This utterance, fresh from the heart, explains the subsequent alienation of Cromwell from Vane and the high republicans. He had the fatalism about him without which nothing great is achieved in times of political crisis; the consciousness of a divine work that must be done through him, though personal peace and honour were wrecked in the doing. They were men of theory and principle, ‘brave men and true.’ but with a sense of what was ‘due to their own reputation,’ or, to speak, more kindly, men who would sacrifice themselves or a nation indifferently to the maintenance of what might merely be a formula. In these days of playing at heroes among the ‘inferior races,’ such men, perhaps, receive less credit than is their due, nor is it my purpose to measure the man of principle against the ‘man of destiny,’ who may be a political gambler, but merely to indicate their inevitable {349} collision. If Cromwell had been a political gambler, he would not have been always showing his hand, nor should we have the strange collection of impromptu letters and speeches, speeches of which ‘he could not recall four words’ after they were spoken, which let us see into the workings of his soul. In the last lecture I showed that during the interval between the final break of the independents and army with the king, marked by the vote of no more addresses at the beginning of 1648, and his setting out for the extinction of Hamilton, Cromwell was labouring for such a reconciliation of parties as would gain for the inevitable commonwealth a more general support than that of the professed republican clique. The equal impracticability of presbyterians and republicans, or, if we like, their equal devotion to principle, made reconciliation impossible, and the republicans for the time triumphed. Strong in a text of scripture, in a theory of right borrowed from the municipal republics of Holland and Switzerland, they shut their eyes and had their way. Cromwell knew well to what such a spirit must lead, and his irritation at it once broke out in a conversation with Ludlow. ‘They were a proud set of people,’ he said, ‘only considerable in their own conceits.’ For the time, however, he had to leave them to their conceit, that he might crush the common enemy. During the campaign, the direction in which the logic of events, of ‘outward dispensations,’ was leading became more apparent, and the sense of it pervades his letters. The rapture of successful war brought back to him the old enthusiasm, the consciousness of being the chosen leader of the saints. The righteous judge, he thought, had been appealed to in battle, and had shown which cause was his ‘even to amazement and admiration.’