Parliamentary use and wont, with no great new-fangled inventions, but only prudent modifications and precautions; preservation of the Established Church, the Universities, and the existing legal system; Liberty of Conscience certainly, but so guarded as not to give reins to Quakerism and other Sectarian excesses:  these were the recommendations of Whitlocke.  The Laird of Warriston, it appears, who was not on the Sub-Committee, took up a position of his own in the General Committee, which was neither Vane’s nor Whitlocke’s, but represented what Ludlow calls “the Scottish interest.”  One of its principles was that Liberty of Conscience should be very limited indeed.  And so, through November, while Monk was consolidating his forces in Scotland, the discussion of the new Constitution had been straggling on in the Sub-Committee and Committee at Whitehall, and in less authorized assemblies in the same neighbourhood.  Among these, besides a clerical conclave of Independent ministers, such as Owen and Nye, meeting at the Savoy and advising Whitlocke on the Church-question, one must specially remember Harrington’s Rota Club at the Turk’s Head in New Palace Yard.  That institution was now in its full nightly glory, discussing all the questions that were discussed in Whitehall and many more.  It had won by this time the crowning distinction of being a subject of daily jokes and witticisms.  In a London squib of Nov. 12, 1659, laughing at Harrington and his Rota-men, the public were informed that among the last “decrees and orders of the Committee of Safety of the Commonwealth of Oceana” had been these three:—­1.  “That the politic casuists of the Coffee Club in Bow Street [had the Rota adjourned thither, or was this some other debating Club?] appoint some of their number to instruct the Committee of Safety at Whitehall how they shall find an invention to escape Tyburn, if ever the law be restored; 2.  That Harrington’s Aphorisms and other political slips be recommended to the English Plantation in Jamaica, to try how they will agree with that apocryphal purchase; 3.  That a Levite and an Elder be sent to survey the Government of the Moon, and that Warriston Johnstone and Parson Peters be the men, as a couple of learned Rabbis in Lunatics.”  Heedless of such mockery, the Harringtonians did not cease to put forth their own pamphlets with all seriousness. Valerius and Publicola, or the True Form of a Popular Commonwealth extracted e puris naturalibus is the title of a dialogue of Harrington’s, of Nov. 17, expounding his principles afresh.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Whitlocke, IV. 376 and 379-380; Ludlow, 751-752; Letters of M. de Bordeaux, in Appendix to Guizot, II. 275, 293, 304; Thomason Tract of date, entitled Decrees and Orders, &c.; and Thomason Catalogue.]