We cannot refrain from adding a few words respecting a topic on which the defenders of Charles are fond of dwelling.  If, they say, he governed his people ill, he at least governed them after the example of his predecessors.  If he violated their privileges, it was because their privileges had not been accurately defined.  No act of oppression has ever been imputed to him which has not a parallel in the annals of the Tudors.  This point Hume has labored, with an art which is as discreditable in a historical work as it would be admirable in a forensic address.  The answer is short, clear, and decisive.  Charles had assented to the Petition of Right.  He had renounced the oppressive powers said to have been exercised by his predecessors, and he had renounced them for money.  He was not entitled to set up his antiquated claims against his own recent release.

These arguments are so obvious that it may seem superfluous to dwell upon them.  But those who have observed how much the events of that time are misrepresented and misunderstood will not blame us for stating the case simply.  It is a case of which the simplest statement is the strongest.

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely choose to take issue on the great points of the question.  They content themselves with exposing some of the crimes and follies to which public commotions necessarily give birth.  They bewail the unmerited fate of Strafford.  They execrate the lawless violence of the army.  They laugh at the Scriptural names of the preachers.  Major-generals fleecing their districts; soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, taking possession of the hospitable firesides and hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful windows of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through the market-place; Fifth-monarchy-men shouting for King Jesus; agitators lecturing from the tops of tubs on the fate of Agag; all these, they tell us, were the offspring of the Great Rebellion.

Be it so.  We are not careful to answer in this matter.  These charges, were they infinitely more important, would not alter our opinion of an event which alone has made us to differ from the slaves who crouch beneath despotic sceptres.  Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war.  They were the price of our liberty.  Has the acquisition been worth the sacrifice?  It is the nature of the devil of tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves.  Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism?