This is against fighting ever hereafter.

If so, let us make peace, be it

never so base." Each of the two men had fixed upon one side of the problem which England was called upon to solve. Manchester was appalled by the political difficulty. There stood the Kingship accepted by generation after generation, fenced about with safeguards of law and custom, and likely to be accepted in one form or another by generations to come. A single decisive victory gained by Charles would not only expose those who had dared to make war on him to the hideous penalties of the law of treason-but would enable him to measure the terms of

submission by his own resolves. If Manchester had had the power of looking into futurity, he would have argued that no military success-not even the abolition of monarchy, and the execution of the monarch—would avail to postpone the restoration of Charles's heir for more than a little while.

Cromwell's reply did not even pretend to meet the difficulty. It was not in him to forecast the prospects of kingship in England, or to vex his mind with the consequences of a problematical Royalist victory. It was enough for him to grasp the actual situation. It is true that, at this time, he had not got beyond the position from which the whole of the Parliamentary party had started at the beginning of the war-the position that the war must be ended by a compact between King and Parliament. To Cromwell, therefore, whose heart was set upon the liberation of those who, in his eyes, were the people of God, and the overthrow of that which he regarded as a substitution of ceremonial observances for the religion of the heart, the immediate duty of the moment was to secure that, when the time of negotiation arrived, the right side should be in possession of sufficient military force to enable it to dictate the terms of peace. It was his part not to consider what the King might do if he proved victorious, but to take good care that he was signally defeated. Strange to say, the folly of the Presbyterian party-strong in the two Houses, and in the support of the Scottish army, was playing into Cromwell's hands. On November 20, ten

days after Cromwell's altercations with Manchester, Parliament sent to Oxford terms of peace so harsh as to place their acceptance outside the bounds of possibility. The royal power was to be reduced to a cipher, whilst such a form of religion as might be agreed upon by the Houses, in accordance with the Covenant, was to be imposed on all Englishmen, without toleration either for the sects favoured by Cromwell, or for the Church of Andrewes and Laud which found one of its warmest and most conscientious supporters in Charles. Every man in the three kingdoms, including the King himself, was to be bound to swear to the observance of the Covenant. Such a demand naturally met with stern resistance. "There are three things," replied Charles, "I will not part with the Church, my crown, and my friends; and you will have much ado to get them from me.” It needed no action on the part of Cromwell to secure the failure of such a negotiation, and, as far as we are aware, no word passed his lips in public on the subject.

On November 25, Cromwell appeared in Parliament to urge on the one thing immediately necessary, the forging of an instrument by which the King might be ruined in the field. It was much that the existing military system by which separate armies, to a great extent composed of local forces, and therefore unable to subordinate local to national objects, had been placed under commanders selected for their political or social eminence, had completely broken down. So far was this recognised that, two days before Cromwell's arrival at Westminster, a committee had been appointed, without opposition, to "consider of a frame or model of the whole militia." It was perhaps to assist the committee to come to a right conclusion. his arrival at Westminster, Cromwell indignantly assailed Manchester as guilty of all the errors which had led to the deplorable result at Newbury. Manchester was not slow in throwing all the blame on Cromwell, and it seemed as if the gravest political questions were to be thrust aside by a personal altercation. So angry were the Scottish members of the Committee of both kingdoms, a body which had recently been appointed

that upon

EDWARD, SECOND EARL OF MANCHESTER,

From the Painting by Vandyke, in the collection of the Duke of Manchester, at Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire.