Charles found his position in no respect improved by the execution of Strafford. The Commons, finding their influence and power increasing, grew more and more bold, and were from this time so absorbed in the events connected with the progress of their quarrel with the king, that they left Laud to pine in his prison for about four years. They then found time to act over again the solemn and awful scene of a trial for treason before the House of Peers, the passing of a bill of attainder, and an execution on Tower Hill. Laud was over seventy years of age when the ax fell upon him. He submitted to his fate with a calmness and heroism in keeping with his age and his character. He said, in fact, that none of his enemies could be more desirous to send him out of life than he was to go. CHAPTER IX. CIVIL WAR. [Sidenote: Increasing demands of the Commons.] The way in which the king came at last to a final rupture with Parliament was this. The victory which the Commons gained in the case of Strafford had greatly increased their confidence and their power, and the king found, for some months afterward, that instead of being satisfied with the concessions he had made, they were continually demanding more. The more he yielded, the more they encroached. They grew, in a word, bolder and bolder, in proportion to their success. They considered themselves doing the state a great and good service by disarming tyranny of its power. The king, on the other hand, considered them as undermining all the foundations of good government, and as depriving him of personal rights, the most sacred and solemn that could vest in any human being. [Sidenote: The king gradually loses his power.] It will be recollected that on former occasions, when the king had got into contention with a Parliament, he had dissolved it, and either attempted to govern without one, or else had called for a new election, hoping that the new members would be more compliant. But he could not dissolve the Parliament now. They had provided against this danger. At the time of the trial of Strafford, they brought in a bill into the Commons providing that thenceforth the Houses could not be prorogued or dissolved without their own consent. The Commons, of course, passed the bill very readily. The Peers were more reluctant, but they did not dare to reject it. The king was extremely unwilling to sign the bill; but, amid the terrible excitements and dangers of that trial, he was overborne by the influences of danger and intimidation which surrounded him. He signed the bill. Of course the Commons were, thereafter, their own masters. However dangerous or destructive the king might consider their course of conduct to be, he could now no longer arrest it, as heretofore, by a dissolution.