As commander-in-chief, he maintained the freedom of the elections, kept the army under control, and watched over the peace of the nation. Monk’s greatest service to England was not the restoration of Charles II. After the breach between army and Parliament that was inevitable. “The current,” said Cowley, “was so irresistible, that the strongest strove against it in vain, and the weakest could sail with it to success.” Monk’s merit was that he brought about the Restoration without a civil war. His dexterous and unscrupulous policy blinded the Republicans to his intentions till it was too late for them to resist, and made the army instrumental in effecting what the bulk of it would have fought to prevent. But for him, England would have been, in Cromwell’s phrase, “one Cain.” Thanks to him, the transition from the government of an armed minority to the government which an overwhelming majority of the nation desired was a peaceable and constitutional revolution. So the rule of Puritanism, founded with blood and iron, fell without a blow. The alliance between the Presbyterians and the Royalists, begun thirteen years ago, was now at last completed. The once triumphant Independents were divided and powerless. Maidston, the steward of Cromwell’s household, in a letter to John Winthrop, wrote the epitaph of militant Independency. “The interest of religion lies dreadfully in the dust, for the eminent professors of it, having achieved formerly great victories in the war, and thereby great power in the army, made use of it to make variety of changes in the government, and every one of those changes hazardous and pernicious.... They were all charged upon the principles of the authors, who, being Congregational men, have not only made men of that persuasion cheap, but rendered them odious to the generality of the nation.” At the end of April, 1660, a free Parliament met, the first for twenty years. On May 29th, Charles II. re-entered London “with a triumph of above twenty thousand horse and foot, brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; the ways strewed with flowers, the bells ringing, the streets hung with tapestry, the fountains running with wine.” “I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God,” wrote John Evelyn. “And all this was done without one drop of blood shed, and by that very army which rebelled against him; but it was the Lord’s doing, for such a restoration was never mentioned in any history, ancient or modern, since the return of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity; nor so joyful a day, and so bright, ever seen in this nation, this happening when to expect or to effect it was past all human policy.”