The one man among them who seems really to have comprehended the situation, was Sir Henry Vane. Shrinking from the touch of military violence, he had withdrawn from parliament after Pride purged it, though the purgation was specially in his interest, and had only been induced to join the council of state at the pressing instance of Cromwell. He at once saw the need of popularising the government, and stirred the question of new elections. A committee for considering the question seems to have been constantly sitting during the first year of the commonwealth, with Vane as its chairman, which reported at the beginning of 1650 in favour of a new parliament of four hundred members, and a re-arrangement of constituencies. A corresponding resolution was voted by the house, but no bill was introduced, and meanwhile Vane’s energies were absorbed by the management of the wars with the Scots and the Hollanders. On this, as on the other pressing questions, parliament could never get beyond the stage of resolutions. It resolved to deal with the question of tithes, to provide for popular education out of ecclesiastical funds, and to simplify the law, but no actual legislation was achieved. Thus by the autumn of 1651 it could take credit for an effective administration of war and finance, and for the introduction of a preaching ministry and schoolmasters into Wales. Towards facing the hostile forces which only slumbered around them, towards meeting the demands of the enthusiasm of reformation to {345} which they owed their temporary power, they had done absolutely nothing. On September 6 they heard the speaker read Cromwell’s account of the battle of Worcester, ‘a mercy’ of which ‘the dimensions are beyond my thoughts,’ ‘it is for aught I know a crowning mercy.’ Cromwell, meanwhile, was riding up to London with a look which Mr. Peters, his chaplain, interpreted, or afterwards believed himself to have interpreted, to mean that he would be king of England yet. At Aylesbury he was met, on behalf of the parliament, by St. John and Whitelock, both special representatives of the lawyer’s desire for ‘settlement,’ and ‘government by a single person,’ with whom, especially with St. John, he had long discourse. On the 16th, we read in Whitelock, he took his seat in the house, and there is the significant addition, ‘the parliament resumed the debate touching a new representative,’ also ‘of an act of oblivion and general pardon, with some expedients for satisfaction of soldiery and the ease of the people.’ The question of settlement was now in the hands of one who would not allow it to tarry. LECTURE IV.