From the apprehension of this worst evil the Houses were soon delivered by their new leaders.  The armies of Charles were everywhere routed, his fastnesses stormed, his party humbled and subjugated.  The King himself fell into the hands of the Parliament; and both the King and the Parliament soon fell into the hands of the army.  The fate of both the captives was the same.  Both were treated alternately with respect and with insult.  At length the natural life of one, and the political life of the other, were terminated by violence; and the power for which both had struggled was united in a single hand.  Men naturally sympathise with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity.  Thus misfortune turned the greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of Kings into the Blessed Martyr.

Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execution of Charles; and in all that he says on that subject we heartily agree.  We fully concur with him in thinking that a great social schism, such as the civil war, is not to be confounded with an ordinary treason, and that the vanquished ought to be treated according to the rules, not of municipal, but of international law.  In this case the distinction is of the less importance, because both international and municipal law were in favour of Charles.  He was a prisoner of war by the former, a King by the latter.  By neither was he a traitor.  If he had been successful, and had put his leading opponents to death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without reference to the justice or injustice of his cause.  Yet the opponents of Charles, it must be admitted, were technically guilty of treason.  He might have sent them to the scaffold without violating any established principle of jurisprudence.  He would not have been compelled to overturn the whole constitution in order to reach them.  Here his own case differed widely from theirs.  Not only was his condemnation in itself a measure which only the strongest necessity could vindicate; but it could not be procured without taking several previous steps, every one of which would have required the strongest necessity to vindicate it.  It could not be procured without dissolving the Government by military force, without establishing precedents of the most dangerous description, without creating difficulties which the next ten years were spent in removing, without pulling down institutions which it soon became necessary to reconstruct, and setting up others which almost every man was soon impatient to destroy.  It was necessary to strike the House of Lords out of the constitution, to exclude members of the House of Commons by force, to make a new crime, a new tribunal, a new mode of procedure.  The whole legislative and judicial systems were trampled down for the purpose of taking a single head.  Not only those parts of the constitution which the republicans were desirous to destroy, but those which they wished to retain and exalt, were deeply injured by these transactions.  High Courts of justice began to usurp the functions of juries.  The remaining delegates of the people were soon driven from their seats by the same military violence which had enabled them to exclude their colleagues.