was ready to call one and would take all the chances.  His immediate necessity, of course, was money.  His second Parliament, at the close of its first and loyal session in June 1657, had provided ordinary supplies for three years; but there had been no new revenue-arrangements in the short second session, and the current expenses for the Flanders expedition, the various Embassies, the Court, and the whole conduct of the Government, far outran the voted income.  The pay of the armies in England, Scotland, and Ireland was greatly in arrears; on all hands there were straits for money; and, whatever might be done by expedients and ingenuity meanwhile, the effective extrication could only be by a Parliament.  Not for subsidies only, however, was Cromwell willing to resort again to that agency, with all its perils.  He believed that, in consequence of what had passed since the Dissolution in January, any Parliament that should now meet him would be in a different mood towards himself from that he had recently encountered.  Then might there not be proposals, in which he and such a Parliament might agree, for constitutional changes in advance of the Articles of the Petition and Advice, though in the same direction of orderliness and settled and stately rule?  Was there not wide regret among the civilians that he had not accepted the Kingship; had his refusal of it been really wise; might not that question be reopened?  With that question might there not go the question of the succession, whether by nomination for one life only as was now fixed, or by perpetual nomination, or by a return to the hereditary and dynastic principle which the lawyers and the civilians thought the best?  Nor could the Second House of Parliament remain the vague thing it had been so far fashioned.  It must be amended in the points in which its weakness had been proved; and all the evidence hitherto was that it must be made truly and formally a House of Lords, if even with the reinstitution of a peerage as part and parcel of the legislative system.  Whether such a peerage should be hereditary or for life only might be in doubt; but there were symptoms that, even if the Legislative Peerage should be only for life, Cromwell had convinced himself of the utility, for general purposes, of at least a Social Peerage with, hereditary rank and titles.  In his First Protectorate he had made knights only; in his Second he created a few baronets.  Nay, besides favouring the courtesy appellation of “lords,” as applied to all who had sat in the late Upper House and to the great officers of State, he had added at least two peers of his own making to the hereditary peerage as it had come down from the late reign.[1]