Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 06.djvu/347

Rh is one, whose peril is one. But to little effect. Ludlow, with visible satisfaction, reports how ill the Lieutenant-General sped, when he brought the Army Grandees and Parliament Grandees ‘to a Dinner’ at his own house ‘in King Street,’ and urged a cordial agreement: they would not draw together at all. Parliament would not agree with Army; hardly Parliament with itself: as little, still less, would Parliament and City agree. At a Common Council in the City, prior or posterior to this Dinner, his success, as angry little Walker intimates, was the same. ‘Saturday 8th April 1648,’ having prepared the ground beforehand, Cromwell with another leader or two, attended a Common Council; spake, as we may fancy, of the common dangers, of the gulfs now yawning on every side: ‘but the City,’ chuckles my little gentleman in gray, with a very shrill kind of laughter in the throat of him, ‘were now wiser than our First Parents; and rejected the Serpent and his subtleties.’ In fact, the City wishes well to Hamilton and his Forty-thousand Scots; the City has, for some time, needed regiments quartered in it, to keep-down open Royalist-Presbyterian insurrection. It was precisely on the morrow after this visit of Cromwell’s that there arose, from small cause, huge Apprentice-riot in the City: discomfiture of Trainbands, seizure of arms, seizure of City Gates, Ludgate, Newgate, loud wide cry of ‘God and King Charles!’—riot not to be appeased but by ‘desperate charge of cavalry,’ after it had lasted forty hours. Such are the aspects of affairs, near and far.

Before quitting Part Third, I will request the reader to undertake a small piece of very dull reading; in which however, if he look till it become credible and intelligible to him, a strange thing, much elucidative of the heart of this matter, will disclose itself. At Windsor, one of these days, unknown now which, there is a Meeting of Army Leaders. Adjutant