In the last summer the first use which he had made of each successive advantage, was to renew[b] the offer of opening a negotiation for peace.  It convinced the army of the pacific disposition of their sovereign, and it threw on the parliament, even among their own adherents, the blame of continuing the war.  At length,[c] after the third message, the houses gave a tardy and reluctant consent; but it was not before they had received from Scotland the propositions formerly voted as the only basis of a lasting reconciliation, had approved of the amendments suggested by their allies, and had filled up the blanks with the specification of the acts of parliament to be passed, and with the names of the royalists to be excepted from the amnesty.  It was plain to every intelligent man in either army that to lay such a foundation of peace was in reality to proclaim perpetual hostilities.[2] But the king, by the advice of his council, consented to make it the subject of a treaty, for two ends; to discover whether it was the resolution of the houses to adhere without any modification to these high pretensions; and to make the experiment, whether it were not possible to gain one of the two factions, the Presbyterians or the Independents, or at least to widen

[Footnote 1:  See the letters in Charles’s Works, 142-148.  “I may fairly expect to be chidden by thee for having suffered thee to be vexed by them (Wilmot being already there, Percy on his way, and Sussex within a few days of taking his journey), but that I know thou carest not for a little trouble to free me from great inconvenience.”—­Ibid. 150.]

[Footnote 2:  Journals, vii. 53.  The very authors of the propositions did not expect that the king would ever submit to them.—­Baillie, ii. 8, 43, 73.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1644.  July 4.] [Sidenote b:  A.D. 1644.  Sept. 5.] [Sidenote c:  A.D. 1644.  Nov. 23.] the breach between them by furnishing new causes of dissension.[1]

At Uxbridge, within the parliamentary quarters, the commissioners from the two parties met each other.[a] Those from the parliament had been commanded to admit of no deviation from the substance of the propositions already voted; to confine themselves to the task of showing that their demands were conformable to reason, and therefore not to be refused; and to insist that the questions of religion, the militia, and Ireland, should each be successively debated during the term of three days, and continued in rotation till twenty days had expired, when, if no agreement were made, the treaty should terminate.  They demanded that episcopacy should be abolished, and the Directory be substituted in place of the Book of Common Prayer; that the command of the army and navy should be vested in the two houses, and intrusted by them to certain commissioners of their own appointment; and that the cessation in Ireland should be broken, and hostilities should be immediately renewed.  The king’s commissioners replied, that his conscience would not allow him to consent to the proposed change of religious worship, but that he was willing to consent to a law restricting the jurisdiction of the bishops within the narrowest bounds, granting every reasonable indulgence to tender consciences, and raising on the church property the sum of one hundred thousand