justice for the trial of the king.[380] A very small number among those who sat in this strange tribunal upon Charles the First were undoubtedly capable of taking statesman-like views of the interests of their party, and might consider his death a politic expedient for consolidating the new settlement. It seemed to involve the army, which had openly abetted the act, and even the nation by its passive consent, in such inexpiable guilt towards the royal family, that neither common prudence nor a sense of shame would permit them to suffer its restoration. But by far the greater part of the regicides such considerations were either overlooked or kept in the background. Their more powerful motive was that fierce fanatical hatred of the king, the natural fruit of long civil dissension, inflamed by preachers more dark and sanguinary than those they addressed, and by a perverted study of the Jewish scriptures. They had been wrought to believe, not that his execution would be justified by state-necessity or any such feeble grounds of human reasoning, but that it was a bounden duty, which with a safe conscience they could not neglect. Such was the persuasion of Ludlow and Hutchinson, the most respectable names among the regicides; both of them free from all suspicion of interestedness or hypocrisy, and less intoxicated than the rest by fanaticism. "I was fully persuaded," says the former, "that an accommodation with the king was unsafe to the people of England, and unjust and wicked in the nature of it. The former, besides that it was obvious to all men, the king himself had proved, by the duplicity of his dealing with the parliament, which manifestly appeared in his own papers, taken at the battle of Naseby and elsewhere. Of the latter I was convinced by the express words of God's law; 'that blood defileth the land, and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.' (Numbers, c. xxxv. v. 33.) And therefore I could not consent to leave the guilt of so much blood on the nation, and thereby to draw down the just vengeance of God upon us all, when it was most evident that the war had been occasioned by the invasion of our rights and open breach of our laws and constitution on the king's part."[381] "As for Mr. Hutchinson," says his high-souled consort, "although he was very much confirmed in his judgment concerning the cause, yet being here called to an extraordinary action, whereof many were of several minds, he addressed himself to God by prayer, desiring the Lord, that, if through any human frailty, he were led into any error or false opinion in those great transactions, he would open his eyes, and not suffer him to proceed, but that he would confirm his spirit in the truth, and lead him by a right-enlightened conscience; and finding no check, but a confirmation in his conscience, that it was his duty to act as he did, he, upon serious debate, both privately and in his