General GEORGE MONK

With the exception of Monk and Fairfax, who were not members of the Parliament, and the latter of whom was absent in Yorkshire, these Councillors are to be imagined as also active in the business of the House. About nine of them were Residuary Rumpers who had accepted willingly or cheerfully the return of the secluded. The proportion of Residuary Rumpers in the whole House was even larger. Though it had been reported by Prynne that as many as 194 of the secluded were still alive, and a contemporary printed list gives the names of 177 as available,1 the present House never through its brief session attained to a higher attendance than 150, the average attendance ranging from 100 to 120; and I have ascertained by actual counting that more than a third of these were Residuary Rumpers. It is strange to find among them such of the extreme Republicans as Hasilrig, Scott, Marten, and Robinson. They left the House for a time, but re-appeared in it, whereas Ludlow and Neville and others would not re-appear—Ludlow, as he tells us, making a practice of walking up and down in Westminster Hall outside, partly in protest, partly to show that he had not fled.2 Actually six Regicides remained in the House: viz. Scott, Marten, Ingoldsby, Millington, Colonel Hutchinson, and Sir John Bourchier. The majority of the Residuary Rumpers, however,—represented by such men as Lenthall, St. John, Ashley Cooper, Colonel Thompson, Colonel Fielder, Carew Raleigh, Attorney-General Reynolds, Solicitor-General Ellis, and Colonel Morley, and even by two of the Regicides mentioned (Ingoldsby and Hutchinson),—were now in harmony with the Secluded, and by no means disposed to abet Hasilrig, Scott, and Marten in any farther contest for Rump principles. In other words, the House was now led really by the chiefs of the reinstated members. Prominent among these, besides Crewe, Knightley, Gerrard, Sir John Evelyn of Wilts, Sir William Waller, Sir William Lewis, Arthur Annesley, Sir Harbottle Grimston, and others named as of the Council, were Prynne, Sir Anthony Irby, Major-General Browne, Sir William Wheeler, Lord Ancram (member for a Cornish burgh), William Morrice, and some others, not of the Council.—Prynne, who ought to have been on the Council, if courage for the cause of the Secluded and indefatigable assiduity in pleading it were sufficient qualifications, had not been thought fit for that honour; but he was a very busy man in the House. He had taken his place there very solemnly the first day, with an old basket-hilt sword on; and he was much in request on Committees.—Of more aristocratic manners and antecedents, and therefore fitter for the Council, was Arthur Annesley, a man of whom we have not heard much hitherto, but who, from this point onwards, was to attract a good deal of notice. The eldest son of the Irish peer Viscount Valentia and Baron Mountnorris, he had come into the Long Parliament in 1640 as member for Radnorshire; he had gone with the King in the beginning of the Civil War; but he had afterwards done good service for the Parliament in Ireland during the Rebellion, and had at length conformed to the Commonwealth and the Protectorate. While the Protectorate lasted he had been really a Cromwellian; but, like so many other Cromwellians, he was now a half-declared Royalist. He had been one of the chief negotiators with Monk for the re-seating of the Secluded, and he took at once a foremost place among them, both in the House and in the Council. He was now about forty-fire years of age.—An accession to the House, after it had sat for a week or more, was Mr. William Morrice. He was a Devonshire man, like Monk, to whom he was related by marriage. He had been sent into the Long Parliament in 1645 as Recruiter for Devonshire, and had been afterwards secluded; and he had been returned to Oliver's two Parliaments and to Richard's. Living in Devonshire as a squire "of fair estate," he had acquired the character of an able and bookish man of enlightened Presbyterian principles; he had been of use to Monk in the management of his Devonshire property; there had been constant correspondence between them; and there was no one for whom Monk had a greater regard. Now, accordingly, at the age of about five and fifty, Morrice had left his books and come from Devonshire to London at Monk's request, not only to take his place in Parliament, but also to be a kind of private adviser and secretary to Monk, more in his intimacy than even Dr. Clarges.—To complete this view of the composition of the new Government, we may add that on Feb. 24 Thomas St. Nicholas was made Clerk of the Parliament, and that on the 27th the House appointed Thurloe and a John Thompson to be joint-secretaries of State. There was a division on Thurloe's appointment, but it was carried by sixty-five votes to thirty-eight. The tellers against Thurloe were Annesley and Sir William Waller, but he was supported by Sir John Evelyn of Wilts and Colonel Hutchinson. Thurloe's former subordinate, Mr. William Jessop, was now clerk to the Council of State.3

