Upon his declining to pass four bills, tendered to him as preliminaries of a treaty, which on that very account, besides his objections to part of their contents, he justly considered as unfair, the parliament voted that no more addresses should be made to him, and that they would receive no more messages.[356] He was placed in close and solitary confinement; and at a meeting of the principal officers at Windsor it was concluded to bring him to trial, and avenge the blood shed in the war by an awful example of punishment; Cromwell and Ireton, if either of them had been ever favourable to the king, acceding at this time to the severity of the rest. Yet in the midst of this peril and seeming abandonment, his affairs were really less desperate than they had been; and a few rays of light broke for a time through the clouds that enveloped him. From the hour that the Scots delivered him up at Newcastle, they seem to have felt the discredit of such an action, and longed for the opportunity of redeeming their public name. They perceived more and more that a well-disciplined army, under a subtle chief inveterately hostile to them, were rapidly becoming masters of England. Instead of that covenanted alliance, that unity in church and state they had expected, they were to look for all the jealousy and dissension that a complete discordance in civil and spiritual polity could inspire. Their commissioners, therefore, in England, Lanerk, always a moderate royalist, and Lauderdale, a warm presbyterian, had kept up a secret intercourse with the king at Hampton Court. After his detention at Carisbrook, they openly declared themselves against the four bills proposed by the English parliament; and at length concluded a private treaty with him, by which, on certain terms quite as favourable as he could justly expect, they bound themselves to enter England with an army, in order to restore him to his freedom and dignity.[357] This invasion was to be combined with risings in various parts of the country; the presbyterian and royalist, though still retaining much of animosity towards each other, concurring at least in abhorrence of military usurpation; and the common people having very generally returned to that affectionate respect for the king's person, which sympathy for his sufferings, and a sense how little they had been gainers by the change of government, must naturally have excited.[358]