[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals of dates given, and of Feb. 26 and April 2; Guizot, I. 103-104.]

April 1659 was the third month of the Parliament.  About a hundred of the members hitherto in attendance had then withdrawn, and the attendances had sunk to between 150 and 270.  This was the more ominous because the struggle had now ceased to be one between the Protector’s Government and the Opposition, and had become one between the Court Party and the Army or Wallingford-House Party for the farther use of Thurloe’s victories.

The Republicans, foiled in their own measures, had entered into relations with the Wallingford-House magnates.  True, these were not, for the nonce, Republicans.  On the contrary, they were still one wing of the declared supporters of Richard’s Protectorship, and their chiefs all but composed that Other House the rights of which Thurloe had vindicated so manfully against the Republicans, and which was now therefore a working part of the Legislature.  But might there not be ways and means of breaking down the allegiance of the Wallingford-House men to the Protectorate, their present implication with it notwithstanding?  They were primarily Army-chiefs, and only secondarily politicians for the Protectorate; behind them was the Army itself, charged with Republican sentiments from of old, and with not a few important officers in it who were Republicans re-avowed; and, besides, they were politicians for the Protectorate in an interest of their own which quite separated them from the Court Party.  Might not these differences between the Court Party and the Wallingford-House Party be so operated upon as to force the Court Party into open antagonism to the Army, and so leave the Wallingford-House men no option but to fall back upon Army Republicanism and make the Army an agent, in spite of themselves, for the “good Old Cause”?  How well-founded was this calculation will appear if we remember one or two facts.  Cessation of Army-domination in politics, and reliance on massive public feeling and on constitutional methods, were now fixed principles of the Court Party.  Monk had expressed them when he advised Richard to reduce the Army and get rid of superfluous officers, assuring him that the most disaffected officer, once discharged, would be a very harmless animal.  Henry Cromwell had expressed the same in that letter to Fleetwood in which he sighed for the happy time when the Army would never be heard of except when it was fighting.  Thurloe, Broghill, Falconbridge, and the rest, were of the same general opinion; and parts of the Army itself, they believed, had been schooled into docility.  Monk could answer for the troops and officers in Scotland, Henry Cromwell for those in Ireland, and Lockhart for those in Flanders.  But then there was the great body of soldiers and officers in England, with London for their rendezvous.  To them abnegation of direct influence in politics was death.  It was not only their arrears that they saw endangered, but that Army