Within a week a thousand seamen from the good ships in the broad Thames had offered their services to guard the Parliament from their refuge in the city by water to Westminster, and as many 'prentices had entreated to be permitted to render a similar service by land; four thousand freeholders from Buckinghamshire (Hampden's county) had entered London on horseback with petitions against wicked councillors, and (on the 10th of January) the king had left Whitehall for Hampden Court. But no man knew he would not return thither until seven years later, on another January day, never to leave it more. So few last days come to us clothed in mourning announcing themselves as the last. We step smiling into the ferry-boat which is to carry us for a little while, as we think, across the narrow stream, and wave our hands and say to those who watch us from the familiar shore, "_To-morrow!_" and before we are aware the stream is a sea, the ferry-boat is the boat of Charon, the familiar shore is out of sight; the window of the Banquetting house has become the threshold of the scaffold, and to-morrow is eternity. CHAPTER VII. When I think of the months which passed between the king's attempted arrest of the five members and the first battle of the Civil War, I sometimes wonder how any one can ever undertake to write history. In the little bit of the world known to us, parties were so strangely intertwined, so strangely divided, and so heterogeneously composed. The motives that drew men to one side or the other were so various and so mixed, that I think scarce one of those we knew fought on the same side for the same reason; while the differences which separated many men in the same party were certainly wider in many respects than those which separated them from others against whom they fought. How world-wide the difference between Harry Davenant and Sir Launcelot Trevor! How nicely balanced the scales that made my Father and John Hampden "rebels," and Harry Davenant or Lord Falkland "malignants!" Yet the distinctions were real, at least so it seems to me. Nor do I see how, if all were to be again starting from the same point, either could avoid coming to the same issue. Harry Davenant believed revolution to be ruin, and chose the most arbitrary rule instead. My Father, equally dreading revolution, believed the king to be the great revolutionist; by his arbitrary will changing times and laws; by his hopeless untruth subverting the foundations of society. Slowly he stepped down into the cold bitter waters of civil war, having for his watch-word, "Loyalty to England and her laws!" His chief hope lay in Mr. Hampden.