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 his associates. They were also great patriots and great Englishmen. But nineteen-twentieths of Englishmen hated the whole thing heart and soul, looked upon Charles I's death as an abominable murder, and only prayed for Charles II to come and avenge it.

That young man, now nineteen years old, had fled to the Continent. The Scots invited him to Scotland, made him take the Covenant (which he hated) and prepared to fight for him. But Cromwell and his Ironsides, after going across and stamping out the Irish rebellion with a great deal of cruelty, made short work of one Scottish army at Dunbar in 1650, and of another, which had invaded England, at Worcester in 1651. The young King fought most gallantly at the latter battle, and had a series of hair-breadth escapes before he regained the Continent; you have often heard, perhaps, of how he spent a day in hiding in the upper branches of a great oak-tree in Shropshire—

That is why people wear oak leaves on May 29, and why so many public-houses still bear the sign of the ‘Royal Oak’.

Yet, if civil war was over, there was no civil peace in Britain; and in 1653 Cromwell was obliged to turn out the ‘Rump’ of the Long Parliament and to take on himself the government of England, Scotland, and Ireland as ‘Protector’, a title which pleased his old friends little more than it pleased his old enemies. He made experiment after experiment in forms of government; tried sometimes with, and sometimes without, some sort of sham Parliament; once he even tried to create a sort of sham House of Lords. But all these