Cromwell and Fairfax might lead them; they were ready to disband so soon as they should get their arrears of pay and be secured by an act of indemnity against punishment for offences committed during war. The nominal difficulty at last was about the arrears of pay. Parliament would only agree to pay arrears for eight weeks, and the army asserted its claim for at least fifty weeks. Meanwhile the militia of the city had been placed in trusty presbyterian hands; the king had accepted provisionally (with what insincerity his correspondence showed) the preliminary presbyterian propositions, and pressed for a personal treaty. The lords so far assented to this as to vote that he should be brought to Oatlands, in the neighbourhood of London. If once this had been done, he would have been in direct communication with interests hostile to the army, and the fusion of royalism and presbyterianism would for the time have been {318} complete. Holles and his friends thought the prize was within their grasp, and against the discreet advice of Whitelock pressed the disbanding. The tone of the army grew higher, till one day at the beginning of June, news was brought to the parliament that a troop of horse, under one cornet Joyce, had appeared at Holmby and demanded the king of the commissioners. ‘The commissioners,’ in the words of Whitelock, ‘amazed at it, demanded of them what warrant they had for what they did; but they could give no other account but that it was the pleasure of the army.’ The king afterwards asked them for their commission. Joyce answered, ‘that his majesty saw their commission; the king replied that it had the fairest frontispiece of any he ever saw, being five hundred proper men on horseback.’ [1] On the same day that this happened, Cromwell had ridden out of town with one servant to the quarters of the army, just in time to escape forcible detention by Holles’s friends. The plot now thickened. The army had a general rendezvous at Triploe Heath, and greeted the parliamentary commissioner who met them there with cries of ‘justice! justice!’ Thence gradually moving towards London, they sent up articles of charge against Holles and ten other members, for obstructing the business of Ireland, and acting against the army and the liberty of the subject. During two months they waited for the execution of their demands, sending parliament a reminder now and then, but maintaining perfect self-restraint. Holles and his party, on the other hand, showed all the precipitation of weakness. Under their management the authorities of the city got together a loose army of militiamen, of which the command was given to Massey, and organised the mob of apprentices, which finally put so much pressure on parliament that the speaker and many members of both houses took refuge with the army. This was the turning-point. The army, now under parliamentary sanction, easily walked through Massey’s lines, and quartered in the suburbs. The city was in a panic.