His reply to Widdrington then (Speech IX.) did not withdraw his former refusal, but signified willingness to receive farther information and counsel.  To give such information and counsel, and In fact to reason out the matter thoroughly with Cromwell, the House then appointed a large Committee of ninety-nine, composed in the main, one must fancy, of members who were now eager for the Kingship, or at least had ceased to object.  Whitlocke, Broghill, Glynne, Fiennes, Lenthall, Lord Commissioner Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley, and Thurloe, were to be the most active members of this Committee; but it included also Admiral Montague, Generals Howard, Jephson, Whalley, Pack, Goffe, and Berry, with Sydenham, Rous, the Scotch Earl of Tweeddale, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the poet Waller, and even Strickland.  The Committee was appointed April 9, and the House was to await the issue.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Carlyle, III. 218-228 (with Cromwell’s Speeches VII., VIII., and IX.); Commons Journals of dates.]

It seemed as if it would never be reached.  The Conferences of the Committee with Cromwell between April 11 to May 8, their reasonings with him to induce him to accept the Kingship, his reasonings in reply in the four speeches now numbered X.-XIII. of the Cromwell series, his doubts, delays, avoidances of several meetings, and constant adjournments of his final answer, make a story of great interest in the study of Cromwell’s character, not without remarkable flashes of light on past transactions, and on Cromwell’s theory of his Protectorship and of Government in general.  Speech XIII., in particular, which is by far the longest, and which was addressed to the Committee on April 21, is full of instruction.  Having in his previous speeches dealt chiefly with the subject of the Kingship, and stated such various objections to the kingly title as the bad associations with it, the blasting as if for ever which it had received from God’s Providence in England, and the antipathy to it of many good men, he here took up the rest of the Petition and Advice.  Approving, on the whole, of the spirit and contents of the document, and especially of the apparent rejection in it of that notion of perpetually-sitting Single-House Parliaments which he considered the most fatal fallacy in politics, and persistence in which by the Rump had left him no option but to dissolve that body forcibly and assume the Dictatorship, he yet found serious defects in some of the Articles, and want of precision on this point and that.  His criticisms of this kind were masterly examples of his breadth of thought, his foresight, and his practical sagacity, and made an immediate impression.  For, at this stage of the proceedings, the belief being that he would ultimately accept the Kingship, the House, whose sittings had been little more than nominal during the great Whitehall Conferences, applied itself vigorously, by deliberations in Committee and exchanges of papers with the Protector,