peremptor; notwithstanding the kingdom's evident hazard, and the evident displeasure of our [the Scottish] nation, yet, if Crawford were not cashiered, his [Cromwell's] colonels would lay down their commissions." There was a plot in all this, Baillie thought. The real purpose of the Independents was to bring Manchester out of the clutches of Presbyterianism, or, if that could not be done, to get him to resign, so that Cromwell might succeed to the chief command; in which case the Independents would be able to "counterbalance" the Presbyterians, and "overawe the Assembly and Parliament both to their ends."--It was a very proper plot, too, as every day was proving. What was the last news that had reached London? It was that Essex, the General-in-chief, had been totally beaten by the King in Cornwall (Sept. 1)--Essex himself obliged to escape by ship, leaving his army to its fate; the horse, under Sir William Balfour, to fight their way out by desperate exertion; and the foot, under Skippon, to think of doing the same, but at last to surrender miserably. Waller's army, also, was by this time nowhere. It had perished by gradual desertion. Evidently, it had become a question of some moment for the Parliamentarians _who_ had won Marston Moor, and _who_ should be chief in Manchester's army. [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, II. 229, 230; Rushworth V. 699 _et seq._; Whitlocke (ed. 1853), I. 302, 303; Carlyle's Cromwell, (ed., 1857), I. 158.] The special business which had brought Cromwell to London was, in fact, but a metaphor of the general business then occupying the English nation. Whether a pragmatical Presbyterian Scot should regulate the discipline of an English Parliamentarian army, and whether the Westminster Assembly should establish a Presbyterian Inquisitorship over the whole mind of England, were but forms of the same question. Little wonder, then, that Cromwell, finding himself in London on the smaller form of the business, resolved to move also in the larger. And he did. "This day," writes Baillie on Friday the 13th of September 1644, "Cromwell has obtained an Order of the House of Commons to refer to the Committee of both Kingdoms the accommodation or toleration of the Independents--a high and unexpected Order!" Three days afterwards Baillie is still full of the subject. "While Cromwell is here," he says, "the House of Commons, without the least advertisement to any of us [Scottish Commissioners], or of the Assembly, passes an Order that the Grand Committee of both Houses, Assembly, and us, shall consider of the means to unite us and the Independents, or, if that be found impossible, to see how they may be tolerate. This has much affected us." On turning to the Commons Journals we find the actual words of the Order: "_Ordered_, That the Committee of Lords and Commons appointed to treat with the Commissioners of Scotland and the Committee of the Assembly do take into consideration the