PREFACE

ΤΟ

VOLUMES I. AND II.

In the two volumes which are now given to the public, and more especially in the second, I have reached a part of my work to which all that I have hitherto done has been leading up, and of which all that I can hope to accomplish in the future can be but the development. If I have judged rightly the first fourteen months of the Long Parliament, I am likely to judge rightly the future course of the parties which then came into collision. If I have erred seriously here, I am not likely to find anything worth saying here

after.

What the difficulties of the task have been can only be fully known to those who have attempted to face a similar problem. It is not merely that the subject-matter is one which, even at the present day, strangely evokes the divergent sympathies and passions of Englishmen, and that it has been already attempted by writers of no mean reputation, some of whom have succeeded in convincing their readers that there is nothing more to be said about the matter; but that even the richest materials fail

to yield all that the historian requires. Again and again, however, the frontier of knowledge may be advanced, the enquirer is confronted by darkness into which he cannot safely penetrate.

Yet in spite of all risks I have ventured to tell again a familiar tale. It has not, I hope, been for nothing that many years ago, as a young and unknown writer, I deliberately refrained from selecting a subject more attractive in its own nature than the reign of James I. could possibly be. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that it was the duty of a serious inquirer to search into the original causes of great events rather than, for the sake of catching at an audience, to rush unprepared upon the great events themselves. My reward has been that, whether the present work is well or ill done, it is at all events far better done than it could have been if I had commenced with the tale of the Puritan Revolution itself. Whether that tale will ever be told in its completeness by me, neither I nor any one can tell. To me personally, as a descendant of Cromwell and Ireton, it would be a special satisfaction to call up them and their contemporaries before me, and to learn the true secret of their success and failure. To the historian no more interesting period can be found than one in which men of virtue and ability strove with one another in seeking the solution of the highest problems at a time when the old chain of precedent had been violently snapped, and when all things seemed possible to the active intelligence.

Whatever the future may have in reserve, this present work has constantly reminded me by how

deep a gulf we are separated from the time when I commenced my labours, now some twenty-two years ago. Macaulay and Forster were then in possession of the field. The worship of the Puritans was in the ascendant, and to suggest that it was possible to make out a reasonable case for Bacon and Strafford was regarded as eccentric. All this is changed now. Few are to be found to say a good word for Puritanism, and the mistakes of the Long Parliament are unveiled with an unsparing hand. A dislike of agitation and disturbance has in some quarters taken the place of a dislike of arbitrary power, whilst reverence for culture has often left little room for reverence for liberty.

If I have striven, with what success I know not, to take a broader view of the deeds of the great men who made this England in which we live, and to realise and measure the greatness of Pym, as I have formerly attempted to realise and measure the greatness of Strafford, it must not be forgotten that this has been in great measure rendered possible by the amount of new material which has come into my hands, and which till very lately was entirely inaccessible. The invaluable diary of Sir Symonds d'Ewes, and the State Papers in the Public Record Office, have indeed been studied by previous inquirers, though I have found amongst them gleanings not wholly despicable. The Clarendon MSS., the Carte and Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library have also been helpful. But even if these mines had been more thoroughly worked than they have been, little or nothing would have been found in them to fill up the

great deficiency which every previous historian of the period must have felt. The suspicions entertained of Charles I. by the Parliamentary leaders forms the most prominent feature of the history of the Long Parliament. The whole narrative will be

coloured by the conviction of the writer that these suspicions were either well or ill founded. Yet hitherto there has been no possibility of penetrating, except by casual glimpses, behind the veil of Charles's privacy. What evidence has been forthcoming was too scattered and incoherent to convince those who were not half convinced already. Though even now much remains dark, considerable light has been thrown upon the secrets of Charles's policy by the copies, now in the Record Office, of the correspondence of Rossetti, the Papal Agent at the Court of Henrietta Maria, with Cardinal Barberini. The originals are preserved in the Barberini Palace, where the agents of the Record Office were permitted, by the courtesy of the librarian, Don Sante Pieralisi, to make the copies of them which have stood me in such good stead. I do not know any literary service for which I have had reason to be more profoundly grateful than that which was performed by these gentlemen by directions from the authorities at the Record Office, and of which I and my readers have been the first to reap the benefit.

Scarcely less is the gratitude which I feel to Mr. Rawdon Brown, through whose kindness a great part of the Venetian despatches relating to this period were copied and sent to the Record Office. Those thus forwarded by him are referred to in these