‘Surely, sir,’ he writes to the speaker after the rout at Preston, ‘this is nothing but the hand of God; and wherever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down; for this is the day wherein he alone will be exalted. It is not fit for me to give advice ... more than to pray you, and all that acknowledge God, that they would exalt him, and not hate his people, that are as the apple of his eye, and for whom even kings shall be reproved.’ [1] [1] [_ib_. No. lxiv.] The prosaic meaning of these new ‘dispensations,’ we {350} shall say, was that the military excitement against the royal ‘delinquent’ had become uncontrollable, that Hamilton’s invasion, instigated and aided by the royalist presbyterians in England, had rendered their fusion with the commonwealth’s men impossible, and that the republic must represent the latter party and the army alone. This was no doubt the final judgment which Cromwell’s practical insight had unwillingly arrived at. But we do not really understand this judgment or its consequences, till we appreciate the ‘wondrous alchemy’ of the enthusiasm with which it was fused and molten in Cromwell’s own mind. The whole mental process is exhibited in a letter to Colonel Hammond, written when it had become clear that the presbyterian majority in parliament were determined to treat with the king and restore him to London. Its object was to induce Hammond to disregard the impending vote of parliament, which (as we have seen) would have been ruinous to the cause of free conscience, and to give the king up to the army.