two Houses, was discussed, and adopted without a division; after which there were discussions and adoptions of the remaining proposals, day after day, with occasional divisions about the wording, till March 24.  On that day, the House, their survey of the document being tolerably complete, went back on the postponed clause of the First Article, involving the all-important question of the offer of the Kingship.  Through two sittings that day, and again on March 25 (New Year’s Day, 1657), there was a very anxious and earnest debate with closed doors, the opposition trying to stave off the final vote by two motions for adjournment.  These having failed, the final vote was taken (March 25); when, by a majority of 123 to 62, the Kingship clause was carried in this amended form:  “That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and to exercise the same according to the laws of these Nations.”  Then, it seemed, all was over, except verbal revision of the entire address.  Next day (March 26) it was referred to a Committee, with Chief Justice Glynne for Chairman, to perform this—­i.e. to “consider of the title, preamble, and conclusion, and read over the whole, and consider the coherence, and make it perfect.”  All which having been done that same day, and the House having given some last touches, the document was ready to be engrossed for presentation to Cromwell.  By recommendation of the Committee, the title had been changed from Address and Remonstrance into Petition and Advice.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals of dates, and between March 5 and March 25.]

Of course, the great proposal in Parliament had been rumoured through the land, notwithstanding the instructed reticence or mysterious vagueness of the London newspapers; and, in the interval between the introduction of Sir Christopher Pack’s paper and the conversion of the same into the Petition and Advice, with the distinct offer of Kingship in its forefront, there had been wide discussion of the affair, with much division of opinion.  Against the Kingship, even horrified by the proposal of it, were most of those Army-men who had hitherto been Oliverians, and had helped to found the Protectorate.  Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough, were at the head of this military opposition, which included nearly all the other ex-Major-Generals, and the bulk of the Colonels and inferior officers.  One of their motives was dread of the consequences to themselves from a subversion of the system under which they had been acting and a return to a Constitutional and Royal system in which Cromwell and they might have to part company.  This, and a theoretical Republicanism still lingering in their minds, tended, in the present emergency, almost to a reunion between them and the old or Anti-Oliverian Republicans.  It had been