In his desire to escape from the undoubted evils of military government, Cromwell had the best part of the army behind him. Nor did it, at the moment, appear very difficult to attain this object by coming to terms with the King, especially as the army leaders were prepared to make concessions to Charles's religious scruples. Claiming freedom for themselves in matters of conscience, they were ready to concede it in return, and, for the first time since he had ridden out of Oxford, Charles was allowed to receive the ministrations of his own chaplains, and to join in offering prayer and praise in the familiar language of the Prayer Book of the Church. It was a long step towards the settlement of that religious question which had created so impassable a gulf between the King and the Presbyterians.

The constitutional question remained to be discussed, and the burden of framing terms to bind the King fell upon Cromwell's son-in-law, Ireton, rather than upon Cromwell himself. Cromwell indeed would never have consented to see Charles replaced in the old position, but he was unskilled in constitutional niceties, and he left such details to others. The main difficulty of the situation was not long in revealing itself. Charles, who had been removed to Windsor, talked as if the dispute between the Houses and the soldiers might be referred to his decision. "Sir," replied Ireton, "you have an intention to be the arbitrator between Parliament and us; and we mean to be it between your Majesty and Parliament." It was not that there was any definite constitutional idea in Charles's mind. With him it was rather a matter of feeling than of reason that he could occupy no other place in the State than that which tradition confirmed by his own experience had assigned to the man who wore the crown. For him as for another as weak for all purposes of government, as richly endowed with the artistic temperament as himself,

Under whatever forms, Parliamentary or constitutional, he and no other was to be the supreme arbiter, empowered to speak in due season the decisive word—always just, always in the right. What was passing before his eyes did but confirm him in his delusion. There had been a quarrel between army and Parliament. Where was it to end unless he sat in judgment to dispense equity to both? Against that will—call it firm or obstinate, as we please—so inaccessible to the teaching of facts, so clinging to the ideas which had inspired his life, the pleadings of Cromwell and Ireton would be vain.

Of this Cromwell had no suspicion. He had never had personal dealings with the King, and had little insight into his peculiar character. On July 4 he saw him at Caversham, where Charles had been established, in order that he might be near Reading, now the head-quarters of the army. He fell at once under the charm of Charles's gracious manner, and fancied that a few days would bring about an agreement. In full accord with Fairfax, he hoped to establish the throne on a constitutional and Parliamentary basis. Neither Charles nor any of those who were under his influence could understand the sincerity of this purpose. The French Ambassador, BelliÈvre, seems to have sounded Cromwell on the object of his ambition, and to have received the memorable reply: "No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going". To Sir John Berkeley, an ardent Royalist, Cromwell explained that the army asked only 'to have leave to live as subjects ought to do, and to preserve their consciences,' thinking that no man could enjoy his estates unless the King had his rights. Probably Cromwell, in his conversation, had emphasised the points which the army was willing to concede, and had minimised those on which it expected Charles to yield. Charles, at all events, was so convinced that the officers were prepared, almost unconditionally, to restore him to his former power, that he gave it as a reason for distrusting them, that they had not asked him for personal favours in return. There can be no doubt that Cromwell refrained at this time from pressing the King hardly. He was present at the meeting of Charles with his children, now permitted to visit him for the first time since the beginning of the civil war. Himself a devoted father, he was touched by the affecting scene. The King, he told Berkeley, was the 'uprightest and most conscientious man of his three kingdoms'. Yet he was too keen-sighted to be blind to the other side of his character. He wished, he said, that his Majesty would be more frank and not so strictly tied to narrow maxims.

Already Cromwell's apparent devotion to the King's person was not unnaturally drawing forth harsh criticisms from those who failed to understand the essential unity underlying divergencies in his action. Some at least amongst the Agitators were joining the Presbyterians in sarcasms directed against the man who was everything by turns; who had at one time taken the Covenant—at another time accepted the disbandment of the army; at another time again had made himself the instrument of the army in its resistance of disbandment. Cromwell took no notice of such calumnies. He was more concerned with the eagerness of the Agitators to march upon Westminster with the object of forcing the Houses to condemn the eleven members who were again stirring, and of crushing the discontent which was simmering amongst the City population. Happily the mere threat of force had been sufficient, and Parliament virtually abandoned its hostile attitude by naming Fairfax Commander-in-chief of all the forces in the country. Would it be so easy to deal with Charles? By July 23, The Heads of the Proposals, probably drawn up by Ireton—who, of all the officers, was the most versed in constitutional lore—with the assistance of Colonel Lambert, having been adopted by the Army Council, were submitted to the King. So far as religion was concerned, they anticipated the settlement of the Revolution of 1688, leaving all forms of worship—including that of the condemned Prayer Book—to the voluntary choice of the worshipper. So far as politics were concerned, provision was to be made, not merely for making the King responsible to Parliament, but for making Parliament responsible to the people. There were to be biennial Parliaments, elected by enlarged constituencies, and a Council of State was to be formed, to whose consent in important matters the King was to bow. The first Council was to remain in office for at least seven years. How it was to be nominated after that was left uncertain, probably till the question had been threshed out in discussion with the King. The army leaders had yet to discover how little profit such a discussion would bring. Charles was not prepared to abandon his old position for that of constitutional King, limited, as he had never been limited before, by opposing forces. If he had spoken his objections clearly out it would have been easy to criticise him as one who was blind to the forces which were governing events: it would have been impossible to hold him morally at fault. The course which he took could not but lead to disaster. Listening to the army leaders, he yet conspired against them, still placing his hopes on the assistance of a Scottish army, and speculating on the chances of a breach between the army on the one side and the Parliament and the City on the other, which would enable him to grasp the reins of power under the old conditions. "I shall see them glad ere long," he told Berkeley, "to accept more equal terms." He even went so far as to imagine that Fairfax and Cromwell were to be bribed by offers of personal advantage to re-establish his fallen throne on other terms than those now offered to him. "You cannot," he told them, "do without me. You will fall into ruin if I do not sustain you." He was partly supported by his knowledge that though the City authorities had yielded to the sway of the army, the City apprentices were in a state of disquiet and had broken into the House of Commons, compelling the members to vote a series of Presbyterian resolutions in defiance of the army. In misplaced confidence in this movement in the City, Charles entered into communication with Lauderdale, the ablest member of a body of Scottish Commissioners who had recently arrived nominally to urge the King to accept the Parliamentary terms, but in reality to negotiate a separate agreement between the Scots and the King. Charles eagerly closed with their proposals and allowed Lauderdale to send a message to Edinburgh urging the equipment of a Scottish army for the invasion of England. Unluckily for him, mob-violence was a feeble reed on which to lean. The Speaker of the two Houses, together with the Independent members, took refuge with the army, and the army treating them as the genuine Parliament reconducted them to Westminster. On August 6 Fairfax was named by the reconstituted Parliament Constable of the Tower, which though it had hitherto been guarded by the citizens was from henceforward to be garrisoned by a detachment of the army, whilst another detachment was left at Westminster as a guard to the Houses. The remainder of the soldiers, to show their power, tramped through the City, passing out by London Bridge on the march to Croydon—Cromwell riding at the head of the cavalry.

What could be the possible end of such demonstrations? Every time they were employed, the appeal to force was placed more clearly in evidence, in spite of all efforts to minimise it. Scarcely had the regiments filed out of the City when the Presbyterian majority reasserted itself in Parliament. On the other hand, the Agitators raised their voices for a purge of Parliament which would thrust out those members who had sat and voted under the influence of the mob. Cromwell was growing impatient. "These men," he said of the eleven members, some of whom had returned to their seats when the House was under the dominion of the mob, "will never leave till the army pull them out by the ears." "I know nothing to the contrary," he said on another occasion, speaking of Holles and Stapleton, "but that I am as well able to govern the kingdom as either of them." On this, the eleven members left their seats for good and all, six of them taking refuge on the Continent. Yet the majority in the Commons was Presbyterian still, and refused to vote at the dictation of the army. Cromwell's patience was exhausted. On August 20 he brought a cavalry regiment into Hyde Park in order to obtain a vote that the proceedings of the House, in the absence of the Speaker, had been null and void. Under this threat, the majority gave way, and Cromwell, who had the whole army behind him, gained his immediate end. Once more he was drifting forwards in the direction of that military despotism which neither he nor his comrades desired to establish. The one way of escape still lay in an understanding with the King. With the King, however, no agreement was possible. Charles, hopelessly at fault in his judgment of passing events, stood aloof in the assurance that the strife amongst the opponents would serve but to weaken both. In the negotiations carried on with the army simultaneously with the latest Parliamentary struggle, he fought every point stubbornly. To extricate themselves from this difficulty, Cromwell and Ireton joined in a vote for resuscitating the Newcastle propositions, and allowed Charles to be formally requested to give his consent to those extravagant Presbyterian demands. Charles, driven to the wall, expressed his preference for The Heads of the Proposals. Cromwell and Ireton contrived to persuade themselves that he was in earnest, and gave their support to the King's demand for a personal negotiation with Parliament on that basis.

