blindness had been hastened by his services to the State: "Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed, Hast reared God's trophies, and his work pursued, Though Milton, in his unpractical idealism, was for discontinuing all public support to the clergy, whilst Cromwell, so far as we can judge, was merely for substituting some other mode of payment for the unequal burden of the tithe as it was levied in those days, they concurred on the point of extending religious liberty to the uttermost, and in this Cromwell had the army behind him. For the moment, however, the decision was postponed, as the Commonwealth had become involved in a war which occupied the thoughts of its rulers. In the Dutch war, which broke out in 1652, neither Cromwell nor his brother officers had much part. Ever since the beginning of the Commonwealth a maritime war with France had virtually existed under the pretext of reprisals for injury done by French ships to English trade. The seizure of French goods in Dutch vessels had irritated the Netherlanders, and the Navigation Act passed in 1651 had taken away much of the trade done by them in English ports. In May, 1652, Tromp, the great Dutch admiral, had been sent out with orders to resist the right of search, and on approaching an English fleet commanded by Blake, he had neglected to lower his flag, as required by English commanders in satisfaction of their claim to enforce the Sovereignty over the British Seas, a claim which the Commonwealth had received from the Monarchy. An action resulting brought on war between the two peoples. In this war, neither Cromwell nor the army sympathised. Holding as they did that the force of England, if used at all, should be used for the advantage of Protestantism, they disliked a war waged against a Protestant nation. On the other hand they had no wish to see the English navy playing a craven part; and believing that Tromp had kept his flag flying as a studied insult, they offered no direct opposition to the war. Yet, as long as it was in progress, whenever any overture likely to lead to peace was made, it was sure to have the support of Cromwell and the officers. If the Commonwealth leaders were immersed in preparations for war, the officers of the army had not forgotten their demand for reforms in Church and State, and in contemplating the slackness of Parlia ment with regard to these reforms, their minds were again set on a dissolution of Parliament at a time far earlier than that which had been fixed by the House itself. Towards the end of July the Army Councilnow composed of officers alone-had considered a petition to be addressed to Parliament, and had asked 'that a new representative be forthwith elected'. When the petition was finally submitted to Parliament, this clause had given place to another merely requesting Parliament to consider of some qualifications which would secure the election only of such as are pious and faithful in the interests of the Commonwealth to sit and serve as members in the said Parliament,' in this way shifting from a demand for a dissolution to be followed by a general election, to a demand for partial elections to fill up existing vacancies. Though no direct evidence exists, there are strong reasons for believing that this substitution was made in consequence of Cromwell's intervention. Even then he did not append his signature to the petition. On It was as a mediator-not as a partisan—that Cromwell bore himself at the time when the armyafter an interval of more than two years and a halfonce more began to put pressure on Parliament. the one hand Parliament was not only discredited by its inability to undertake the reforms demanded, but still more by the widely spread belief that many of its members had made full use of their opportunities to feather their own nests. On the other hand, this discredited House, though, mutilated as it was, it had scarcely a semblance of constitutional right, was yet the only body remaining in existence to which even a semblance appertained. Cromwell might not be an authority on constitutional law, but he had an instinctive apprehension for the truth on which all constitutional law is based-that the first thing necessary in the institutions of any country is not that they shall be theoretically defensible, but that they should meet with general acceptance. Those who like ourselves can look back on that stirring time from the safe vantage ground which we occupy, can see that, so far as constitutional questions were concerned, the work of the men of the seventeenth century was to substitute Parliament for the Crown as the basis of / authority, and we have, accordingly, considerable difficulty in placing ourselves in the position of those to whom only part of the drama had been unrolled. In 1652, at least, it was impossible to appeal to the truncated Parliament as in any way representing the nation. Yet how was it possible to base authority on any new Parliament which should even approximate to such a representation? Except with extreme theorists there was no desire to evoke such a spectre. Already in 1650 Vane, speaking on behalf of the Parliamentary majority, had advocated a scheme of partial elections which left the members in possession of their seats, and the army leaders now proposed to substitute for this a general election modified by qualifications which would exclude all men of Royalist proclivities. The question at this time dividing Parliament and Army was therefore merely the choice of the best means of controlling the national verdict. The plan on either side might be one that men might reasonably adopt according to different points of view. Neither was likely to excite enthusiasm or to be generally accepted as a new basis of authority round which the nation could be expected to rally. There is no reason to suppose that Cromwell had anything better to propose, and it is certain that the theory, accepted at the present day, that it is better to allow a nation to learn by experience of misfortune than to force it, even to its own benefit, in a given direction, had no supporters in 1652, and least of all was it likely to find an advocate in Cromwell. Cromwell had the strongest faith in the virtue of conferences at which such problems could be threshed out by men of good-will separated only by intellectual differences. It had been by an appeal to a committee that he had surmounted the difficulties which had faced him when the Levellers, in 1647, called prematurely for the trial of the King. He now, in October, 1652, secured the meeting of a conference between the leading members of Parliament and the principal officers. "I believe," he afterwards declared, "we |