The main cause of the two civil wars and the execution of the King—ecclesiastical questions—was still in abeyance; nothing was settled in Church or State. Nor were the finances of the country in a hopeful condition; neither the Church lands nor the King's lands nor all the revenues formerly given to royalty served to pay the expenses of the Dutch War. Cromwell's dreams of retirement vanished; urged from within by his own eager soul and from without by the appeals of those who could not bear their burdens without his help, he remained in the forefront of affairs, the leader of the army in name and fact, a figure slightly enigmatical, needed by all and by some feared.
He was not without his enemies. Edmund Ludlow, on one of his visits to London, told him frankly that the extreme Puritans could not forget his attempt to come to terms with the late King, and the extreme moderates could not forget his execution of the mutineers at Ware.
The last time Ludlow and Cromwell had crossed words Cromwell had ended the argument by hurling a cushion at his opponent's head. Now he answered mildly and declared that the Lord was bringing to pass through him what He had promised in the 110th Psalm; he expounded this theory for an hour, and Ludlow was silenced by rhetoric if not convinced by reason.
Meanwhile Cromwell, whether he silenced his critics by oratory or hurled cushions, went his way without heeding any of them; sometimes mildly, sometimes in sudden gusts of temper, sometimes in strange exalted excitements he pursued a policy which, however obscure and vague it might seem to others, was clear as crystal and bright as flame to him.
The feeling between the army and the remnant of Charles' last Parliament still ruling at Westminster became again restless and intense; all men began to see that the present Government was, and could be nothing else, but provisional. A date, three years off, was fixed for the dissolution of the present Parliament, and Cromwell called a conference between the chief lawyers and the chief captains, to whom he offered two vital questions: Should they have a republic or a monarchy? if a monarchy, who was to be King?
The Parliament men were mostly for a monarchy, the army men for a republic: Desborough and Whalley were especially strong for that.
Oliver Cromwell was not with them: he had never been at heart republican; but he said little, and the conference broke up, as the others had done, without solving a single difficulty.
Sometime after the Lord-General, coming from his luminous obscurity where he gleamed, keeping all men in an uncertainty as to his wishes and his intentions, asked the Lord Whitelocke, lawyer and Parliament man, to attend him in his walking in the Park, and to there discuss with him the unsettlement and turmoil of the State.