When the Parliament received the news of Worcester, they voted Cromwell four thousand pounds a year, gave him Hampton Court for a residence, and sent a deputation to present their thanks. On September 12th, he made a triumphal entry into London. Hugh Peters, the army chaplain, professed to perceive a secret exultation in his bearing, and whispered to a friend that Cromwell would yet make himself king. But Whitelocke recorded that “he carried himself with great affability, and in his discourses about Worcester would seldom mention anything of himself, but mentioned others only, and gave, as was due, the glory of the action to God.” From his despatch, it was evident that Cromwell regarded the “crowning mercy” of Worcester not only as the consummation of the work of war, but as a call to take in hand and accomplish the tasks of peace. It should provoke the Parliament, he told the Speaker,

“to do the will of Him who has done His will for it and for the nation—whose good pleasure it is to establish the nation and the change of government, by making the people so willing to the defence thereof, and so signally blessing the endeavours of your servants in this late great work.”

For in spite of its victories the government of the Commonwealth was essentially a provisional government, and acquiesced in, rather than accepted by, the nation. Even its adherents felt that something more permanent and more constitutional must be established in its place, now that the Civil War was over. In a conference between officers and members of Parliament, which Cromwell brought about soon after his return to London, this feeling plainly appeared. The lawyers were all for some monarchical form of government. Some suggested that the late King’s third son, the Duke of Gloucester, now twelve years old, should be made king. The soldiers would not hear of anything that smacked of monarchy. “Why,” asked Desborough, “may not this as well as other nations be governed in the way of a republic?” Cromwell said little, and seemed more anxious to learn what others thought, than to express his own views. He agreed with the lawyers that “a settlement of somewhat with monarchical power in it” would be most effectual. He knew that a strong executive power was needed either for the tasks of peace or war, but doubted whether a return to the Stuart line was possible. He agreed with the soldiers that a new Parliament was an immediate necessity, but, as in 1649, he held that it would be more honourable and more expedient to induce the Long Parliament to dissolve itself. Publicly and privately he used all his influence to persuade the House to do so. “I pressed the Parliament,” he says, “as a member to period themselves, once and again and again, and ten, nay, twenty times over.” But, in spite of “a long speech made by his Excellency,” it was only by two votes that the House resolved to fix a date for its dissolution, and then the date named was three years distant (November 3, 1654). Cromwell was obliged to resign himself to the delay, and do what he could for the settlement of the nation through the instrumentality of the existing Parliament. The task which was now before him was more difficult than fighting the Irish or the Scots; more was expected of him, and his power was less.

“Great things,” said a letter to Cromwell, “God has done by you in war, and good things men expect from you in peace: to break in pieces the oppressor, to ease the oppressed of their burdens, to release the prisoners out of bonds, and to relieve poor families with bread.”

For some months after Worcester, petitions were often addressed directly to the General and the Army instead of to the Parliament. But all power was in the hands of the Parliament, and as dangers grew more remote, this body grew less amenable to the influence of the man who had saved it. Of the sixty or seventy members who habitually took part in its proceedings, the ablest were also members of the Council of State, absorbed in the daily business of administration, and with little energy left for the consideration of far-reaching legislative plans. Of the rest, many were engrossed by local affairs, others occupied with their farms and their merchandise, many building up fortunes by speculating in confiscated lands. Some few were notoriously corrupt, but partisanship and favouritism were more general evils than corruption. Vane complained to Cromwell that some of his colleagues were so obstructive, that “without continual contestation they will not suffer to be done things that are so plain that they ought to do themselves.” “How hard and difficult a matter it was,” said Cromwell himself, “to get anything carried without making parties, without practices indeed unworthy of a Parliament.”

Yet difficult though it was, Cromwell and the officers succeeded in inspiring the Parliament with some portion of their own energy. Politically, the most pressing measure was the grant of an amnesty to the conquered Royalists. So long as they were liable to punishment and confiscation for acts done during the last ten years, the wounds of the Civil War could never be healed. In February, 1652, Cromwell at last persuaded Parliament to pass an act of pardon for all treasons committed before the battle of Worcester, but it was unhappily clogged with exceptions and restrictions which robbed it of much of its efficacy. More than once during the divisions on the bill, Cromwell was teller against these restrictions, and bigoted republicans afterwards thought he did so from sinister motives. He contrived that delinquents should escape due punishment, wrote Ludlow, “that so he might fortify himself by the addition of new friends for the carrying on his designs.” To Cromwell it seemed an act of political expediency. It was necessary, he held, to be just to Royalists as well as Puritans, to unbelievers as well as believers; perhaps even more necessary.

