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Select practical writings of Richard Baxter (1835)
Select practical writings of Richard Baxter - 1835 Author:Richard Baxter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART THIRD. FROM HIS RETURN TO KIDDERMINSTER TO THE TER 1660. The personal history of Baxter is so closely connected with the history of the times in which... more » he lived, that it seems necessary, in this place, briefly to review the progress of public events from the siege of Oxford, in the beginning of the year 1646, to the death of Cromwell, in September, 1658. After the battles and sieges by which all the south-western parts of England had been reduced under the power of the parliament, the victorious army, commanded by Fairfax and Cromwell, returned as soon as the spring opened, to put an end to the war by besieging the king in his head-quarters at Oxford. On receiving this intelligence, and learning that the enemy was just at hand, Charles, with only two attendants, left the city by mght, in disguise, and, fleeing to the north, threw himself into the hands of the Scottish armv, then employed in the siege of Newark. He was aware that the Scots, in their zeal for covenant uniformity, had begun to be disgusted with the dilatory proceedings of the English parliament respecting the establishment of Presbyterianism as the only and divinely-authorized form of church government. He knew that they looked on the progress of Independency with equal alarm and abhorrence; and his hope was that, by throwing himself upon them whose claims in relation to their own country he had fully satisfied, he might be able to break up their alliance with England. The Scottish generals, however, refused to enter into any separate treaty with him; and while they paid him scrupulously all the exterior respect due to majesty, he was in fact a prisoner rather than a sovereign. At their suggestion, which, in his circumstances, differed little from a command, he gave orders to the commanders at Oxford, an...« less