[Footnote 1:  Clar.  Pap. iii. 704.  Ludlow, 364, 365.  Price, 773.]

[Footnote 2:  Gumble, 270.  Two offers of assistance were made to the general, on the supposition that he might aspire to the supreme power; one from the republicans, which I have mentioned, another from Bordeaux, the French ambassador, in the name of Cardinal Mazarin.  On one of these offers he was questioned by Sir Anthony Ashley Copper in the council of state.  If we may believe Clarges, one of his secret advisers, it was respecting the former which Clarges mentioned to Cooper.  With respect to the offer from Bordeaux, he tells us that it was made through Clarges himself, and scornfully rejected by Monk, who nevertheless consented to receive a visit from Bordeaux, on condition that the subject should not be mentioned.—­Philips, 602, 604.  Locke, on the contrary, asserts that Monk accepted the offer of the French minister; that his wife, through loyalty to the king, betrayed the secret; and that Cooper put to the general such searching questions that he was confused, and, in proof of his fidelity, took away the commissions of several officers of whom the council was jealous.—­Memoirs of Shaftesbury, in Kennet’s Register, 86.  Locke, ix, 279.  See note (K).]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1660.  March 10.]

and of the property which they had acquired, as the infallible consequences of the restoration of the royal exile; and they so far wrought on the fears of the officers, that an engagement to oppose all attempts to set up a single person was presented[a] to Monk for his signature, with a request that he would solicit the concurrence of the parliament.  A second council of officers was held the next morning;[b] the general urged the inexpediency of troubling the house with new questions, when it was on the point of dissolving itself; and by the address and influence of his friends, though with considerable difficulty, he procured the suppression of the obnoxious paper.  In a short time he ordered the several officers to join their respective regiments, appointed a commission to inspect and reform the different corps, expelled all the officers whose sentiments he had reason to distrust, and then demanded and obtained from the army an engagement to abstain from all interference in matters of state, and to submit all things to the authority of the new parliament.[1]

Nineteen years and a half had now elapsed since the long parliament first assembled—­years of revolution and bloodshed, during which the nation had made the trial of almost every form of government, to return at last to that form from which it had previously departed.  On the 16th of March, one day later than was originally fixed, its existence, which had been illegally prolonged since the death of Charles I., was terminated[c] by its own act.[2] The reader is already acquainted with its history.  For the glorious stand

[Footnote 1:  Philips, 603, 606.  Price, 781.  Kennet’s Reg. 113.  Thurloe, vii. 852, 859, 870.  Pepys, i. 43.  Skinner, 279-284.]