“The right spirit,” he added, “was such a spirit as Moses had and Paul had—which was not a spirit for believers only, but for the whole people.”

Next in importance to a general amnesty came the Reform of the Law—a phrase which, in the minds of those who used it, meant not simply legal changes, but social reforms in general. There was much need of both. The Civil War had ruined its thousands; society was disorganised by its consequences: the relations of landlord and tenant, of debtor and creditor, were complicated by unforeseen calamities; the prisons of London were crammed with poor debtors, and the country swarmed with beggars. For the lawyers it was the best possible of worlds, and they were never more prosperous or more unpopular.

“We cannot mention the Reformation of the Law,” said Cromwell to Ludlow in 1650, “but the lawyers cry out we mean to destroy property, whereas the law as it is now constituted serves only to maintain the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor.” “Relieve the oppressed,” he urged Parliament in his Dunbar despatch; “reform the abuses of all professions, and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.”

Parliament had done something already to meet these complaints. In November, 1650, it had passed an act ordering that all legal proceedings and documents should be henceforth in English, besides an earlier act for the relief of poor prisoners. Now it boldly appointed twenty-one commissioners, chosen outside its own body, with Matthew Hale at their head, “to consider the inconveniencies of the Law—and the speediest way to remedy the same,” and to report their proposals to a Committee of the House itself (January 17, 1652). The commissioners fell roundly to work, and presented in the next few months drafts of many good bills, some of which became law during the Protectorate, and others in the present century. They even took in hand the task of codification, and drew up “a system of the Law” for the consideration of Parliament.

During this same period the reorganisation of the Church was also attempted. The Long Parliament had passed acts for the augmentation of livings, for the punishment of blasphemy, and for the propagation of the Gospel in Wales and Ireland. But it had abolished Episcopacy without replacing it by any other system of Church government, and it had ejected royalist clergymen without providing any machinery for the appointment of fit successors. In London, in Lancashire, and in a few other districts, there were voluntary associations of ministers on the Presbyterian model, but throughout the greater part of England, the Presbyterian organisation decreed in 1648 had never been actually established. The Church was a chaos of isolated congregations, in which a man made himself a minister as he chose, and got himself a living as he could. The reduction of this chaos to order seemed so difficult a problem, and beset with so many controversial questions, that Parliament hesitated to undertake it.

John Owen, once Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland, took the duty on himself, and on February 10, 1652, he and fourteen other ministers presented to Parliament a comprehensive scheme for the settlement of the Church. The House answered by referring it to a committee appointed to consider the better propagation of the Gospel, of which committee Cromwell was the most important member. Owen’s scheme, like the Agreement of the People, proposed the continuance of a national Church with tolerated dissenting bodies existing by its side. The Church was to be controlled by two sets of commissioners, partly lay and partly clerical: local commissioners, who were to determine the fitness of all candidates seeking to be admitted as preachers; itinerant commissioners, who were to move from place to place ejecting unfit ministers and schoolmasters. On the limits of the toleration to be granted to dissenters, the committee was split into two sections. The scheme proposed that the opponents of the essential principles of the Christian religion should not be suffered to promulgate their views. When pressed to define what these principles were, Owen and his friends produced a list of fifteen fundamentals, the denial of which was to disqualify men from freedom to propagate their opinions. Cromwell thought these limitations too restrictive, and wished for a more liberal definition of Christianity. “I had rather,” he emphatically declared, “that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us, than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.” It was in consequence of these debates that Milton, in May, 1652, addressed to Cromwell the sonnet in which he adjured him to remember that “peace hath victories no less renowned than war.”

But Milton did not share Cromwell’s belief in the necessity of an Established Church, and it was Vane, not Cromwell, whom he praised as the statesman who knew the true bounds of either sword, and had learnt what severed the spiritual from the civil power. By the time the sonnet to Vane was written, ecclesiastical controversies had fallen into the background; the short period of peace and reform was over; Cromwell and Vane alike were forced to turn their attention to the problems of foreign policy and the tasks of war.

