On the 5th of January he gave orders for sowing melon-seed at Wimbledon; and dwelt on Lord Ormond's work for him in Ireland. He made a jest of the threat of bringing him to a public trial. Kings had been killed in battle, treacherously put to agonizing deaths in dungeons whose walls tell no tales, and let no cries of anguish through, secretly stabbed at midnight. But the rebels it seemed plain were not foes of that stamp. Even the example three of his Cavaliers had lately given them in treacherously assassinating Rainsborough, one of Cromwell's bravest officers at Doncaster, kindled in the most fanatical of the Roundheads no emulation, but simply a burning indignation and contempt. Save the sword of battle, or the dagger of the murderer, no weapon was known wherewith to kill a king. The Roundheads did not number assassination among their "instruments of justice." The war was over. What then was there for His Majesty to fear? Strafford, indeed, had been almost as confident up to the last. And neither gray hairs or consecration had saved the Archbishop's head from the scaffold. But between an anointed king and the loftiest of his subjects, according to the royal and the royalist creed, the distinction was not of degree but of nature. All the courts of Europe surely would rise and interfere ere a king should be tried before a tribunal of his lieges, of creatures who held honour and life by his breath. Nor only earthly courts. Would the One Tribunal before which a sovereign alone could be summoned, suffer such an infringement of its rights? So the king went on jesting at the thought of his subjects bringing him to trial, playing his "three games," and peacefully sowing seeds for more harvests than one. And meanwhile Cromwell came back slowly advancing from Scotland to London; Petitions for Justice on the Chief Delinquent lay on the table of the House of Commons not unheeded; on the 6th of January, Colonel Pride, with his soldiers, guarded the door of the House of Commons, and sent thence every member who disposed still to prolong treaties with the king; in the afternoon of that same 6th of January, General Cromwell was thanked by the "purged" house, or Rump, of fifty members, for his services, and the High Court of Justice was instituted for the trial of "Charles Stuart, for traitorously and tyrannically seeking to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people." And on the 19th of January, not three weeks after he had been tranquilly planning at Westminster for his summer garden crops, and sowing seed for other harvests in Ireland, the king was sitting in Westminster Hall arraigned before this Court as a "tyrant, traitor, and murderer." And still only were the heavens unmoved, but not a word of remonstrance or of generous pleading had come from one crowned head in Europe.