In the last lecture we saw that the immediate result of Cromwell’s presence in the house after his return from Worcester was the revival of the questions of a new election and a general settlement, which, during the last two years the republican oligarchy, with its head in the bush, had not chosen to face. In pressing these questions Cromwell was true to the instinct of comprehension which had governed his course throughout. It appears from the Memoirs of Berkley, who had been the chief negotiator with him on the king’s behalf in the summer of 1647, that he was then convinced of the difficulty of establishing a government on so narrow a foundation as was afforded either by the army or an oligarchical parliament. His project at that time was to restore the king on the condition of his calling a new parliament, from which he declared royalists should be excluded. This forms the basis of the propositions which the army offered to the king, while he was still in their keeping, and which, with expansion and variation according to circumstance, were pressed upon parliament during the following {346} year. They provide that the sitting parliament should come to an end within a year; that afterwards a parliament should be summoned every two years, to sit for not less than a hundred and twenty, or more than two hundred and forty days; that members should be taken away from the decayed towns, and representation awarded to the several counties according to the amount of taxation. No one who had borne arms for the king was to be eligible to parliament for five years. The old privy council was to be superseded by a council of state, of which the members for the next seven years were to be agreed on at once; after that they were to be nominated by parliament. The coercive jurisdiction of bishops was to be abolished; the use of the common prayer and the taking of the covenant to be alike voluntary. Subject to these conditions the king was to be restored, and a general act of oblivion was to be passed, with power to parliament to except certain persons, not more than five in number, from its benefit. This document was supposed to come directly from the hand of Ireton, who was more at his ease in composition than Cromwell. As Cromwell says in a letter of this period to his daughter, Ireton’s wife, he writes to her rather than to her husband, ‘for one line of mine begets many of his.’ ‘In these declarations and transactions of the army,’ says Whitelock, [1] ‘colonel Ireton was chiefly employed, or took on him the business of the pen.’ He was ‘of a working and laborious brain and fancy, and set himself much upon these businesses, wherein he was encouraged and assisted by lieutenant-general Cromwell, his father-in-law. Having been bred in the Temple, he had a little knowledge of law, which led him into the more errors.’ [1] [ii. 162.]