The nation received the intelligence of the dissolution with sorrow and indignation, The only persons to whom this event gave pleasure were those few discerning men who thought that the maladies of the state were beyond the reach of gentle remedies.  Oliver St. John’s joy was too great for concealment.  It lighted up his dark and melancholy features, and made him, for the first time, indiscreetly communicative.  He told Hyde that things must be worse before they could be better, and that the dissolved Parliament would never have done all that was necessary.  St. John, we think, was in the right.  No good could then have been done by any Parliament which did not fully understand that no confidence could safely be placed in the King, and that, while he enjoyed more than the shadow of power, the nation would never enjoy more than the shadow of liberty.

As soon as Charles had dismissed the Parliament, he threw several members of the House of Commons into prison.  Ship-money was exacted more rigorously than ever; and the Mayor and Sheriffs of London were prosecuted before the Star-Chamber for slackness in levying it.  Wentworth, it is said, observed, with characteristic insolence and cruelty, that things would never go right till the Aldermen were hanged.  Large sums were raised by force on those counties in which the troops were quartered.  All the wretched shifts of a beggared exchequer were tried.  Forced loans were raised.  Great quantities of goods were bought on long credit and sold for ready money.  A scheme for debasing the currency was under consideration.  At length, in August, the King again marched northward.

The Scots advanced into England to meet him.  It is by no means improbable that this bold step was taken by the advice of Hampden, and of those with whom he acted; and this has been made matter of grave accusation against the English Opposition.  It is said that to call in the aid of foreigners in a domestic quarrel is the worst of treasons, and that the Puritan leaders, by taking this course, showed that they were regardless of the honour and independence of the nation, and anxious only for the success of their own faction.  We are utterly unable to see any distinction between the case of the Scotch invasion in 1640, and the case of the Dutch invasion in 1688; or rather, we see distinctions which are to the advantage of Hampden and his friends.  We believe Charles to have been a worse and more dangerous king than his son.  The Dutch were strangers to us, the Scots a kindred people speaking the same language, subjects of the same prince, not aliens in the eye of the law.  If, indeed, it had been possible that a Scotch army or a Dutch army could have enslaved England, those who persuaded Leslie to cross the Tweed, and those who signed the invitation to the Prince of Orange, would have been traitors to their country.  But such a result was out of the question.  All that either a Scotch or a Dutch invasion could do was to give the public feeling of England an opportunity to show itself.  Both expeditions would have ended in complete and ludicrous discomfiture, had Charles and James been supported by their soldiers and their people.  In neither case, therefore, was the independence of England endangered; in both cases her liberties were preserved.