Whoever has studied the character of Cromwell will have remarked the anxiety with which he laboured to conceal his real designs from the notice of his adherents.  If credit were due to his assertions, he cherished none of those aspiring thoughts which agitate the breasts of the ambitious; the consciousness of his weakness taught him to shrink from the responsibility of power; and at every step in his ascent to greatness, he affected to sacrifice his own feelings to the judgment and importunity of others.  But in dissolving the late parliament he had deviated from this his ordinary course:  he had been compelled to come boldly forward by the obstinacy or the policy of his opponents, who during twelve months had triumphed over his intrigues, and were preparing to pass an act which would place new obstacles in his path.  Now, however, that he had forcibly taken into his own hands the reins of government, it remained for him to determine whether he should retain them in his grasp, or deliver them over to others.  He preferred the latter for the maturity of time was not yet come:  he saw that, among the officers who blindly submitted to be the tools of his ambition, there were several who would abandon the idol of their worship, whenever they should suspect him of a design to subvert the public liberty.  But if he parted with power for the moment, it was in such manner as to warrant the hope that it would shortly return to him under another form, not as won by the sword of the military, but as deposited in his hands by the judgment of parliament.

It could not escape the sagacity of the lord-general that the fanatics, with whose aid he had subverted the late government, were not the men to be intrusted with the destinies of the three kingdoms; yet he deemed it his interest to indulge them in their wild notions of civil and religious reformation, and to suffer himself for a while to be guided by their counsels.  Their first measure was to publish a Vindication of their Proceedings.[1] The long parliament they pronounced[a] incapable “of answering those ends which God, his people, and the whole nation, expected.”  Had it been permitted to sit a day longer, it would “at one blow have laid in the dust the interest of all honest men and of their glorious cause.”  In its place the council of war would “call to the government persons of approved fidelity and honesty;” and therefore required “public officers and ministers to proceed in their respective places,” and conjured “those who feared and loved the name of the Lord, to be instant with him day and night in their behalf."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Printed by Henry Hills and Thomas Brewster, printers to the army, 1653.]

[Footnote 2:  Ludlow, ii. 24.  Thurloe, i. 289, 395.  Sir H. Vane, after all the affronts which he had received, was offered a place in the council; but he replied that, though the reign of the saints was begun, he would defer his share in it till he should go to heaven.—­Thurloe, i. 265.]