How far Cromwell had been aware beforehand of such a project as that of Sir Christopher Pack’s paper may be a question.  That he had let it be known for some time that he was not disinclined to a revision and enlargement of the constitution of the original Protectorate may be fairly assumed; but that he had concocted Pack’s project and arranged for bringing it on (which is Ludlow’s representation, and, of course, that of all the Histories) is very unlikely.  The project, as in Pack’s paper, and as agreed upon by Whitlocke, Glynne, and other lawyers and Parliament men, was by no means, in all its parts, such a project as Cromwell himself would have originated.  To the Kingship he may have had no objection, and we have his own word afterwards that he favoured the idea of a Second House of Parliament; but there were accompanying provisions not so satisfactory.  What he had hitherto valued in his Protectorate was the place and scope given to his own supreme personality, his power to judge what was best and to carry it through as he could, unhampered by those popular suffrages and Parliamentary checks and privileges which he held to be mere euphemisms for ruin and mutual throat-cutting all through the British Islands in their then state of distraction; and it must therefore have been a serious consideration with him how far, in the public interests, or for his own comfort, he could put himself in new shackles for the mere name of King.  What, for example, of the proposed restitution of the ninety-and-odd excluded members to the present Parliament?  How could he get on after that?  In short, there was so much in Pack’s paper suggestive of new and difficult questions as to the futurity of Cromwell, his real influence in affairs, if he exchanged the Protectorship for Kingship, that the paper, or the exact project it embodied, cannot have been of Cromwell’s devising.  There are subsequent events in proof of the fact.

On the 27th of February, the fourth day after the introduction of Pack’s paper, and the very day of the Fast appointed by the House prior to consideration of it in detail, Cromwell had been waited on by a hundred officers, headed by the alarmed Major-Generals, imploring him not to allow the thing to go farther.  His reply was that, though he then specifically heard of the whole project for the first time, he could by no means share their instantaneous alarm.  Kingship was nothing in itself, at best “a mere feather in a man’s hat”; but it need be no bugbear, and at least ought to be no new thing to them.  Had they not offered it to him at the institution of the Protectorate, though the title of Protector had been then preferred?  Under that title he had been often a mere drudge of the Army, constrained to things not to his own liking.  For the rest, were there not reasons for amending, in other respects, the constitution of the Protectorate?  Had it not broken down in several matters, and were there not deficiencies in it?  If there had been