"Yet I trust to it that he is entertained with civility?" said the Lieutenant-General. "Were it otherwise it would look very ill."
Without waiting for a reply to this, which was intended more as a rebuke to Parsons' tone of speech than as question, for Cromwell knew very well how the King was treated and lodged, the Lieutenant-General passed up the stairs and along the galleries towards the royal apartments, preceded by one of the palace attendants.
Parsons looked after him with mingled admiration and envy.
"There goes the darling of the army and the terror of the Parliament," he said to another officer who had joined him. "They no more know what to do with Noll Cromwell than they know what to do with Charles Stewart."
He voiced the common view of the situation of the Parliament men; the which had indeed found themselves in greater difficulties during the peace than they had done during the war, though they had succeeded in getting the Scots out of the kingdom and the King into their own hands.
After wearisome and confused negotiations between the King, the Scots, and the Presbyterians had come to nothing through Charles' haughty refusal to forsake the Church of England and take the solemn Covenant, the Parliament had paid the Scots ₤20,000, as an instalment of the pay due to them, and on this the Northerners had marched away across the Borders to the endless disputes among themselves, headed by Argyll, the Covenanter, and Hamilton, the royalist, who were now one up, now one down, like boys on a see-saw.
The King had been delivered to the Parliamentary Commissioners and lodged with great respect at Holmby.
And then the Parliament was confronted with other problems: On one hand the clamours of the people for a good understanding with His Majesty, and on the other side the claims of the army, which refused to be disbanded without the arrears of pay owing, which arrears were not forthcoming except in so small a proportion as to be indignantly refused by the soldiers.
Some of the right was on the side of the army and all the might. Neither Parliament nor nation could do anything with them, especially as all the force and fervour of the new Puritan religion which had defeated the King was to be found in the ranks of the soldiers, for nearly all the Parliament men were Presbyterians, and nearly all the army belonged to one or other of the enthusiastic sects commonly named 'Independents'; and oft either side of this cleavage of religious belief was nearly as much bitterness as had animated Puritan and Papist against each other.