When Cromwell left England in the summer of 1649, all the world seemed hostile to the Republic. Worcester made Great Britain once more a power in Europe, and foreign States began to seek the friendship of the Republic, or at least to fear its enmity.

This great change was chiefly due to Cromwell’s victories. “Truth is,” wrote Bradshaw to Cromwell after Dunbar, “God’s blessing upon the wise and faithful conduct of affairs where you are gives life and repute to all other attempts and actions upon the Commonwealth’s behalf.” Much, too, was due to the successes of Blake. By the spring of 1652, the navy had swept royalist privateers from the British seas and the Mediterranean, and reduced, one after another, all the colonies or dependencies which refused to submit to the Republic. Rupert’s fleet, blockaded in Kinsale by Blake from May to November, 1649, could do nothing to help Ormond in capturing Dublin and Londonderry, or to hinder Cromwell’s progress in Ireland. When Rupert escaped he made his way to Lisbon, and under the protection of the King of Portugal refitted his ships and captured English merchantmen. In March, 1650, Blake appeared off the mouth of the Tagus, and kept Rupert’s ships cooped up there for the next six months. At last, in October, 1650, during Blake’s absence, Rupert put to sea, and entering the Mediterranean began to plunder and burn English merchantmen. Blake captured or destroyed most of his ships off Malaga and Cartagena, and with the two which were left him Rupert took refuge in Toulon. Next came the turn of the islands, which were the headquarters of the royalist privateers. In May, 1651, Sir John Grenville surrendered the Scilly Islands to Blake, just in time to prevent their falling into the hands of a Dutch fleet sent to punish Grenville’s attacks on Dutch commerce. The Isle of Man fell in October. In December, Blake captured Jersey and Guernsey, where Sir George Carteret had carried on the business of piracy on a larger and still more lucrative scale than Grenville. Finally, in January, 1652, Sir George Ayscue’s fleet reduced Barbadoes and the West Indian islands, while in March, Virginia and Maryland gave in their submission. Lords of all the territories the Stuarts had ruled, and with a stronger army and fleet than they had ever possessed, the republican leaders were free to intervene in European politics.

The Thirty Years’ War had ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. France and Spain were still fighting, but with no great vigour, the one distracted by the civil wars of the Fronde, the other weak from misgovernment and the decay of its trade. Each wanted the help of England, but while Spain had recognised the Republic in December, 1650, France still delayed, and while Spain had allowed Blake to victual his fleet in Spanish ports, France gave shelter to Rupert’s ships in its harbours, and allowed him to sell his prizes there. Not only French privateers but French men-of-war attacked English commerce in the Levant; and in France Charles gathered around him the exiled Royalists, and plotted against the peace of the Republic. At the moment, even religious as well as political motives favoured an alliance with Spain. In the Spanish dominions, there were no Protestants left to be persecuted, but the Huguenots of Southern France, relying upon the tradition of English policy which had existed since the Reformation, still looked to their co-religionists in England for support. The wars of the Fronde supplied a second motive for intervention, and to support the last defenders of political freedom in France against the encroachments of a centralising monarchy was a cause which naturally appealed to enthusiastic republicans. When Condé and the Frondeurs of Guienne applied to England and Spain for help against Mazarin, Spain responded at once, and a strong party in the English Council of State was ready to return a favourable answer. Whether the Spanish or the French party in that body would gain the upper hand depended largely on the decision of Cromwell. Ever since Worcester, and indeed earlier, foreign diplomatists had turned their attention to the General, reported his casual utterance, and striven to divine his intentions.

People who believed that the Republic would seek to propagate republican institutions abroad regarded Cromwell as the destined instrument of that policy. “If he were ten years younger,” Cromwell was rumoured to have said, “there was not a king in Europe he would not make to tremble,” and that as he had better motives than the late King of Sweden he believed himself capable of doing more for the good of nations than the other did for his own ambition. Marvell hailed him on his return from Ireland as a deliverer,—one whose future conquests should mark a new era in the history of all oppressed nations.

