In the following spring Cromwell was appointed to the command of the army that was to conquer Ireland. Thence he was recalled in the summer of 1650, and shortly afterwards was sent into Scotland. Thus till his return from the battle of Worcester in September 1651, he had no chance of pressing his projects of conciliation and reform at the headquarters of government. Such glimpses as we have, however, of his civil activity during this period show a constant tendency in the same direction. It was he who prevailed on Vane to join the council of state, and obtained a modification of the engagement to suit Vane’s views. Thus to restore to the government the ablest civilian of the time, who had a special dislike for military domination, was a strange course if it was his object to clear the way for himself, but a most natural one if his object was general conciliation. Again, in the summer of 1650, when it was proposed to send the army under Fairfax into Scotland, and while Fairfax, ‘being hourly persuaded by the presbyterian ministers and his own lady, who was a great patroness of them,’ was doubting of the justness of the war, and finally resolving to lay down his {353} command, Cromwell was foremost in urging him to retain it. The memoir-writers of the time, interpreting events by the jealousy of later years, treat Cromwell’s earnestness on this occasion as simulated, a piece of the ‘great subtlety with which he now carried himself,’ but what its object might be, if it were simulated, they do not explain. If his object were personal aggrandisement, it is unaccountable that he should go out of his way to put the command of the army in the hands of another. If on the other hand it were a general settlement, it was quite natural that he should seek to conciliate the presbyterian interest to the commonwealth, in the person of the man who alone combined presbyterian sympathies with toleration of the sectaries. But though Cromwell, during this period, was quite free from the thought which Mr. Peters attributed to him, ‘that he would be king of England yet,’ still the impatience for an establishment of a ‘free church of saints’ in a free state, and the ‘heat of inward evidence’ that he was himself the man to achieve it, was growing constantly stronger in him. He led his army into Ireland, as Joshua into Canaan, and his last letter to the parliament, as he was setting sail from Milford Haven, offered to their consideration the removal of penal statutes that enforce the consciences of honest conscientious men. His conquest of Ireland, and afterwards of Scotland, was achieved in and through a constant fire of enthusiasm.