alienated as many as had been alienated by Laud's injudicious resuscitation of obsolete forms. Most Englishmen would have been quite content if they could have got a king who would have shown some reasonable respect for the wishes of Parliament, and who would abstain from open illegality.

In short, the leaders of the commonwealth found themselves, in some sort, in the same position as that in which Laud found himself in 1629. They had an ideal of their own, which they believed to be really good for the nation, and they hoped that, by habituating the nation to that which they thought best, they could at last bring it to a right frame of mind. If their experiment and its failure is more interesting than Laud's experiment and its failure, it is because their ideal was far higher than his. It broke down, not because they were wrong, but because the nation was not as yet ripe for acceptance of any thing so good.

The difference of opinion which slowly grew up between army leaders and Parliamentary leaders was only the natural result of the tacit acknowledgment of this rock ahead, which was none the less felt because both parties shrank from avowing it. A free Parliament would, perhaps, be a Royalist Parliament. In that case it would probably care nothing about liberty, and would certainly care nothing about Puritanism. How was the danger to be met? The fifty or sixty men who called themselves a Parliament had their own remedy for the disease. Let there be new elections to the vacant seats, but let their own seats not be vacated. Let these old members have power to reject such new members as seemed to them unfit to serve in Parliament. There would be something that looked like a free Parliament, and yet it would not be a free Parliament at all. Those only would be admitted who were thought by the old members to be the right sort of persons to influence the nation.

The scheme, in fact, was a sham, and Cromwell disliked shams. He had another objection equally strong. If there

was one thing for which he and his soldiers had fought and bled, it was for the sake of religious liberty, a liberty which was real enough as far as it went, even if it was much less comprehensive than that which has been accepted in later times. No security was offered for religious liberty under the new-old Parliament. There was nothing to prevent it from abolishing all that existed at any moment it pleased.

As often happens, moral repugnance came to the help of logical reasoning. Not a few of the members of Parliament were conducting themselves in such a way as to forfeit the respect of all honest men. Against foreign foes, indeed, the commonwealth had been successful. The navy, reorganized by Vane, had cleared the seas of Royalist privateers. Commercial jealousy against the Dutch had mingled with the tide of political ill-feeling. In 1651 the Navigation Act was aimed at the Dutch carrying trade, which had flourished simply because the Dutch vessels were better built, and long experience had enabled them to transport goods from one country to another more cheaply than the merchants of other nations. Henceforth English vessels alone were to be allowed to import goods into England, excepting in the case of vessels belonging to the country in which the goods were produced.

War was the result. In January, 1652, the seizure of Dutch ships began. The two sturdy antagonists were well matched. There were no decisive victories; but, on the whole, the English had the upper hand.

Such a war was expensive. Royalists were forced to compound for their estates, forfeited by their adoption of the king's cause. Even if this measure had been fairly carried out, the attempt to make one part of the nation pay for the expenses of the whole was more likely to create dissension than to heal it. But it was not fairly carried out. Members of Parliament took bribes to let this man and that man off more easily than those who were less able to pay. The effects of unlimited power were daily becoming more manifest.

To be the son or a nephew of one of the holders of authority was a sure passport to the public service. Forms of justice were disregarded, and the nation turned with vexation upon its so-called liberators, whose yoke was as heavy to bear as that which had been shaken off.

Of this dissatisfaction Cromwell made himself the mouthpiece. His remedy for the evil, which both sides dreaded, was not the perpetuation of a Parliament which did not represent the nation, but the establishment of constitutional securities which would limit the powers of a freely elected Parliament. He and his officers proposed that a committee, formed of members of Parliament and officers, should be nominated to deliberate on the requisite securities.

On April 19 he was assured, or believed himself to be assured, by one of the leading members that nothing would be done in a hurry. On the morning of the 20th he was told that Parliament was hurriedly passing its own bill, in defiance of his objections. Going at once to the House, he waited till the decisive question was put to vote. Then he rose. The Parliament, he said, had done well in their pains and care for the public good. But it had been stained with "injustice, delays of justice, self-interest." Then, when a member interrupted him, he blazed up into anger. "Come,

come! we have had enough of this. I will put an end to this. It is not fit you should sit here any longer." Calling in his soldiers, he bade them clear the House, following the members with words of obloquy as they were driven out. "What shall we do with this bauble?" he said, taking up the mace. "Take it away." Then, as if feeling the burden of the work which he was doing pressing upon him, he sought to excuse himself, as he had sought to excuse himself after the slaughter of Drogheda. "It is you," he said, “that have forced me to do this. I have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work."

XLIII.

LAST DAYS OF CROMWELL.-MASSON.

[Cromwell was now virtually supreme. In December, 1653, he was made Lord Protector of the three kingdoms, and entered, with characteristic energy, upon the herculean task of establishing a permanent civil organism, and of securing recognition for his government abroad. Both his home and his foreign policy were exceedingly brilliant, challenging the admiration even of his enemies; but he was constantly harassed by factions, was often compelled to resort to force when he would have ruled constitutionally, and at last broke down under a burden which proved to be greater than even he could bear.]

THOUGH but in his sixtieth year, and with his prodigious powers of will, intellect, heart, and humor unimpaired visibly in the least atom, his frame had for some time been giving way under the pressure of his ceaseless burden. For a year or two his handwriting, though statelier and more deliberate than at first, had been singularly tremulous, and to those closest about him there had been other signs of physical breaking up. Not till late in July, however, or early in August, was there any serious cause for alarm; and then in consequence of the terrible effects upon his highness of his close attendance on the death-bed of his second daughter, the muchloved Lady Claypole. She had been lingeringly ill for some time of a most painful internal disease, aggravated by the death of her youngest boy, Oliver. Hampton Court had received her as a dying invalid, "tortured by frequent and long convulsion-fits;" and here, through a great part of July, the fond father had been hanging about her, broken-hearted and unfit for business.

Before her death his grief had passed into an indefinite illness, described as "of the gout and other distempers;" and though he was able to come to London on the 10th of August, he returned to Hampton Court greatly the worse. But, after four or five days of confinement, he was out again for an hour