Under these circumstances the Independent party and the army split in two. The greater number of the superior officers, together with the Parliamentary leaders of the party, Vane, St. John and Fiennes, supported Cromwell and Ireton in an attempt to persuade Parliament to open the negotiations asked for by the King. As was not unnatural, there were others, Rainsborough in the army, and Marten in the House of Commons, who gathered round them a new Republican party, declaring it useless to enter into a fresh discussion with Charles, and even talking of imprisoning him in some fortress. Coalescing with the Presbyterians, who wished merely to summon Charles to accept a selection from the Newcastle Propositions, they beat Cromwell on the vote, in spite of his warning that by disowning the King they were playing into the hands of men who 'were endeavouring to have no other power to rule but the sword'. Inside and outside the House Cromwell was denounced as a mere time-server, who had no other end in view but his own interests. Cromwell's only answer was to urge Charles more pressingly than before to make the concessions without which his restoration to any kind of authority was out of the question. Conscious of his own integrity, he still hoped for the best, even from Charles. "Though it may be for the present," he wrote to a friend, "a cloud may be over our actions to those who are not acquainted with the grounds of them, yet we doubt not God will clear our integrity and innocence from any other ends we aim at but His glory and the public good." Yet September passed away, and Charles had made no sign.

Charles's silence did but strengthen the party amongst the soldiers which aimed at cutting the political knot with the sword. In the Army Council indeed Cromwell was still predominant, and on October 6 it agreed to meet on the 14th, to formulate terms which the King might be able to accept. In the interval everything was done to come to a private understanding with Charles. Charles, however, was trusting to the probable Scottish invasion, and saw in the events taking place more closely under his eyes no more than a chance of discrediting Cromwell and his associates. When the Army Council met on the 14th, the subject of continuing the negotiations had to be dropped. The position was well explained in a letter from a Royalist. "The secret disposition," he wrote, "is that there is no manner of agreement between the King and the army; all this negotiation having produced no other effect but to incline some of the chief officers not to consent to his destruction, which I believe they will not, unless they be over-swayed; but cannot observe that they are so truly the King's as that they will pass the Rubicon for him, which if they could do, considering the inclination of the common soldiers, and generally of the people they might do what they would; but they are cold, and there is another faction of desperate fellows as hot as fire."

Almost, if not altogether, in despair, Cromwell sought a compromise with the Presbyterians on the basis of the temporary establishment of Presbyterianism as the national religion, with as large a toleration as he could persuade them to grant. When the House of Commons refused to extend toleration to the worship authorised by the Prayer Book, it was obvious that the scheme was not one which had a chance of obtaining the assent of Charles. Cromwell's hope of uniting Parliament and army in bringing pressure upon the King was as completely frustrated as his former hope of bringing about an understanding between the King and the army. His impotence could not but give encouragement to the other 'faction of desperate fellows as hot as fire' to demand a settlement on quite another basis from that on which Cromwell and the other army leaders had vainly attempted to found a Government.

In all his efforts, Cromwell's aim had been to strengthen the chances in favour of the new toleration by intertwining it with the old constitutional pillars of King and Parliament. His schemes, based as they were on a thoroughly political instinct which warned him against the danger of cutting the State adrift from its moorings, had broken down mainly in consequence of the resistance of the King. It was but natural that earnest men should seek new modes of gaining their ends when the old ones proved ineffective. As the years of revolution passed swiftly on, new and more drastic schemes appeared upon the surface, not, as is often said, because in some unexplained way revolutions tend in themselves to strengthen the hands of extreme men, but because the force of conservative resistance calls forth more violent remedies. The misgovernment of Buckingham and Laud had fostered the Parliamentary idea. The resistance of Parliament to toleration had led to the conception by the army leaders of the idea of Parliamentary reform, and now the failure of those leaders produced the plan of founding a government not on institutions sanctified by old use and wont, but on a totally new democratic system. Outside the army, the main supporter of the new principles was John Lilburne, who had been a lieutenant-colonel in Manchester's army before the formation of the New Model, a man litigious and impracticable, but public-spirited and prepared to accept the consequences of his actions on behalf of his fellow-citizens or of himself. During the troubles he spent a great part of his life in prison, and at the present time he had been more than a year in the Tower. He had a large following in the army, and early in October five regiments deposed their Agitators, and choosing new ones, set them to draw up a political manifesto which, under the name of The Case of the Army Truly Stated, was laid before Fairfax on the 18th.

The new thing in this scheme of the recently elected Agitators was not that they proposed to fix the institutions of the State by means of written terms. That had been done again and again by Parliament in various propositions submitted to Charles since the commencement of the Civil War, and more recently by the army leaders in The Heads of the Proposals. What was new was that they proposed in the first place to secure religious freedom and other rights by the erection of a paramount law unalterable by Parliament; and in the second place to establish a single House of Parliament—all mention of King or House of Lords was avoided—with full powers to call executive ministers to account—a House which was to be elected by manhood suffrage—an innovation which they justified on the ground that 'all power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this nation'. It was a complete transition from the principles of the English Revolution to those of the French.

Against the foundation of a government on abstract principles, Cromwell's whole nature—consonant in this with that of the vast majority of the English people—rose in revolt. On the 20th he poured out his soul in the House of Commons in a three-hours' speech in praise of monarchy, urging the House to build up the shattered throne, disclaiming on behalf of the whole body of officers any part in the scheme of the party of the new Agitators, who were now beginning to be known as Levellers. It was to no purpose. Monarchy without a King was itself but an abstract principle, and Charles would accept no conditions which would not leave him free to shake off any constitutional shackles imposed upon him. Only four days before the delivery of Cromwell's speech, Charles had assured the French Ambassador that he trusted in the divisions in the army, which would be sure to drive one or other of the disputants to his side.

The immediate result of Charles's resolution to play with the great questions at issue was an attempt by Cromwell and the officers to come to terms with the Levellers. On October 28 a meeting of the Army Council was held in Putney Church, to which several civilian Levellers were admitted, the most prominent of whom was Wildman, formerly a major in a now-disbanded regiment. Fairfax being out of health, Cromwell took the chair. The Agitators put the question in a common-sense form. "We sought," one of them said, "to satisfy all men, and it was well; but, in going to do it, we have dissatisfied all men. We have laboured to please the King; and, I think, except we go about to cut all our throats, we shall not please him; and we have gone to support a House which will prove rotten studs.D I mean the Parliament, which consists of a company of rotten members." Cromwell and Ireton—they continued—had attempted to settle the kingdom on the foundations of King and Parliament, but it was to be hoped that they would no longer persist in this course. Ireton could but answer that he would never join those who refused to 'attempt all ways that are possible to preserve both, and to make good use, and the best use that can be of both, for the kingdom'. The practical men had become dreamers, whilst the dreamers had become practical men. The Levellers, at least, had a definite proposal to make, whilst Cromwell and Ireton had none. Since the appearance of The Case of the Army, the Agitators had reduced its chief requirements into a short constitution of four articles, which they called The Agreement of the People, intending, it would seem, to send it round the country for subscription, thus submitting it to what, in modern days, would be called a plebiscite, though apparently it was to be a plebiscite in which only affirmative votes were to be recorded. Nothing could be more logical than this attempt to find a basis of authority in the popular will, if the other basis of authority, the tradition of generations, was to be of necessity abandoned.

Cromwell, of all men in the world, was reduced to mere negative criticism. The proposal of the Agitators, he admitted, was plausible enough. "If," he said, "we could leap out of one condition into another that had so precious things in it as this hath, I suppose there would not be much dispute; though perhaps some of these things may be well disputed; and how do we know if, whilst we are disputing these things, another company of men shall gather together, and they shall put out a paper as plausible as this? I do not know why it may not be done by that time you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it, if that be the way; and not only another and another, but many of this kind; and if so, what do you think the consequence would be? Would it not be confusion?... But truly I think we are not only to consider what the consequences are ... but we are to consider the probability of the ways and means to accomplish it, that is to say that, according to reason and judgment, the spirits and temper of this nation are prepared to receive and go along with it, and that those great difficulties which lie in our way are in a likelihood to be either overcome or removed. Truly to anything that's good, there's no doubt on it, objections may be made and framed, but let every honest man consider whether or no these be not very reasonable objections in point of difficulty; and I know a man may answer all difficulties with faith, and faith will answer all difficulties really where it is, as we are very apt all of us to call faith that perhaps may be but carnal imagination and carnal reasoning."

