Over the most questionable as well as the most momentous passage in Falkland's public life, his admirer passes with a graceful literary movement. Falkland was sworn in as a Privy Councillor three days before, and as Secretary of State, four days after, the attempt of the King to seize the Five Members. He was thus, in outward appearance at least, brought into calamitous connection with an act which, as Clarendon sees, was the signal for civil war. Clarendon vehemently disclaims for himself and his two friends any knowledge of the King's design. So far as the more violent part of the proceeding is concerned, we can easily believe him; a woman mad with vindictive arrogance inspired it, and nobody except a madman would have been privy to it; but it is not so easy to believe him with regard to the impeachment, which was in fact an attempt to take the lives of the King's enemies by arraigning them before a political tribunal, hostile to them and favourable to their accuser, instead of bringing them to a fair and legal trial before a jury. By accepting the Secretaryship, Falkland at all events assumed a certain measure of responsibility after the fact for a proceeding which, we repeat, rendered civil war inevitable, because it must have convinced the popular leaders that to put faith in Charles with such councillors as he had about him would be insanity; and that if they allowed Parliament to rise and the Kong to resume the power of the sword, not only would all their work of reform be undone, but the fate of Sir John Eliot would be theirs. Clarendon owns that Hampden's carriage from that day was changed, implying that up to that day it had been temperate; and the insinuation that, beneath the cloak of apparent moderation, Hampden had been secretly breathing counsels of violence into the minds of others deserves no attention, when it comes from a hostile source. Of the purity of Falkland's motives we entertain not the shadow of a doubt; but we venture to think that it is very questionable whether he did right, and this not only on grounds of technical constitutionalism, which in the present day would render imperative the retirement of a Minister whose advice had been so flagrantly disregarded, but on grounds of the most broadly practical kind. He forfeited for ever, not only any influence which he might have retained over the popular leaders, and any access which he might have had to them in their more pacific mood, but probably all real control over the King. Charles was the very last man whom you could afford to allow in the slightest degree to tamper with your honour. It is surely conceivable that the recollection of an unfortunate step, and the sense of a false position, may have mingled with the sorrow caused by the public calamities in the melancholy which drove Falkland to cast away his life.