nd it was published by sound of drum in London and
Westminster.[1]

This victory was followed by another. Many of the peers still clung to the
notion that it was intended to abolish their privileges, and therefore
resolved not to sink without a struggle. They insisted that the new army
should take the covenant, and subscribe the directory for public worship;
they refused their approbation to more than one half of the officers named
by Sir Thomas Fairfax; and they objected to the additional powers offered
by the Commons to that general. On these subjects the divisions in the
house were nearly equal, and whenever the opposite party obtained the
majority, it was by the aid of a single proxy, or of the clamours of the
mob. At length a declaration was made by the Commons, that "they held
themselves obliged to preserve the peerage with the rights and privileges
belonging to the House of Peers equally as their own, and would really
perform the same."[b] Relieved from their fears, the Lords yielded to a
power which they knew not how to control; the different bills were passed,
and among them a new self-denying ordinance, by which every member of
either house was discharged from all[c]

[Footnote 1: Journals, Jan. 9, 13, 25, 27; Feb. 11, 15; of Lords, 159, 175,
169, 193, 195, 204. Clarendon, ii. 569.]

[Sidenote a: A.D. 1645. Feb. 15.]
[Sidenote b: A.D. 1645. March 25.]
[Sidenote c: A.D. 1645. April 3.]

civil and military offices, conferred by authority of parliament after the
expiration of forty days.[1]

Hitherto I have endeavoured to preserve unbroken the chain of military and
political events: it is now time to call the attention of the reader to the
ecclesiastical occurrences of the two last years.

I. As religion was acknowledged to be the first of duties, to put down
popery and idolatry, and to purge the church from superstition and
corruption, had always been held out by the parliament as its grand and
most important object. It was this which, in the estimation of many of the
combatants, gave the chief interest to the quarrel; this which made it,
according to the language of the time, "a wrestle between Christ and
antichrist," 1. Every good Protestant had been educated in the deepest
horror of popery; there was a magic in the very word which awakened the
prejudices and inflamed the passions of men; and the reader must have
observed with what art and perseverance the patriot leaders employed it
to confirm the atta