Not a word had Cromwell to say on behalf of any possible understanding with the King. All that he could do was to stave off a declaration in favour of the establishment of a democratic Republic, by proposing that the Army Council should reduce into formal shape the engagements entered upon at Newmarket and Triploe Heath. As those engagements had been put forward as demands to Parliament—not to the King, this suggestion at least thrust aside for the time being the thorny question of the possibility of coming to an understanding with Charles. Cromwell's proposal, however, was not likely to secure unanimity. Wildman, on behalf of the Levellers, refused to be bound by engagements which he personally held to be unjust. On this Cromwell asked for the appointment of a committee to examine this question, as well as any others upon which there was a difference of opinion. He pleaded with his audience not to approach the matters in controversy 'as two contrary parties'. His hearers were in no temper to profit by the suggestion. Wildman threw out a hint that if Parliament were to patch up an arrangement with the King, it would detract from natural right. The expression at once divided the assembly into two camps. Ireton declared that there was no such thing as natural right. Cromwell asked for the appointment of a committee to discuss the questions that had been raised about the engagements of the army. A Captain Audley sensibly urged the controversialists to remember that it was no time for empty disputation. "If we tarry long," he said, "the King will come and say who will be hanged first." Neither Audley's judicious remark, nor Cromwell's words thrown in from time to time in favour of peace, could stop the wrangle, which at least served to draw from Cromwell the nearest approach he ever made to the enunciation of a constitutional principle. Though the Council of the Army, he declared, was not 'wedded and glued to forms of government,' it was prepared to maintain the doctrine that 'the foundation and the supremacy is in the people—radically in them—and to be set down by them in their representations,' in other words by their representatives in Parliament. To conciliate this doctrine with the upholding of the ancient constitution, reformed indeed, but unaltered in its main features, was the problem which the nation solved for itself in 1689, but which neither the nation nor Cromwell could contrive to solve so long as Charles I. refused to face the teaching of events.

On the following day, after a prayer-meeting held in compliance with a suggestion from the pious Colonel Goffe, the Army Council met again, to resolve, after long debate, to lay aside the consideration of the engagements of the army and to proceed at once to the examination of The Agreement of the People. This determination was a check to Cromwell, who had proposed the committee. It was not long before his prudence was justified. A debate sprang up on the question of manhood suffrage, claimed by the Levellers as being in accordance with natural right, and rejected by their opponents, to whom natural right was a mere absurdity. After a fierce dispute, Cromwell did his best to persuade the meeting to avoid abstract considerations, and to content itself with the discussion of such questions as whether the existing franchise could be in any way improved. His characteristic tendency to look to the preservation of ancient rights finding no scope in any possible scheme for the retention of the monarchy, fixed itself on the question of the constitution of Parliament. Colonel Rainsborough, who, on questions relating to Parliamentary elections, was the chief speaker on the side of the Levellers, proposed an appeal from the Army Council to the Army at large. His proposal found no support and the Council broke up without coming to a decision.

After this Cromwell had his way. On the 30th the committee which he suggested, and on which both parties were represented, met to consider the points at issue. The constitutional scheme to which its assent was given followed the lines of The Heads of the Proposals more than those of The Agreement of the People. It proposed reforms, not an entire shifting of the basis of government. Above all, it adhered to the view that the new constitution should come into existence by an agreement between King and Parliament—not by an appeal to the natural rights of man. In the long run Cromwell was justified by the event. On no other basis would the distressed nation find rest. His wisdom so far as present results were concerned was less conspicuous.

The next meeting of the Army Council was held under discouraging circumstances. Charles, who had for some time been established at Hampton Court, had refused to renew the parole which he had given, and it had been found necessary to strengthen his guards. Though there was no accurate knowledge at Putney of his intrigue with the Scots, enough had leaked out to raise grave suspicion, and when, on November 1, Cromwell again took the chair, he called on those present to 'speak their experiences as the issue of what God had given in answer to their prayers'. The result was distinctly unfavourable to the King. One said that the negative voice of the King and Lords must be taken away; another that he could no longer pray for the King; a third that their liberties must be recovered by the sword. Cromwell did his best to stem the tide. Pointing out, just as a modern historian might do, that there had been faults on both sides, he called on 'him that was without sin amongst them to cast the first stone'. He then turned to the more practical question of the difficulty of maintaining discipline in the army, if the authority of Parliament were shut off. "If there be no Parliament," he argued, "they are nothing, and we are nothing likewise." Though Cromwell was not yet prepared to strike at the King, he no longer regarded his comprehension in the new constitution as absolutely essential. He was even ready to accept the new democratic basis of The Agreement of the People, if there should be a wide demand for it. He must look, he said, for 'a visible presence of the people, either by subscriptions or numbers—for in the government of nations that which is to be looked after is the affections of the people'. For the present, however, he seemed most inclined to trust in Parliament as the source of authority. On one thing he was clear, that the discipline of the army must not be ruined by such an appeal to the general body of the soldiers in support of the Agreement as Rainsborough had contemplated. "I must confess," he said, "that I have a commission from the General, and I understand what I am to do by it. I shall conform to him according to the rules and discipline of war ... and therefore I conceive it is not in the power of any particular men, or any particular man in the army, to call a rendezvous of a troop, or regiment, or in the least to disoblige the army from the commands of the General.... Therefore I shall move what we shall centre upon. If it have but the face of authority, if it be but a hare swimming over the Thames I will take hold of it rather than let it go."

It was hard, indeed, in those days, to say where the face of authority was to be found, and Cromwell was far from being able to solve the question. The most innocent suggestion made by his opponents was that the army must purge Parliament and declare the King responsible for the ruin of the country. Goffe declared that it had been revealed to him that the sin of the army lay in its tampering with God's enemies, in other words, with Charles. Cromwell struck in with an expression of distrust in personal revelations. He himself, he explained, was guided by God's dispensations, that is to say, in more modern phrase, by the requirements of the situation. He acknowledged that danger was to be apprehended from the King and House of Lords, and that it was not his intention 'to preserve the one or the other with a visible danger and destruction to the people and the public interest'. On the other hand, he refused to accept it as certain that God had determined to destroy King and Lords, though he thought it probable that it was so. In the end, the constitutional discussion was transferred to a committee.

For a right judgment of Cromwell's character and habits of procedure no evidence exists of such importance as that which has been thus summarised. Here at least is laid bare before us his reluctance to abandon an untenable position, long after it has become clear to more impatient spirits that it has become untenable. Yet his hesitation is not based on any timorous reluctance to act. It arises from his keen sense of the danger of any alternative policy, a sense which will be overmastered as soon as action in one direction or the other becomes a manifest necessity. On November 8, seeing that the Levellers were bent on pushing forward their proposal of manhood suffrage, he obtained a vote from the Army Council directing that both officers and Agitators should be sent back to their regiments. There can be little doubt that the danger was greater than was thus indicated, and that there was truth in a story which charged the Levellers with intending, at this time, to purge the Parliament and to bring the King to trial. On the 11th, at all events, the brave but fanatical Colonel Harrison was calling for the prosecution of the King, and on the same day Cromwell sent to Whalley, who commanded the guard at Hampton Court, to provide against any attempt on Charles's person. Similar warnings had reached Charles himself, and on the evening of the same day he quietly made his escape. On the 14th, after the failure of a scheme for the provision of a vessel from Southampton to carry him to France, he reached Carisbrooke, where the Governor of the Castle was Robert Hammond, Cromwell's cousin. Cromwell's first task was to ensure the discipline of the army. His persistent efforts to keep up negotiation with the King had exposed him to the distrust of the Levellers, and it is said that some of them had resolved to murder him in his bed. There was no time to be lost. On the 15th a rendezvous of a third part of the army was to be held on Corkbush Field, not far from Ware, and there could be no doubt that the Levellers would make desperate attempts to seduce the regiments from their military obedience. To meet the danger, a manifesto was issued in the name of Fairfax and the Army Council, in which Fairfax offered to give his support to the early dissolution of Parliament and to a plan for making the House of Commons 'as near as may be, an equal representative of the people that are to elect'. For the rest, every soldier would be expected to sign a form of adhesion to the General and the Council. Speaking broadly, the conflict was between the men who knew the importance of maintaining the discipline of the army, and those who would reduce it to an armed mob eager to compel Parliament to adopt the democratic system of The Agreement of the People. On the 15th the soldiers gathered to the appointed rendezvous on Corkbush Field, where most of the regiments, with more or less reluctance, submitted to their officers. Two, those of Harrison and Robert Lilburne, both of which had been ordered elsewhere, mutinously made their appearance with copies of The Agreement of the People in their hats, as well as the motto "England's Freedom! Soldiers' Rights!" A few words from Fairfax reduced Harrison's regiment to obedience. Cromwell, finding that Lilburne's men defied his order to remove the papers from their hats, rode into the ranks with his sword drawn, on which the regiment, with one accord, did as it was bidden. Three of the ringleaders were condemned to death by a court-martial held on the spot, and then ordered to throw dice for their lives. He who threw lowest was shot in the presence of the whole force, and the mutiny was brought to an end.

