_Encroachments of the parliament._--The aim of the houses, however, in the bill for regulating the militia, presented to Charles in February 1642, and his refusal to pass which led by rapid steps to the civil war, was not so much to remove those uncertainties by a general provision (for in effect they left them much as before), as to place the command of the sword in the hands of those they could control;--nominating in the bill the lords lieutenant of every county, who were to obey the orders of the two houses, and to be irremovable by the king for two years. No one can pretend that this was not an encroachment on his prerogative.[224] It can only find a justification in the precarious condition, as the Commons asserted it to be, of those liberties they had so recently obtained, in their just persuasion of the king's insincerity, and in the demonstrations he had already made of an intention to win back his authority at the sword's point.[225] But it is equitable, on the other hand, to observe that the Commons had by no means greater reason to distrust the faith of Charles, than he had to anticipate fresh assaults from them on the power he had inherited, on the form of religion which alone he thought lawful, on the counsellors who had served him most faithfully, and on the nearest of his domestic ties. If the right of self-defence could be urged by parliament for this demand of the militia, must we not admit that a similar plea was equally valid for the king's refusal? However arbitrary and violent the previous government of Charles may have been, however disputable his sincerity at present, it is vain to deny, that he had made the most valuable concessions, and such as had cost him very dear. He had torn away from his diadem what all monarchs would deem its choicest jewel, that high attribute of uncontrollable power, by which their flatterers have in all ages told them they resemble and represent the Divinity. He had seen those whose counsels he had best approved, rewarded with exile or imprisonment, and had incurred the deep reproach of his own heart by the sacrifice of Strafford. He had just now given a reluctant assent to the extinction of one estate of parliament, by the bill excluding bishops from the house of peers. Even in this business of the militia, he would have consented to nominate the persons recommended to him as lieutenants, by commissions revocable at his pleasure; or would have passed the bill rendering them irremovable for one year, provided they might receive their orders from himself and the two houses jointly.[226] It was not unreasonable for the king to pause at the critical moment which was to make all future denial nugatory, and enquire whether the prevailing majority designed to leave him what they had not taken away. But he was not long kept in uncertainty upon this score. The nineteen propositions tendered to him at York in the beginning of June, and founded upon addresses and declarations of a considerably