forfeited the confidence and affection of his subjects.

But while we blame the illegal measures of Charles, we ought not to screen
from censure the subsequent conduct of his principal opponents. From the
moment that war seemed inevitable, they acted as if they thought themselves
absolved from all obligations of honour and honesty. They never ceased to
inflame the passions of the people by misrepresentation and calumny; they
exercised a power far more arbitrary and formidable than had ever been
claimed by the king; they punished summarily, on mere suspicion, and
without attention to the forms of law; and by their committees they
established in every county a knot of petty tyrants, who disposed at
will of the liberty and property of the inhabitants. Such anomalies may,
perhaps, be inseparable from the jealousies, the resentments, and the
heart-burnings, which are engendered in civil commotions; but certain it is
that right and justice had seldom been more wantonly outraged, than they
were by those who professed to have drawn the sword in the defence of right
and justice.

Neither should the death of Charles be attributed to the vengeance of the
people. They, for the most part, declared themselves satisfied with their
victory; they sought not the blood of the captive monarch; they were even,
willing to replace him on the throne, under those limitations which they
deemed necessary for the preservation of their rights. The men who hurried
him to the scaffold were a small faction of bold and ambitious spirits, who
had the address to guide the passions and fanaticism of their followers,
and were enabled through them to control the real sentiments of the nation.
Even of the commissioners appointed to sit in judgment on the king,
scarcely one-half could be induced to attend at his trial; and many of
those who concurred in his condemnation subscribed the sentence with
feelings of shame and remorse. But so it always happens in revolutions: the