Philip Chesney Yorke

“ The aims and principles of neither party in the conflict could satisfy a man of Falkland’s high ideals and intellectual vision. His royalism could not suffer the substitution, as the controlling power in the state, of a parliament for the monarchy, nor his conservatism the revolutionary changes in church and state now insisted upon by the opposite faction. The fatal character and policy of the king, the most incapable of men and yet the man upon whom all depended, must have been by now thoroughly understood by Falkland. ”

“ Triennial parliaments would be sufficient to control the bishops, if they meditated any further attacks upon the national liberties, and he urged that “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Even Hampden still believed that a compromise with the episcopal principle was possible, and assured Falkland that if the bill taken up to the Lords on the 1st of May 1641, excluding the bishops from the Lords and the clergy from secular offices, were passed, “there would be nothing more attempted to the prejudice of the church.” Accordingly the bill was supported by Falkland. ”

“ The chief interest in Falkland does not lie in his writings or in the incidents of his career, but in his character and the distinction of his intellectual position, in his isolation from his contemporaries seeking reformation in the inward and spiritual life of the church and state and not in its outward and material form, and as the leader and chief of rationalism in an age dominated by violent intolerance and narrow dogmatism. His personal appearance, according to Clarendon, was insignificant, “in no degree attractive or promising. His stature was low and smaller than most men ”