In the Civil War Falkland was always "ingeminating _Peace, Peace_". Our hearts are with him, but it was of no use. It is an unhappy part of civil wars that there can be no real peace till one party has succumbed: compromise only leads to a renewal of the conflict. There is sense as well as dignity in the deliberate though mournful acceptance of necessity, and the determination to play out the part which could not be declined, expressed in the letter written at the outbreak of the conflict by the Parliamentarian, Sir William Waller, to a personal friend in the other camp: "My affections to you are so unchangeable that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person; but I must be true to the cause wherein I serve. The great God, who is the searcher of my heart, knows with what reluctance I go upon this service, and with what perfect hatred I look upon a war without an enemy. The God of peace, in His good time, sent us peace, and in the meantime fit us to receive it! We are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are assigned us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour, and without personal animosities." A man in this frame of mind, we submit, was likely to get to the end of a civil war more speedily than a man in the mood, amiable as it was, of Falkland. Perhaps, after all, the failure, the inevitable failure of Falkland's passionate pleadings for peace may have saved him from a worse doom than death on the field even of civil war. In the case of the Five Members, the King had shown how little regard he had, at least how little regard the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty? which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt, have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded, and the power of the sword had returned into the King's hands. Falkland might have even seen the scaffold erected, through the prostitution of his own honour, for the men whose ardent associate he had been in the overthrow of government by prerogative and in the impeachment of Strafford.