The triumph of the popular leaders was complete, but it was stained with those frauds and acts of violence with which they had but recently so bitterly reproached the king. Six members of the Upper House quitted London, to repair to the court of Charles. Northumberland retired to his castle. The Commons were soon about to find themselves alone; they were astonished and uneasy, for the most impetuous sectaries and the most violent demagogues began to give themselves free play. {108} "If the king will not lend himself to every demand," wrote a pamphleteer, "he must be extirpated, he and his race, and the crown must be entrusted to some one else." Henry Martyn supported the pamphlet, attacked before the House. "Without doubt," he said, "the ruin of a single family is better than that of many." "I demand," exclaimed Sir Nevil Poole, "that Mr. Martyn be summoned to say of what family he speaks." "Of the king and his children," replied Martyn, without hesitating. The most violent spirits in the House had not yet gone to the length of proclaiming their hopes aloud. Martyn was suffered to be placed in the Tower without resistance, and was excluded from Parliament. The danger, however, became too pressing to admit of division among the party. The king laid siege to Gloucester, the only stronghold which still arrested him in his march upon London, or impeded the free communication of the royal armies. Common sense gained the ascendant over party hatreds. The moderate understood that before negotiating it was necessary to conquer; the fanatics recognized the truth, that to gain a victory it was for them to serve, for their rivals to command. Essex and his friends regained everywhere the authority of which they had but recently been deprived, and the more impassioned of their adversaries omitted nothing in assuring them of the confidence of Parliament and the country. The week had scarcely passed when the earl set out at the head of fourteen thousand men, to proceed by forced marches to the relief of Gloucester, which city the king had been closely blockading for a fortnight. {109}