The people wept; they soon began to tremble. Everywhere the Parliamentary generals were beaten by the royalist chiefs. The enemies of Essex, by allowing his army to suffer, had reckoned upon the successes of his rivals. Fairfax had been beaten on the 30th of June at Atherton Moor. Sir John Hotham was upon the point of surrendering Hull to the queen. Lord Willoughby could no longer defend Lincolnshire against Lord Newcastle. The confederation of the eastern states, the great bulwark of Parliament, seemed about to be broken up. In Cornwall, where the command was in the hands of the most faithful and best servants of the king, the Marquis of Hertford, Sir Bevil Grenville, Sir Ralph Hopton, the peasants hereditarily attached to their lords had followed them to the war, as in France the Vendéans were to follow the nobles a hundred and fifty years later. Like them they seized upon the batteries, assaulting them with their staves. Sir William Waller there lost two battles in one week. Everywhere the cities opened their gates to the king. Bristol, the second stronghold in the kingdom, surrendered at the first attack. The queen had rejoined the king, bringing three thousand men and some cannon, upon that same plain of Keynton, where, in the preceding year, the two parties had for the first time come to blows. Charles and his wife returned to Oxford in triumph, and Sir William Waller came back to London without troops. {106} Amidst so many disasters, Essex had not stirred, imputing his inaction to those very persons who reproached him with it. He caused the Upper House to be advised to sue for peace from the king. "If this proceeding does not bring about a treaty," he said, in conclusion, "it will be necessary, I think, to beg his Majesty to go away from this scene of slaughter, and then, in one day, the two armies must settle the dispute." A few days earlier the overtures of Essex might, perhaps, have been well received; but the king had recently declared officially that the individuals still assembled at Westminster, after the retirement of so many members, no longer formed two real Houses, that they had lost all legal existence, and no longer deserved the name of Parliament. He forbade all his subjects to obey this set of traitors and sedition-mongers. Parliament, thus attacked, voted the formation of a committee entrusted to ask assistance of the Scots, and the House of Lords declared that it would not address any proposal for peace to the king until he should have revoked his proclamation against the legality of Parliament.