"The King and the Parliament do not profess to be on opposite sides of the game," he replied. "But if, in fact, it has come to that, can you wonder at any amount of mutual suspicion? Yet our Puritan faith is, that there is but one law of truth and equity in heaven and earth for prince, soldier, peasant, woman, and child. And I believe that, even with hostile nations, not all the diplomatic subtleties in the world would give us the strength there is in a trusted word. Let it once be felt of man or nation, 'They have said it, therefore they mean it;' and they have a strength nothing else can give. There must be two threads to weave a web of false policy. Withdraw one, and the other falls to pieces of itself. I believe the ruler who could make the word of an Englishman a proverb for truth, would do more for the strength of England than one who won her fortresses on every island and coast in the world." "But see how the king trusts the people, Mr. Drayton," she said. "His presence in that very tumultuous disorderly city ought to make them believe him." "I do not see that His Majesty has had reason to distrust the people," my Father replied. "Ah!" she sighed; "if you had only seen His Majesty amidst his family, his chivalrous tenderness to the queen, his native stateliness all laid aside in playful fondness for his children." "It might have made it more painful to have to distrust him as a king," my Father replied. "It could scarcely have made it more possible to trust." "Well," she said, "either the nation will learn, ere long, to trust his gracious intentions as he deserves, or will learn to their cost what a sovereign they have distrusted!" But scarcely a week afterwards the whole country was set in a flame by the tidings that His Majesty had gone in person--attended by five hundred armed men, many of them young desperadoes, feasted the night before at Whitehall--to arrest the five members (Pym, Hampden, Hazelrig, Denzil Hollis, and William Strode) in the inviolate sanctuary of the nation, the Parliament House itself. And after that my Father and Lady Lucy ceased to hold any more political debates. He simply said, when, on the evening of those tidings, we met in the village,-- "The meaning of His Majesty's promises seems plain at last." And she replied,-- "But if all good men distrust His Majesty, will he not be driven to trust to evil men?" "I am afraid the course of falsehood is ever downward," he answered, very sadly, "and the breaches of just distrust ever widening." "But, for heaven's sake, Mr. Drayton," she said, with an imploring accent, as we returned with her to the Hall, "think before you plunge into these terrible divisions." "I have thought long, madam," he said, "for I have fought in the Thirty Years' War, and seen how war can devastate."