By this time the weary round of negotiation was beginning afresh. Charles sent up new proposals to the Parliament, proposals which, if he were in earnest, might possibly serve as a foundation for an agreement. It concerned Parliament and army alike to discover whether Charles, who for many months had shown no sign of eagerness for settlement, was now aiming at anything more than an excuse to enable him to gain time for an arrangement with the Scots. So suspicious had the officers grown that Ireton was heard to say that if peace were to be made between King and Parliament, he hoped it would be such as that the army 'might, with a safe conscience, fight against both'. If we are to believe a story, told indeed only after the Restoration, but which has inherent probability in it, Cromwell and Ireton, having reason to suppose that a letter from Charles to the Queen would be carried by a man who was to stay the night at the Blue Boar in Holborn, disguised themselves as troopers, and waited in the inn drinking beer till the messenger arrived. Then, ripping up his saddle, they found the expected letter, from which they learnt that 'the King had acquainted the Queen that he was now courted by both the factions, the Scotch Presbyterians and the army, and which bid fairest for him should have him, but he thought he should close with the Scots sooner than the other'. According to another account, the letter also assured Henrietta Maria that she need not concern herself about any concessions he might make, as 'he should not look upon himself as obliged to keep any promises made so much on compulsion whenever he had power enough to break them'.

Whatever may be the exact truth about the intercepted letter, it is exceedingly likely that Cromwell, in some way or other, received intelligence which confirmed his growing belief in Charles's untrustworthiness. This view of the case is confirmed by the fact that, not long after, the Parliament prepared four Bills, not as a basis of a settlement, but as a test to show whether Charles was in earnest or not, principally by asking him to abandon his control over the militia. On the other hand Charles so misconceived his position as to send Berkeley to Fairfax with a request that he would support him in asking for a personal treaty unfettered by any conditions whatsoever. When, on November 28, Berkeley arrived at head-quarters, Fairfax briefly referred him to Parliament, whilst neither Cromwell nor Ireton would enter into conversation with him. To the soldiers who had mistrusted him Cromwell professed 'that the glories of this world had so dazzled his eyes that he could not discern clearly the great works the Lord was doing; that he was resolved to humble himself, and desired the prayers of the saints, that God would be pleased to forgive his self-seeking'. On the following morning he sent a message to Berkeley in a more worldly strain, bidding him 'be assured he would serve His Majesty as long as he could do it without his own ruin, but desired that he would not expect that he should perish for his sake'. Such at least was the form given to the message by Berkeley when he wrote his Memoirs at a later date, and we may at least take it as established that Cromwell made it clear to Charles that, after what had happened, it was perfectly hopeless to expect the army to bring pressure on Parliament in his favour.

Charles turned to the Scots. There were two parties in Scotland—the party of the ministers of the Kirk, headed by the Marquis of Argyle, and the party of the nobility, headed by the Duke of Hamilton, of which the leading members were the Duke's brother, the Earl of Lanark, and the Earl of Lauderdale, both of whom, like many other Scottish nobles, had thrown themselves into the Presbyterian movement so long as it was directed against Bishops, but had rallied to the Crown as soon as the Ministers strove to make themselves independent of the nobility. It was this latter party that was represented by the Scottish Commissioners in England, and on December 26 Charles signed an agreement with them—The Engagement, as it was called—which gave him his own way in England, allowing him to put an end to all toleration of the sects, and to grant a dominant position to Presbyterians for three years only. Against the English Parliament and the army the Scots were to claim for the Crown the power over the militia, the control over the Great Seal, the bestowal of honours and offices, the choice of Privy Councillors, and the negative voice in Parliament. In support of this settlement, which included a disbandment of the army and a dissolution of Parliament, a Scottish army was to march into England. Of all the Scotsmen embarked in this scheme, the only man of marked ability was Lauderdale, and though no direct evidence exists on the subject, it seems likely enough that the Engagement was mainly, if not altogether, his work. If the suggestion be accepted that the picture by Janssen in the possession of the present Duke, in which a paper is being handed by Lauderdale to Lanark, represents the transference of the Engagement from the former to the latter, it would lend additional strength to the supposition founded on the relative intellectual powers of the two men. However this may be, it is certain that two days after the signature of The Engagement, Charles rejected the Four Bills which had been laid before him by the English Parliament, thus showing his own belief that it was no longer needful for him to keep up even the semblance of an understanding with the Houses at Westminster.

That the result of a successful Scottish invasion would be to restore Charles to the throne on the old conditions, and to sweep away everything for which any English party had struggled, can hardly be doubted. It is true that The Engagement was buried in the garden of Carisbrooke Castle, and that not a word of its contents reached any English ears. Yet from the rejection of the Four Bills, following on the visit of the Scottish Commissioners to Carisbrooke, it was evident that some dangerous project was on foot, and even those who had welcomed a Scottish army in 1643, when it invaded England at their bidding, were likely to be scandalised at the intervention of another Scottish army in opposition to themselves. To Cromwell and to the soldiers of every grade, the prospect of seeing those objects for which they had shed their blood wrenched from them by a Scottish invasion, was peculiarly offensive. In the army all quarrels were hushed and all offences pardoned in face of the obvious danger. What was more, the leading officers assured Parliament that the army might be relied upon against the invaders. The extreme Levellers indeed continued to regard Cromwell as a time-server and a hypocrite, and some even of those who were ready to accept his co-operation were somewhat suspicious. "If you prove not an honest man," said Hazlerigg to him, "I will never trust a fellow with a great nose for your sake."

Under the circumstances Charles's Royalist friends were sent away from Carisbrooke, and he himself, after a futile attempt to escape, treated as a prisoner under lock and key. A vote that no further addresses should be made to the King passed the Commons. For some time the Lords refused their concurrence, and it was only on a threat of the intervention of the army that they gave way. After the struggle was at an end, two regiments occupied Whitehall and the Mews. The supremacy of the army in the State was growing more pronounced as each political difficulty arose. There are good reasons for believing that before the end of January, 1648, Cromwell, to whom the interference of the army in politics was almost as objectionable as the establishment of a democracy on abstract principles, proposed to transfer the Crown from Charles to the Prince of Wales; preserving the office whilst changing the persons. No proposal could have been more statesmanlike; but, unhappily, it was not possible to carry it into effect. The whole of the Royal family was too exasperated against the enemies of its head to lend itself to such a transaction. There can be no doubt that Cromwell had, by this time, abandoned all thought of looking to Charles as the basis of the political settlement he desired. About the end of February a letter from Charles to the Queen was intercepted which convinced those into whose hands it fell that the writer was preparing to take the aggressive against his opponents. Early in February Cromwell was found amongst the supporters of a Parliamentary declaration intended to uphold the vote of No Addresses, in which Charles's misdemeanours were set forth at length, somewhat in the fashion of the Grand Remonstrance. His attempt to bring into England Germans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Lorrainers, and Danes as well as Irishmen was one of the principal counts against him. Cromwell is even said to have 'made a severe invective against monarchical government,' though it is probable that his argument was directed less against a hereditary chief-magistracy bound by constitutional limitations than against a system under which the King retained the ultimate decision of all questions in his own hands. At all events, he refused to commit himself absolutely to Republicanism, thereby exasperating those who, like Marten, and even his own bosom friend—the younger Vane—had come to the conclusion that, in the England of that day, a Republic was the only alternative to an absolute monarchy.