1: A single folio fly-leaf, dated March 26 in the Thomason copy, and called "The Grand Memorandum: A True and Perfect Catalogue of the Secluded Members of the House of Commons," &c. It was printed by Husbands on the professed "command" of one of the members (Prynne?).

2: The fly-leaf mentioned in last note gives the names of thirty-three Rumpers who did not sit in the House after the readmission of the secluded members. Arranged alphabetically they were:—Anlaby, Bingham, John Carew, Cawley, James Challoner, Crompton, Darley, Fleetwood, John Goodwyn, Nicholas Gold, John Gurdon, Sir James Harrington, Hallows, Harvey, Heveningham, John Jones, Viscount Lisle, Livesey, Ludlow, Christopher Martin, Neville, Nicholas, Pigott, Pyne, Sir Francis Russell, the Earl of Salisbury, Algernon Sidney, Walter Strickland, Sir William Strickland, Wallop, Sir Thomas Walsingham, and Whitlocke. Compare with the list of the Restored Rump, ante pp. 453-455.

3: Commons Journals of dates, and generally from Feb. 21 to March 16, 1659-60, with examination of the lists of all the Committees through that period; Ludlow, 845-846; Wood's Ath. IV. 181 et seq. (Annesley), and III. 1087 et seq. (Morrice); Clarendon, 891 and 895.

By the rough compact made with Monk, the House was to confine itself to the special work for which it was the indispensable instrument, and to push on as rapidly as possible, through that, to an act for its own dissolution. The majority was such that the compact was easily fulfilled. Six-and-twenty days sufficed for all that was required from this reinstated fag-end of the famous Long Parliament.

Naturally much of the work of the House took the form (1) of redress of old or recent injuries, and (2) of rewards and punishments. Almost the first thing done by the House was to restore the privileges of the City of London, release the imprisoned Common Council men and citizens, and issue orders for the repair of the broken gates and portcullises. The City and the Parliament were now heartily at one, and there was a loan from the City of £60,000 in token of the happy reconciliation. Sir George Booth, who had been recommitted to the Tower by the Rump, was finally released, though still on security. There were several other releases of prisoners and removals of sequestrations, and at length (Feb. 27) it was referred to a Committee to consider comprehensively the cases of all persons whatsoever then in prison on political grounds. On the 3rd of March particular orders were given for the discharge of the Earl of Lauderdale, the Earl of Crawford, and Lord Sinclair, from their imprisonment in Windsor Castle; and thus the last of the Scottish prisoners from Worcester Battle found themselves free men once more. Twelve days afterwards the House went to the extreme of the merciful process by ordering the release of poor Dr. Matthew Wren, the Laudian ex-Bishop, who had been committed by the Long Parliament early in 1641 along with Laud and Strafford, and who had been lying in the Tower, all but forgotten, through the intervening nineteen years. At the same time discretionary powers were given to the Council of State to discharge any political prisoners that might be still left.—In the article of punishments the House was very temperate indeed. Notorious Rumpers were removed, of course, from military and civil offices, and there were sharper inquiries after Colonel Cobbet, Colonel Ashfield, Major Creed, and others too suspiciously at large; but, with one exception, there seemed to be no thought of the serious prosecution of any for what had been done either under the Rump Government or during the Wallingford-House interruption. The exception was Lambert. Brought before the Council, and unable or unwilling to find the vast bail of £20,000 which they demanded for his liberty, he was committed by them to the Tower; and the House, on the 6th of March, confirmed the act, and ordered his detention for future trial. While Lambert was thus treated as the chief criminal, the rewards and honours went still, of course, mainly to Monk. To his Commandership-in-chief of all the Armies there was added the Generalship of the whole Fleet, though in this command, to Monk's disappointment, Montague was conjoined with him (March 2). He was also made Keeper of Hampton Court; and the £1000 a year in lands which the Rump had voted him was changed by a special Bill into £20,000 to be paid at once (March 16), As the Bill was first drafted, the reward was said to be "for his signal services"; but by a vote on the third reading the word "signal" was changed into "eminent." Perhaps Annesley, Sir William Waller, and the other new chiefs at Whitehall were becoming a little tired of the praises of so peculiar an Aristides. But he was still a god among the Londoners. From St. James's, which was now his quarters, he would go into the City every other day, to attend one of a series of dinners which they had arranged for him in the halls of the great companies, and at which he found himself so much at ease in his morose way that he would hardly ever leave the table "till he was as drunk as a beast." Ludlow, who tells us so, would not have told an untruth even about Monk; and Ludlow was then in London, knowing well what went on. Let us suppose, however, that he exaggerated a little, and that old George was the victim of circumstances.1

