It was excellent advice that Clarges brought back. True to his simple creed, Monk told Richard he must break the political power of the army and gather round him to share in the government the natural leaders of the people. He showed him exactly how to do it, but Richard was too weak or too indolent to follow his instructions. His only idea was to offer Monk a large sum of money to support him by force. Dearly as he loved riches, Monk refused. He had pledged himself to the Cromwells, and that was enough. Richard would want all his money himself. Every day the Republican army, with Lambert and Fleetwood at its head, grew stronger, and the "new Royalists," as they called the Cromwellians, grew weaker. Before he had been eight months on the throne Richard gave up the struggle, dissolved his Parliament, and weakly identified himself with the army. The inevitable result followed. At the end of May he abdicated in favour of a military republic. The leading officers formed themselves into a provisional government, and took immediate steps to recall the Republican remnant of the Long Parliament, which since its expulsion by Cromwell had come to be looked upon as representing the "good old cause" of the Commonwealth. It was at all events a pretence of constitutionalism, and Monk seized the excuse to sullenly acquiesce in the new order. "Had Richard not dissolved his Parliament," he always said, "I would have marched down to support it," and in view of his subsequent conduct there is every reason to believe he meant what he said. But Richard had pusillanimously thrown up the game before his friend could help him, and Monk was not a man to plunge his country into civil war in such a hopeless cause. And so when his kinsman Cornet Monk arrived from Ireland on a special mission from Henry Cromwell he found he was too late. The first act of the restored "Rump" was one of the last importance. In their eagerness to get control over the army they insisted on every officer receiving his commission from themselves at the hands of the Speaker. Monk accepted a new commission with the rest, and from that moment he was as devoted a servant to Parliament as ever he had been to Cromwell; but, unlike Cromwell, the new Government committed the folly of not trusting him. The Council of State immediately set to work to fill his army with their own nominees. Monk protested, and refused to permit the new men to act without the Speaker's commission. Fortunately public business was so disturbed in London that most of these commissions never arrived.