And Roger spoke but too truly. For it is impossible to say how deeply that act of the king's in invading the Parliament had incensed the whole nation. It showed, as nothing else could have done, my Father said, that what was holy ground to the nation was mere common soil to the king. Men had borne to have soldiers illegally billeted on their homes; fathers torn, against law, from their families, and left to die in prisons. Each such act of tyranny was exceptional or partial, and might be redressed by patient appeals to our ancient laws. Much of personal liberty might be sacrificed rather than violate the order on which all true liberty is based. But the Parliament House during the sitting of the Parliament was the sacred hearth of the nation itself. Every man felt his own hearth violated in its violation. Henceforth nothing was sacred, nothing was safe, throughout the land. And from that day, my Father, dreading civil war as only a soldier can who knows what the terrors of war are, never seemed to have a doubt that it must come. Nor, candid as he was, to the verge of weakness (as Aunt Dorothy thought), in his anxiety to allow what was just to all sides, did he ever seem after that to doubt, if the strife came, on which side he must stand. There was a strange mixture of rigid adherences to ancient forms, with the boldest spirit of liberty, in that scene in Parliament on the 3rd of January 1642. Dr. Antony wrote us how all the members rose uncovered before the king, how the speaker on his knee beside his own chair, which the king had usurped, refused to answer His Majesty's questions as to the absence of the five members, whom his eye vainly sought in their vacant places, saying: "Please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor ears to hear, nor tongue to speak in this place, save as the House directs me." "Words," wrote Dr. Antony, "respectful enough for a courtier of Nebuchadnezzar, with a meaning as kingly as those of any Cæsar. Not a disrespectful word or gesture was directed against the king as he retired baffled from the House, saying, that he saw the birds had flown, and protesting that he had intended no breach of privilege. But before he descended the steps of the Hall to rejoin the armed guard outside, the civil war, my Father said, had begun." The next day the king had returned baffled from another attempt to arrest the five members in the city. The aldermen, true representatives of the great merchants of England, were as resolute as the Parliament. They made His Majesty a great feast, but no concessions.