should “have a fat buck of this season” out of the New Forest, Hampton Court Park, or some other deer-preserve of the Commonwealth.  The attendances in the Council through August and September averaged from twelve to sixteen, and generally included Whitlocke, Vane, Bradshaw, Hasilrig, Scott, Johnstone of Warriston, Neville, Salway, Walton, Berry, and Sydenham.  Fleetwood and Desborough were more rarely present.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals of dates and of Aug. 25 and Sept. 14 (Ashley Cooper); Whitlocke, IV. 355-362; Thurloe, VII. 731-734 (about Montague); and Order Books of Council of State from Aug. 11 to the end of September 1659.  There is a gap in the series of the Order Books, as preserved in the Record Office, between Sept. 2, 1658, the day before Oliver’s death and Aug. 11, 1659.  After Oct. 25, 1659, there is again a gap.]

Precisely in this time of triumph after Lambert’s success did the Rumpers find leisure to address themselves to the question of the Form of Government they were to set up in the Commonwealth before retiring from the scene themselves.  It was on the 8th of September that, after some previous debates in the House, it was referred to a committee of twenty-nine “to prepare something to be offered to the House in order to the settlement of the Government of this Commonwealth.”  The Committee was to sit from day to day, and to report on or before the 10th of October.  Vane was named first on the Committee, which included also Hasilrig, Whitlocke, Marten, Neville, Fleetwood, Sydenham, Salway, Scott, Chief Justice St. John, Downes, Strickland, and Sir Gilbert Pickering.  What a work for a Committee!  It was predetermined, of course, that the Constitution they were to concoct was to be one suitable for a Free Commonwealth or Republic, without King, Single Person of any other denomination, or House of Lords; but, even within that prelimitation, what a range of possibilities!  Nor were the Committee to be perplexed only by the varieties of their own inventiveness in the art of constitution-making.  All the theorists and ideologists of England, Scotland, and Ireland, were on the alert to help them, Ludlow’s summary of the various proposals made within the Committee itself, or pressed upon it from the outside, is worth quoting.  “At this time,” he says, “the opinions of men were much divided concerning a Form of Government to be established amongst us.  The great officers of the Army, as I said before, were for a Select Standing Senate, to be joined to the Representative of the People.  Others laboured to have the supreme authority to consist of an Assembly chosen by the People, and a Council of State to be chosen by that Assembly, to be vested with executive power, and accountable to that which should next succeed, at which time the power of the said Council should determine.  Some were desirous to have a Representative of the People constantly sitting, but changed by a perpetual rotation.  Others proposed that there