"Now," said the Lieutenant-General, "he has no power to be false. Nor will the Parliament ever again be as defenceless as it was when he was last at Whitehall."
"Then," put in Ireton shrewdly, "if you offer terms to the King which leave the power of the sword with the Parliament, you offer what he, even in his utmost extremity, will not accept."
"We have had no experience of what he will do in extremity," replied Cromwell, "since he has never come to it till now."
"But has he not," cried Harrison, "always refused to give up what he terms his rights? Did he not contemptuously reject the Uxbridge Treaty?"
"As any man might have guessed he would," replied Cromwell dryly; he had been no party to the folly of the Presbyterians in asking the King to accept these impossible conditions. "He will always be a Prelatist, yet he might—nay, he must—rule according to the laws of England, and allow all men freedom in their thoughts."
"He never will!" exclaimed Harrison.
"He must," repeated Cromwell.
His pipe had now gone out; he knocked out the ashes against the tent pole and rose.
"The settlement of this war," remarked Henry Ireton, "is like to be more trouble than the fighting of it."