The Scotch, with the best intentions, but with even more unfitness--having taken up arms against Episcopacy, having been in the pay of Parliament, and having fostered a Presbyterian spirit in England--proffered their help. The Commissioners, who had just returned to London, and had taken umbrage at the treatment which they had received from the Royalist and High Church Lord Mayor--complaining that he had assigned to them lodgings in a plague-stricken house[286]--made their appearance at Windsor Castle, in the month of January, to tell his Majesty, that the liberties of England and Scotland must stand and fall together, and to ascribe the existing disorders of the country to the plots of Papists and prelates, who aimed at subverting the purity and truth of religion.[287] Yet, while thus manifestly taking the Parliament side in the controversy, the Scotch coolly offered their services to compose the difference between the King and his subjects. Nothing could come of this, nor of a renewal of the offer in May sent from the Council in Edinburgh to Charles, at York, through the hands of their Chancellor. Even the most impartial advice and the wisest diplomacy now must have been too late, for the dispute had gone beyond any healing power, since both parties laid their hands on the scabbards of their swords, and, in fact, the blade was already half drawn by each. [Sidenote: _Manifestoes._] [Sidenote: 1642.] It is not our province to enter upon the question between King and Parliament, touching the militia. It is sufficient to observe that, when such a question arose, war could not be far off. Nor does it become us to notice the simply political aspects of those voluminous papers belonging to the Civil War which have been collected by Rushworth,[288] containing the manifestoes of the two belligerents, who--like all belligerents down to the Prussians and Austrians this very summer--writing what they know would be read by the whole world, sought to throw the whole blame of the quarrel on each other; and while both were buckling on their armour, neither liked to be seen striking the first blow. It must be confessed, that in these patiently prepared, and able, though tedious documents, the thrusts at the enemy are more effective than the counter-thrusts. Both King and Parliament wished to be thoroughly constitutional in the form of everything which they said and did; and on the side where justice lay it was far more easy for them to be so, when assailing their antagonists than when they were defending themselves. In other words, it was easy for the Parliament to prove that the King had violated the Constitution; but it was not so easy to prove that, when taking all power into their own hands--especially when taking up arms--they kept within the formal lines of the English Constitution. The legal fiction of arming in the King's name against the King's person; the separation of Charles Stuart