The Commons, to testify that they no longer felt themselves safe in their own House, betook themselves to the City where, establishing a permanent committee to sit at the Grocers' Hall, they adjourned till the 11th of January. The next day Charles, taking his usual attendants, went into the City, and at Guildhall demanded of the Lord Mayor and aldermen that they should hunt out and deliver to him the accused Members who had taken refuge amongst them. His demand was coldly received, and after dining with one of the sheriffs he returned. His passage through the city was attended by continued cries of "Privilege! Privilege of Parliament!" And one Henry Walker, an ironmonger and political pamphleteer, threw into his Majesty's carriage a paper bearing the words, "To your tents, O Israel!" Scarcely had Charles reached Whitehall, when a deputation from the Corporation waited on him, complaining of the Tower being put into unsafe hands, of the fortifying of Whitehall, the wounding of citizens on their way to petition Parliament, of the dangerous example of the king entering the House of Commons attended by armed men, and praying him to cease from the prosecution of the five Members of Parliament, and to remove from Whitehall and the Tower all suspicious personages.
As Charles still persisted by proclamation in endeavouring to get possession of the five Members, and as a hundred stand of arms, with gunpowder and shot, had been removed from the Tower to Whitehall, a thousand marines and boatmen signed a memorial to the committee of the Commons sitting at Guildhall, offering to guard them on the appointed day to their House in Westminster. The committee accepted the offer, which was immediately followed by one from the apprentices. Seeing that the City, the seamen, and everybody were of one mind in condemning his violent invasion of the national sanctuary of the House of Commons, Charles on the 10th of January, the day previous to the meeting again of Parliament, quietly withdrew with his family to Hampton Court, and the next day removed thence to Windsor. Little did he imagine, deplorable as was his retreat, that he would never enter his capital again till he came as a prisoner in the hands of this insulted Parliament. Yet his feelings at this moment must have been melancholy in the extreme. "In this sad condition," says Clarendon, "was the king at Windsor; fallen in ten days from a height and greatness that his enemies feared, to a lowness, that his own servants durst hardly avow the waiting on him."