‘A great number of people attended at Guildhall. When a scout came in and brought news that the array made a halt, or other good intelligence, they cry “one and all!” But if the scouts reported that the army was advancing nearer them, then they would cry as loud, “Treat, treat, treat!”’ [2] The corporation, {319} its cheap vaunts at an end, sent resolutions to the army in favour of ‘a sweet composure.’ In calm indifference to its good words and its bad, the army on August 6 marched through London, ‘in so orderly and civil a manner, that not the least offence was offered by them to any man in word, action, or gesture.’ [1] [Whitelock, ii. 154.] [2] [_ib_. ii. 189.] The king, now in the hands of the army, had been following its movements, and when it finally established its headquarters at Putney, he was allowed to live in considerable state at Hampton Court, with his own attendants, but under the guard of Colonel Whalley, Cromwell’s trusted cousin. Here he stayed till his flight to Carisbrook in the Isle of Wight, in the following November. Those who explain Cromwell’s life by its result, as a long scheme for his own elevation, suppose that during this period he carried on private negotiations with the king, first perhaps with the view of restoring him to power under his own direction, but afterwards to lure him on to destruction; that with this object he encouraged him by vain hopes to refuse the proposals of parliament, and finally to escape from Hampton, whence by some mysterious means he was guided to an asylum of Cromwell’s own preparing at Carisbrook. Such a view is expressed even in the panegyric of Marvell, written on Cromwell’s return from Ireland in the summer of 1650; ‘What field of all the civil war Where his were not the deepest scar? And Hampton shows what part He had of wiser art, Where, twining subtle fears with hope, He wove a net of such a scope That Charles himself might chase To Carisbrook’s narrow case; That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn.’