The king having sent two messages, one from Evesham,[*] another from Tavistoke,[**] desiring a treaty, the parliament despatched commissioners to Oxford with proposals, as high as if they had obtained a complete victory.[***] * 4th of July, 1644.
** 8th of Sept 1644.
*** Dugdale, p.737.Rush.

vol.vi.p 850.
The advantages gained during the campaign and the great distresses of the royalists, had much elevated their hopes; and they were resolved to repose no trust in men inflamed with the highest animosity against them, and who, were they possessed of power, were fully authorized by law to punish all their opponents as rebels and traitors.
The king, when he considered the proposals, and the disposition of the parliament, could not expect any accommodation, and had no prospect but of war, or of total submission and subjection: yet, in order to satisfy his own party, who were impatient for peace, he agreed to send the duke of Richmond and earl of Southampton with an answer to the proposals of the parliament, and at the same time to desire a treaty upon their mutual demands and pretensions.[*] It now became necessary for him to retract his former declaration, that the two houses at Westminster were not a free parliament; and accordingly he was induced, though with great reluctance, to give them, in his answer, the appellation of the parliament of England.[**] But it appeared afterwards, by a letter which he wrote to the queen, and of which a copy was taken at Naseby, that he secretly entered an explanatory protest in his council book; and he pretended, that though he had called them the parliament, he had not thereby acknowledged them for such.[***] This subtlety, which has been frequently objected to Charles, is the most noted of those very few instances from which the enemies of this prince have endeavored to load him with the imputation of insincerity; and have inferred that the parliament could repose no confidence in his professions and declarations, not even in his laws and statutes.

There is, however, it must be confessed, a difference universally avowed between simply giving to men the appellation which they assume, and the formal acknowledgment of their title to it; nor is any thing more common and familiar in all public transactions.
* Whitlocke, p.

110.
** Whitlocke, p.

111 Dugdale, p.