"
Keeping in view the reforms secured during the first session of the Long
Parliament, it may fairly be urged that everything necessary to this end
had been gained prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, everything, of
course, save the control of the sword; and this, if the King could have
been trusted, was not immediately urgent, and would necessarily have
followed the control of the purse. "If the King could have been
trusted!" In these words the key to the whole situation is to be found.
The Parliamentary leaders could not, did not, dared not, trust the
King: hence the power of the sword had to be wrested from his grasp. It
was this that made the Civil War inevitable. It was this that rendered
constitutional government, government by discussion, government by
compromise, impossible. It was this well-grounded and repeatedly
confirmed distrust of the King that, after years of war and repeated and
sincere negotiations, negotiations which only served still further to
reveal his duplicity, made the execution of the King unavoidable. As the
judicial Gardiner well says,[30:1] in summing up the causes which led to
this most solemn, impressive, and instructive event in the whole history
of England--"The situation, complicated enough already, had been still
further complicated by Charles' duplicity. Men who would have been
willing to come to terms with him, despaired of any constitutional
arrangement in which he was to be a factor; and men who had long been
alienated from him were irritated into active hostility.
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