assistance in England. This was effected in September, 1643, and the confederates contributed directly thirty thousand pounds for the support of the royal army, fifteen thousand pounds in money, and fifteen thousand pounds in pensions.
This was not accomplished without exciting the notice of the parliament, who sent over commissioners to endeavour to win over the protestants in Ormond's army, but in vain. In the month of November Ormond shipped five regiments to the king. These were sent to Chester, to garrison that town under lord Byron; but they were rather marauders than soldiers; they had been raised by the parliament, and fought against it for the king; and they were as loose in discipline as in principles. In about six weeks after their arrival, they were visited by Sir Thomas Fairfax, at Nantwich, when fifteen thousand of them threw down their arms, amongst them the afterwards notorious general Monk. Nor was this the only mischief occasioned to the royal cause by these Irish troops. Their arrival disgusted the royal forces under Newcastle in the north, who declared that they would not fight with catholics and Irish rebels.
Whilst the Scotch were mustering to enter England, the marquis of Newcastle was bearing hard on the parliament forces in Yorkshire. He had cleared the country of them except Hull, which he was besieging; and Lincolnshire was also so overrun with his forces, that lord Fairfax, governor of Hull, was obliged to send his son, Sir Thomas, across the Humber, to the help of the earl of Manchester. Fairfax united with Cromwell near Boston, and at Winceby-on-the-wolds, about five miles from Horncastle, the united army under Manchester came to a battle with the troops of Newcastle, and completely routed them, thus clearing nearly all Lincolnshire of them. Cromwell had a horse killed under him, and Sir Ingram Hopton, of Newcastle's army, was killed. The battle was won by Cromwell and Fairfax's cavalry.
The close of this year was saddened to the parliament by the death of Pym. It was, indeed, a serious loss, following that of Hampden. No man had contributed so much to give firmness to the conduct of the commons, and clearness to the objects at which it aimed. His mind was formed on the old classic model of patriotic devotion. He had no desire to pull down the crown or the church, but he would have the one restrained within the limits of real service to the country, and the other to those of its spiritual benefit. Therefore he recommended sternly resistance to the royal power, preferring civil war to perpetual slavery, and the exemption of bishops and clergymen from all civil offices. Seeing from the first the ends that he would attain, guided by the most solemn and perspicuous principles, he never swerved from them under the pressure of flattery or difficulty, and he would not let the state swerve. His eloquence and address, but far more his unselfish zeal, enabled him to draw the commons and intimidate the lords. He boldly told the peers that they must join in the salvation of the country, or see it saved without them, and take the consequences in the esteem or the contempt of the people. They would have fared better had they profited by his warning. Pym was the Aristides of the time: he sought no advantage to himself, he derived nothing from his exertion or his prominent position, but the satisfaction of seeing his country saved by his labours. He derived no influence from his wealth or rank, for he had none of either; his whole prestige was intellectual and moral; he wore himself out for the public good, and died as poor as he commenced, the only grant which he received from the state being an honourable burial in Westminster Abbey. The sycophants of royalty, on the return of monarchy, cast out his remains from that miscellaneous charnel-house of kings, patriots poets, sycophants, and kept mistresses; but there was a monument which they dared not touch, in which his memory lives, the heart of the nation, for there is no man to whom posterity owes, and will owe, more of the glory, the freedom, and the daily comforts of Englishmen. Wherever we go, we walk over his tomb, for it embraces every foot of English ground, and out of it springs perpetually the ennobling and enfranchising consciousness of what, as a nation, we are and must be.
At the opening of 1644 Charles had devised a scheme for undermining the authority of the parliament, which was by issuing a proclamation for its extinction. Clarendon, who was now the lord chancellor, very wisely assured him that the members of the parliament sitting at Westminster would pay no heed to his proclamation, and that a better measure would be to summon parliament to meet at Oxford. That would give every member of both houses, who were at all inclined to again recognise the royal authority, the opportunity to join him; and, on the other hand, a parliament assembling by call and authority of the king at his court, would stamp the other as illegal and rebellious. The advice was adopted, and at the summons forty-three peers and one-hundred and eighteen commoners assembled at Oxford. These, however, consisted of such as had already seceded from the parliamentary party, and the king claimed as the full number of his parliament at Oxford, eighty-three lords, and one hundred and seventy-five commons. According to Whitelock, there met at Westminster twenty-two lords only, and eleven more were excused on different accounts, making thirty-three; of the commons there were more than two hundred and eighty. The king, in his parliament, promised all those privileges which he had so pertinaciously denied to all his past parliaments, and a letter, subscribed by all the members of both houses, was addressed to the earl of Essex, requesting him to inform "those by whom he was trusted," that they were desirous to receive commissioners, to endeavour to come to a peaceable accommodation on all matters in dispute. Essex returned the letter, refusing to forward a paper which did not acknowledge the authority of the body addressed. The point was conceded, and Charles himself then forwarded him a letter addressed to the lords and commons of parliament assembled at Westminster in his own name, soliciting, by advice of the lords and commons of parliament assembled at Oxford, the appointment of such commissioners "for settling the rights of the crown and parliament, the laws of the land, and the liberties and property of the subject."
In this letter appeared a remarkable sentence, no other than a recommendation of toleration on religious subjects, the first mention of such topic, as Dr. Lingard has observed. in the history of England This was, we may feel assured.