It was about this time that a meeting took place, the proceedings at which were recorded by Edmund Ludlow, himself a Republican or Commonwealth's-man—to use the term in use amongst contemporaries. Anxious to bring men of different opinions into line against Charles, Cromwell gave a dinner to the leaders of the various parties, after which a conference was held in which, according to Ludlow, Cromwell and his friends 'kept themselves in the clouds, and would not declare their judgments either for a monarchical, aristocratical or democratical government, maintaining that any of them might be good in themselves, or for us according as Providence should direct us'. The old difference of opinion between the men of practice and the men of theory was, on this occasion, aggravated by the fact that many theoretical upholders of a Commonwealth drew the very practical conclusion that not only were Charles's subjects absolved from their allegiance, but that it was the duty of Parliament to call the King to account for the blood that had been shed in England in consequence of his misdeeds. The conference begun in the interests of peace bade fair to lead to open division, and Cromwell, to silence angry vituperation, flung a cushion at Ludlow's head and ran downstairs. Ludlow in his turn threw the cushion back at Cromwell, and, as he proudly boasted, 'made him hasten down faster than he desired'. A rough piece of horseplay, it at all events served its purpose in quieting a strife which, every minute that it lasted, was doing injury to the cause which Cromwell desired to serve.

At no time did Cromwell fix beforehand the methods by which he intended to work, though he never had any doubt of the object against which his energies were to be directed. He had contended first against irresponsible monarchical power, then in turn against military anarchy, Presbyterian tyranny, the political supremacy of the army, and abstract theories of government. He was ready to meet each danger as it arose, with the help of all who, whatever their opinions on other points might be, were ready to join him in attacking the abuse which he wished at the time to abate. If, like Ludlow, they persisted in looking too far ahead, there was nothing for it but to silence them, if it were but by flinging cushions at their heads.

In the Spring of 1648 Cromwell and his political allies had thus to deal with a very complicated situation. They had to face not merely Charles's intrigue with the Scots, but also the widely spread discontent in England. Especially in the towns, men were weary of military dictation, and of the increased taxation by which the army was supported. Parliament too was as unpopular as the army. Englishmen were no less weary of the prolonged uncertainty which neither army nor Parliament seemed capable of bringing to an end. In their longing for a settled government, a considerable part of the population turned their eyes to the throne, as the ancient basis of authority and order. If England had been polled, there would probably have been a large majority in favour of Charles's restoration to power, and yet, it was precisely amongst those whose system was most democratic that the most intense opposition to a restoration was to be found.

To Cromwell, man of order and discipline as he was, a restoration unaccompanied with security against the old mischief was intolerable. Of his own disinterestedness he gave at this time undeniable proof. Parliament having granted him lands valued at £1,680 a year, proceeded to reduce his pay at the same time that it reduced that of other officers, by the large sum of £1,825. Far from taking umbrage at this diminution of his income, he presented not less than £5,000 to the public cause, and also abandoned the arrears due to him, which at that time amounted to £1,500. Certainly dangers were gathering thickly. An intercepted letter from the King's agent at the Hague disclosed Charles's expectation to be succoured not only by an Irish army but by a Dutch one. Common prudence taught Cromwell to do everything in his power to conciliate any party that might stand by his side against so extensive a combination. When his scheme for placing the Prince of Wales on the throne was revived about the middle of March, some of the Episcopal clergy preferred an understanding with the army to an understanding with the Scots. Towards the end of the month, Cromwell was still in negotiation with members of the Royalist party, the purport of which it is impossible to define, but which probably had its rise in his persistent desire to maintain royalty in some shape or form as a basis of order. It is at least certain that he gained much obloquy from his own party. "I know," he wrote to a friend, "God has been above all ill reports, and will in His own time vindicate me. I have no cause to complain." It was never Cromwell's way to answer calumny by a public explanation of his conduct.

At last, however, Cromwell came to the conclusion that nothing was to be hoped from an understanding with the Royalists; and it therefore became more necessary to secure the co-operation of the English Presbyterians. An attempt to win the City Magistrates by concessions was, however, promptly repulsed. On April 6 it became known in London that Charles had all but succeeded in effecting his escape, and on the 9th a City mob was rushing westwards along the Strand with the intention of overpowering the soldiers at Whitehall and the Mews. A charge of cavalry ordered by Cromwell drove them back, but it was not till the following day that the tumult was suppressed. All this while the Hamilton party, which was keen for an invasion of England, was gaining strength in Scotland. So black did the outlook become that one more appeal was made to the King, and there are strong reasons for believing that he was warned that, if he persisted in refusing compliance to the demands made upon him—whatever they may have been—Parliament would proceed, on April 24, to depose him, and to crown the Duke of York, who was still in their hands, as James II. Charles replied by sanctioning a plan for his son's escape, and before the appointed day arrived the boy was well on his way to the Continent.

The first resistance to Parliament came from an unexpected quarter. As early as on February 22, Colonel Poyer, the Governor of Pembroke Castle, had refused to deliver up his charge till his arrears had been paid, and on March 23 he had proceeded to seize the town. At first no more than a local difficulty was apprehended, and Colonel Horton was despatched to suppress the rising. On his arrival he wrote that he was likely to have the whole of South Wales on his hands. Almost at the same time it was known at Westminster that a Scottish army was actually to be raised. Presbyterian as was the majority of the English Parliament, it had no mind to have even its favourite religion established by an invading army of Scots, especially as that army would be the army of the Scottish nobility, who were supposed not to feel any warm attachment to the Presbyterian cause except so far as their own interests were connected with it. It was the hesitation of the English Presbyterians between their political and their ecclesiastical aims which alone could have given a free hand to Fairfax and Cromwell. It was Cromwell who, seconded by Vane, carried a vote in the House for granting concessions which the City under the pressure of the recent intelligence, was now prepared to accept as satisfactory. A further vote that the House would not alter the fundamental government of the kingdom by King, Lords and Commons, was supported by the leading Independents. The House then proceeded to declare itself ready to concur in a settlement on the ground of the propositions laid before the King at Hampton Court, that is to say, on the ground of the establishment of Presbyterianism without any liberty of conscience whatsoever. Whether Cromwell was in his place when the last two votes were taken is uncertain. At all events we can hardly be wrong in supposing that he had no objection to the Presbyterians amusing themselves with another hopeless negotiation whilst the army took the field. He had had too much experience of Charles's character as a diplomatist to imagine that he was likely to aim at anything more than hoodwinking his opponents till the time came when he might deem it advisable to hoodwink his allies.

Cromwell's presence was imperatively needed at head-quarters, which were now established at Windsor. He found the army in an agitated condition, and we may well believe that his own feelings were no less agitated. The peaceful settlement which he had so long pursued seemed farther off than ever, and he can have brought with him no friendly thoughts of a King who would neither accept reasonable terms for himself, nor abdicate in favour of those who would. On April 29 the chief men of the army held a prayer-meeting to inquire 'into the causes of that sad dispensation,' and in a discussion which followed on the 30th Cromwell urged those present thoroughly to consider their actions as an army and their conduct as private Christians, that they might discover the cause of 'such sad rebukes' as were upon them by reason of their iniquities. That day no definite result was arrived at, but on the next, news having arrived that the forces in Wales had suffered a check, Fairfax ordered Cromwell to take the command in those parts. Before Cromwell set out for his new command one more meeting was held. "Presently," we are told by one who was present, "we were led and helped to a clear agreement amongst ourselves, not any dissenting, that it was the duty of our day, with the forces we had, to go out and fight against those potent enemies which that year in all places appeared against us, with humble confidence, in the name of the Lord only, that we should destroy them; also enabling us then, after serious seeking His face, to come to a very clear and joint resolution on many grounds at large then debated amongst us, that it was our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed and mischief he had done to his utmost against the Lord's cause and people in these poor nations."

To what other conclusion could these men possibly come? How were they likely to recognise the deeply seated belief in the justice of his Church and cause which lay behind the slippery trickiness of Charles? and how, even if they had recognised it, could they have counted it to him for righteousness? For many a month Cromwell had staved off this decision. Now, he could not reconcile it to his conscience to stave it off any longer; his conscience in this, no doubt, concurring with his interests. He left the Presbyterians at Westminster to their own devices—to pass an ordinance which imposed the bitterest penalties on heresy, and to toy with the idea of a fresh negotiation with Charles, content that they had been brought into line with the army in opposition to a Cavalier insurrection at home and a Scottish invasion from abroad. Every indication served to convince the Houses of the Royalist character of the insurrection. There were tumults either actually breaking out or threatened in Suffolk, in Essex and in Surrey, and in every case a resolution to support the King was either declared or implied. Such a development was no more to the taste of the Presbyterians than to that of the soldiers, and the army was therefore able to calculate on the support of a Parliament which, though it might detest the principles of the soldiers, was unable to dispense with their services.