1: Commons Journals of dates, and generally from Feb. 21 to March 16; Ludlow, 855-856.

A large proportion of the proceedings of the House and the Council may be described as simply a re-establishment of Presbyterianism. The secluded members being Presbyterians to a man, there was at once an enthusiastic recollection of the edicts of the Long Parliament between 1643 and 1648, setting up Presbytery as the national Religion, with a determination to revert in detail to those symbols and forms of the Presbyterian system which the triumph of Independency had set aside during the Commonwealth, and which had been allowed only partially, and side by side with their contraries, in the broad Church-Establishment of the Protectorate. The unanimity and rapidity of the House in their votes in this direction must have alarmed the Independents and Sectaries. It was on Feb. 29 that the House appointed a Committee of twenty-nine on the whole subject of Religion and Church affairs—Annesley, Ashley Cooper, Prynne, and Sir Samuel Luke (i.e. Butler's Presbyterian "Sir Hudibras") being of the number; and on the 2nd of March, on report from this Committee, the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith, as it had been under discussion in the Long Parliament in 1646 (Vol. III. p. 512), was again brought before the House, and passed bodily at once, with the exception of chapter 30, "Of Church Censures," and chapter 31, "Of Synods and Councils"—which two chapters it was thought as well to keep still in Committee. The same day there were other resolutions of a Presbyterian tenor. But the climax was on March 5, in this form: "Ordered, That the SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be printed and published, and set up and forthwith read in every church, and also read once a year according to former Act of Parliament, and that the said SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be also set up in this House." Thus, when the bones of Alexander Henderson had been for more than thirteen years in their tomb in Grey Friars churchyard in Edinburgh, was the great document which he had drafted in that city in August 1643, as a bond of religious union for the Three Kingdoms, and only the first fortunes of which he had lived to see, resuscitated in all its glory. What more could Presbyterianism desire? That nothing might be wanting, however, there followed, on the 14th of March, a Bill "for approbation and admittance of ministers to public benefices and lectures," one of the clauses of which prescribed means for the immediate division of all the counties of England and Wales into classical Presbyteries, according to those former Presbyterianizing ordinances of the Long Parliament which had never been carried into effect save in London and Lancashire. The Universities were to be constituted into presbyteries or inserted into such; and the whole of South Britain was to be patterned ecclesiastically at last in that exact resemblance to North Britain which had been the ideal before Independency burst in. What measures of "liberty for consciences truly tender" might be conceded did not yet appear. Anabaptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts, and Monk's "Fanatics" generally, might tremble; and even moderate and orthodox Independents might foresee difficulty In retaining their livings in the State Church. Indeed Owen was already (March 13) displaced from his Deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, by a vote of the House recognising a prior claim of Dr. Reynolds to that post.1