Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/374

360 that he only longed to be well rid of the whole onerous burden.

There wore various chiefs in the army, so nearly equal in rank and influence, that there was certain to be strife for the chief command. Fleetwood had married a sister of the present protector's; Desborough was his uncle; his brother Henry, who was lord-lieutenant of Ireland, was a much more resolute and able man than himself; and Monk, in Scotland, had great power in his hands. The chief command in the army lay, by the late instrument, in the protector himself; but the officers of the army met and drew up a petition that the chief command should be conferred on some one of the generals who had shown his attachment to the cause by his services, and that no officer should be deprived of his commission except by sentence of a court martial. Richard, by the advice of Thurloe, replied that he had appointed general Fleetwood lieutenant-general of the forces, but that to give up the supreme command would be to violate the "Petition and Advice," by which he held his own authority. This did not content the officers; they still held their meetings, a liberty which Oliver had wisely suppressed, and there were many suspicions expressed amongst them. They asserted that Henry Cromwell would soon be placed above Fleetwood, who, though a conscientious man, was a very weak and vacillating one, and they demanded that Thurloe, St. John, and Pierrepont, Richard's ablest counsellors, should be dismissed, as enemies to the army. It was clear that a collision must take place betwixt these parties and Thurloe, and his friends advised Richard to call a parliament, by which he would not only be able to curb the power of the officers, but to raise money for the payment of the soldiers. The nation was keeping a large fleet under Ayscue or Ayscough, part of which was cruising in the Baltic, to protect the English allies, the Swedes, against the Danes and Dutch, and another under Montague was blockading the Dutch coast. Money, therefore, was absolutely necessary to defray expenses, and Richard consented to call a parliament. It was a necessary evil, a formidable under-taking; for the five months that passed before their meeting, Richard ruled with all the outward state, and with more than the quiet of his father. But his father, with all his vigour and tact, had never been able to manage a parliament, every one of which immediately set about to overthrow him; what hope, then, that Richard's placid temper could contend with such a restless and domineering body? It was absolutely impossible, and he was immediately made sensible of it. To introduce as many members of the commons as he could favourable to his views, he departed from his father's plan of only calling them from the larger boroughs and the counties, and returned the franchise to the lesser and decayed boroughs. Every means was used besides to obtain the return of men favourable to the government; and in Scotland and Ireland, from whence thirty members each were admitted, the elections were conducted under the eyes of the commander of the forces. But, notwithstanding, from the very first assembling of the commons, they showed that they were likely to be as unmanageable as ever. When Richard summoned the commons to meet him in the lords, scarcely half the members attended, lest they should sanction the existence of a body that they disclaimed. The commons were as much divided as the army. There were the friends of the government, who were instructed to stand firm by the "Petition and Advice," and the government, founded by it, of one ruling person and two houses of parliament. Then there were the presbyterians and republicans, who were for no lords nor protector either, and were led on by Haselrig, Scott, Bradshaw, Lambert, Ludlow, and others of those united parties, with whom Vane and Fairfax now co-operated. Fairfax, from the moment when he showed his disapprobation of the death of Charles I., had retired to private life, but now he reappeared, and, though become a royalist at heart, his spirited lady no doubt having roused that feeling in him, he voted with the republican party, as most likely to prevail against the protectorate, and thus pave the way to monarchy. Besides these, there were many neutrals or moderates, and a considerable sprinkling of young royalists, who, by Charles's advice, had got in under other colours.

However much these parties differed amongst themselves, there were sufficient of them adverse to the protectorate to commence an immediate attack upon it. They foil at once to debating the legality of the "Petition and Advice," and of course the government by a single person and two houses. They asked what was the "Petition and Advice," and they declared it to be an instrument of no force, passed by a very small majority of a house from which a hundred members had been forcibly excluded. The debates on this question were long and violent. Though parliament met on the 27th of January, it was the 14th of February before they had decided that Richard's right to the protectorate should be settled by another bill, but with much restricted prerogative, and it was not till the 28th of March that they allowed the right of the other house to sit, but with no superiority to the commons, and with no authority to send messages to it except by members of the house. These points settled, there were high demands for a searching inquiry into the management of all departments of the state, with heavy charges of waste, embezzlement, oppression, and tyranny, in the collection of the excise. Threats of impeachment were held out against Thurloe and the principal ministers, as well as against Butler and some others of the officers.

This aroused the generals, who were themselves divided into two great factions. One set met at Whitehall under Ingoldsby, Whalley, Goffe, lord Charles Howard, and others favourable to the protector; another, under Fleetwood and Desborough, met at Wallingford House, who, though the protector's relations, were bent on their own and the army's ascendancy. They were joined by Lambert, who, after being deprived of his commission, had remained at Wimbledon, cultivating his garden, and seeming to be forgotten; but now he came forth again, was received with enthusiasm by the soldiers, who had great confidence in his ability, and he and Desborough used to meet with a third party, consisting chiefly of the inferior officers, at St. James's.

At this place of meeting a council of officers was organised, which soon became influential with the Wallingford House or Fleetwood's section. Here they drew up an address to Richard, complaining of the arrears of their pay being withheld, and of the neglect with which the army was treated;