That army was not one to be easily defeated. Before Cromwell reached his appointed station, he heard that Horton had overcome the Welshmen at St. Fagans. The political effect of the victory was immense. "To observe the strange alteration," wrote a London Independent to a friend in the army, "the defeating of the Welsh hath made in all sorts is admirable. The disaffected to the army of the religious Presbyterians now fawn upon them—partly for fear of you, and partly in that they think you will keep down the Royal party which threatened them, in their doors, in the streets, to their faces with destruction, and put no difference between Presbyterian and Independent." On May 19 the Common Council of the City declared its readiness to live and die with the Parliament, at the same time requesting that a fresh negotiation should be opened with the King—a proposal which was at once accepted. The Royalists were bitterly disappointed. "How long," jibed one of them, "halt ye between two opinions? If Mammon be God, serve him; if the Lord be God, serve Him. If Fairfax be King, serve him; if Charles be King, restore him." To Fairfax and Cromwell the decision of the City must have come as a great relief. The work before them was hard enough, but there was no longer reason to despair.

So far as Fairfax was concerned, it had been intended that he should march against the Scots whilst Cromwell marched into Wales. A rising in Kent, followed by the defection of part of the navy, frustrated this design. On June 1 Fairfax defeated the Kentish Royalists at Maidstone, but a part of their forces crossing the Thames threw themselves into Essex in the hope of rallying the Royalists of the eastern counties to their side. Fairfax after a magnificently rapid march penned them into Colchester, where they could only be reduced by a long and tedious blockade. At the same time Cromwell, having pushed on through South Wales, was occupied with the siege of Pembroke Castle, which did not surrender till July 11, thus leaving full time for the completion of the Scottish preparations. "I pray God," he had written to Fairfax whilst as yet the issue was undecided, "teach this nation and those that are over us, and your Excellency and all us that are under you, what the mind of God may be in all this, and what our duty is. Surely it is not that the poor godly people of this kingdom should still be made the object of wrath and anger, nor that our God would have our necks under a yoke of bondage; for these things that have lately come to pass have been the wonderful works of God breaking the rod of the oppressor as in the day of Midian, not with garments much rolled in blood, but by the terror of the Lord, who will yet save His people and confound His enemies."

What a light is thrown upon Cromwell's thoughts by these words! No Parliamentary supremacy or rule of the majority—not even a general toleration after the fashion of Roger Williams or Milton was uppermost in his mind. Security for those whom he styled 'the poor godly people' was the main object of his striving, though he was too large-minded not to assign an important, if but a secondary place, to questions relating to the fall or preservation of Kings and Parliaments, as the institutional framework of political order without which even 'the poor godly people' could not enter the haven of safety.

Three days before Cromwell was released from Pembroke the Scottish army under the Duke of Hamilton had crossed the Border, sending before it a declaration against toleration either for the Common Prayer Book or for the worship of the sects. It was unlikely that if Charles were restored by Hamilton's means he would be required to fulfil more than that portion of the declaration which related to the repression of the sects. The Hamilton party, as the secular party in Scotland, was devoid of enthusiasm, and anxious to throw off the yoke of the clergy. Hamilton, however, was a most incompetent general. He and his army, in short, had no advantage but that of numbers over the well-disciplined and fiery enthusiasts who followed Cromwell. They neither trusted God nor kept their powder dry.

Though the invading army entered England by way of Carlisle, Cromwell marched against them not through Lancashire but through Yorkshire. He had to supply his men with shoes and stockings from Northampton and Coventry, and to halt at Doncaster to pick up the artillery which was forwarded him from Hull, as well as to rejoin Lambert, who was in command of the small force which it had been possible to despatch to the North whilst Cromwell was detained at Pembroke, and who had been doing his best to delay the progress of the Scots till Cromwell was ready to strike home. On its march through Lancashire, Hamilton's army, some 21,000 strong, pushed slowly forward in a long straggling column, the van and the rear at too great distance from each other to be able to concentrate in case of an attack. On August 17, when Cromwell had crossed the hills into Ribblesdale and was close at hand upon his left flank, Hamilton, who had pushed on his cavalry to Wigan sixteen miles in advance, sent the bulk of his infantry across the Ribble at Preston, leaving Sir Marmaduke Langdale with 3,600 English Royalists on the north bank, whilst another detachment was some miles in the rear. It did not need much generalship to overwhelm an army under such leadership as this. Cromwell fell upon Langdale, who had posted his small force to the greatest advantage behind hedges, and after a hard tussle, carried the position and captured the greater part of the division. Then lining the steep northern bank of the Ribble with musketeers, he drove Hamilton from the flat southern bank and, later on, across the Darwen which, near this point, flows into the Ribble. What followed was little more than mere pursuit. The Scots, half starved and discouraged, were beaten wherever they attempted to make a stand, and Hamilton at last surrendered at Uttoxeter, eight days after the battle.

It was Cromwell's first victory in an independent command, and if the Scottish leader had played into his hands, he had been wanting in no part of an efficient general to profit by his folly. Once more, in the despatch in which he announced his success to the Speaker, he harped upon the old string, the duty of the Parliamentary Government to give protection to the 'people of God'. "Surely, Sir," he wrote, "this is nothing but the hand of God, and wherever anything in this world is exalted or exalts itself, God will put it down; for this is the day wherein He alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me to give advice, nor to say a word what use you should make of this; more than to pray you and all that acknowledge God, that they would take courage to do the work of the Lord in fulfilling the end of your magistracy in seeking the peace and welfare of this land; that all that will live peaceably may have countenance from you, and they that are incapable and will not leave troubling the land may speedily be destroyed out of the land."

On August 27, ten days after the victory at Preston, Colchester capitulated, and as far as England was concerned, the second civil war was brought to an end, only a few fortresses in the North—incapable of prolonged resistance without succour from any army in the field—still holding out. It remained to be considered what policy should be adopted towards the defeated Scots, and first of all towards the thousands of prisoners captured at Preston and in the pursuit which followed. Of these a division was made—those who had been pressed into the service being set at liberty under an engagement never again to bear arms against the Parliament of England. Those who had voluntarily taken service under Hamilton were transported to Barbados or Virginia, not, as is commonly said, as slaves, but as servants subjected for a term of years to a master who, though he usually dealt with them far more harshly than with his negro slaves, was at least bound to set them at liberty at the end of the appointed time.

The decision in this matter rested with Parliament—not with Cromwell. It was for Cromwell to follow up the relics of the Scottish army left behind to the north of Preston, and which, after the defeat of their comrades, had retreated to Scotland. Nor could it be doubted that the word of the victorious general would have great weight with Parliament in that settlement of the outstanding complaints against Scotland which was now impending. It was fortunate that this was so, as Cromwell was just the man to turn to the best advantage the dispute between the Scottish parties now bursting into a flame. The defeat of Hamilton left the way open to Argyle and that party of the more fanatical clergy whose followers in the strongly Presbyterian West were known as Whiggamores, an appellation from which the later appellation of Whig was derived. The West rose in arms, and the Whiggamore Raid—as it was called—swept from power those few partisans of Hamilton who were still at liberty, and placed Scotland once more in the hands of Argyle and the clergy. On September 21, whilst the conflict was yet undecided, Cromwell entered Scotland, demanding the surrender of Berwick and Carlisle, still occupied by Scottish garrisons. Argyle, glad of English support to strengthen his nascent authority, gave a hearty consent; and, to display the overwhelming strength of the English army to the Scottish people, Lambert was sent forward in advance, Cromwell following with the bulk of the army and arriving in Edinburgh on October 4. On the 7th Cromwell returned to England, leaving Argyle under the protection of Lambert at the head of two regiments of horse. In the meanwhile Cromwell had come to an understanding with Argyle that no Scotsman who had supported the Engagement with Charles should be allowed to retain office, a stipulation as much in accordance with Argyle's wishes as with his own. A fanatic might have objected that it was unfitting that a tolerationist should give his support to the most intolerant clergy in Protestant Europe. As a statesman, Cromwell could but remember that unless England were to assume the direct control over the Government of Scotland, it must leave such matters to local decision, especially as there were few or no Independents in Scotland to be wronged by any action which the new Government at Edinburgh might take. Yet there was undoubtedly a danger for the future in the divergency of aim between the followers of Argyle in Scotland and those of Cromwell in England.

