Such was his reply, but "the duty of my place" was for him no longer the magic solvent of all ethical difficulties that it had been. During his long proconsulship "honest George" had developed from the soldier into the statesman. True he clung still to his cherished first-born as ardently as ever. "I am not one of those," he had just written to the Speaker, "that seek great things, having had my education in a commonwealth where soldiers received and observed commands but gave none.... Obedience is my great principle, and I have always and ever shall reverence the Parliament's resolution in civil things as infallible and sacred." That the military power must be subject to the civil was still his creed, but it was no longer the whole of it. He began to see that for the rule to hold good the civil power must be that which was authorised by the Constitution; that it must be the power to which the Government was entrusted by the country. Since the deposition of the King and the abdication of the Protector the constitutional civil power was the Parliament, and the junto of politicians who were sitting at Westminster was not the Parliament. It was a truth he would perhaps have been slower to grasp had they treated him better in the matter of commissions; but they had stupidly forced the situation home to the hard-witted soldier, and having once embraced the idea he was not likely to abandon it. Nor was this all. The man of the hour was Lambert, his old rival, and the very apostle of the doctrines he abhorred. For Lambert the army was a political body which had won the people their liberties, and which alone was capable of administering them. His idea of the army was that it should be an executive corporation as self-contained and independent as other men at other times have sought to make the Church. For this Cromwell had discarded him. For this he had come upon the scene once more, and the civil power was in league with him.