There is a terrible strength in the pathetic majesty which enshrines a fallen king; a well-nigh irresistible power in the crown which has become a crown of thorns. A captive monarch is a more perilous foe than a victorious army to the subjects who hold him captive. How often during those sad years, 1647 and 1648, I had to go over all the causes of the civil war again and again; Eliot slowly murdered in his unlawful and unwholesome prison; the silenced Parliaments; the tortured Puritans; the imprisoned patriots. How often I had to recall all its course--Prince Rupert's plundering; the king's repeated duplicity, slowly wearing out the nation's lingering trust in him, and baffling all attempts at negotiation. I had to repeat these things to myself, by an effort of will again and again, in order to keep true to our principles at all. And the conflict with this rebound of instinctive loyalty, which went on in my heart secretly, was going on in the city openly at the time when we took up our abode there. So strong and general, indeed, was this rebound of loyalty, that in that August, 1647, which was our honeymoon, it seemed that the whole city of London--at the beginning of the war the Parliament's very strength and stay--was panting to return to its allegiance, led by the Presbyterian majority in the House of Commons. The conflict seemed altogether to have shifted its ground. The enemy now dreaded by the city was not the king, but the army which its own liberal contributions and persevering courage had done so much to create. Like the German magician, Dr. Faustus, of whom Aunt Gretel used to tell us, the city crouched trembling before the untameable spirit it had evoked, as from moment to moment it grew into more terrible stature and strength. Sunday the 1st August, 1647, my first Sunday in London, was a memorable day to me. Through all the hush of the Puritan Sabbath there was a deep hum of unrest throughout the city, a ceaseless stir of men walking in silent haste hither and thither, or gathering for eager debate at the corners of streets, in the squares, or in any public place. It was a notable contrast to the cheerful stir of animal life and the deep under-stillness at Netherby. On the Friday before, the House of Commons had been invaded, not as once in the beginning of the strife by the king trampling on "Privilege" in quest of five "traitors," but by a crowd of 'prentices with hats on, clamouring for the king against the army. Then the two Speakers of the Lords and Commons had fled to the army, with the mace, and all the Independent members. The eleven banished Presbyterian members had returned; among them Denzil Hollis (one of the king's fated "five traitors" who had afterwards withstood the royal forces so gallantly at Brentford) and Sir John Clotworthy, whose zeal had pursued Archbishop Laud with theological questions even on the scaffold.