1641 the bar. STRAFFORD AT THE BAR. 305 not slow to avail himself. Never had he seemed more truly Strafford at great than when he appeared at the bar, like some fierce but noble animal at bay, to combat the united attacks of his accusers, in his own unaided strength. His crisp black hair was now streaked with grey, and his proud face was . softened by the feeling of his calamities, and by the reverence which he felt for the great assembly of the peers, from which he firmly expected to receive that justice which was his due. With marvellous self-restraint he professed for the House of Commons a respect which it must have been difficult for him to feel. The most consummate actor could not have borne himself better. Strafford was no actor. He spoke out of the fulness of his heart, out of his consciousness of his own integrity, out of his incapacity to understand any serious view of the relations between a Government and a nation other than that upon which he had acted. For several days the Court was almost entirely occupied with the charges relating to the affairs of Ireland. Undoubtedly His Irish Strafford did not succeed in showing that he had government. been a constitutional ruler. He had again and again acted with a high-handed disregard of the letter of the law, and had sometimes violated its spirit. He fell back on his good intentions, on his anxiety to secure practical justice, and on the fact that his predecessors had acted very much as he was accused of acting. Though the plea was undoubtedly insufficient, the view which Strafford took of Ireland was far truer than the view which had been taken by Pym. What was really needed, as far as Ireland was concerned, was not Strafford's punishment, but a serious and impartial investigation into the causes of Irish disorder with the view of coming to an agreement as to the conditions under which the government of that country could in the future be carried on. It is needless to say that not a single member of the English Parliament ever thought for an instant of anything of the kind. The only remedy which they imagined to be needed was to place Ireland in the hands of men like Lord Mountnorris or the Earl of Cork. Ignorance brings with it its inevitable penalty, and vengeance, this time not slow-footed, was already on the track. Had Strafford committed To Pym the argument that the laws of Ireland had been violated was mainly important as showing a readiness to violate the laws of England as well. Very early in his conduct of the case he had to face the question treason? for which he must long ago have been prepared. If Strafford had done all that he was alleged to have done, if he had violated the law in innumerable instances for his own private ends, had he committed treason? The doctrine of treason as it had been elaborated in the Middle Ages, had fixed that name upon acts committed against the person or authority of the Sovereign. No one knew better than Strafford that in this sense he had not committed treason. Pym's conception of treason. Pym, on the other hand, advanced a larger and nobler conception of the crime. It is possible that he was led to his argument by the extension of treason by the judges in the Tudor reigns from an attack on the King's personal authority to an attack such as Essex had contemplated in the last days of Elizabeth upon the system of government supported by the Sovereign. He now argued that the worst traitor was not he who attacked the Sovereign's person or government, but he who attacked the Sovereign in his political capacity, and, by undermining the laws which constituted his greatness, exposed him to disaster and ruin. If the principle itself was politically grander than that which lay at the root of the old treason law, it had for judicial purDifficulty of poses the incurable defect, as it was thus presented, applying it. of a want of definiteness. The charge of treason might be reserved for offences of the blackest dye, such as a deliberate attack by force of arms upon Parliament. It might, on the other hand, be employed to cover any strong opposition to the popular sentiment. Already there had been signs that this danger was imminent. Finch and Berkeley, as well as Laud, had already been voted by the Commons to have been guilty of treason, and it required a very strong imagination to believe that the foundations of the State had really been endangered by either Finch or Berkeley. The time might soon On this change, see the Introduction to Mr. Willis Bund's Selections of Cases from the State Trials. 1641 WHAT IS TREASON? 307 arrive when treason would be as light a word in the mouth of a member of Parliament as damnation had been in the mouth of a mediæval ecclesiastic. Yet, even if it had been conceded that Pym's view of treason was the true one, and if care had been taken to restrict it to a deliberate conspiracy to change the existing system of government, it was hard to call upon Strafford to pay the penalty. Not only had he himself had no such deliberate intention of changing the government, but he had never had fair warning that what he was doing would be regarded in the light in which it was now seen. It might be well that the law of treason should be altered so as to include some actions which had been done by Strafford; but it was hard upon him, and of the worst possible example to future times, to inflict the penalty of death under an interpretation of the law which was now heard of for the first time. Strafford therefore had much to say on his own behalf. His vigorous defence told on his audience. Ladies who had obtained seats in Westminster Hall were loud in his Increasing praise. Amongst