1: Commons Journals of dates.
Sir Christopher Pack's paper of Feb. 23, 1656-7, entitled The Humble Address and Remonstrance, &c., was nothing less than a proposed address by Parliament to the Protector, asking him to concur with the Parliament in a total recast of the existing Constitution. It had been privately considered and prepared by several persons, and Whitlocke had been requested to introduce it, "Not liking—several things in it," he had declined to do so; but, Sir Christopher having volunteered, Whitlocke, Broghill, Glynne and others, were to back him. Indeed, all the Oliverians were to back him. Or, rather, there was to grow out of the business, according as the Oliverians were more hearty or less hearty in their cooperation, a new distinction of that body into Thorough Oliverians and Distressed Oliverians or Contrariants. Why this should have been the case will appear if we quote the First Article of the proposed Address after the Preamble. It ran thus: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of KING of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and exercise thereof, to hold and enjoy the same, with the rights and privileges and prerogatives justly, legally, and rightfully, belonging thereunto: That your Highness will be pleased, during your life-time, to appoint and declare the person who shall, immediately after your death, succeed you in the Government of these Nations." The rest of the Address was to correspond. Thus Article II. proposed a return to the system of two Houses of Parliament, and generally the tenor was towards royal institutions. On the other hand, the regality proposed was to be strictly constitutional. There was to be an end to all arbitrary power. There were to be free and full Parliaments once in three years at farthest; there was to be no violent interference in future with the process of Parliament, no exclusion of any persons that had been duly returned by the constituencies; and his Highness and Council were not to make ordinances by their own authority, but all laws, and changes or abrogations of laws, were to be by Act of Parliament. Oliver was to be King, if he chose, and a King with very large powers; but he was to keep within Statute.1
1: Whitlocke, IV. 286 and 289; Commons Journals of March 2, 3, and 24, 1656-7, and March 25, 1657 (whence I have recovered the original wording of Article I. of the Address).
On March 2 and 3 the First Article of the Address was debated, with the result that it was agreed to postpone any vote on the first and most important part of the Article, offering Oliver the Kingship, but with the passing of the second part, offering him, whether it should be as King or not, the power of nominating his successor. A motion for postponing the vote on this part also was lost by 120 to 63. Then, on the 5th, Article II., proposing Parliaments of two Houses, was discussed, and adopted without a division; after which there were discussions and adoptions of the remaining proposals, day after day, with occasional divisions about the wording, till March 24. On that day, the House, their survey of the document being tolerably complete, went back on the postponed clause of the First Article, involving the all-important question of the offer of the Kingship. Through two sittings that day, and again on March 25 (New Year's Day, 1657), there was a very anxious and earnest debate with closed doors, the opposition trying to stave off the final vote by two motions for adjournment. These having failed, the final vote was taken (March 25); when, by a majority of 123 to 62, the Kingship clause was carried in this amended form: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and to exercise the same according to the laws of these Nations." Then, it seemed, all was over, except verbal revision of the entire address. Next day (March 26) it was referred to a Committee, with Chief Justice Glynne for Chairman, to perform this—i.e. to "consider of the title, preamble, and conclusion, and read over the whole, and consider the coherence, and make it perfect." All which having been done that same day, and the House having given some last touches, the document was ready to be engrossed for presentation to Cromwell. By recommendation of the Committee, the title had been changed from Address and Remonstrance into Petition and Advice.1
1: Commons Journals of dates, and between March 5 and March 25.
