This announcement was received not only with astonishment, but with enthusiastic expressions of joy. The Lord Mayor and Council plighted their troth with him and the officers, he was invited to dine at the Guildhall, and all the bells in the City were set ringing in exultation. The Corporation attended the general to his lodgings amid the acclamations and the bonfires of the people, at which they roasted rumps in ridicule of the Parliament, and heaped on it every infamy which wit and ribaldry could devise. This _coup d'état_ awoke the Parliament to their blunder; they had made an enemy of the very man and army into whose hands they had put a power which could instantly crush them. There were some zealots, the Haselrigs and Scotts, who advised restoring Fleetwood to the chief command, and bringing back the exiled regiments; but Sunday, which intervened, enabled the more sober counsel to prevail, and they sent a deputation to invite the general to return to Whitehall, and promised that the writs for the excluded members should be ready by the day appointed. But these incidents had made an advance in Monk's proceedings. He had seen, as he came up the country, the universal demand for the restoration of the Long Parliament, and the unmitigated contempt for the present one. He had felt the pulse of the country also as to the return of the king, and his intercourse with the City had only confirmed the impression that the whole body of excluded members must come back as a stepping-stone to the recall of Charles. The Presbyterian interest in the City was as strong as ever, and its enmity to the Independents unabated. He therefore called together his officers to discuss with the deputation the points at issue, and the officers insisted that the excluded members must be restored. Monk then placed the City in a state of defence, and returned to Whitehall. There he summoned the excluded members who were in town, together with the members of the sitting Parliament, and read them a paper, in which he assured them that the people at large demanded a full and free Parliament, as the only means of settling these "bleeding nations." He declared that he would impose no restrictions on them himself, but that his guards should freely admit all the excluded as well as the other members, to take measures for a dissolution of the present Parliament, and the calling of a new one, full and free, on the 20th of April next. He did not believe, he said, that monarchy or prelacy would be tolerated by the people, but that a moderate Presbyterian government, with liberty of conscience, appeared most likely to be acceptable. And as to the Peers, if it were not proper to restore to them their House, yet he thought their hereditary marks of honour should be left them.