Note 269 — Chapter X

"The difference in the temper of the common people of both sides was so great that they who inclined to the parliament left nothing unperformed that might advance the cause; whereas they who wished well to the king thought they had performed their duty in doing so, and that they had done enough for him, in that they had done nothing against him." Clarendon, pp. 3, 452. "Most of the gentry of the county (Nottinghamshire)," says Mrs. Hutchinson, "were disaffected to the parliament; most of the middle sort, the able substantial freeholders and the other commons, who had not their dependence upon the malignant nobility and gentry, adhered to the parliament."—P. 81. This I conceive to have been the case in much the greater part of England. Baxter, in his Life, p. 30, says just the same thing in a passage worthy of notice. But the Worcestershire populace, he says, were violent royalists, p. 39. Clarendon observes in another place (iii. 41), "There was in this county (Cornwall), as throughout the kingdom, a wonderful and superstitious reverence towards the name of a parliament, and a prejudice to the power of the court." He afterwards (p. 436) calls "an implicit reverence to the name of a parliament, the fatal disease of the whole kingdom." So prevalent was the sense of the king's arbitrary government, especially in the case of ship-money. Warburton remarks, that he never expressed any repentance, or made any confession in his public declarations, that his former administration had been illegal. Notes on Clarendon, p. 566. But this was not, perhaps, to be expected; and his repeated promises to govern according to law might be construed into tacit acknowledgments of past errors.