dissolved the Parliament with every mark of displeasure.

Between the dissolution of this shortlived assembly and the
meeting of that ever memorable body known by the name of the Long
Parliament, intervened a few months, during which the yoke was
pressed down more severely than ever on the nation, while the
spirit of the nation rose up more angrily than ever against the
yoke. Members of the House of Commons were questioned by the
Privy Council touching their parliamentary conduct, and thrown
into prison for refusing to reply. Shipmoney was levied with
increased rigour. The Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs of London were
threatened with imprisonment for remissness in collecting the
payments. Soldiers were enlisted by force. Money for their
support was exacted from their counties. Torture, which had
always been illegal, and which had recently been declared illegal
even by the servile judges of that age, was inflicted for the
last time in England in the month of May, 1610.

Everything now depended on the event of the King's military
operations against the Scots. Among his troops there was little
of that feeling which separates professional soldiers from the
mass of a nation, and attaches them to their leaders. His army,
composed for the most part of recruits, who regretted the plough
from which they had been violently taken, and who were imbued
with the religious and political sentiments then prevalent
throughout the country, was more formidable to himself than to
the enemy. The Scots, encouraged by the heads of the English
opposition, and feebly resisted by the English forces, marched
across the Tweed and the Tyne, and encamped on the borders of
Yorkshire. And now the murmurs of discontent swelled into an