Cromwell transferred his forces into Yorkshire to hasten the surrender of Pontefract and Scarborough, which still held out. The political interest of the day had shifted to the South. Parliament, as soon as it was relieved from danger, had determined to reopen the negotiation with the King, and the conference—known as The Treaty of Newport—commenced in the Isle of Wight on September 18. In the regiments under Cromwell's command, as well as in Fairfax's army, the disgust was intense, and Ireton now took the lead in calling for a purge of the House which would get rid of such members as supported this piece of misplaced diplomacy. To complete the dissatisfaction of the army, the demands of Parliament included the establishment of Presbyterianism without a shadow of toleration on either hand. It is unnecessary here to follow up this negotiation in detail. The objection taken to Charles's counter-proposals was less that they were themselves unjust, than that it was impossible to hinder him from slipping out of his promise whenever he felt strong enough to do so. Of this objection Ireton was the mouthpiece in Fairfax's army, and on or about November 10, he laid before the Council of officers the draft of a Remonstrance of the Army. It touched on many constitutional proposals, but the clause of the greatest practical interest asked 'that the capital and grand author of all our troubles, the person of the King, may be speedily brought to justice for the treason, blood and mischief he is therein guilty of'. The suggestion was too much for Fairfax, and he carried his officers with him in favour of a proposal that the army should ask the King to assent to the heads of a constitutional plan which would have reduced the functions of the Crown to that influence which is so beneficially exercised at the present day.

This proposal made to the King on the 16th was, however, rejected at once. The feeling of the army being what it was, Charles virtually signed his own death-warrant by this action, and it might seem to a superficial observer, as if his sufferings were due to his refusal to anticipate two centuries of history, and to abandon all the claims which had been handed down to him by his predecessors. To the careful inquirer, it is evident that the causes of the army's demand lay far deeper. The men who made it were no constitutional pedants. It was the deep distrust with which Charles had inspired them that led to this drastic mode of setting him aside from the exercise of that authority which he had so constantly abused. It was his avoidance of open and honourable speech which brought Charles to the block. Those who imagine that he was brought to the scaffold because of his refusal to submit to the abolition of episcopacy, forget that it had been in his power to secure the retention of episcopacy when it was offered him in The Heads of the Proposals, if only he had consented to its being accompanied by a complete toleration.

The effect of the news which Cromwell from time to time received from the army in England may be traced in the letters written by him at this time. In one which he sent to Hammond on November 6 he justified his dealings with Argyle, suggesting that the example of Scotland, where one Parliament had been dissolved and another had been elected, might be followed in England. In a second letter, written on the 20th, after he had had time to consider the rejection by Charles of the proposal of the army, he replied bitterly to an order of the House to send up Sir John Owen, a prisoner taken in Wales, that he might be banished. Cromwell angrily wrote that those who brought in the Scots had been adjudged traitors by Parliament, 'this being a more prodigious treason than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another, this to vassalise us to a foreign nation, and their fault who have appeared in this summer's business is certainly double theirs who were in the first, because it is the repetition of the same offence against all the witnesses that God has borne, by making and abetting a second war'. "To vassalise us to a foreign nation." Here, in political matters at least, was the head and front of Charles's offending. It was this that finally broke down Cromwell's reluctance to shake himself loose from constituted authority. "God," Hammond had written, "hath appointed authorities among the nations, to which active or passive obedience is to be yielded. This resides in England in the Parliament. Therefore active or passive resistance is forbidden." To this reasoning Cromwell replied, on the 25th, by various arguments, closing with the daring suggestion that the army might, after all, be 'a lawful power called by God to oppose and fight against the King upon some stated grounds; and, being in power to such ends,' might not they oppose 'one name of authority for these ends as well as another name'? Whatever might be the worth of these considerations, no good was to be expected from Charles. "Good," he protested, "by this man against whom the Lord hath witnessed, and whom thou knowest!"

Surely we have here laid bare before us Cromwellian opinion in the making. As in other men, the wish was father to the thought. The desire, whether for private or for public ends, shapes the thoughts, and in Cromwell's case, as the desires swept a wider compass than with most men, the thoughts took a larger scope and, to some extent, jostled with one another. The cloudy mixture would clear itself soon enough.

Meanwhile events followed quickly on one another in the south. Hammond, as too soft-hearted, was removed from Carisbrooke, and on December 1 emissaries from the army removed Charles to Hurst Castle, where he could be more easily isolated. The foremost men in the army talked openly of putting the King to death, and adopted Cromwell's suggestion that Parliament should be forcibly dissolved, and a new one elected in its place. In this sense a Declaration was issued on November 30, and on December 2 the army marched into London. The Commons showed themselves to be unaffected by threats of violence, and voted on the 5th that the King's offers were 'a ground for the House to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom'. The scheme of a dissolution favoured by the army was wrecked on the resistance of the Independent members of the House. There was to be a purge, not a dissolution followed by a general election. The plan thus agreed on was carried into practice on the morning of the 6th, when Colonel Pride stood with a military guard at the door of the House, turning back or arresting the members who had voted for a continuance of the negotiation with the King. When Cromwell returned to Westminster, on the evening of the same day, he declared that he had not 'been acquainted with the design; yet, since it was done, he was glad of it, and would endeavour to maintain it'. As 'Pride's purge' had not been resolved on before the previous night it was physically impossible that he should have been informed of the resolution taken. There can be little doubt that he had given his sanction to the other plan of a dissolution, and had also concurred in the language ascribed to Ireton and Harrison on the previous evening. "Where," they had said of the House, "have we either law, warrant, or commission to purge it, or can anything justify us in doing it but the height of necessity to save the kingdom from a new war that they, with the conjunction of the King, will presently vote and declare for, and to procure a new and free representative, and so successive and free representatives, which this present Parliament will never suffer, and without which the freedoms of the nation are lost and gone!" It will be worth while to remember these words, when the continuance of the now truncated Parliament was at last brought to an end.

It was Cromwell's habit to accept the second best, when the best proved unattainable. As to subjecting the King to a traitor's death, Cromwell, as on so many other occasions, exercised a moderating influence. Ireton, it seems, would have been satisfied if Charles were tried and sentenced, after which he might be left in prison till he consented 'to abandon his negative voice, to part from Church lands' and 'to abjure the Scots'. Cromwell even wanted the trial itself to be deferred. By a small majority the Army Council resolved that Charles's life should be spared. As a last effort in this direction, Lord Denbigh was despatched to Windsor—to which place Charles had been removed—to lay before him conditions on which he might yet be permitted to live. Charles, who cannot but have known the nature of the overtures now brought, refused even to see the messenger. Though no direct evidence has reached us, it can hardly be doubted that the terms offered included the renunciation of the negative voice and the abandonment of the Church, that is to say, of Bishops' lands; in other words, the abandonment of control over legislation and of episcopacy. Here at last Charles found no possibility of evasion, and driven as he was to the wall, the true gold which was in him overlaid by so much ignorance and wrong-headedness revealed itself in all its purity. For him the only question was whether he should betray the ordinance of God in Church and State. The incapable ruler—the shifty intriguer—was at once revealed as the sufferer for conscience' sake.

Neither Cromwell nor his brother-officers had an inkling of this. To them Charles, in refusing this final overture, had asserted his right to be the persecutor of the godly and the obstructor of all beneficent legislation. Their patience was at length exhausted. On January 1, 1649, an ordinance was sent up to the Lords creating a High Court of Justice for the trial of the King, accompanied by a resolution that 'by the fundamental laws of this kingdom it is treason in the King of England for the time being to levy war against the Parliament and Kingdom of England'. 'If any man whatsoever,' said Cromwell when this ordinance was under debate, 'hath carried on the design of deposing the King, and disinheriting his posterity; or, if any man hath yet such a design, he should be the greatest traitor and rebel in the world; but since the Providence of God hath cast this upon us, I cannot but submit to Providence, though I am not yet provided to give you advice'. In the last words were the last symptoms of hesitation on Cromwell's part. Somehow or other all his efforts to save Charles from destruction had failed, and it was as much in Cromwell's nature to attribute the failure to Providence as it was in Charles's nature to regard himself as the earthly champion of the laws of God.

The House of Lords having refused to pass the ordinance, the House of Commons declared 'the people to be, under God, the original of all just power,' and in consequence, 'the Commons of England in Parliament assembled' to be capable of giving the force of law to their enactments. From this time forth the name of an Act was given to the laws passed by a single House. On January 6, such an Act erected a High Court of Justice for the trial of the King, on the ground that he had had a wicked design to subvert his people's rights, and with this object had levied war against them, and also, having been spared, had continued to raise new commotions. Therefore, that no chief officer or magistrate might hereafter presume to contrive the enslaving or destroying of the nation, certain persons were appointed by whom Charles Stuart was to be tried.

