one step towards the restoration of the king.  But on all other questions, whenever there was a prospect of throwing impediments in the way of the ministry, or of inflaming the discontent of the people, they zealously lent their aid to the republican party.  It was proved that, while the revenue had been doubled, the expenditure had grown in a greater proportion; complaints were made of oppression, waste, embezzlement, and tyranny in the collection of the excise:  the inhumanity of selling obnoxious individuals for slaves to the West India planters was severely reprobated;[1] instances of extortion were daily announced to the house by the committee of grievances; an impeachment was ordered against Boteler, accused of oppression in his office of major-general; and another threatened against Thurloe for illegal conduct in his capacity of secretary of state.  But, while these proceedings awakened the hopes and gratified the resentments of the people, they at the same time spread alarm through the army; every man conscious of having abused the power of the sword began to tremble for his own safety; and an unusual ferment, the sure presage of military violence, was observable at the head-quarters of the several regiments.

[Footnote 1:  Clar.  Pap. iii. 429, 432.  Thurloe, 647.  Burton’s Diary, iii. 448; iv. 255, 263, 301, 403, 429.  One petition stated that seventy persons who had been apprehended on account of the Salisbury rising, after a year’s imprisonment, had been sold at Barbadoes for “1550 pounds’ weight of sugar a-piece, more or less, according to their working faculties.”  Among them were divines, officers, and gentlemen, who were represented as “grinding at the mills, attending at the furnaces, and digging in that scorching island, being bought and sold still from one planter to another, or attached as horses or beasts for the debts of their masters, being whipped at the whipping-posts as rogues at their masters’ pleasure, and sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England.”—­Ibid. 256.  See also Thurloe, i. 745.]

Hitherto the general officers had been divided between Whitehall and Wallingford House, the residences of Richard and of Fleetwood.  At Whitehall, the Lord Falconberg, brother-in-law to the protector, Charles Howard, whom Oliver had created a viscount,[1] Ingoldsby, Whalley, Goffe, and a few others, formed a military council for the purpose of maintaining the ascendancy of Richard in the army.  At Wallingford House, Fleetwood and his friends consulted how they might deprive him of the command, and reduce him to the situation of a civil magistrate; but now a third and more numerous council appeared at St. James’s, consisting of most of the inferior officers, and guided by the secret intrigues of Lambert, who, holding no commission himself, abstained from sitting among them, and by the open influence of Desborough, a bold and reckless man, who began to despise the weak and wavering conduct of Fleetwood.  Here originated the plan