Throughout September the king was holding conferences at Newport with the Commissioners of the Parliament. All bore witness to the ability and readiness with which he spoke. His hair had turned gray, his face was furrowed with deep lines of care, but all the old majesty was in his port, and even those who had known him before were surprised at his learning and wit. But, alas, it was mere speech. The king wrote to his friends excusing himself for making concessions, by the assurance that he merely did it in order to facilitate his escape. And more than that, all the actors in that drama, sincere or not, were rapidly fading into mere performers in a pageant. The decisive conferences were held, the true work was done. The doom was fixed elsewhere. By the middle of November the army, victorious from Wales and Scotland, and mindful of the prayer-meeting at Windsor, was again at St. Albans, calling for justice on the Chief Delinquent. On the 29th of November the king was removed from Carisbrook to Hurst Castle, a lonely, bare and melancholy fort opposite to the Isle of Wight, whose walls were washed by the sea. On December the 2d the quiet of Mr. Henry's house and of the royal orchard was broken, by the arrival of a portion of the Parliament army at Whitehall, trampling down with heavy armed tread the grass which had grown in the deserted palace-court. On Sunday there was much preaching in many quarters, of a kind little likely to calm the storm. In the churches the Presbyterian preachers declaimed fervently against the atrocity and iniquity of seizing the person of the king. In the parks Independent soldiers preached on the equality of all before the law of God. "Tophet is ordained of old," one of them took for his text. For the king it is prepared. A notable example, my husband said, of that random reading of the Sacred Scriptures which turns them into a lottery of texts to conjure with, like a witch's charms. In the Parliament my old hero Mr. Prinne, with his cropped ears and his branded forehead, stood up and boldly pleaded for the king, never braver, I thought, than then. On the 5th of December came another invasion of the Parliament House, Colonel Pride and his soldiers turning all the Presbyterian and Royalist members back from the doors. "Pride's Purge." It was a sorely perplexed time. Had the very act of despotism which first roused the nation to the point of civil war now to be repeated in the name of liberty for the ruin of the king? "What are we fighting for? I used to ask myself. The battle-cries, as well as the front of the armies, had so strangely changed. For the king and Parliament? The king was in prison. The Parliament was reduced to fifty members. For the nation? The nation was half in insurrection. For liberty? No party seemed to allow it to any other.