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ever, a sacrifice to the caprice, though he may have been to the faithlessness of a sovereign, but to the judicial vengeance of an outraged people, whose righteous cause he had once espoused, aud then basely deserted for the service of a king, whom he meant to erect into a despot by his cherished project of Thorough. A significant term was that word Thorough; significant enough to bring to the block its accomplished employer, in the person of the famous or rather infamous Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford.

In less than eight years from the period of the lastnamed trial, occurred in the same place another yet more memorable, even that of the tyrant whom Strafford had so efficiently served: too efficiently, indeed, for himself. Of all the characters in English history, none have been so variously represented as Charles the First. Perhaps he may be most appropriately described as uniting all the opposite defects exhibited by those of his ancestors who had ruled for more than two centuries to the north of the Tweed. James the First, the royal poet of Scotland, succeeded to the administration of affairs after a long imprisonment in England, when, for crimes real or imaginary committed in his absence, he adjudged to death or confiscation the flower of his nobility and as the natural consequence of such severity, fell himself in

:

the end by the poniard of an assassin.

James the Second united to the cruelty of his father that treachery which induced him to violate the rites of hospitality, by murdering with his own hand the great earl of Douglas at the royal table. James the Third, less able than his predecessors, and a slave to his favourites, became the victim of an aristocracy inflamed by the severities of former reigns, and no longer controlled by any symptoms of talent in the person of the sovereign. His son, James the Fourth, headstrong and incautious, involved himself and his country in a contention with England, which at length terminated in death and disgrace on that fatal field of Flodden, out of which the most elegant of modern poets has successfully woven so exquisite a tale. James the Fifth lent his countenance to the suppression of the great religious reformation; and by a series of impolitic acts so forfeited the affections of his subjects, that in the end his own army refused to draw the sword on his behalf. His daughter Mary, on account of her attachment to the papacy, and her marriage with the murderer of her husband, found herself a prisoner in the hands of her subjects, and supplanted by her own infant son upon the throne. That son, James the Sixth, and the first of

his name and his race that

"Ruled all Britain to the sea,"

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though devoted by profession to the protestant religion, was really opposed to everything that savoured of liberty either in Church or State. An invader of the rights of the Church in Scotland, of the privilege of parliament in England, his memory is branded on the page of history as that of a prince who maintained

"The right divine of kings to govern wrong;"

and on the page of literature, as one by whom learning was degraded into imbecile pedantry. The child of such a parent was the unfortunate Charles the First, in whom were unhappily combined the severity of the first James, the faithlessness of the second, the favouritism of the third, the rashness of the fourth, and the impolicy of the fifth, with the attachment to arbitrary power that characterized his father, and that brought him to an end precisely similar to that of his grandmother.

In the last year of his life, we find him the prisoner of the people he had misgoverned. Unhappily for him, those who had the greatest influence in political affairs were precisely the men least disposed to forgive a public injury. The consequence was, that the royal criminal was not allowed that birthright of all Englishmen, a fair trial. In the first instance, the parliament itself had been packed by

the forcible exclusion of a number of members, so that it is impossible to consider those who remained as being that which, by a solemn resolution, they declared themselves to be, "the commons of England in parliament assembled, who, being chosen by representing the people, have the supreme power in the nation;" or, indeed, as anything else than the slavish instruments of an implacable and furious military despotism. In the next place, the court chosen for the trial of the king by this wretched remnant of what was once a free parliament, was not composed of impartial judges, but of well-known political partisans, who had for years been opposed to his government, and before whom it was impossible he should ever obtain a fair hearing. It may be said, that the trial of a king by his subjects was an event so unprecedented, that it could not have been conducted according to any of the ordinary forms of procedure: of this we are not so certain; it is a question, however, whether, if the king deserved no more than deposition, a trial were necessary at all. In after years his son was deposed by a vote of the convention, without formal arraignment before any tribunal, the only difference in his case being the overt act of leaving the throne vacant, which it certainly needed no trial to prove. From all these considerations, we think it must appear that the trial of Charles the

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First was both unfair and unconstitutional, and only instituted for the purpose of procuring his death by those who were already determined upon it. He refused, himself, to acknowledge the legal authority of the Court, to answer its indictment, or even to uncover his head in the presence of the judges. And, however much his protest may have contained of falsehood or absurdity, and however enormous the political crimes for which he really had to answer, it must surely be conceded that a criminal is warranted in refusing to plead before a Court composed of enemies bent upon his destruction. How much soever Charles may, in the arrangements of Providence, have deserved the ignominious fate which he met, one thing is certain that no human hand could be justified in inflicting it upon him. In a word, his trial was a mockery, and his execution a murder.

In objecting to the validity of the High Court of Justice, the unhappy despot followed the legal advice of one, who, whilst he generally adhered to the side of monarchy, maintained principles and displayed virtues worthy of a nobler cause than that of his unfortunate sovereign. This was the great and judicious Sir Matthew Hale.

The political character of Hale, so far as it can be considered royalist, must be viewed (to use a modern phrase) as essentially conservative; but it should

H