order to Fleetwood to force, at any loss, his detached corps across the Teme. Cromwell at the same moment threw a bridge of boats over the Severn at Bunshill, near the confluence of the two rivers, and restored the communication that had been partially cut off. A hot fire near Powick—so sudden were these movements-was the first thing that attracted the attention of Charles, who, from one of the towers of the cathedral, was examining the positions of the enemy, when, finding that an attack was begun in that quarter, he instantly dispatched a re-enforcement of horse and foot to the spot, and gave instructions to the commanding officer to prevent, if possible, the formation of the bridge. But a similar addition had been made to the detachment under Fleetwood, who again outnumbered his opponents, and pressed them with great vivacity toward Worcester. "The Scots, in the hope that, by occupying so large a force, they might afford to their countrymen on the other side of the Severn an opportunity of breaking the regiments under Cromwell, maintained the most obstinate resistance." They disputed every inch of ground which presented the slightest advantage; fought from hedge to hedge, and frequently charged with the pike, to check the advance of the enemy.

For an instant this rolled the tide of battle back toward the Teme; but fresh battalion after battalion arrived to the support of Fleetwood, who then bore the Scots by fair force of numbers even across the bridge.

Cromwell was meanwhile deciding the battle under the walls of the town; and here, or on both sides of the river, from two o'clock in the morning till night-fall, had this terrible contest raged with unceasing fury. The main body of the enemy's infantry had advanced out of the city against the renowned chief of the Ironsides, and the conflict upon one spot in this quarter, Cromwell wrote in his dispatch, lasted three hours. It was closed by the veteran regiment which had so often closed the battles of the Parliament, and which

now, for the last time, advanced at the word of Cromwell. The victory was complete-gloriously complete, as the lordgeneral exultingly wrote, and "gained after as stiff a contest for many hours-including both sides of the river"-as he had ever seen. The fort having been summoned, and Colonel Drummond still refusing to surrender it, it was carried, in all the wild triumph of the victory, by a furious storm, wherein fifteen hundred men were put to the sword. Charles, flying through the streets in piteous despair, in vain attempted to rally his troops, and, finding they would no longer move, is said to have cried out, with a burst of passionate tears, "Then shoot me dead, rather than let me live to see the sad consequences of this day." A crown had vanished from his grasp.

On another man, who still stood upon that field, a crown was now descending. He stood there, some time after the day was won, in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Then, calling Fleetwood and Lambert to his side, he told them, with a fit of boisterous laughter, that he would knight them, as heroes of old were knighted (he did not say by kings), on the field where they had achieved their glory. The excitement subdued, he retired to his tent, and there, at "ten o'clock at night," "weary, and scarce able to write," he yet wrote to the Parliament of England these memorable words: "The dimensions of this mercy are above my thoughts. It is for aught I know a crowning mercy."

XLII.

DISSOLUTION OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT.-GARDINER.

[The Long Parliament, or what was left of it, was now the highest legitimate authority in the land. In the course of the revolution, however, it had been weeded out several times, and, in its present maimed and shrunken form, could not pretend to represent the public sentiment of the country. Nevertheless it clung to power, and steadily refused to make way for a new Parliament, freely chosen. For this reason Cromwell drove it out.]

"PEACE," Sung Milton, in his sonnet to Cromwell, "hath her victories no less renowned than war." Peace, too, has her forlorn hopes, her stout battling for a cause lost by anticipation, and destined only to re-appear in other days when the standard shall have been intrusted to arms more fortunate, if not more stalwart. Cromwell and the higher officers in the army, Sir Henry Vane and the nobler spirits yet remaining in the Parliament, were alike bent upon realizing the same high object—a free state governed in accordance with the resolutions of its elected representatives, and offering guarantees for individual liberty of thought and speech, without which Parliamentary government is only another name for tyranny. But their powers were not equal to their wishes. The revolutionary force in the country had been spent long before the execution of Charles; and now that his possible successor was a youth of whom no harm was known, the Royalist flood was mounting steadily. Even the original feeling of the nation had not been against royalty, but against the particular way in which the king had acted; and the necessity for dethronement, and the supposed necessity for execution, had been founded upon reasoning which had never stirred the popular heart. The nation at large did not really care for a commonwealth, did not care for religious liberty. The violent suppression of the Episcopalian worship had

alienated as many as had been alienated by Laud's injudicious resuscitation of obsolete forms. Most Englishmen would have been quite content if they could have got a king who would have shown some reasonable respect for the wishes of Parliament, and who would abstain from open illegality.

In short, the leaders of the commonwealth found themselves, in some sort, in the same position as that in which Laud found himself in 1629. They had an ideal of their own, which they believed to be really good for the nation, and they hoped that, by habituating the nation to that which they thought best, they could at last bring it to a right frame of mind. If their experiment and its failure is more interesting than Laud's experiment and its failure, it is because their ideal was far higher than his. It broke down, not because they were wrong, but because the nation was not as yet ripe for acceptance of any thing so good.

The difference of opinion which slowly grew up between army leaders and Parliamentary leaders was only the natural result of the tacit acknowledgment of this rock ahead, which was none the less felt because both parties shrank from avowing it. A free Parliament would, perhaps, be a Royalist Parliament. In that case it would probably care nothing about liberty, and would certainly care nothing about Puritanism. How was the danger to be met? The fifty or sixty men who called themselves a Parliament had their own remedy for the disease. Let there be new elections to the vacant seats, but let their own seats not be vacated. Let these old members have power to reject such new members as seemed to them unfit to serve in Parliament. There would be something that looked like a free Parliament, and yet it would not be a free Parliament at all. Those only would be admitted who were thought by the old members to be the right sort of persons to influence the nation.

The scheme, in fact, was a sham, and Cromwell disliked shams. He had another objection equally strong. If there

was one thing for which he and his soldiers had fought and bled, it was for the sake of religious liberty, a liberty which was real enough as far as it went, even if it was much less comprehensive than that which has been accepted in later times. No security was offered for religious liberty under the new-old Parliament. There was nothing to prevent it from abolishing all that existed at any moment it pleased.

As often happens, moral repugnance came to the help of logical reasoning. Not a few of the members of Parliament were conducting themselves in such a way as to forfeit the respect of all honest men. Against foreign foes, indeed, the commonwealth had been successful. The navy, reorganized by Vane, had cleared the seas of Royalist privateers. Commercial jealousy against the Dutch had mingled with the tide of political ill-feeling. In 1651 the Navigation Act was aimed at the Dutch carrying trade, which had flourished simply because the Dutch vessels were better built, and long experience had enabled them to transport goods from one country to another more cheaply than the merchants of other nations. Henceforth English vessels alone were to be allowed to import goods into England, excepting in the case of vessels belonging to the country in which the goods were produced.

War was the result. In January, 1652, the seizure of Dutch ships began. The two sturdy antagonists were well matched. There were no decisive victories; but, on the whole, the English had the upper hand.

Such a war was expensive. Royalists were forced to compound for their estates, forfeited by their adoption of the king's cause. Even if this measure had been fairly carried out, the attempt to make one part of the nation pay for the expenses of the whole was more likely to create dissension than to heal it. But it was not fairly carried out. Members of Parliament took bribes to let this man and that man off more easily than those who were less able to pay. The effects of unlimited power were daily becoming more manifest.