parallel, and excited a deeper interest.
The unbounded power which Shaftesbury had acquired in the city of
London, and its state of factious fermentation, had been equalled by
nothing but the sway exercised by the leaders of the League in the
metropolis of France. The intrigues by which the Council of Sixteen
placed and displaced, flattered or libelled, those popular officers of
Paris, whom the French call _echevins_, admitted of a direct and
immediate comparison with the contest between the court and the whigs,
for the election of the sheriffs of London; contests which attained so
great violence, that, at one time, there was little reason to hope
they would have terminated without bloodshed. The tumultuous day of
the barricades, when Henry the second, after having in vain called in
the assistance of his guards, was obliged to abandon his capital to
the Duke of Guise and his faction, and assemble the states of his
kingdom at Blois, was not entirely without a parallel in the annals of
1681. The violence of the parliament at London had led to its
dissolution; and, in order to insure the tractability of their
successors, they were assembled, by the king, at Oxford, where a
concurrence of circumstances rendered the royal authority more
paramount than in any other city of the kingdom. To this parliament
the members came in an array, which more resembled the parliament of
the White Bands, in the reign of Edward the second, than any that had
since taken place. Yet, though armed, and attended by their retainers
and the more ardent of their favourers, the leaders of opposition
expressed their apprehensions of danger from the royal party. The
sixteen whig peers, in their memorable petition against this removal,
complained, that the parliament would at Oxford be exposed to the
bloody machinations of the papists and their adherents, "of whom too
many had crept into his majesty's guards." The aid of ballads and
libellous prints was called in, to represent this alteration of the
usual place of meeting as a manoeuvre to throw the parliament, its
members, and its votes, at the feet of an arbitrary monarch[1]. It is
probable that this meeting, which rather resembled a Polish diet than
a British parliament, would not have separated without some signal,
and perhaps bloody catastrophe, if the political art of Halifax, who
was at the head of the small moderate party, called Trimmers, joined
to the reluctance of either faction to commence hos