Affairs had now reached such a crisis that they could no longer continue undecided. A Parliament was called in 1640, after an unexampled interval of eleven years, and, after a few days' session, was angrily dissolved. Another, however, was indispensable in the same year, and on the 3d of November the Long Parliament met. The long-repressed indignation of the Commons broke forth at once. Laud and Wentworth, the principal advisers of the king, were tried and executed, and precautions taken, by stringent acts, to prevent a recurrence of arbitrary government. Everywhere there seemed a rally in favour of the Protestant or liberal cause. The death of Richelieu, the destroyer of French freedom, opened a prospect of recovered independence to the Huguenots; the victories of Torstenson the Swede, worthy successor of Gustavus Adolphus, brought down the pride of the Austrian Catholics; and Puritans, Independents, and other outraged sects and parties, by the restoration of the Parliament, got a terrible instrument of vengeance against their oppressors. A dreadful time, when on both sides the forms of law were perverted to the most lawless purposes; when peacefully-inclined citizens must have been tormented with sad misgivings by the contending claims of Parliament and King,--a Parliament correctly constituted and in the exercise of its recognised authority, a King with no flaw to his title, and professing his willingness to limit himself to the undoubted prerogatives of his place. [A.D. 1642.] It was probably a relief to the undecided when the arbitrament was removed from the court of argument to the field of battle. All the time of that miserable civil war, the other states of Europe were in nearly as great confusion as ourselves. France was torn to pieces by factions which contended for the mantle of the departed cardinal; Germany was traversed from end to end by alternately retreating and advancing armies. But still the simultaneousness of events abroad and at home is worthy of remark. The great fights which decided the quarrel in England were answered by victories of the Protestant arms in Germany and the apparent triumph of the discontented in France. The young king, Louis the Fourteenth, carried from town to town, and disputed between the parties, gave little augury of the despotism and injustice of his future throne. There were barricades in Paris, and insurrections all over the land. But at last, and at the same time, all the combatants in England, and France, and Germany--Huguenot, Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant, and Papist--were tired out with the length and bitterness of the struggle. So in 1648 the long Thirty Years' War was brought to a close by the Peace of Westphalia. Kingly power in France was curtailed, the house of Austria was humbled; and Charles was carried prisoner to Windsor. The Protestants of Germany, by the terms of the peace, were replaced in their ancient possessions. They had freedom of worship and equality of civil rights secured. A general law preserved them from the injustice or aggressions of their local masters; and the compromise guaranteed by so many divergent interests, and guarded by such equally-divided numbers, has endured to the present time. The English conquerors would be contented with no less than their foreign friends had obtained. But the blot upon their conduct, the blood of the misguided and humbled Charles, hindered the result of their wisest deliberations. Moderate men were revolted by the violence of the act, and old English loyalty, delivered from the fear of foreign or domestic oppression, was awakened by the sad end of a crowned and anointed King. [A.D. 1649.] Nothing compensates in an old hereditary monarchy for the want of high descent in its ruler. Not all Cromwell's vigour and genius, his glory abroad and energetic government at home, attracted the veneration of English squires, whose forefathers had fought at Crecy, to the grandson of a city knight, or, at most, to the descendant of a minister of Henry the Eighth. Charles the Second rose before them with the transmitted dignity of a hundred kings. He counted back to Scottish monarchs before the Norman Conquest, and traced by his mother's side his lineal ancestry up to Charlemagne and Clovis. English history presents no instance of the intrusion of an unroyal usurper in her list of sovereigns. Cromwell stands forth the solitary instance of a man of the people virtually seizing the crown; and the ballads and pamphlets of the time show how the comparative humility of his birth excited the scorn of his contemporaries. And this feeling was not limited to ancient lords and belted cavaliers: it permeated the common mind.