With such dangerous elements all around it, the household of the republic was by no means united in itself. It rested on a temporary coalition between three sets of men, between whom as we have seen there was no real love; the genuine commonwealth’s men, a section of the ‘grandees of the parliament,’ and the leaders of the army. The ‘grandees of the parliament’ had, with scarcely an exception, kept their hands from the death-warrant of Charles. They recognised the new order of things partly to avoid a breach with the army, partly from fear of presbyterian ascendency and an unchecked royalist reaction. So far as they looked ahead at all, they probably contemplated a re-establishment of monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester, the late king’s youngest son, whom the parliament had in its keeping. This at least was the case with Whitelock, who was in his way a representative man. On the new council of state (of forty), which included seven peers or eldest sons of peers, five baronets, four knights, and some temporising lawyers, this section had a numerical majority. On the other hand, the stiff republicans were in a decided minority on the council. Only ten regicides were upon it, and from these must be deducted Cromwell and one or two officers whom he could command, and who were not republican on principle. The most eminent of this section were Marten, Bradshaw, Ludlow, and Scott. Bradshaw, a special friend of Milton, had presided at the trial of Charles, {336} in a high beaver hat lined with steel, with the composure, according to Milton, of a man with whom the trial of kings had been the business of life. He was afterwards president of the council of state, where Whitelock, a rival and perhaps jealous lawyer, complains that he did not understand the nature of his office, and made long discourses of his own that no one wanted to hear. Scott had been an officer in the new-model army, but seems already to have been jealous of Cromwell, being one of those men with whom hatred of the ‘rule of a single person’ was a principle of life. In later days, when Monk was supreme, the restoration inevitable, and the republicans fleeing, he stood up in parliament and said that, though he knew not where to hide his head, yet he must say that not his hand only but his heart had been in the execution of Charles. As might be expected, the restoration brought him the honour of martyrdom for his cause. Ludlow was a man of the same temper. His qualities were clearly much valued by Cromwell, and there seems to have been more real friendship between them at this time than Ludlow, looking back upon it from his exile at Vevay in the light of subsequent events, was willing to admit. Marten alone had some touch of the modern French republican about him. We have seen with what zest he arranged the more sensational incidents of the commonwealth. When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless