Cromwell, like every other great leader who rises in a period of storm and convulsion, could partly direct the forces around him, and in part had to be directed by them. He did not sympathize with the extreme position of the army about the King—the “man of blood,” as the Puritan zealots called him, whose life they already demanded; nor yet with their radical political aspirations. But it was the army alone through which he could act, which gave him his strength; and in return he was the one man who could in any way check or control it, for its loyalty to, and admiration of, the great leader at whose hands it had drained the cup of victory, were the only emotions strong enough to offset its fierce zeal for its own theories of Church and State. Cromwell was most earnestly desirous of getting a working compromise between the King, the Presbyterian Parliament, and the Independent army; a compromise which would allow the King to reign, exercising such executive powers as the Parliament felt he should possess, and which should leave the supreme control to Parliament, but with sufficient guarantees for political and religious freedom to insure justice to the Independents and the soldiers. He strove so hard to accomplish his purpose as to excite angry mutterings against himself among his own followers in the army; and the first steps of the impending revolution were seemingly taken by him only because he was irresistibly pushed onward by the army itself. When, however, he had once made up his mind that there was no other path possible, he trod it as a leader, with all his wonted firmness and decision. The effort for reconciliation was hopeless, chiefly because the King was an utterly impossible person with whom to deal. He had many bitter foes; but they could not prevail against him until he convinced some of his would-be friends that he was absolutely and utterly untrustworthy. He never for a moment entertained the idea of accepting his defeat, of abandoning the effort to rule as a despot, and of acting with good faith toward the people. His purpose was to play off the Presbyterians, together with the Scotch, against the Independents; as he wrote to a friend, he hoped to get either the one party or the other “to side with me for extirpating one another, and I shall be really King again.” Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Parliament was determined not to tolerate the “sectaries” of the Congregationalist and Baptist Churches, and was drawing closer and closer to the Scotch Covenanters, who were even more intolerant; and finally it grew ready to accept the King himself on almost any terms, if it could overcome the army.