Besides licensed divines, preaching and
praying was at that time practiced by almost all men in the kingdom
except scholars."
Thus as every parish had its Davies and its Morgan, the unhappy Charles,
faultless as a man, and at worst only ill-advised as a Monarch, found
himself, after much ineffectual submission, and many unconstitutional
abridgements of his lawful rights, required to surrender the scanty
remains of his prerogative, and consent to be a state-engine, in the
hands of his enemies. When, driven from his capital by riots, his fleet,
army, militia, garrisons, magazines, revenues, nay, his palaces and
personalities seized, by those who still called themselves his most
dutiful subjects, and prefaced their requisitions, that he would
virtually surrender as their prisoner with the title of an humble
petition; when, after all these humiliations and privations, the King
found it necessary to throw himself on the allegiance of his faithful
subjects, and to appeal to arms by raising the royal standard, only a
few hundred, out of the millions he governed, joined him.
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