This was hardly the work that Monk had promised himself when he volunteered for Ireland; but at any rate it was a great relief to him that he was leaving behind the politics which he detested and only half understood for some hard fighting which was his meat and drink. But he was to be sadly disappointed. Lord Leicester, commissioned by the King and paid by the Parliament, was still in England, detained by orders from Oxford. In Ormonde Charles knew he had a representative in every way satisfactory. He was a royalist above suspicion. The advent of Leicester could only strengthen the hands of the Lords Justices, who represented the Lord Lieutenant in his absence. These men were staunch Parliamentarians, and made it their business to oppose Ormonde's influence in every way. Indeed their enemies accused them of deliberately thwarting his operations in order that, by allowing the rebellion to spread, there might be a larger area of land for confiscation. In return for providing money for the suppression of the rebellion an influential body of London capitalists had obtained from Parliament a concession of one quarter of the land which should become liable to confiscation; and it is to be feared the Lords Justices were to some extent interested in this gigantic job. The Lords Justices had their fortunes to make, and they saw them in their power of distributing the forfeited lands. Their interests as well as their opinions were in sympathy with the parliamentary cause. Thus Ormonde represented for them a double danger, and without accusing them of actually fostering rebellion, it is certain that they did their best to discredit Ormonde with the King in order to procure his recall. To seek Monk's attitude in the strife we need not go far. If he had any sympathies either way, which is very doubtful, they were certainly at this time parliamentarian. Indeed a slight he received about this time must have sharply spurred him to the side to which contempt for the King, anxiety about his pay, and the influence of his friends the Sidneys already inclined him. In May Sir Charles Coote, the governor of Dublin, had been killed in action. No one deserved to succeed him so well as "honest George." No one had done so much for the place, above all, in keeping in temper the troops who were always on the verge of mutiny for want of pay and clothes and food. Accordingly Lord Leicester, on the recommendation of the Lords Justices, sent over a commission by which he was appointed governor at a double salary of forty shillings a day, a little addition which made the post doubly dear to the soldier of fortune; but hardly had the commission arrived when there came a letter direct from the King approving the permanent appointment of Lord Lambert, who had been acting as Coote's deputy, and Monk found the governorship and his forty shillings a day snatched out of his very mouth.