THE CHILDREN OF CHARLES THE FIRST: CHARLES, JAMES, AND MARY These two pictures were painted during the happy days of Charles I., when he lived with his children around him, before he yielded to the evil counsels of others and set himself against the people. There is a beautiful story of these days which tells us that while Charles was hunted up and down the land the leaders of the Parliamentary army would sometimes visit his children, whom they held captive. They were all, it is said, courteous to these innocent children of an unhappy father; but there was only one who knelt to them in loyalty, and that was Cromwell. We can imagine the picture of the stern Cromwell, who was to hunt Charles Stuart to his doom, kneeling to the king's little son James, who was to become king and to be himself driven from his throne. SMAKE PEARE THIS The Child's Book of WHAT THIS STORY TELLS US MIL "HIS is the story of the men of the Great Rebellion that took place 250 years ago between the English people and their king. Charles I. was a man who made many men love him. But it was his evil fortune to be a king, and he believed that God sent kings to rule as they liked, even if they had to act unjustly and to break solemn promises. Therefore from the beginning he insisted on going his own way, often against the laws. But the Parliament men held that the king had no right to set aside the laws, and therefore the king and the Parliament soon found themselves quarrelling. Parliament said that the king might not force the people to give him money, or to worship God in any way other than they pleased, and because the king insisted on these things men refused to obey him, and Charles had them put into prison. We read here of men who fought in the war that these quarrels brought about. ΤΟΝ MEN OF THE GREAT REBELLION painter called CONTINUED FROM 1732 Van Dyck, who made many portraits of King Charles. If you have ever seen one of them, it is easy for you to understand why, with all his faults and his follies, men loved him with a passionate devotion, and how he still casts a spell over men's n:inds. There is a dignity, a majesty, in the grave, delicate face, a charm in the haunting, melancholy eyes, a kingly air in the pose, which make you feel that this was a man for whose sake many would die gladly. And yet we can see that it is not the face of a man wise in counsel or strong in action. Grace and graciousness are there, but no jot of power. Now, if you look on the face of Oliver, it is as though it had been hewn roughly out of solid granite, grim and massive and hard; there is power in every line, but of grace or graciousness no whit. This man is a born fighter and a born leader. The other is born for defeat. During the first years of King Charles's life he was not the heir to the throne; he became heir on the death of his elder brother, Henry. From his youth, the prince had evil counsellors. His father, King James I., was very clever, but we read on page 892 how the shrewd King of France, Henry IV., described him as "the wisest fool in Christendom." Never was a monarch so JULIUS CASAR undignified as he; perhaps that is one reason why Charles bore himself always with such dignity. But James gave the prince for a companion a young gentleman who was very handsome, very brave, very proud, and very worthless; whom he made a lord, and who became famous as the Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham utterly won the heart of Charles, and taught him to think that princes and their favourites are altogether above the law. Moreover, it was due to Buckingham that Charles married the pretty French princess Henrietta Maria, who proved, in her turn, a counsellor fully as bad as Buckingham himself, after the duke had been slain by a crazed assassin. So that the two people whom Charles loved best in the world were the worst advisers he could have found, yet it was their advice he always followed. But of all the ill counsel that he got from these two, or from his father, the worst was their teaching that the word of a king may be lightly given and lightly broken; and this, more than aught else, brought Charles to his ruin. For although the people were wroth with him before he signed the promises in the Petition of Right, they were far more angry afterwards; because, although he may have made himself believe that he broke no pledges, yet he knew well enough what all men supposed that he meant by HERBERT SPENCER the promises he had given; and the people felt that he had played them false. And, again, when he gave up Strafford to his doom, all knew that he had broken his word; and when the Parliament resolved to fight, it was because they would not trust his faith. And at the last, when Cromwell and his party resolved that the king must die, it was because they had lost all hope that he would keep the promises he made if he were allowed to live. THE HE EVIL TEACHING OF HIS BOYHOOD THAT So that evil doctrine not only brought upon England the countless woes of civil war, but it brought upon Charles himself the loss of his crown and his life. Yet Charles really believed that he was in the right, except when he surrendered Strafford. For he held that the king is appointed by God, and should rule his people not as the people think good for themselves, but as the king thinks good for them, and that, whether he rules ill or well, none can call him to account save the King of kings; therefore, if his people are disobedient, he may compel them to his will, regardless of law. Besides that, he saw that the Parliament was now' demanding rights which it had never claimed before, so that if he gave way there would remain to the king no power at all. And it was this which made some Parliament men, like Hyde and Falkland, go over to the king's side. Now, after the king had most openly broken the law by entering the House of Commons, seeking there to arrest the five men who were the chiefs of the party that opposed him, he went away from London, and there was little enough hope that war could be avoided. And some months later Charles unfurled his standard at Nottingham, having gathered troops round him; and this was the beginning of the great civil war. OL LIVER CROMWELL, THE MAN WHO WAS Let us see, now, what manner of life had been lived by the man who was to conquer the king. Oliver