Cromwell’s acts, however, showed no trace of the revolutionary zeal attributed to him. He revealed himself at his first appearance in foreign politics as a keen and realistic statesman, more anxious to extend his country’s trade and his country’s territory than to spread republican principles in foreign parts. The only sentimental consideration which seemed to move him was sympathy for oppressed Protestants. He refused the proposals which Condé’s agents made to him immediately after Worcester, but he did not hesitate to send one emissary to Paris to negotiate with De Retz, and another to ascertain the real condition of the south of France. The question how to improve the position of the Huguenots was the one which interested him most, and it soon appeared evident that to effect this by an understanding with the French Government would be easier than to attempt armed intervention in their favour. From the beginning, therefore, Cromwell showed a preference for the French rather than the Spanish alliance. In the spring of 1652, he and two other members of the Council of State opened a secret negotiation with Mazarin for the cession of Dunkirk. Its garrison was hard pressed by the Spaniards, and the opinion was that the French Government, being unable to relieve it, would rather see it in English than Spanish hands. In April, five thousand English soldiers were collected at Dover, to be embarked for Dunkirk at a moment’s notice. But Mazarin refused to pay the price demanded for the English alliance, and while he hesitated and haggled, the partisans of a Spanish alliance gained the upper hand in the English Council and the negotiation was broken off. As France continued its refusal to recognise the Republic unconditionally, it became necessary to use force. In September, 1652, Blake swooped down on a French fleet sent to revictual Dunkirk, took seven ships, and destroyed or drove ashore the rest, with the result that the besieged fortress surrendered to the Spaniards the next day. At last, in December, 1652, an ambassador arrived in London announcing, in the name of Louis XIV., that the union which should exist between neighbouring states was not regulated by their form of government, and formally recognising the Commonwealth.

Ere this took place, England had become involved in a war with Holland. The two Protestant Republics seemed created by nature for allies. England had helped the Dutch to establish their freedom, and Holland had ever been the chosen refuge of Puritan fugitives. But ever since 1642, dynastic and commercial causes had driven the two states farther apart. The marriage of William II. with Mary, daughter of Charles I., had secured the support of the Stadtholder to Charles I. and Charles II., and neutralised the good will of the Dutch republicans. With the death of William II., in October, 1650, and the practical abolition of the office of Stadtholder, the republican party gained the ascendancy, and better relations seemed possible. Six months later, the Commonwealth sent St. John and Strickland to The Hague to offer on behalf of England, not merely a renewal of the old amity, but “a more strict and intimate alliance and union, whereby there may be a more intrinsical and mutual interest of each in other than hath hitherto been, for the good of both.” The Dutch were willing to make a close commercial alliance, but would go no farther, and negotiations were broken off without any discussion of the “coalescence,” or political union, which the English ambassadors were empowered to propose. After this failure the commercial rivalry of the two nations became more acute. “We are rivals,” a member of the Long Parliament once said, “for the fairest mistress in the world—trade.” In March, 1651, the Dutch made a treaty with Denmark, which damaged English trade in the Baltic. In October, England passed the Navigation Act, which at one stroke barred Dutch commerce with the English colonies, deprived Dutch fishermen of their market in England, and threatened to destroy the Dutch carrying trade. The United Provinces sent ambassadors to negotiate for its repeal, but other questions arose which complicated the situation still further. There were old disputes about the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of England in the British seas, the salute due to the English flag, and the right to exact tribute for permission to fish. There was a new dispute about the rights of neutrals. England, practically at war with France, claimed the right of seizing French goods in Dutch ships, whilst the Dutch put forward the principle that the flag covered the cargo. Memories of the Amboyna Massacre, and demands for compensation for old misdeeds of the Dutch in the East Indies, put fresh obstacles in the way of agreement. Then on May 12, 1652, came a chance collision between Blake and Tromp, off Dover, and the two Republics were at war.

To Cromwell, nothing could have been more unwelcome than this war with the Dutch. He thought England in the right on the questions at issue between the two states, and when Parliament sent him to investigate the causes of the fight, he came back convinced that the fault lay with Tromp and not with Blake. But the war threatened to frustrate for ever the scheme of a league of Protestant powers which Cromwell cherished in his heart. “I do not like the war,” he declared to the representatives of the Dutch congregation in London; “I will do everything in my power to bring about peace.” In every attempt made to come to terms with the Dutch, Cromwell headed the peace party, and the negotiations through unofficial agents, which began in the summer of 1652, were inspired by him.

