"Alack--it is beyond my understanding," sighed his wife; "but it seems to me _he is the King_!"
"Be not deceived by high-sounding words," replied the Lieutenant-General. "Charles Stewart is a man and must pay as men pay--for their sins and their follies."
As he spoke the servant entered with a note, which had just been brought, he said, by General Fairfax's man.
Cromwell gazed at the seal--Henry Ireton's arms pressed into wax scarcely cold--a full minute before he opened it, and the blood rushed to his face.
When he opened the letter his fingers shook.
It contained a few words from his son-in-law, the sand yet sticking to the ink.
The King had utterly refused to see Lord Denbigh, and utterly refused to have any dealings either with Parliament or army.
He defied them. Now, driven to the last extremity, he had flung aside all subterfuge and all evasion; he stood by his conscience, and no matter what the consequences, he refused terms which he regarded as a betrayal of God's laws in Church or State.
Oliver Cromwell crumpled up the letter with a gesture of, for him, unusual agitation.
"So it is over!" he muttered. He gazed at his wife with eyes that did not see her; drops of sweat stood out on his forehead and his lips quivered.
"What is over?" asked Elisabeth Cromwell, in terrified tones.
"The reign of Charles Stewart," he replied simply.
The Lords having rejected the ordinance for bringing the King to trial, the Commons, always under the influence of the army, declared themselves capable of enforcing their own act by their own law, "the People being, under God, the original of all just power."
Charles was hurried from Windsor to St. James's, and the day after his arrival in London put on his trial for having endeavoured to subvert his people's rights, for having levied war on them with the help of foreign troops, and with having, after once being spared, endeavoured by all wicked arts to again involve the kingdom in bloody confusion.
This was the end after so many years of strife, evasion, pacts made and broken, bloodshed and lives ruined. Charles was a prisoner on trial for his life, and in one of his splendid beds at Whitehall (now the headquarters of the army) Oliver Cromwell slept or lay awake and struggled with tumultuous thoughts.