Cromwell had farmed his lands in Huntingdonshire, seeking to make no stir in the world. Once, indeed, he had come forward in his own part of the country as champion of the people's rights in the matter of certain lands of which they were being robbed. But for the rest he was known chiefly as a very religious man, who for his religion's sake had been willing to leave his own home and seek a new one in America, but that he and his company were stayed by the king's order when they were about to depart. However, when that Parliament met with which the king declared war, Cromwell was one of the members-a rough, uncouth figure, unskilled and confused of speech, yet a man of mark by reason of his deadly earnestness. Among the clever men there, practised in the arts of debate, it did not seem that he was a mightier man than any of them. Then the war broke out, and the tide of it ran in favour of the Cavaliers and against the army of the Parliament. And it was Cromwell who saw how the tide must be turned. For he saw that what made Rupert's soldiers so irresistible was the proud sense of honour which made them fear nothing but disgrace, and that these men must win unless they were fought by soldiers who feared death as little as they for the burning love of a great cause; and then the victory would fall to those whose discipline was best. THE HO GATHERED ABOUT OLIVER MEN OF THE GREAT PURITAN ARMY Therefore, Cromwell went down to the Eastern Counties, and gathered troops of men picked out for their zeal in religion, but also for their strength and valour and horsemanship. And these men he trained in utter obedience, so that when they came to the shock of battle these Ironsides swept all before them, yet were ready to rally to their chief's command and stay their hands from needless pursuit and plunder; godly men after their stern fashion, who believed with their whole souls that their cause was the cause of freedom and righteousness. So, at Marston Moor and Naseby fight, the Ironsides smote and shattered the gallants whom none before had been able to resist. But after the rout of Naseby the king's cause was lost, and Charles gave himself up to the Scots, who were in arms to aid the English Parliament; and after a time the Scots gave him up to the Parliament. ́ For what the Scots desired was that the king should accept their Covenant, MEN OF THE and should replace the form of worship of the English Church by Presbyterianism, as most of the English Parliament desired likewise. But, although Charles might easily have won back his crown and most of his power by consenting thereto, this was a thing which he would in no wise do, being as loyal to what he held to be the true religion as any Puritan. WHY CROMWELL AND THE ARMY RESOLVED THAT THE KING MUST DIE So the Parliament chiefs sent the king under guard to Holmby House. But now Cromwell and the soldiers were ill content with the Parliament, seeing that it was willing to make terms with the king which would not have secured the liberty of religion, which was the thing they most cared about. Therefore, they sent a troop of soldiers under command of Cornet Joyce to bring the king away from Holmby House and keep him under charge of the Army itself. And then, because the Army, and the Parliament, and the Scots were in disagreement, the king tried. privately to treat with each of them, and to make them the more obstinate in their disagreements with each other, hoping that thereby he might yet triumph over them all. But when he tried to escape from the country, and was stopped in the Isle of Wight and held prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle, the Royalists rose in insurrection, and Cromwell saw that the king had been only making pretences. And so he and all the Army were resolved that when the insurrection was put down there could be no peace in the land unless the king's life were ended and the will of the Army were made to prevail. НЕ THE STRANGE SPECTACLE THAT ENGLAND SHOWED THE WORLD Then England showed the world a strange spectacle. For they who had risen in arms against their king in the name of the law, which is higher than the king, now set up a tribunal to judge the king which was itself without rights from any law. So that now it was the king who stood for the law, and his judges who stood for arbitrary power, which means power that is not restrained by law. And the Army, having this power, cut off the head of the king in the name of the people of England, GREAT REBELLION though all knew that the chief part of the people of England shrank in horror from the deed. Thus, in the last days of his life, the king who had wrought so much ill to the land became a martyr, and throughout those days he acted with a most royal dignity and showed great tenderness and courage. He would make no defence before judges who had no right to try him. In his prison he remained calm and collected, mindful of his friends and his children, but with his thoughts bent upon eternity. And when the last hour came, and he stepped through the window of Whitehall on to the scaffold, and looked on the crowds that had gathered to see how a king can die, He nothing common did nor mean Upon that memorable scene, But bowed his stately head Down as upon a bed. Let us turn now to the man who, more than any other, had brought about this terrible deed. Cromwell had striven his hardest to make terms with Charles, and to restrain the Army, which would willingly have made away with him long before. But at last he had judged that there was no way left but the terrible way he took. When his mind was made up, he never faltered. On the king's death warrant there is no signature written more firmly or boldly than that of Oliver Cromwell. For no man could be more utterly merciless than he, if it seemed to him that the need arose for firmness, as he showed when he slew and spared not at the taking of Drogheda and Wexford in Ireland. Yet he had no love for bloodshed; his mercilessness was the more terrible because he loved mercy. He made himself king of England in all but the name, just as he slew King Charles because he could see no other way of restoring order in the land. He established order and made the country prosperous. The foreign. nations, which at first treated England ́as an outcast state when she had put |