PART SECOND
TO THE END OF THE FIRST CIVIL WAR
1642-1646
There is therefore a great dark void, from February 1641 to January 1643, through which the reader is to help himself from Letter III. over to Letter IV., as he best may. How has pacific England, the most solid pacific country in the world, got all into this armed attitude; and decided itself to argue henceforth by pike and bullet till it get some solution? Dryasdust, if there remained any shame in him, ought to look at those wagonloads of Printed Volumes, and blush! We, in great haste, offer the necessitous reader the following hints and considerations.
It was mentioned above that Oliver St. John, the noted Puritan Lawyer, was already, in the end of January 1641, made Solicitor-General. The reader may mark that as a small fraction of an event showing itself above ground, completed; and indicating to him a grand subterranean attempt on the part of King Charles and the Puritan Leaders, which unfortunately never could become a fact or event. Charles, in January last or earlier (for there are no dates discoverable but this of St. John’s), perceiving how the current of the Nation ran, and what a humour men were getting into, had decided on trying to adopt the Puritan leaders, Pym, Hampden, Holles and others, as what we should now call his ‘Ministers’: these Puritan men, under the Earl of Bedford