At first, the result of the war was favourable to England. The Dutch had an enormous commerce and a comparatively small navy; England had a large navy and comparatively little commerce. “The English,” said a Dutchman, “were attacking a mountain of gold, while the Dutch were attacking a mountain of iron.” Individually, the English men-of-war were stronger vessels than the Dutch, and armed with heavier guns. Moreover, English naval operations were under the direction of one body, whilst the Dutch were managed by five distinct admiralty boards. Added to this, the geographical position of England gave it the command of the route by which Dutch fleets approached their own shores, and while Blake and Ayscue were free to attack as they chose, the Dutch admirals were generally hampered by the task of defending large convoys of merchantmen. In November, 1652, however, Tromp defeated Blake off Dungeness, and for more than two months the command of the Channel passed to the Dutch. It was not regained till Blake and Monk defeated him in a three days’ fight off Portland, in February, 1653. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, one English squadron had been defeated off Elba, and another was blockaded in Leghorn; the Baltic was closed to English commerce, Denmark was about to ally itself with Holland to maintain the exclusion, and 1652 closed gloomily for the Commonwealth.

A still stronger argument for peace was provided by the internal condition of England. The war put a stop to all reforms; instead of progress there was a retrograde movement. The army cost a million and a half a year, the navy nearly a million; three hundred thousand pounds were required to build new frigates, and there was a deficit of about half a million. To meet this expenditure, the Long Parliament fell back on the old plan and confiscated the estates of about 650 persons, and applied the proceeds to the maintenance of the navy. Most of the persons thus sentenced to beggary were insignificant people who had done nothing deserving such a punishment. The healing policy which Cromwell had advocated was definitely abandoned, and he was full of indignation at the injustice he witnessed. “Poor men,” he afterwards said, “were driven like flocks of sheep by forty in a morning to confiscation of goods and estates, without any man being able to give a reason why two of them should forfeit a shilling.”

The reorganisation of the Church ceased to make any progress. Parliament discussed some of the proposals of Cromwell’s committee, but did nothing. One of its last acts was to decline to continue the powers of the Commissioners for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, appointed some three years earlier. To Cromwell, this refusal seemed a deliberate discouragement of “the poor people of God in Wales,” and a clear proof that men zealous for the spread of religion had little to hope from the Parliament. “That business,” he said, “to myself and officers was as plain a trial of their spirits as anything.” As to the reform of the law, it appeared equally hopeless. Hale’s bills lay neglected on the table of the House, or, like that for the registration of all titles to land, were swamped by floods of talk in committee.

“I will not say,” said Cromwell of the Parliament, “that they were come to an utter inability of working reformation, though I might say so in regard to one thing—the Reformation of the law, so much groaned under in the posture it is now. That was a thing we had many good words spoken for, but we know now that three months together were not enough for the settling of one word ‘Incumbrances.’”

The army grew more and more impatient. In August, 1652, the council of officers presented a petition to Parliament demanding that “speedy and effectual means” should be taken for carrying out a long list of reforms specified. But for Cromwell they would have included in it the demand for an immediate dissolution. The House gave the officers good words in plenty, and told them that the things they asked for were “under consideration,” but months passed and there were only a few feeble indications of activity. In October, meetings began between the officers and the leading members of Parliament.

“I believe,” affirmed Cromwell, “we had at least ten or twelve meetings, most humbly begging and beseeching of them that by their own means they would bring forth those good things which had been promised and expected; that so it might appear that they did not do them by any suggestion from the army, but from their own ingenuity: so tender were we to preserve them in the reputation of the people.”

Whitelocke relates an interview between himself and Cromwell, in which the latter dwelt on the pride, ambition, and self-seeking of the members of Parliament, their engrossing all places of honour and profit for themselves and their friends, their delays, their factions, their injustice and partiality, and their design to perpetuate themselves in power. It was necessary, continued Cromwell, that there should be some other authority strong enough to restrain and curb the exorbitances of a body which claimed supreme power and was so unfit to rule. Whitelocke hoped that the Parliament would mend its ways, and thought it would be hard to create such an authority. “What if a man should take upon him to be king?” asked Cromwell. All Whitelocke could answer was, that if Cromwell were to take upon himself that title the remedy would be worse than the disease, and that his best plan was to make terms with Charles II.

