victorious army, and a compromise was effected. Charles was permitted to choose any place on the Isle of Wight where the conference should take place, and he decided on the town of Newport. From the parliament five lords, including Northumberland and Pembroke, and ten commissioners, including Vane the younger, Grimstone, Hollis, and Pierpont, were appointed commissioners, and on Charles's part appeared the duke of Richmond, the marquis of Hertford, the earls of Southampton and Lindsay, with other gentlemen, and a number of his chaplains and lawyers. These were not admitted to sit with the parliamentary commissioners and the king, were not to interpose any opinions or arguments during the discussion, which were to be direct from Charles; but they were suffered to be in the room behind a curtain, where they could hear all, and to whom Charles was at liberty to retire and consult them. The conditions were the same submitted at Hampton Court, and the king again consented to the surrender of the command of the army for ten years; but he would not accede to the abolition of episcopacy, but merely its suspension for three years; that the episcopal lands should not be forfeited, but granted on long leases, and he would not bind himself to accept the covenant. In fact, he stood just as rooted to his own notions, as if he had even the most distant chance of ever obtaining them. In vain the presbyterians knelt and prayed him with tears to concede, to prevent the utter ruin of both himself and them. The commission met on the 18th of September, and it was limited to the 4th of November; but that time arrived and nothing further was concluded. The commissioners took their leave and proceeded to Cowes, but they were met by a resolution of the commons to prolong the conference to the 21st, which was afterwards extended to the 25th.
There were signs and circumstances enough abroad to have brought any other man to make the best terms he could. On the 11th of September, previous to the meeting of the commission, a petition of many thousands of well-affected men in the cities of London and Westminster, in the borough of Southwark, and the neighbouring villages, "had been presented, praying that justice might be done on the chief author of the great bloodshed which had been perpetrated in the war." They called for the execution of Holland, Hamilton, Capel, Goring, and the rest of the royalist officers now confined at Windsor. Clarendon says, that Capel, at the execution of Lisle and Lucas at Colchester, had spoken so fiercely about it, saying they had better shoot all the rest of the prisoners, and had so upbraided Ireton in particular, to whose vindictive disposition he attributed the bloody deed, that the army was vehement for the death of these men. Numbers of other petitions to the same effect came up from the country and from the regiments, declaring that after so many miraculous deliverances from their treacherous and implacable enemies by the Almighty, it was sinful to delay any longer the punishment of these instruments of cruelty, and especially of the king, the chief offender, the raiser of the war, and the stubborn rejecter of all offers. The army was the more vehement, because one of their most gallant and long-tried leaders, colonel Rainsborough, and been foully murdered by a number of the royalists. After the revolt of the fleet, he was sent to relieve the castle of Pontefract. He had arrived at Doncaster when Sir John Digby and colonel Morrice, who commanded in Pontefract for the king, determined, says Clarendon, "to make a noble attempt." This noble attempt was to get admittance to him on pretence of having a letter to him from Cromwell, and to assassinate him. They proceeded on Sunday, the 29th of October, to Doncaster, with a party of twelve horse. They were readily admitted to the town on the credit of their message, and Digby and Morrice, with one man, went into the room where Rainsborough was in bed, whilst the other horsemen rode on to the bridge leading to the Pontefract road, and held the guard in conversation till their commanders should come. The murderers then went upstairs to Rainsborough, told him he was their prisoner, and that he must choose whether he would go with them or be killed. He rose to go, but in coming out of the house, and not seeing a troop of horse as he expected, but only one man, he immediately cried a rescue, when the assassins thrust him through, and galloping to the bridge, they and their horsemen killed such of the guard as opposed, and rode off. "There was not an officer in the army," Clarendon says, "whom Cromwell would not as willingly have lost as Rainsborough;" and "the gallant party," as he called them, not only gloried in their base deed, but contemplated others of the same kind.
No wonder that the army was become impatient of further tolerance of such an enemy. Colonel Ludlow, who was also a member of parliament, protested that it was time that the country laid to heart the blood spilt, and the rapine perpetrated by commission from the king, and to consider whether the justice of God could be satisfied, or His wrath appeased, if they granted an act of oblivion as the king demanded. No; the blood of murdered thousands cried from the ground; as the Book of Numbers declared, "blood defiled the land, and the kind could not be cleansed except by the blood of him who shed it." He failed in converting Fairfax to his creed on this head; but Ireton was a more willing listener, and he joined his regiment in petitioning, on the 18th of October, that crime might be impartially punished, without any distinction of high or low, and that whoever should speak or act in favour of the king, before he had been tried and acquitted of shedding innocent blood, should be adjudged guilty of high treason. The example was followed by several other regiments; on the 21st Ingoldby's regiment petitioned in direct terms for the trial of the king, and declared the treaty at Newport a trap; and on the 16th of November a long and stern remonstrance was addressed by the assembled officers of the army to the house of commons, demanding that "the capital and grand author of all the troubles and woes which the nation had endured, should be speedily brought to justice for the treason, blood, and mischief of which he had been guilty; that the lords should be abolished, and the supreme power vested in the commons. That if the country desired any more kings, they should be elected by the commons; that a period should be fixed for the close of this parliament; and that any future king should be sworn to govern by the aid of parliament alone." This startling remonstrance was signed by Rushworth, the historian, secretary to Fairfax, the general himself accompanying the remonstrance by a letter. A violent debate upon this re-
