Was this crime, assuming it to have been proved, of so deep a dye that it was fair to treat it as one which Strafford must have known beforehand to be punishable in accordance with the general spirit of the law, though nothing had been done in contravention of any actual statute as hitherto interpreted? To the first of these questions no one would now hesitate to answer in the affirmative. To the second, those who have most deeply studied Strafford's life and character would be ready unhesitatingly to reply in the negative. To understand Pym's consistency in upholding the doctrine, that Strafford was punishable by the spirit of the law, it is necessary to remember that neither he, nor the great majority of the House of Commons, doubted for an instant that Strafford's attack upon the constitution was intentional and deliberate. He was to them the great apostate, led into paths of daring wickedness by the combined temptations of avarice and ambition.

Second reading of the Attainder Bill.

Pym's anxiety to bring Strafford's condemnation within the terms of the existing law would have led him even yet to persist in the impeachment. To the mass of his fellowmembers it was more important that Strafford should die than that the law should be magnified. Before the King's message about the Irish army arrived, the Attainder Bill had been read a second time, and it was ordered that it should be discussed in a Committee of the whole House in the afternoon from day to day. The temptation to bring a pres

1 L. J. iv. 216.

2

2 In his suggestive article on the trial in Fraser's Magazine (April, 1873) Mr. Palgrave thinks he sees evidence of an attempt to delay the Bill.