These conferences came to nothing, and in January, 1653, the impatience of the army grew uncontrollable. The officers held regular meetings at St. James’s, sent a circular letter to the armies in Ireland and Scotland, appealed to their fellow soldiers to stand by them, and drew up threatening addresses to Parliament. Most of the council of officers would be content with nothing less than an immediate dissolution, and were ready to effect it by force. Cromwell opposed any resort to violence, and succeeded, though with difficulty, in holding them back. To a friend, he complained that he was pushed on by two parties to do an act, “the consideration of the issue whereof made his hair to stand on end.” Major-General Lambert headed one party, eager to be revenged on the House for depriving him of the Lord Deputyship of Ireland. The other was headed by Major-General Harrison, an honest man, “aiming at good things,” but too impatient to obtain them “to wait the Lord’s leisure.”

Meanwhile Parliament, thoroughly alarmed by the rising agitation, took up once more the “Bill for a New Representative,” and began to press it forward in earnest. They determined what the constituencies should be, and fixed the qualification for the franchise. By the middle of April, the bill was nearly through committee, and required nothing but a third reading to make it law. In the hands of the parliamentary leaders, however, it had become a scheme for perpetuating themselves in power. The bill was to be a bill for recruiting the numbers of the House, and the present members were to keep their seats without the necessity of re-election. They would be the sole judges of the validity of the votes given, and the eligibility of the persons chosen. Nor was it only at the next election that this system of recruiting was to be adopted; it was to be applied also to all future Parliaments.

To this ingenious scheme the officers of the army had many objections. One was, that the right of election was too loosely defined, and that its interpretation was entrusted to men in whom they had no confidence. They insisted on a political as well as a pecuniary qualification for the franchise, and complained that neutrals and men who had deserted the cause would be able to vote. To put power into the hands of such men, was to throw away the liberties of the nation.

Equally objectionable was the system of election proposed. It gave the people no real right of choice, but only a seeming right. Leicestershire might be tired of Haslerig, and Hull have lost confidence in Vane, yet both must continue to be represented by the men they had chosen in 1640. Lancashire would cease to be unrepresented, but the members it elected might be kept out by the veto of men who had practically elected themselves. Though the army was prepared to restrict the franchise and limit the choice of the electors, it was not prepared to acquiesce in so complete a mockery of representative government.

To Cromwell and the constitutional theorists amongst the officers, there was another insurmountable objection to the bill. What they disliked most in the rule of the Long Parliament was the union of legislative and executive power in the hands of a body possessing unlimited authority and always in session. They wanted short Parliaments, sitting for not more than six months in the year, and limited in their power as well as in their duration. What the bill offered instead of the perpetuation of the Long Parliament, was a succession of perpetual Parliaments, sitting all the year round, following each other without any interval, and exercising the same arbitrary power which the Long Parliament had exercised.

“We should have had fine work then,” said Cromwell.... “A Parliament of four hundred men, executing arbitrary government without intermission, except some change of a part of them; one Parliament stepping into the seat of another, just left warm for them; the same day that the one left, the other was to leap in.... I thought, and I think still, that this was a pitiful remedy.”

For these reasons, the officers resolved to prevent the passage of the bill at any cost. The whole future of the Cause seemed to depend on the issue.

“We came,” said Cromwell, “to this conclusion amongst ourselves: That if we had been fought out of our liberties and rights, necessity would have taught us patience, but to deliver them up would render us the basest persons in the world, and worthy to be accounted haters of God and His people.”

Cromwell became reluctantly convinced that if persuasion failed, it was his duty to use force.

The only hope of an honourable ending of the Long Parliament lay in its acceptance of a compromise. At a conference with some members on April 19, 1653, Cromwell and the officers proposed an expedient which they thought would answer: Let the Parliament drop the bill, dissolve itself at once, and appoint a provisional government. Let the members “devolve their trust to some well affected men, such as had an interest in the nation, and were known to be of good affection to the Commonwealth,” and leave these men “to settle the nation.” “It was no new thing,” said the officers, “when this land was under the like hurlyburlies,” and they proved it by historical precedents. The members demurred and argued, but in the end they promised to think it over and meet the officers for another conference next day. Vane and others pledged themselves, in the meantime, to suspend further proceedings on the Bill for a New Representative, and the officers separated hopefully.

