enactment that no officer or soldier should be cashiered without the sentence of a court martial. Oliver was perfectly right in holding that the attack on the other House was equivalent to an assault on the constitutional Protectorate.

He had himself looked to that House

as restoring to him in another form the powers which he had abandoned when he let fall the Instrument. By keeping in his own hands the selection of its members, and providing that that House should have a veto on subsequent nominations—the principle of inheritance being totally excluded-he imagined that he had sufficiently provided for the future. His objects in so doing may be taken as those set forth by a writer who had ample means of gathering his intentions. "It was no small task for the Protector to find idoneous men for this place, because the future security of the honest interest seemed-under God-to be laid up in them; for by a moral generation, if they were well chosen at the first, they would propagate their own kind, when the single person could not, and the Commons, who represented the nation, would not, having in them for the most part the spirit of those they represent, which hath little affinity with a respect of the cause of God." It is easy to criticise such a principle from a modern point of view. Yet if the morality of Oliver's political actions are ever to be judged fairly, it must never be forgotten that the right of an honest Government to prevent the people

from injuring themselves by out-voting the saner members of the community was rather than any democratic or Parliamentary theory-the predominant note of his career. It is this at least which explains his assent to the choice of the nominated Parliament, as well as his breach with the Parliaments which he dismissed in 1655 and 1658.

Such views could not but lead the Protector to a breach with his second Parliament as well. The men who were grumbling at the insolence of his new lords were, as he well knew, prepared to follow up their attack by another more directly aimed at his own authority. The remainder of the Protector's speech is only intelligible on this supposition. Professing his intention to stand by the new constitution, he accused his opponents of a design to subvert it. "These things," he asseverated, "lead to nothing else but to the playing of the King of Scots' game-if I may so call him and I think myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent it; and if this be so, I do assign it to this cause-your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which might prove the settlement of the nation; and if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I do dissolve this Parliament ! And let God be judge between you and me!"

No man knew better than Oliver the weight of the

blow that had fallen on him. His attempt to govern constitutionally with a Parliamentary constitution had proved as impracticable as his attempt to govern constitutionally with a military constitution For a whole week he shut himself up, meditating apart from his Council on the means of repairing the disaster. Only once during the whole time did he even appear in his family circle. Then after prolonged consultation with advisers gathered from far and near, he resolved to summon another Parliament to meet in that very spring. He at least would stand firmly by the constitution to which he had sworn, and he could but hope that the nation would be equally loyal when the choice between ordered liberty and the unrestricted government of a single House was fairly set before the electors. It was the remedy applied afterwards by William III. to a similar mischief, and not applied in vain.

Unfortunately for Cromwell the circumstances were not the same. It is unnecessary here to discuss the relative merits of written and unwritten constitutions on the one hand, or of a dominant Parliament and a dominant executive on the other. The one form of government or the other may be desirable in different nations or at different times. The one thing needful is that the institutions of a nation, whatever they be, shall be supported by the national sentiment. It was this that Oliver had never succeeded in evoking,

because he had never appealed to it, and he was hardly likely to succeed in evoking it now. He could, for a time-and only for a time-rule England with an army He could not rule it with a piece of paper. At no long distance, as he already saw, the unchecked supremacy of Parliament would bring back the Stuarts, because the traditional hold of the old monarchy upon the minds of men was the only power capable of keeping in check alike the tyranny of the army, and the anarchy which could not but arise if contending parties were left to struggle for the mastery without fear of military intervention. Oliver's own power for good was growing feebler. Financial embarrassments gathered round him. The sailors and soldiers went unpaid, even though Bremen had not been occupied and no English army was struggling-it can hardly be doubted-towards certain defeat in the heart of Germany.

The Parliament he contemplated never came into existence. Another great Royalist plot took up for a time all the energies of the Government. Oliver, with his usual clemency, contented himself with two executions, those of Dr. Hewit and Sir Henry Slingsby, whilst three more victims expiated their share in a project for raising a tumult in London. Once again affairs appeared to take a more favourable turn. The victory of the Dunes, in which the French army, aided by 6,000 English troops, overthrew the Spaniards,

was won on June 4, whilst the surrender of Dunkirk on the 14th, together with the subsequent gains of the allies in Flanders put out of the question any landing of the exiled King in England with Spanish aid. The thought of bringing a new Parliament together might seem capable of realisation under these happy auspices, and preparations were made for its meeting in November.

Whether that Parliament, if ever it had met, would have supported the Protectorate more firmly than its predecessors, is a question which can never be answered. All that can be said is that the radical elements of the situation remained unchanged. Oliver had been deeply saddened by his failure, and his anxious thoughts told on his already enfeebled health. Death had been busy in his family circle. Young Rich, the newly wedded husband of his daughter Frances, died in February. On August 6 his bestbeloved daughter, Lady Claypole, passed away after a long and painful illness. Oliver's sorrowing vigils by her bedside broke down what remained to him of bodily endurance. Now and again indeed he was able to take the air, and on one of these occasions George Fox coming to talk with him on the persecutions of the Friends, marked the changed expression of his face. "Before I came to him," noted Fox, "as

*Her second marriage with Sir John Russell took place after the Restoration,