Of course, the great proposal in Parliament had been rumoured through the land, notwithstanding the instructed reticence or mysterious vagueness of the London newspapers; and, in the interval between the introduction of Sir Christopher Pack's paper and the conversion of the same into the Petition and Advice, with the distinct offer of Kingship in its forefront, there had been wide discussion of the affair, with much division of opinion. Against the Kingship, even horrified by the proposal of it, were most of those Army-men who had hitherto been Oliverians, and had helped to found the Protectorate. Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough, were at the head of this military opposition, which included nearly all the other ex-Major-Generals, and the bulk of the Colonels and inferior officers. One of their motives was dread of the consequences to themselves from a subversion of the system under which they had been acting and a return to a Constitutional and Royal system in which Cromwell and they might have to part company. This, and a theoretical Republicanism still lingering in their minds, tended, in the present emergency, almost to a reunion between them and the old or Anti-Oliverian Republicans. It had been some of the Oliverian Army-men in Parliament, at all events, that had first resisted Pack's motion. Ludlow's story is that they very nearly laid violent hands on Pack when he produced his paper; and the divisions in the Commons Journals exhibit Lambert and various Colonels, with Strickland, as among the chief obstructors of the Petition and Advice in its passage through the House. Strickland, it will be remembered, was an eminent member of the Protector's own Council; and, as far as one can gather, several others of that body, besides Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, and Strickland—perhaps half of the whole number of those now habitually attending the Council—were opposed to the Kingship. On the other hand, the more enthusiastic Oliverians of the Council, those most attached to Cromwell personally, e.g. Sir Charles Wolseley, appear to have been acquiescent, or even zealous for the Kingship; and there were at least some military Oliverians, out of the Council, of the same mind. In the final vote of March 25, carrying the offer of Kingship, the tellers for the majority were Sir John Reynolds (Tipperary and Waterford), and Major-General Charles Howard (Cumberland), while those for the minority were Major-General Butler (Northamptonshire), and Colonel Salmon (Dumfries Burghs). Undoubtedly, however, the chief managers of the Petition and Advice in the House from the first had been Whitlocke, Glynne, and others of the lawyers, with Lord Broghill. The lawyers had been long anxious for a constitutional Kingship: nothing else, they thought, could restore the proper machinery of Law and State, and make things safe. Accordingly, out of doors, in the whole civilian class, and largely also among the more conservative citizens, the idea of Oliver's Kingship was far from unwelcome. The Presbyterians generally, it is believed, were very favourable to it, their dispositions towards Cromwell having changed greatly of late; nor of the old Presbyterian Royalists were all averse. There were Royalists now who were not Stuartists, who wanted a king on grounds of general principle and expediency, but were not resolute that he should be Charles II. only. The real combination of elements against Oliver's Kingship consisted, therefore, of the unyielding old Royalists of the Stuart adhesion, regarding the elevation of the usurping "brewer" to the throne as abomination upon abomination, the Army Oliverians or Lambert and Fleetwood men, interested in the preservation of the existing Protectorate, and the passionate Republicans and Levellers, who had not yet condoned even the Protectorate, and whom the prospect of King and House of Lords over again, with all their belongings, made positively frantic.
How far Cromwell had been aware beforehand of such a project as that of Sir Christopher Pack's paper may be a question. That he had let it be known for some time that he was not disinclined to a revision and enlargement of the constitution of the original Protectorate may be fairly assumed; but that he had concocted Pack's project and arranged for bringing it on (which is Ludlow's representation, and, of course, that of all the Histories) is very unlikely. The project, as in Pack's paper, and as agreed upon by Whitlocke, Glynne, and other lawyers and Parliament men, was by no means, in all its parts, such a project as Cromwell himself would have originated. To the Kingship he may have had no objection, and we have his own word afterwards that he favoured the idea of a Second House of Parliament; but there were accompanying provisions not so satisfactory. What he had hitherto valued in his Protectorate was the place and scope given to his own supreme personality, his power to judge what was best and to carry it through as he could, unhampered by those popular suffrages and Parliamentary checks and privileges which he held to be mere euphemisms for ruin and mutual throat-cutting all through the British Islands in their then state of distraction; and it must therefore have been a serious consideration with him how far, in the public interests, or for his own comfort, he could put himself in new shackles for the mere name of King. What, for example, of the proposed restitution of the ninety-and-odd excluded members to the present Parliament? How could he get on after that? In short, there was so much in Pack's paper suggestive of new and difficult questions as to the futurity of Cromwell, his real influence in affairs, if he exchanged the Protectorship for Kingship, that the paper, or the exact project it embodied, cannot have been of Cromwell's devising. There are subsequent events in proof of the fact.
