greeted truly enough as "King
Pym."

[Sidenote: The meeting of the Parliament.]

On the eve of the elections he rode with Hampden through the counties to
rouse England to a sense of the crisis which had come. But his ride was
hardly needed, for the summons of a Parliament at once woke the kingdom
to a fresh life. The Puritan emigration to New England was suddenly and
utterly suspended; "the change," said Winthrop, "made all men to stay in
England in expectation of a new world." The public discontent spoke
from every Puritan pulpit, and expressed itself in a sudden burst of
pamphlets, the first-fruits of the thirty thousand which were issued in
the twenty years that followed, and which turned England at large into a
school of political discussion. The resolute looks of the members, as
they gathered at Westminster on the third of November 1640, contrasted
with the hesitating words of the king; and each brought from borough or
county a petition of grievances. Fresh petitions were brought every day
by bands of citizens or farmers. The first week was spent in receiving
these petitions, and in appointing forty committees to examine and
report on them, whose reports formed the grounds on which the Commons
subsequently acted. The next work of the Commons was to deal with the
agents of the royal system. It was agreed that the king's name should be
spared; but in every county a list of officers who had carried out the
plans of the Government was ordered to be prepared and laid before the
House. But the Commons were far from dealing merely with these meaner
"delinquents." They resolved to strike at the men whose counsels had
wrought the evil of the past years of tyranny; and their first blow was
at the leading ministers of the king.

[Sidenote: Impeachment of Strafford.]

Even Laud was not the centre of so great and universal a hatred as the
Earl of Strafford. Strafford's guilt was more than the guilt of a
servile instrument of tyranny, it was the guilt of "that grand apostate
to the Commonwealth who," in the terrible words which closed Lord
Digby's invective, "must not expect to be pardoned in this world till he
be despatched to the other." He was conscious of his danger, but Charles
forced him to attend the Court; and with characteristic boldness he
resolved to anticipate attack by accusing the Parliamentary leaders of a
treasonable correspondence with the Scots. He reached London a week
after the opening of the Parliament;