[288] Clarendon and Whitelock _passim_; Baxter's _Life_, pp. 44, 55. This license of Maurice's and Goring's armies in the west first led to the defensive insurrection, if so it should be called, of the club-men; that is, of yeomen and country people, armed only with clubs, who hoped, by numbers and concert, to resist effectually the military marauders of both parties, declaring themselves neither for king nor parliament, but for their own liberty and property. They were of course regarded with dislike on both sides; by the king's party when they first appeared in 1644, because they crippled the royal army's operations, and still more openly by the parliament next year, when they opposed Fairfax's endeavour to carry on the war in the counties bordering on the Severn. They appeared at times in great strength; but the want of arms and discipline made it not very difficult to suppress them. Clarendon, v. 197; Whitelock, 137; _Parl. Hist._ 379, 390.
The king himself, whose disposition was very harsh and severe, except towards the few he took into his bosom, can hardly be exonerated from a responsibility for some acts of inhumanity (see Whitelock, 67, and _Somers Tracts_, iv. 502, v. 369; Maseres's _Tracts_, i. 144, for the ill-treatment of prisoners); and he might probably have checked the outrages which took place at the storming of Leicester, where he was himself present. Certainly no imputation of this nature can be laid at the door of the parliamentary commanders; though some of them were guilty of the atrocity of putting their Irish prisoners to death, in obedience, however, to an ordinance of parliament. _Parl. Hist._ iii. 295; Rushworth's Abridgement, v. 402. It passed October 24, 1644, and all remissness in executing it was to be reckoned a favouring of the Irish rebellion. When we read, as we do perpetually, these violent and barbarous proceedings of the parliament, is it consistent with honesty or humanity to hold up that assembly to admiration, while the faults on the king's side are studiously aggravated? The partiality of Oldmixon, Harris, Macauley, and now of Mr. Brodie and Mr. Godwin, is full as glaring, to say the very least, as that of Hume.
[290] The excise was first imposed by an ordinance of both houses in July 1643 (Husband's _Collection of Ordinances_, p. 267), and afterwards by the king's convention at Oxford. See a view of the financial expedients adopted by both parties in Lingard, x. 243. The plate brought in to the parliament's commissioners at Guildhall, in 1642, for which they allowed the value of the silver, and one shilling per ounce more, is stated by Neal at £1,267,326, an extraordinary proof of the wealth of London; yet I do not know his authority, though it is probably good. The university of Oxford gave all they had to the king; but could not of course vie with the citizens.