He was not more successful with the presbyterians, whose leaders he got to confer with the independents, and whom he afterwards addressed in the city. ‘The city,’ according to a contemporary presbyterian writer, ‘were now wiser than our first parents, and rejected the serpent and his subtleties.’ The presbyterian zeal in fact, as it boasted of itself, would learn nothing by events. During the summer of 1648, while the army under Cromwell and Ireton was trampling out the royalist risings and scattering the intrusive Scots (no longer led by Lesley), Holles availed himself of the absence of the military members to return to the house and regain his majority. Under his direction, and at the pressure of the city, negotiations in the exclusive presbyterian interest were re-opened with the king. These led to concessions on his part, only made to gain time, which at last, in the beginning of December, in a house of two hundred and forty-four, were voted a sufficient basis of agreement. This vote made the final rent between military and parliamentary power, and Vane, who more than anyone else dreaded this rent, resisted it to the utmost. Marten, however, was already bringing up Cromwell from the north, and Cromwell a few days before had given voice to the ‘great zeal he found among his officers for impartial justice on offenders.’ Soldiers full of the same zeal were already in the suburbs. The day after the vote was passed, colonel Pride ‘purged’ the house of the ‘royalising’ members; within two days Cromwell appeared in it arm in {325} arm with Marten, and the military republic was virtually established. It is needless to repeat the story of the king’s trial and execution, or tell how his judges wore all the dignity of men who believed themselves in the sight of God and the world to be violating the false divinity of consecrated custom that a true divinity might appear, or how Charles, after a few bursts of misplaced contempt or passion, yet at the last, in Marvell’s words, ‘Nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try; Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite, To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed.’