Having once given his consent to the trial, Cromwell threw himself into the support of the resolution with all his vigour. "I tell you," he replied to some scruples of young Algernon Sidney on the score of legality, "we will cut off his head with the crown upon it." When a majority of the members of the Court refused to sit; when divisions of opinion arose amongst those who did sit; when difficulties, in short, of any kind arose, it was Cromwell who was ready with exhortation and persuasion to complete the work which they had taken in hand. His arguments appear to have been directed not to the technical point whether Charles had levied war against the nation or not, but to convince all who would listen that there had been a breach of trust in his refusal to do his utmost for the preservation of the people. Charles, on the other hand, maintained, as he was well entitled to do, that he was not being tried by any known law, and that the violence used against him would lead to the establishment of a military despotism over the land. Nothing he could say availed to change the determination of the grim masters of the hour. On January 27 sentence of death was pronounced by Bradshaw, the President of the Court, and on the 30th this sentence was carried into execution on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House of his own palace of Whitehall.

That Cromwell, once his mind made up, had contributed more than any other to this result can hardly be doubted. If we are to accept a traditional story which has much to recommend it, we have something of a key to his state of mind. "The night after King Charles was beheaded," we are told, "my Lord Southhampton and a friend of his got leave to sit up by the body in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. As they were sitting very melancholy there, about two o'clock in the morning, they heard the tread of somebody coming very slowly upstairs. By-and-by the door opened, and a man entered very much muffled up in his cloak, and his face quite hid in it. He approached the body, considered it very attentively for some time, and then shook his head—sighed out the words, 'Cruel necessity!' He then departed in the same slow and concealed manner as he had come. Lord Southhampton used to say that he could not distinguish anything of his face, but that by his voice and gait he took him to be Oliver Cromwell."

Whether there was indeed any such necessity may be disputed for ever, as well as that other question whether the army had a right to force on the trial and execution in the teeth of the positive law of the land. The main issue was whether, whatever positive law might say, a king was not bound by the necessities of his position to be the representative of the nation, acting on its behalf, merging his own interests in those of his people, refusing to coerce them by foreign armies, and owing to them, whenever it became prudent to speak at all, the duty of uttering words of simple truth. So Elizabeth had acted: so Bacon had taught. That Charles's own conduct was moulded on far different principles it is impossible to deny. Confidence in his own wisdom was inherent in his nature, and there is no reason to doubt that he soberly believed his critics and antagonists to be so heated by faction that he was actually unable to do his best for the nation as well as for himself unless he called foreign armies to his aid, and raised false expectations in the hope of throwing off each party with whom he was treating, as soon as a convenient opportunity arrived. Such an attitude could not but engender resistance, and when long persisted in, necessarily called forth an attitude equally unbending. That which to Cromwell was at one time a cruel necessity—at another time a decree of Providence—was but the natural result of the offence given by Charles to men who required plain dealing in a ruler from whom nothing but ill-concealed deceitfulness was to be had. The final struggle had come to be mainly one over the King's retention of the Negative Voice, which, if he had been permitted to retain it, would enable him to hinder all new legislation which did not conform to his personal wishes. No doubt he had both law and tradition on his side, but, on the other hand, his antagonists could plead that the law of the land must depend on the resolution, not of a single person, but of the nation itself.

"Fortunately or unfortunately," I can but repeat here what I have already said elsewhere, "such abstract considerations seldom admit of direct application to politics. It is at all times hard to discover what the wishes of a nation really are, and least of all can this be done amidst the fears and passions of a revolutionary struggle. Only after long years does a nation make clear its definite resolves, and, for this reason, wise statesmen—whether monarchical or republican—watch the currents of opinion, and submit to compromises which will enable the national sentiment to make its way without a succession of violent shocks. Charles's fault lay not so much in his claim to retain the Negative Voice, as in his absolute disregard of the conditions of the time, and of the feelings and opinions of every class of his subjects with which he happened to disagree. Even if those who opposed Charles in the later stages of his career failed to rally the majority of the people to their side, they were undoubtedly acting in accordance with a permanent national demand for that government by compromise which slowly, but irresistibly, developed itself in the course of the century.

"Nor can it be doubted that, if Charles had, under any conditions, been permitted to reseat himself on the throne, he would quickly have provoked a new resistance. As long as he remained a factor in English politics, government by compromise was impossible. His own conception of government was that of a wise prince, constantly interfering to check the madness of the people. In the Isle of Wight he wrote down with approval the lines in which Claudian, the servile poet of the Court of Honorius, declared it to be an error to give the name of slavery to the service of the best of princes, and asserted that liberty never had a greater charm than under a pious king. Even on the scaffold he reminded his subjects that a share in government was nothing appertaining to the people. It was the tragedy of Charles's life that he was utterly unable to satisfy the cravings of those who inarticulately hoped for the establishment of a monarchy which, while it kept up the old traditions of the country, and thus saved England from a blind plunge into an unknown future, would yet allow the people of the country to be to some extent masters of their own destiny.

"Yet if Charles persistently alienated this large and important section of his subjects, so also did his most determined opponents. The very merits of the Independents—their love of toleration and of legal and political reform, together with their advocacy of democratic change—raised opposition in a nation which was prepared for none of these things, and drove them step by step to rely on armed strength rather than upon the free play of constitutional action. But for this, it is probable that the Vote of No Addresses would have received a practically unanimous support in the Parliament and the nation, and that in the beginning of 1648 Charles would have been dethroned, and a new government of some kind or other established with some hope of success. As it was, in their despair of constitutional support, the Independents were led, in spite of their better feelings, to the employment of the army as an instrument of government.

"The situation, complicated enough already, had been still further complicated by Charles's duplicity. Men who would have been willing to come to terms with him despaired of any constitutional arrangement in which he was to be a factor, and men who had been long alienated from him were irritated into active hostility. By these he was regarded with increasing intensity as the one disturbing force with which no understanding was possible and no settled order consistent. To remove him out of the way appeared, even to those who had no thought of punishing him for past offences, to be the only possible road to peace for the troubled nation. It seemed that, so long as Charles lived, deluded nations and deluded parties would be stirred up by promises never intended to be fulfilled, to fling themselves, as they had flung themselves in the Second Civil War, against the new order of things which was struggling to establish itself in England.

"Of this latter class Cromwell made himself the mouthpiece. Himself a man of compromises, he had been thrust, sorely against his will, into direct antagonism with the uncompromising King. He had striven long to mediate between the old order and the new, first by restoring Charles as a constitutional King, and afterwards by substituting one of his children for him. Failing in this, and angered by the persistence with which Charles stirred up Scottish armies and Irish armies against England, Cromwell finally associated himself with those who cried out most loudly for the King's blood. No one knew better than Cromwell that it was folly to cover the execution of the King with the semblance of constitutional propriety, and he may well have thought that, though law and constitution had both broken down, the first step to be taken towards their reconstruction was the infliction of the penalty of death upon the man who had shown himself so wanting in the elementary quality of veracity upon which laws and constitutions are built up. All that is known of Cromwell's conduct at the trial points to his contempt for the legal forms with which others were attempting to cover an action essentially illegal."

A further question which has been often mooted is whether Cromwell—whatever may be said on the purity of his motives—did not commit a blunder in respect of the interests of himself and his cause. If those who have discussed this problem mean that the attempt to establish a free government during Cromwell's lifetime was rendered more difficult by the execution of the King, it is hard to gainsay their opinion, though the estrangement of the bulk of the population from the new order, in consequence of the execution, is probably very much exaggerated. Those who, like the Cavaliers, had been mulcted of a portion of their estates had an additional reason for detesting a government which had used them so ill, and there must have been a certain number amongst the crowds who read the Eikon Basilike—the little book in which Charles's vindication of his life was supposed to have been written by his own hand—who were permanently affected by that sentimental production of Dr. Gauden. If, however, it is argued that Cromwell and his allies might possibly have succeeded in establishing a government to their taste if they had abstained from inflicting the last penalty on the King, it can only be answered that other causes made their success in the highest degree improbable. Their plans for the benefit of the people were on the one hand too far advanced to secure popular support; and, on the other hand, too defective in fair-play to their opponents to deserve it. Puritanism was not, and never could be the national religion, and though it made more enemies through its virtues than through its defects, those who strove to enforce its moral and social precepts needed a strong military force at their backs. The irritation caused by the interference of the army in religion and politics, and by the demands on the tax-payer which the maintenance of the army rendered necessary, would surely have been fatal to any government resting on such a basis, even if Charles had been suffered to prolong his days. If there remains any interest in Cromwell's career after the execution of the King it arises from his constantly renewed efforts to throw off this incubus, and his repeated failures to achieve his purpose.