On the 27th of February, the fourth day after the introduction of Pack's paper, and the very day of the Fast appointed by the House prior to consideration of it in detail, Cromwell had been waited on by a hundred officers, headed by the alarmed Major-Generals, imploring him not to allow the thing to go farther. His reply was that, though he then specifically heard of the whole project for the first time, he could by no means share their instantaneous alarm. Kingship was nothing in itself, at best "a mere feather in a man's hat"; but it need be no bugbear, and at least ought to be no new thing to them. Had they not offered it to him at the institution of the Protectorate, though the title of Protector had been then preferred? Under that title he had been often a mere drudge of the Army, constrained to things not to his own liking. For the rest, were there not reasons for amending, in other respects, the constitution of the Protectorate? Had it not broken down in several matters, and were there not deficiencies in it? If there had been a Second House of Parliament, for example, would there have been that indiscreet decision in the case of James Nayler, a decision that might extend farther than Nayler, and leave no man safe?—Thus, with the distinct information that Cromwell would not interfere with Pack's project in its course through the House, had the Officers been dismissed. It was probably in consequence of their remonstrance with Cromwell, however, that the vote on the Kingship clause of the First Article had been postponed from the 2nd of March to the 25th. The delay had been useful. Though Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, and the mass of the military men, still remained "contrariants," not a few of them had been shaken by Cromwell's arguments, or at least by his judgment. If he, whom it was their habit to trust, was prepared to take the Kingship, and saw reasons for it, why should they stand out? So, before the vote did come on, Major-Generals Berry, Goffe, and Whalley, with others, had ceased to oppose, and the Kingship clause, reserved to the last, as the keystone of the otherwise completed arch, had been carried, as we have seen, by two-thirds of the House.1
1: Godwin, IV. 349-353; Carlyle, III. 217.
It was on Tuesday, March 31, in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, that Speaker Widdrington, attended by the whole House, and by all the high State-officers, formally presented to Cromwell, after a long speech, the Petition and Advice, engrossed on vellum. The understanding, by vote of the House, was that his Highness must accept the whole, and that otherwise no part would be binding. Cromwell's answer, in language very calm and somewhat sad (Speech VII.), was one of thanks, with a request for time to consider. On the 3rd of April, a Committee of the House, appointed by his request, waited on him for farther answer. It was still one of thanks: e.g. "I should be very brutish did I not acknowledge the exceeding high honour and respect you have had for me in this Paper"; but it was in effect a refusal, on the ground that, being shut up to accept all or none, he could not see his way to accept (Speech VIII.). Notwithstanding this answer, which could hardly be construed as final, the House next day resolved, after two divisions, to adhere to their Petition and Advice, and to make new application to the Protector. On the previous question the division was seventy-seven to sixty-five, Major-Generals Howard and Jephson telling for the majority, and Major-General Whalley and Colonel Talbot for the minority; on the main question there was a majority of seventy-eight, with Admiral Montague and Sir John Hobart for tellers, against sixty-five, told by General Desborough and Colonel Hewson. A Committee having then prepared a brief paper representing to his Highness the serious obligation he was under in such a matter, there was a second Conference of the whole House with his Highness (April 8). His reply to Widdrington then (Speech IX.) did not withdraw his former refusal, but signified willingness to receive farther information and counsel. To give such information and counsel, and In fact to reason out the matter thoroughly with Cromwell, the House then appointed a large Committee of ninety-nine, composed in the main, one must fancy, of members who were now eager for the Kingship, or at least had ceased to object. Whitlocke, Broghill, Glynne, Fiennes, Lenthall, Lord Commissioner Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley, and Thurloe, were to be the most active members of this Committee; but it included also Admiral Montague, Generals Howard, Jephson, Whalley, Pack, Goffe, and Berry, with Sydenham, Rous, the Scotch Earl of Tweeddale, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the poet Waller, and even Strickland. The Committee was appointed April 9, and the House was to await the issue.1