us sit in silence,” quoth Sir Dudley Digges, “we are miserable, we know not what to do!” Nay, cried Sir Nathaniel Rich, “we must now speak, or forever hold our peace.”  Then did grim Mr. Prynne and Sir Edward Coke mingle their words with sobs, while there were few dry eyes in the House.  Presently they found their voices, and used them in a way that wrung from the startled king his formal assent to the Petition of Right. [Sidenote:  Remarkable scene in the House of Commons]

There is something strangely pathetic and historically significant [6] in the emotion of these stern, fearless men.  The scene was no less striking on the 2d of the following March, when, “amid the cries and entreaties of the Speaker held down in his chair by force,” while the Usher of the Black Rod was knocking loudly at the bolted door, and the tramp of the king’s soldiers was heard in the courtyard, Eliot’s clear voice rang out the defiance that whoever advised the levy of tonnage and poundage without a grant from Parliament, or whoever voluntarily paid those duties, was to be counted an enemy to the kingdom and a betrayer of its liberties.  As shouts of “Aye, aye,” resounded on every side, “the doors were flung open, and the members poured forth in a throng.”  The noble Eliot went to end his days in the Tower, and for eleven years no Parliament sat again in England. [7]

It was in one and the same week that Charles I. thus began his experiment of governing without a Parliament, and that he granted a charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay.  He was very far, as we shall see, from realizing the import of what he was doing.  To the Puritan leaders it was evident that a great struggle was at hand.  Affairs at home might well seem desperate, and the news from abroad was not encouraging.  It was only four months since the surrender of Rochelle had ended the existence of the Huguenots as an armed political party.  They had now sunk into the melancholy condition of a tolerated sect which may at any moment cease to be tolerated.  In Germany the terrible Thirty Years War had just reached the darkest moment for the Protestants.  Fifteen months were yet to pass before the immortal Gustavus was to cross the Baltic and give to the sorely harassed cause of liberty a fresh lease of life.  The news of the cruel Edict of Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but give the English Puritans great concern.  Everywhere in Europe the champions of human freedom seemed worsted.  They might well think that never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation that was fast becoming intolerable.  Such were the anxious thoughts of the leading Puritans in the spring of 1629, and in face of so grave a problem different minds came naturally to different conclusions.  Some were for staying in England to fight it out to the bitter end; some were for crossing the ocean to create a new England in the wilderness.  Either task was arduous enough, and not to be achieved without steadfast and sober heroism. [Sidenote:  Desperate nature of the crisis]