It may be questioned how far this declaration was warranted by the real facts of the case. The majority of the army was probably opposed to any violence being shown to the son of the great Protector, but in critical times it is the small knot of restless, unscrupulous spirits who rule the inert mass, and impose their own views upon the sluggish and the timid; and Desborough well knew the irresolute and impressionable character of Richard Cromwell.

On the other hand, many members of Parliament protested that they would stand by him, that if he allowed the army to suppress Parliament, he would find it immediately his own master, and would be left without a friend. Ingoldsby, Goffe, and Whalley supported this view, and one of them offered to go and kill Lambert, who was the originator of all the mischief. Richard called a council to consider the proposition. Whitelock represented the danger of dissolving Parliament, and leaving himself at the mercy of the army; but Thurloe, Lord Broghill, Fiennes, and Wolseley declared there was no alternative, for if the army and Parliament came to strife, the Cavaliers would rise and bring in Charles. Richard reluctantly gave way, and on the 22nd of April he signed a commission empowering Fiennes, the Keeper of the Seal, to dissolve Parliament. Fiennes summoned the Commons to the Upper House by the Usher of the Black Rod, but they shut the door in the face of that officer, and refused to obey, adjourning themselves for three days. Fiennes, however, declared Parliament dissolved, the Commons having been duly summoned to witness it, and a proclamation was issued to that effect.

The warning of Whitelock was at once verified; the moment that the Parliament ceased, all regard to Richard by the army ceased with it. From that moment he was deserted except by a small knot of officers—Goffe, Whalley, and Ingoldsby,—and he was as completely annihilated as Protector as if all parties had deposed him by assent and proclamation. The council of officers proceeded to take measures for the exercise of the supreme power. They placed guards to prevent the adjourned Commons from re-taking their seats at Westminster as they proposed, and by their own authority dismissed Ingoldsby, Goffe, Whalley, and the other officers who had adhered to Richard, from their commands in the army, and restored Lambert and all the others who had been cashiered by Oliver. Having thus restored the Republicanism of the army, they determined to recall the Rump, as a body which they believed they could command; and they accordingly issued an order for the reassembling of the House of Commons which Oliver had so unceremoniously dismissed on the 20th of April, 1653. At this call, Lenthall, the old Speaker of the Rump, with about forty or fifty members of the Rump, hastened the next day to Westminster, where Lambert kept guard with the troops, and after some discussion in the Painted Chamber, they went in a body to the House through two files of Lambert's soldiers, and took their places as a real Parliament. But their claim to this exclusive right was immediately disputed. The same day, the 7th of May, a large number of the members who had been excluded by Pride's purge, in 1648, of whom one hundred and ninety-four were still alive, and eighty of them residing in the capital, assembled in Westminster Hall, and sent up to the House a deputation of fourteen, headed by Prynne, Annesley, and Sir George Booth, to demand equal liberty to sit; but as this would have overwhelmed them with a Presbyterian majority, the doors were closed against them: they were kept back by the soldiers who filled the lobby, who were ironically called "the keepers of the liberties of England," and they were informed that no member could sit who had not already signed the engagement. On the 9th, however, Prynne made his way into the House, and kept his seat, in spite of all efforts to dislodge him, till dinner-time; but going out to dine, he found himself shut out on his return.

THE MANOR HOUSE, WIMBLEDON (1660).

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The Rump now proceeded to appoint a Committee of Safety, and then a Council of State, which included Fairfax, Lambert, Desborough, Bradshaw, Fleetwood, Ashley Cooper, Haselrig, Vane, Ludlow, St. John, and Whitelock. Letters were received from Monk in Scotland, congratulating the Rump on their return to power, but hypocritically begging them to keep in mind the services of Cromwell and his family. Lockhart sent over from Flanders the tendered services of the regiments there, and was confirmed in his office of ambassador, and also commissioned to attend a conference between the ministers of France and Spain, to be held at Fuentarabia, whither Charles Stuart had also betaken himself. Montague sent in the adhesion of the fleet, and, what was still more consoling, Henry Cromwell, whose opposition in Ireland was much dreaded, resigned his office, and was permitted to retire into private life.

