great activity in appointing committees to consider grievances, and in pressing resolutions, which if carried out would have made English law more cheap, and English land more free, than it has ever been since. There was no result however in the way of effective legislation, and the old conviction of the army, that it was the true parliament and judicature of the nation, was beginning to revive. At the end of 1650 letters were read in {356} the house, ‘that officers of the army by commission from Lambert did determine controversies between party and party; wherewith the people were much satisfied with the quick despatch they received with full hearing.’ At the same time petitions were circulating in the army for reform of abuses and a new parliament, in the same tone which had prevailed when the army had before (in the year 1648) been in direct contact with the civil power. The real fact was that the parliament was once more face to face with its true, its sole constituency, the military saints, with whom its conceit of antique republicanism would avail little, unless it could realise in the hard world of ‘interests’ the reforming enthusiasm which had created it. Such realisation, if possible at all, was clearly impossible to an oligarchy which had always been unpopular and was becoming factious. [1] [Whitelock, iii. p. 371.] We have not the means of tracing in detail the conduct of Cromwell during this crisis. It is clear that he made no secret of his thoughts. In November 1651 he obtained a vote of the house that it would put a term to its sitting, but only one so remote as November 1654. The next question necessarily was, how should the new election, and the general work of reconstruction, be regulated? That it would require rigorous control in the presence of the royalist gentry and the angry presbyterian clergy, was abundantly clear. Was this control to be in the hands of the Rump oligarchy, disunited, estranged from the army, incapable of swift and secret action as a deliberative assembly must be, or in the hands of a single person who had a name of terror and hope, and to whom the heart of the army was as his own? This was the real question at issue, and at the end of 1651 we find Cromwell, at a conference which he invited between the grandees of parliament and the officers, explicitly stating it. It was as impossible for him now, however, as it had been on a like occasion in 1648, to bring about an understanding. The great lawyers of the house generally were in favour of government by a single person, but only St. John seems to have shared Cromwell’s views as to who the single person should be. Whitelock was in favour of restoring monarchy in the person of the duke of Gloucester. To the enthusiasts of the army the very name of monarchy was blasphemy against Christ, whom they were expecting shortly to restore the kingdom to the saints. The theoretical republicans of {357} the Rump were in favour of