Something needed to be done. The Royalists throughout all this tumult had not been asleep. They had increased the miserable confusion, and even rejoiced in the gloom, because the darker the night the nearer the dawn. Booth's rising in August had been repressed, but an enormous flood of disaffection, of which that had been a sort of Geyser outgush, continued to boil beneath the surface. Secret conferences were held; plots were laid. The deeply engrained love of Monarchy in the English mind--only painted over of late years--now that the paint was being rubbed off, became distinctly visible. The press took the utmost license. Evelyn in his _Apology for the Royal Party_ denounced the Rump as a coffin which was yet less empty than the heads of certain politicians. He boldly demanded the restoration of Charles Stuart, maintaining that he might be trusted because of his innate love of justice, and his father's dying injunctions; and because there were none, however crimson-dyed their crimes, whom he would not pardon in the abundance of his clemency and mercy. The author of _A Plea for Limited Monarchy_ adds the sorrows of memory to the pleasures of hope, as motives for restoring the King; for he dwells upon the decay of trade, and complains that the oil and honey promised by Oliver had been turned to bitterness and gall; and that Lambert's free quarterings had licked up the little which had been left in the people's cruse.[52] [Sidenote: 1659.] These appeals fell on willing ears. The nation was weary--weary of inefficient rulers, weary of ideal Republics. Had there been some master-spirit equal to the departed one, with a strong and well-disciplined Army at his back, the Commonwealth might even now at last have been restored to what it was two years before; but nobody like the vanished man remained, and the Army fell to pieces. [Sidenote: MONK.]