While the House was discussing, some hundred officers, at the head of whom were Lambert, Desborough, and Fleetwood, son-in-law of Cromwell, presented themselves at the residence of the Protector. They implored him not to accept the title of king. "This title displeases the army," they said; "it is hazardous for your person and the three nations; it will make way for the return of Charles Stuart." Cromwell immediately replied to them, "that the title of king need not startle them so dreadfully, inasmuch as some of them well knew it was already offered to him and pressed upon him by themselves when this government was undertaken, that the title 'king,' a feather in a hat, is as little valuable to him as to them. But on every occasion," he said, "they had made him their instrument;" and he briefly recalled all the arbitrary acts which he had accomplished, he said, at the instigation of the army. "The nation is tired of uncertain arbitrary ways, and wishes to come to a settlement," he continued. "By what this Parliament have done by their own mere vote and will with James Naylor, you will see that a check is necessary; what has happened to James Naylor may be any one's case some day. Does the fundamental law of the Protectorate empower me to check them?" {264} The facts which Cromwell recalled were embarrassing; his voice was full of influence over his old companions. Several wavered in their resistance; a compromise was arrived at. It was agreed that the question of the title of king should be suspended until the end of the debate. Upon this condition the officers accepted the two Houses of Parliament, and the right of the Protector to designate his successor; they undertook to allow the discussion to follow its course peacefully. On the 25th of March, the House voted, by a hundred and twenty-three votes against sixty-two, the first clause of the project which had been reserved until that day: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective dominions and territories thereunto belonging, and to exercise the same according to the laws of those nations." On the 25th of March, 1657, Cromwell received the House at Whitehall, in that banqueting-hall which eight years beforehand, Charles I. had crossed between two rows of soldiers on his way to the scaffold. "I am but a servant," said the speaker, Widdrington, "and I have not to express my own thoughts, but to declare what Parliament has commanded. I am like a gardener who plucks flowers in the garden of his master and makes therewith a nosegay. I will only offer to your Highness what I have gathered in the garden of Parliament." And he detailed the eighteen articles of the "humble petition and advice," dwelling upon the impossibility of mutilating it by rejecting one article to accept the other. {265}