These appeals fell on willing ears. The nation was weary—weary of inefficient rulers, weary of ideal Republics. Had there been some master-spirit equal to the departed one, with a strong and well-disciplined Army at his back, the Commonwealth might even now at last have been restored to what it was two years before; but nobody like the vanished man remained, and the Army fell to pieces.
MONK.
General Monk had a large portion of it under his immediate control in the North. The Committee of Safety had, in the month of November, appointed him Commander-in-Chief of all the forces, and he now determined to employ his influence for purposes of his own. The troops under Lambert, who still cherished Republican ideas and designs, were ordered by a messenger of Parliament to withdraw to their respective quarters; consequently that ambitious and turbulent personage retired into privacy. The soldiers in London, tired of their commanders, had asked for the restoration of the Rump, and had placed themselves under its authority. Monk alone possessed much military power. In the month of January we find him marching up to London. On entering the gates of York two Presbyterian ministers escorted him to his lodgings; one of them, the eminent Edward Bowles, "the spring that moved all the wheels in that city," who "dealt with the General about weighty and dangerous affairs," keeping him up till midnight, and pressing him very hard to stay there, and declare for the King. "Have you made any such promise?" inquired Monk's chaplain. "No, truly, I have not; or, I have not yet," was the reply. After a pause the chaplain remarked, "When the famous Gustavus entered Germany, he said, 'that if his shirt knew what he intended to do, he would tear it from his back, and burn it.'" The speaker applied the story to his master, entreating him to sleep between York and London; and when he entered the walls of the Metropolis to open his eyes, and look about him.[53] Perhaps the chaplain knew that such counsel would be agreeable to his patron; but it was quite unnecessary to talk in this fashion to one pre-eminently reticent, and as watchful with his eyes as he was cautious with his lips.
1660.
Monk, at the time, was far from being reputed a Royalist. He, with his officers, had in the month of June, 1659, expressed Republican opinions. In the following November the same person corresponding with Dr. Owen, and other representatives of the Independents in London, promised that their interests should ever be dear to his heart; and gave it as his opinion that the laws and rights for which they had been struggling through eighteen years might be "reduced to a Parliamentary Government, and the people's consenting to the laws."[54] The General reached St. Albans on the 28th of January, when Hugh Peters preached before him a characteristic sermon, little thinking of what the chief person in the audience was about to accomplish. "As for his sermon," says one who heard it, "he managed it with some dexterity at the first (allowing the cantings of his expressions.) His text was Psalm cvii. 7. 'He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to the city where they dwelt.'[55] With his fingers on the cushion he measured the right way from the Red Sea through the wilderness to Canaan; told us it was not forty days' march, but God led Israel forty years through the wilderness before they came thither; yet this was still the Lord's right way, who led his people crinkledom cum crankledom; and he particularly descended into the lives of the patriarchs, how they journeyed up and down though there were promises of blessing and rest to them. Then he reviewed our civil wars, our intervals of peace and fresh distractions, and hopes of rest; but though the Lord's people (he said) were not yet come to the City of Habitation, He was still leading them on in the right way, how dark soever His dispensations might appear to us."[56]
As I am writing an Ecclesiastical, and not a Political History, I leave untouched the tangled web of incidents occurring in the City in the councils of the Republicans; and in the relations of Monk to the conflicting parties, between the 6th and 11th of February. I can only state, that on the last of these days the martial chief appeared at Guildhall, and said, "What I have to tell you is this: I have this morning sent to the Parliament to issue out writs within seven days, for the filling up of their House, and when filled to sit no longer than the 6th of May, but then to give place to a full and free Parliament."[57]
MONK.
The joy which this intelligence produced in the City was unbounded, and it comes before us with the vividness of a present event in the garrulous Diary of Pepys. As merry peals rolled and fired from the London steeples, fourteen bonfires were kindled between St. Dunstan's and Temple Bar; and at Strand Bridge the gossip at the same time counted thirty-one of those English demonstrations of delight. The butchers, at the Maypole in the Strand, rang a peal with their knives; and on Ludgate-hill a man occupied himself with turning a spit, on which was tied a rump of beef, whilst another man basted it. At one end of the street there seemed "a whole lane of fire," so hot that people were fain to keep on the side farthest off.[58]
The excitement following the news in other parts seems to have been not less intense.