During that period no Parliament was convoked, a thing unparalleled in English history. Buckingham having been assassinated by a Puritan fanatic, the Earl of Stafford and Archbishop Laud became its royal advisers. The Earl contrived a plan for making the king absolute. All who differed from Laud were tried in the High Commissioner’s Court, while the Star Chamber Court fined, whipped, and imprisoned those who spoke ill of the king’s policy or refused to pay the money he illegally demanded. The bitter persecution of the Puritans drove them to America. In Scotland, Charles carried matters with a high hand. Laud attempted to abolish Presbyterianism and introduce a liturgy. The Scotch rose _en masse_, and signed (some of them with their own blood) a covenant binding themselves to resist every innovation directed against their religious rights. Finally, an army of Scots crossed the border into England, and Charles was forced to assemble the famous “Long Parliament” (1640), which lasted twenty years. The old battle was renewed. Stafford, and afterward Laud, were brought to the block; the Star Chamber and High Commissioners’ Courts were abolished, and Parliament voted that it could not be adjourned without its own consent. Charles attempted to arrest five of the leaders of Parliament in the House of Commons itself. They hid in the City of London, whence a week later they were brought back to the House of Commons in triumph. Charles hastened Northward, and unfurled the royal banner. For a time his supporters swept everything before them.
Then arose Oliver Cromwell, a man of the “Common People,” who, with his Ironsides regiment at Marston Moor (1644), drove the cavaliers pell-mell from the field. Nasby (1645) was the decisive contest of the war. Cromwell swept the field, and the royal cause was irrevocably lost. Charles fled to the Scots, who gave him up to the Parliament; but the army of the “Common People,” led by Cromwell, soon got him into its possession, and he was condemned to death on the charge of treason, and was beheaded.
Thus, as has ever been the case when the “Common People” have been goaded by insult into a furious state of temper, some leader has aptly sprung, like Cromwell, from their ranks, and carried them triumphantly to victory. In the same way George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Grover Cleveland have each in turn led the hosts of the “Common People” to victory in their battles against “divine rights,” injustice, “caste,” and “sham aristocracy.”