The Wallingford House party of officers alone created serious apprehension. They sent in a list of fifteen demands, which were immediately taken into consideration, and the Rump successively voted, in compliance therewith, that a form of government should be passed calculated to preserve the liberties of the people, and that it should contain no single person as Protector, nor House of Peers. They also agreed that liberty of conscience should be allowed to all believers in the Scriptures who held the doctrine of the Trinity, except Papists and Prelatists. But one of these demands was for lands of inheritance to be settled on Richard Cromwell to the value of ten thousand pounds a year, and a pension on her Highness, his mother, of ten thousand pounds a year. On this it was remarked that Richard was still occupying Whitehall as if he were Protector, and they made it conditional that he should remove thence. They proposed that if he retired from the Protectorate, they would grant him twenty-nine thousand pounds for the discharge of his debts, two thousand pounds for present necessities, and ten thousand pounds to him and his heirs. Richard cheerfully signed a formal abdication in May, 1659, but his pension was never paid. After the Restoration he fled to the Continent, where he remained for twenty years. He returned in 1680, and lived peaceably on his estate at Cheshunt, or at Mardon, in Hursley, near Winchester, which he received with Dorothy Mayor, and there spent a jolly life in old English state, dying in 1712. During his father's life, he is said in convivial hours to have drunk the health of his father's landlord, Charles Stuart; and he possessed a chest which contained the addresses and congratulations, even the protestations of profound fidelity from corporations, congregations, and almost all the public men, and on this chest he would seat himself in his jocund hours, amongst his convivial friends, and boast that he was sitting on the lives and fortunes of most of the leading men of England. Henry Cromwell also passed his life as a quiet country gentleman on his estate of Swinney, near Soham, in Cambridgeshire, till his death in 1673. His government of Ireland was, on his resigning, put into the hands of five commissioners, and the command of the army was given to Ludlow.

Charles and his party abroad, watching the continual bickerings of their enemies in England, put in motion all their machinery to create confusion, and to seize the opportunity of taking every possible means of procuring a revolt amongst them. Charles, to encourage his partisans, announced his intention of coming to England to head them. The 1st of August was fixed on for a rising, and Charles hastened into Boulogne, to be ready to pass over into Wales or Cornwall. The Duke of York was to lead over six hundred of the Prince of Condé's veterans, and, crossing from Boulogne, land on the coast of Kent, whilst the Duke of Gloucester was to proceed from Ostend with four thousand troops under Marshal Marsin. Unfortunately for them, their plans had been revealed to Thurloe by Sir Richard Willis, one of the king's sealed knot of seven trusted confidants. Convinced by this treason that the enterprise would fail, Charles sent circular letters to stop the rising. But these in some instances arrived too late. Many appeared in arms, and were fallen upon and routed or taken prisoners by the Parliamentarians. Sir John Gore, the Lady Mary Howard, daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, in addition to many other persons of distinction, were arrested on charges of high treason. In Cheshire Sir George Booth raised the royal standard, and took possession of Chester; but on learning the news of the king's deferring the enterprise, and that General Lambert was marching against them, he and his associates fled to Nantwich, where Lambert overtook and totally routed them. Colonel Morgan, with thirty of his men, fell on the field; the Earl of Derby was taken disguised as a servant; Sir Thomas Middleton, who was eighty years old, fled to Chirk Castle, but soon surrendered; and Booth himself, disguised as a woman, and riding on a pillion, was betrayed and taken on the road to London, near Newton Pagnell. This unlucky outbreak and defeat threw the adherents of Charles abroad into despair. Montague, the admiral, who had been won over, and had brought his fleet to the mouth of the Thames to facilitate the passage of the king's troops, pretended that he had come for provisions, and, though he was suspected, he was allowed to return to his station. Charles himself, now almost desperate, made a journey to Fuentarabia, where Mazarin and Don Louis de Haro, the ministers of France and Spain, were engaged in a treaty, in the hope that, if it were concluded, he might obtain some support from them. But he was very coldly received; Mazarin would not even see him. In fact, his fortunes were apparently at the lowest ebb, but it was in reality only the dark hour before the dawn. The day of his fortune was at hand.

Parliament, on Lambert's victory, voted him thanks and one thousand pounds to purchase a jewel in memory of it; but Lambert distributed the money amongst his soldiers. Parliament resenting this, regarded it as intended to win the soldiers to his cause, that he might tread in Cromwell's steps, and make himself Dictator. It was well known that he had entertained hopes of being named his successor, and this suspicion was immediately confirmed by his officers, whilst on their march at Derby, signing a petition, and sending it up with a demand that Fleetwood should be made permanently Commander-in-Chief, and Lambert his lieutenant-general. No sooner did Haselrig see this petition, than he denounced it as an attempt to overturn Parliament, and moved the committal of Lambert and its author to the Tower. But Fleetwood repelled the charge by assuring them that Lambert, who was already in town when the petition was got up, knew nothing of it. The House, however, ordered all copies of the paper to be destroyed, and voted that any addition to the number of officers was needless, chargeable, and dangerous. At the same time they proceeded to conciliate the soldiers by advancing their pay, and, to discharge their arrears, on the 5th of October they raised the monthly assessment from thirty-five thousand pounds to one hundred thousand pounds.