Two conclusions at least had been arrived at in the Sub-Committee and Committee, and approved by the Wallingford-House Council of officers, before the middle of November, when they were actually embodied in the Treaty with Monk’s Commissioners in London.  One was as to the mode of determining Parliamentary qualifications.  That duty was to be entrusted to a body of nineteen persons, ten of them named (Whitlocke, Vane, Ludlow, St. John, Warriston, &c.), and the other nine to be chosen by the Armies of England, Ireland, and Scotland, three by each.  A still more important conclusion was as to the body, intermediate between the present powers and the People, to which the whole Constitution should be submitted for revision and ratification before being imposed upon the People.  It was to be a great Representative Council of the Army and Navy, to be composed of delegates in the proportion of two commissioned officers from each regiment in England, Scotland, or Ireland, chosen by the commissioned officers of the regiments severally, together with ten naval officers to be chosen by the officers of the Fleet collectively.  To Ludlow, approving only coldly of all that departed from his fixed idea of sheer restitution of the Rump, this arrangement seemed, nevertheless, a very fair one.  It was settled, in fact, that the great Representative Council should meet at Whitehall on the 6th of December, by which time the complete draft of the Constitution would be ready.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Whitlocke, IV. 374; Phillips. 671-672.]

The Army and Navy Council did meet on that day, and it is from their proceedings that we learn best the nature of the Constitution submitted to them.  The meeting, indeed, was not the great one that had been expected.  The delegates from Ireland had not arrived; none had come from Monk’s army, though due intimation had been given to him and he was reckoned bound by the Treaty; and, of course, in the circumstances, delegates could not be spared from Lambert’s.  There was, however, a sufficient gathering, and Ludlow attended, by request, as one representative from Ireland.  In a debate of five or six days all the questions that had been discussed in the Committee of Safety and its Sub-Committee were discussed over again, Ludlow and Colonel Rich fighting for the restitution of the Rump even yet as the one thing needful, others starting wild proposals even yet for a restoration of the Protectorate, but Fleetwood, Desborough, and the majority urging substantially the proposals that had come from the Committee of Safety, or rather a reduction of those, by the omission of such portions of them as were Vane’s, to the moderate and conservative core which might be regarded as Whitlocke’s.  As Whitlocke himself was permitted to be present and advise in the Council, he was able to contribute much to this result by his lawyerly gravity and frequent mentions of the Great Seal.  Altogether the Constitution as it passed the Council may be considered as his.  And what