cope of the Statute of Treasons. It is impossible indeed to provide for
some of the greatest dangers which can happen to national freedom by any
formal statute. Even now a minister might avail himself of the temper of
a Parliament elected in some moment of popular panic, and, though the
nation returned to its senses, might simply by refusing to appeal to the
country govern in defiance of its will. Such a course would be
technically legal, but such a minister would be none the less a
criminal. Strafford's course, whether it fell within the Statute of
Treasons or no, was from beginning to end an attack on the freedom of
the whole nation. In the last resort a nation retains the right of
self-defence, and a Bill of Attainder is the assertion of such a right
for the punishment of a public enemy who falls within the scope of no
written law.

[Sidenote: The Army Plot.]

The counsel of Pym and of Hampden had been prompted by no doubt of the
legality of the attainder. But they looked on the impeachment as still
likely to succeed, and they were anxious at this moment to conciliate
the king. The real security for the permanence of the changes they had
wrought lay in a lasting change in the royal counsels; and such a change
it seemed possible to bring about. To save Strafford and Episcopacy
Charles listened in the spring of 1641 to a proposal for entrusting the
offices of state to the leaders of the Parliament. In this scheme the
Earl of Bedford was to become Lord Treasurer, Pym Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Holles Secretary of State, while Lords Essex, Mandeville, and
Saye and Sele occupied various posts in the administration. Foreign
affairs would have been entrusted to Lord Holland, whose policy was that
of alliance with Richelieu and Holland against Spain, a policy whose
adoption would have been sealed by the marriage of a daughter of Charles
with the Prince of Orange. With characteristic foresight Hampden sought
only the charge of the Prince of Wales. He knew that the best security
for freedom in the after-time would be a patriot king. Charles listened
to this project with seeming assent; the only conditions he made were
that Episcopacy should not be abolished, nor Strafford executed; and
though the death of Lord Bedford put an end to it for the moment, the
Parliamentary leaders seem still to have had hopes of their entry into
the royal Council. But meanwhile Charles was counting the chances of a
very different policy. The cou