to, and on June 26 Oliver was solemnly installed as Protector, under a Parliamentary title, with all but Royal pomp at Westminster Hall. Too much has been made by some modern writers of Oliver's defeat on the question of the Kingship. The title, as he himself truly said, would have been but a feather in his cap. It is doubtful whether its acceptance would have disarmed a single enemy. The rocks upon which the Protector was running were of a far too substantial character to be removed by the assumption of an ill-fitting symbol. Whether he wore a crown or not, no one could have regarded Oliver as Charles I. had been regarded; or even as William III., who in some sort continued the Protector's work, came afterwards to be regarded. Apart from the really unimportant question of the crown, the military party had for the time been beaten all along the line. Not only had the Major-Generals disappeared, and Lambert himself, driven to surrender all his offices, military or civil, retired to the cultivation of tulips at Wimbledon; but the Humble Petition and Advice, that is to say, a Parliamentary constitution, had entirely displaced the Instrument of government as the fundamental law of the three nations. The more important of the stipulations of the new constitution were necessarily of the nature of a compromise. In return for the establishment of a second House composed of his own nominees, the Protector was able to abandon the claim of the Council to exclude members of what must now be regarded as the House of Commons--seeing that a vote with which he was dissatisfied would be of no avail if it was no more than the vote of a single House. Nor was it only an occasional check on the old House that he had gained. The new House, nominated by himself in the first place, was endowed with the right in the future of excluding from its benches any new member nominated by himself or by a future Protector. As he took care to name none who were not strong Puritans and devoted to the Protectorate, he expected that the new House would be able, for all time, to reject legislation contrary to the interests of Puritanism or to the Protectoral constitution. The question of finance, which had wrecked the last Parliament, was settled in a way equally satisfactory to the Protector. The number of soldiers to be kept on foot was passed over in silence, whilst the same sum, £1,800,000, which had been approved by the first Protectorate Parliament as needful for the wants of the army and navy together with those of the domestic government, was now granted, not for five years as had been proposed by the former Parliament, but till the Protector and the two Houses agreed to alter it. The scheme by which the Instrument had fixed the strength of the army at 30,000 men, and had then left the Protector and Council free to levy whatever supplies they thought needful for its support, was deliberately left out of account. On paper, the terms of agreement showed fairly enough.