It was this exhilaration of energy in the Lord’s work, not a vulgar ambition of kingship, that shone in Cromwell’s countenance as he rode up from Worcester a year later, and that made him press, as we have seen, on the first day when he resumed his seat in the house, for measures of settlement and reform. ‘Peace hath her victories,’ as Milton wrote to him at this time, ‘no less renowned than war,’ but they were to be won not in days but in centuries, and by the energy not of feeling but of thought. He had a temper, he once said of himself, that ‘caused him often to overact business,’ and his trusted ‘son Ireton,’ in whose ‘working brain’ the same plans were combined with a more cautious and calculating temper, was no longer at hand to restrain him. He had died at his post in Ireland three months after the battle of Worcester; his death, we are told, ‘striking a great sadness in Cromwell.’ [1] ‘No man could prevail with him so much or {355} order him so far as Ireton could,’ but there is no reason to think that had Ireton lived he would have altered, though he might sometimes have checked, Cromwell’s career. If Cromwell had died when Ireton did, he would have died like him in the full odour of republican sanctity, and his subsequent breach with the republicans was due to his pressing forward the army project of reform and reconstruction which had first taken shape in Ireton’s brain. In his letter to the parliament after Dunbar he professed a desire (a notable instance of his frankness) not to ‘precipitate them by importunities’ in the work of settlement, and he was true to his profession. For a year and a half, however, from September 16, 1651, to April 20, 1653, he loyally endeavoured to rouse the republican oligarchy to the necessities of the situation. If his importunity was not pressing, that of the people was, and it was clear that the parliament must give some practical ‘reason why’ for its existence, or lose its prestige. Petitions from the country were constantly coming in, all conceived in the ‘levelling’ sense which I described in the last lecture. Their general burden is that tithes may be either abolished as levitical and Romish, or gathered into a common treasury, and then some part of them applied to the maintenance of a godly ministry in each county; that those ‘drunken, malignant, scandalous, and profane ones,’ that go under the name of ministers, be put to work for their living; that justice may be given, not bought, and all matters of _meum_ and _tuum_ determined free, yet by a written law; that some check may be put on the swarms of lawyers, attorneys, and solicitors, nourished with the bread of oppression by long and tedious suits. Sometimes they wax eloquent, hoping that ‘justice may come down like a mighty stream, free for the poorest to resort unto, too strong for the richest to divert.’ The Rump parliament meanwhile, not, we may fairly suppose, considering its previous inaction, without pressure from Cromwell, showed