For the moment, at least, the parks were saved. About three months after the Royal tragedy the Council took the whole matter under their consideration, with the result that the record of their proceedings contains the following important decision: “To report to the House that the Council think Whitehall House, St. James’s Park, St. James’s House, Somerset House, Hampton Court, and the Home Park, Theobalds, and the Park, Windsor, and the Little Park next the House, Greenwich House and Park, and Hyde Park, ought to be kept for the public use of the Commonwealth, and not sold.” The Parliament, however, undertook the care of its new acquisitions with bad grace. It was continually selling portions of its patrimony, and where sales could not be effected it freely destroyed. Nothing seems to have been done for Hyde Park while its ultimate fate remained in suspense; meanwhile the populace used it for their own amusement. Gradually the cover for game became less good as the invasion extended. New areas were converted into grass lands. The Park lost for ever its characteristics as a game preserve, which for so long it had retained. Wars and alarms continued to be the public state. Soon great preparations were made for Cromwell’s departure for Ireland, and a grant was given to William Yarvell, a carriage master, to put all the horses provided for the campaign which could not be accommodated in Marylebone into Hyde Park to graze. Again, in the following year, a notice appears in the State Papers that Colonel Hammond received two hundred horses, and was told to turn them out to grass, but this permission was withdrawn the same year. On Cromwell’s return to England, in the spring of 1650, from the scenes of the bloody massacres by which he had subdued Ireland, he entered London in triumph. When passing the old camp where he had reviewed his Ironsides years before, multitudes of citizens came out to greet him. The soldiers stationed there discharged a volley, big guns were fired, and the people shouted and cheered all the way to Whitehall. The fate of Hyde Park did not remain long undecided. In spite of much haggling by the Council, the vandals of Parliament succeeded in two or three years in obtaining their own way. London lost its playground. The Park was condemned to be sold by order of Parliament in 1652, and realised about £17,000. The “eligible” property, as an enthusiastic auctioneer of to-day would probably describe it, was divided into three lots, namely: The Gravel-pit division was bought by Richard Wilcox for £4144. The Kensington division, bought by a merchant, John Tracy, for £3906; and The Middle, Banqueting, and Old Lodge Divisions were purchased by Anthony Deane, of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, for £9020.