the peers the conviction was growing that, whatever else he might be, he was not a traitor. In the House of Commons, on the other March 25. feeling in favour of Strafford. tion in the House of Dissatisfac hand, the cry for blood was waxing louder. There was an increasing disposition to resent all licence given to the necessities of the defence as a delay of justice. The frequent adjournments of the Lords for the consideration of points of procedure were regarded as mere procrastination, and one member asked that the peers might be requested to stop the prisoner's mouth whenever he spoke at undue length.1 Undoubtedly the Commons were thinking more of the future than of the past. That which irritated them was not so much the thought that Strafford had been cruel to Mountnorris, or that he had converted to his own use several thousand pounds of the King's money, as the thought that if he was left alive he would soon be found at the Causes of their displeasure. 1 D'Ewes's Diary, Harl. MSS. clxii. 359. head of an army prepared to drive them out of Westminster, and ready to explain that, startling as the proceeding might seem, it was only a temporary and accidental interruption of the harmonious working of the constitution. Charles, of all men, was most anxious to save Strafford, but neither he nor the Queen could understand that they could only save him by entirely renouncing all thought of appealing to force. Already an offer had been made to them which they were loth entirely to reject, and that offer, if it were once known, would be sufficient to seal Strafford's fate. Wants of the English army. For some time the dissatisfaction in the English army had been on the increase. "This I will say of you of the Parlialiament," wrote one of the officers in January to his brother, who was a member of the House of Commons; "you are the worst paymasters I know. Next Tuesday we have six weeks due to us, and unless there be some speedy course taken for the payment you may well expect to hear that all our soldiers are in a mutiny, to the ruin of the country, for they are notable sheep-stealers already." I Effect of the vote in Scots. tion of the English officers. On March 6, in the very height of the pressure for payment to the Scots, the Commons had come to a vote, transferring to the troops of that nation 10,000l. which had been previously assigned to the English army. The news favour of the had naturally caused the gravest dissatisfaction amongst the troops in Yorkshire. Their talk ran on mutiny. Officers and soldiers were alike in distress. Henry Dissatisfac- Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, Ashburnham, Wilmot, and Pollard, were members of the House of Commons as well as officers. "If such papers as that of the Scots," said Wilmot in the House, when the matter was under discussion, “will procure monies, I doubt not but the officers of the English army may easily do the like.” When the vote had been passed these four officers consulted together. The resolution which they adopted was apparently a curious resultant from the double character which they bore. As officers of an army which had been stinted in its pay by the E. Verney to R. Verney, Jan. 15, Verney MSS. 2 Idem, March 8, ibid. 1641 An army petition proposed by Percy and others. THE ARMY DISSATISFIED. 309 House of Commons, they were ready to offer their services to the King. As members of the House of Commons they were bound to keep within the limits of constitutional law, at least after their own interpretation. They proposed to induce the officers in the North to sign a declaration that they would stand by the King if Parliamentary pressure were put upon him to compel him to assent to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords, or to force him to disband the Irish army before the Scots were disbanded, or if the full revenue which he had enjoyed for so many years were not placed in his hands. Such was the military version of the fundamental laws of the realm. Percy was commissioned to offer to the King the sup The King to port of the army on these terms. There can be very be informed. little doubt that he knew pretty well that these three points were precisely those on which Charles was most anxious He has already heard of another plan. The Queen in her hopes assistance. Richelieu refuses to receive her in France. that a stand should be made. Yet when he spoke to the King on the subject he was surprised to find that a more violent proposal still had already been laid before him.1 That proposal, like all other violent proposals to which Charles was called on to listen, was warmly supported by the Queen. Henrietta Maria had been ready in the disappointed beginning of March to clutch at any aid, however of foreign hopeless it might seem. She had been deeply disappointed in her expectation of foreign help. Richelieu had intimated to her, in his most polite phrases, that it would not be advisable, in her own interest, that she should visit France in this conjuncture of her affairs; and she reasonably conjectured that this advice concealed a preference for an alliance with a strong Parliament 1 Percy to Northumberland, June 14 (Rushworth, iv. 255). It is impossible to trace out the dates of these early proceedings of Percy and his friends. The interview with the King must have taken place a few days before March 21, as from Chudleigh's evidence on Aug. 13 (Harl. MSS. clxiv. 28) it appears that Percy and his friends had drawn back (as Suckling expressed himself) about March 20; that is to say, probably on March 21, the date on which Chudleigh arrived from the North. The interview took place before this. |