Another parliamentary leader, Sir Arthur Haslerig, whose authority with the House was equal, if not superior, to Vane’s, had come up from the country resolved to defeat the compromise. He told his fellow members vehemently that the work they went about was accursed, and that it was impossible to devolve their trust. When the House met next day, it adopted Haslerig’s view, called for the bill, and proceeded to push it through its last stage regardless of protests. They meant then to adjourn to November, so that it would be impossible to amend or repeal the act; to leave the Council of State to carry on the government, and to make Fairfax General, instead of Cromwell.

News came to Cromwell at Whitehall that the House was proceeding with all speed upon the Bill fora New Representative. Till a second and a third messenger confirmed the tidings, he could not believe “that such persons would be so unworthy.” Then he hurried down to the House, dressed as he was, not like a general or a soldier, but like an ordinary citizen, “clad in plain black clothes with grey worsted stockings,” and sat down, as he used to do, “in an ordinary place.” For a quarter of an hour he sat still, listening to the debate, until the Speaker was about to put the question whether the bill should pass. Cromwell turned to Major-General Harrison, whispered “This is the time I must do it,” and, rising in his place, put off his hat and addressed the House. At first, and for a good while, he spoke in commendation of the Parliament, praising its labours and its care for the public good. Then he changed his note, and told the members of their injustice, their delays of justice, their self-interest, and other faults. As his passion grew, he put his hat on his head, strode up and down the floor of the House, and, looking first at one, then at another member, chid them soundly, naming no names, but showing by his gestures whom he meant. These were corrupt, those scandalous in their lives, that man fraudulent, that an unjust judge. “Perhaps you think,” he said, “that this is not parliamentary language; I confess it is not; neither are you to expect any such from me. You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament. I will put an end to your sitting.” “Call them in,” he cried, turning to Harrison, and at the word Harrison went out and brought back twenty or thirty musketeers of Cromwell’s own regiment from the lobby. Only a show of force was needed. Cromwell pointed to the Speaker in his chair, and said to Harrison, “Fetch him down.” The Speaker refused to leave the chair unless he were forced. “Sir,” said Harrison, “I will lend you my hand,” and putting his hand in Lenthall’s he helped him to the floor. Sidney, who sat next the chair that day, declined to move. “Put him out,” ordered Cromwell; so Harrison and an officer laid their hands on his shoulders and led him towards the door. Then, looking scornfully at the mace on the table, Cromwell exclaimed, “What shall we do with this bauble?” and, calling a soldier, said, “Here, take it away.”

After the mace and the Speaker were gone, all the members left the House. As they went out, Cromwell turned to them and cried: “It is you that have forced me to this, for I have sought the Lord night and day, that He would rather slay me than put me upon the doing this work.” Addressing Vane by name, he reproached him with his broken faith, adding that he might have prevented this, but he was a juggler and had no common honesty. Then, taking the bill from the hands of the clerk of the House, he ordered the doors to be locked, and went away.

It remained still to dissolve the Council of State which the Parliament had appointed. In the afternoon, Cromwell came to the Council, and told its members that if they were met as private persons they should not be disturbed; but if as a council, it was no place for them, and they were to take notice that the Parliament was dissolved.

“Sir,” replied John Bradshaw, “we have heard what you did at the House this morning, and before many hours all England will hear it; but you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves: therefore, take you notice of that.”

Bradshaw was right: the ideal of constitutional government which the Long Parliament represented would prove stronger in the end than Cromwell’s redcoats. That Parliament had all the faults with which Cromwell charged it; but for Englishmen it meant inherited rights, “freedom broadening slowly down,” and all that survived of the supremacy of law. With its expulsion, the army flung away the one shred of legality with which it had hitherto covered its actions. Henceforth, military force must put its native semblance on, and appear in its proper shape. Henceforth, Cromwell’s life was a vain attempt to clothe that force in constitutional forms, and make it seem something else, so that it might become something else. Yet was there not also something to be hoped from a policy which took its stand on realities instead of legal fictions?