Liberty, like religious toleration, has been won through the internecine warfare between various forms of despotism; and the strength of the Royalists lay in the fact that parliament, in espousing Presbyterianism, weighted its cause with an ecclesiastical system as narrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New presbyter was but old priest writ large, and the balance between the two gave the decision into the hands of the Independents, whose numerical inferiority was redeemed by Cromwell's military genius. When Presbyterians and Independents had ground the Royalists to powder at Marston Moor and Naseby, Charles sought to recover his authority through their quarrels. He fell between two stools. His double dealings with both parties led to the second civil war, to his own execution, and to the abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords in 1649. Having crushed Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland, to which Charles and his son had in turn appealed, Cromwell was faced with the problem of governing England. The victorious party was in a hopeless minority, and some of the fervour with which the Independents appealed to divine election may have been due to a consciousness that they would not have passed the test of a popular vote. In their view, God had determined the fundamentals of the constitution by giving the victory to His elect; these fundamentals were to be enshrined in a written rigid constitution, and placed beyond the reach of parliament or the people. Under the sovereignty of this inspired constitution (1653), which provided, among other things, for the union of England, Ireland, and Scotland, a drastic reform of the franchise and redistribution of seats, the government was to be in the hands of a "single person," the Protector, and a single chamber, the House of Commons. The single person soon found the single chamber "horridly arbitrary," and preferred the freedom of military despotism. But his major-generals were even more arbitrary than the single chamber, and in 1657 a fresh constitution was elaborated with a Second Chamber to make it popular. The Restoration had, in fact, begun almost as soon as the war was over; the single chamber republic of 1649-1653 had given place to a single- chamber monarchy, called the Protectorate, and a further step was taken when in 1657 the "other" House was added; Cromwell was within an ace of making himself a king and his dynasty hereditary. Only his personal genius, the strength of his army, and the success of his foreign policy enabled him thus to restore the forms of the old constitution without the support of the social forces on which it had been based. His death in 1658 was necessarily followed by anarchy, and anarchy by the recall of Charles II.