The Beaumont family would now have felt happy, and Arthur might have talked of love, assured of a favourable audience, had not every future plan and private feeling been engrossed by the situation of the King, whose mournful tragedy now drew near its final close. Like many others, Arthur de Vallance had been drawn, by the grossest misrepresentations, to oppose a Prince whose real character, bursting through the mists of adversity, now dazzled the eyes of those who had affected to speak of him as a meteorous exhalation, owing its lustre to chance, and destitute of the inherent qualities which constitute true greatness. To a general revolt and disaffection, arising from some actual and many imaginary grievances, succeeded an universal conviction of delusion, disappointment, disgust, and contrition. All parties but that which had the King in their keeping were ready to unite in efforts to save him from those who meant to make his corse a step to his hereditary dignity; and this, no less from a sense of his deserts and injuries, than from feeling experimentally, that destroying the balance of the Constitution annihilated their own liberty, and that the whips used by lawful rulers are, by usurpers, exchanged for scorpions. The rule of a limited monarch was now supplied by the tyranny of many despots--I say many; for though Cromwell had seized the whole administration into his own hands, managing what was called the House of Commons and the army by his creatures, annihilating the aristocratic branch of the legislature, and cajoling his brother-general, while he prepared the scaffold and sharpened the axe for the Monarch whom it was the settled purpose of Fairfax to preserve; yet his government had the feature which constantly characterizes newly-assumed power. He durst not disoblige the supporters of his greatness; and the services of his myrmidons were purchased by a sort of tacit agreement, that they might enrich themselves with the plunder of an oppressed people. Rapacity, therefore, walked triumphant through the land. Loyalty and Episcopacy had already been stripped. The bare carcase of truth and honour afforded no food for the carrion birds who floated round the unfledged antitype of the royal eagle. The adherents to the Rump parliament (as the House of Commons was then called, before Cromwell excluded from it the members who were offensive to his views), the Presbyterians and Republicans, had lately fattened on the miseries of their countrymen. Some of these, repenting their former errors, made efforts to save the King's life; and, for the crime of petitioning to that effect, were exposed to the rigorous punishments of imprisonment and sequestration. The royalists, conscious of their weakness, had suspended all military efforts, and fearing lest, by irritating their enemies, they should precipitate their Master's fate, they confined themselves to supplicatory addresses to him who alone had power to chain the fury of these human tigers.