It may still indeed be questioned whether, admitting the propositions tendered to the king to have been unreasonable and insecure, it might not yet have been expedient, in the perilous condition of his affairs, rather to have tried the chances of peace than those of war. If he could have determined frankly and without reserve to have relinquished the church, and called the leaders of the presbyterian party in both houses to his councils, it is impossible to prove that he might not both have regained his power over the militia in no long course of time, and prevailed on the parliament to consent to its own dissolution. The dread that party felt of the republican spirit rising amongst the independents, would have induced them to place in the hands of any sovereign they could trust, full as much authority as our constitution permits. But no one who has paid attention to the history of that period, will conclude that they could have secured the king against their common enemy, had he even gone wholly into their own measures.[284] And this were to suppose such an entire change in his character, and ways of thinking, as no external circumstances could produce. Yet his prospects from a continuance of hostilities were so unpromising that most of the royalists would probably have hailed his almost unconditional submission at Uxbridge. Even the steady Richmond and Southampton, it is said, implored him to yield, and deprecated his misjudging confidence in promises of foreign aid, or in the successes of Montrose.[285] The more lukewarm or discontented of his adherents took this opportunity of abandoning an almost hopeless cause; between the breach of the treaty of Uxbridge and the battle of Naseby, several of the Oxford peers came over to the parliament, and took an engagement never to bear arms against it. A few instances of such defection had occurred before.[286]