their connexions, and only the steadiness of Rons, Sydenham, and the other sober spirits, in making that vote the occasion of a resurrender of all power into Cromwell’s hands, had prevented the consequences.  And so, Cromwell’s Protectorate having come in where Harrison wanted to keep a vacuum for the Fifth Monarchy, and that Protectorate having not only conserved Tithes and an Established Church, but professed them to be parts of its very basis, Harrison had abjured Cromwell for ever.  “Those who had been to me as the apple of my eye,” said Harrison afterwards, “when they had turned aside, said to me, Sit thou on my right hand; but I loathed it.”  Through the Protectorate, accordingly, Harrison, dismissed from the Army, had been living as a suspected person, with great powers of harm; and, three or four times, when there were Republican risings, or threatenings of such, it had been thought necessary to question him, or put him under temporary arrest.  The last occasion had been just before the opening of the present Parliament, when he was arrested with Vane, Rich, and others, and had the distinction of being sent as far off as Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, while Vane was sent only to the Isle of Wight, and Rich only to Windsor.  The imprisonments, however, being merely precautionary, had been but short; and, at the time of the proposal of the Kingship to Cromwell, Harrison, as well as the others, was again at liberty.

That Harrison had ever practically implicated himself in any attempt to upset the Protectorate by force hardly appears from the evidence.  He was an experienced soldier, and, with all his fervid notions of a Fifth Monarchy, too massive a man to stir without calculation.  All that can be said is that he was an avowed enemy of Cromwell’s rule, that he was looked up to by all the Fifth-Monarchy Republicans, and that he held himself free to act should there be fit opportunity.  But there were Harrisonians of a lower grade than Harrison.  Especially in London, since the winter of 1655, there had been a kind of society of Fifth-Monarchy Men, holding small meetings in five places, only one man in each meeting knowing who belonged to the others, but the five connecting links forming a central Committee for management and propagandism.  It must have been from this Committee, I suppose, that there emanated, in Sept. 1656, a pamphlet called “The Banner of Truth displayed, or a Testimony for Christ and against Antichrist:  being the substance of several consultations holden and kept by a certain number of Christians who are waiting for the visible appearance of Christ’s Kingdom in and over the World, and residing in and about the City of London.”  Probably as yet these humble Fifth-Monarchy Men had not gone beyond private aspirations.  At all events, Thurloe, though aware of their existence, had not thought them worth notice.  But Sindercombe’s Plot of Feb. 1656-7, and the subsequent proposal of the Kingship for Cromwell, had excited them prodigiously,