was it?  Nothing very alarming.  A new Parliament, of a Single House, to be elected by the people very much as by use and wont, but in conformity with a well-considered scheme of “qualifications” for keeping out the dangerous; a separation, however, of the Executive from the Legislative, by the appointment, as heretofore, of a Supreme Council of State; maintenance of the Established Church, and that by Tithes till some other as ample provision should be devised; Toleration of Dissent and of free expression of religious belief, but still on this side of Quakerism and other anomalies, heresies, and extravagancies:  such, after all, was the homely outcome.  If Vane and the theorists of the Harringtonian Club were disappointed, Ludlow was even in worse despair; and at the last moment he proposed an extraordinary addition.  If the late Rump was not to be restored, and if they were to adopt a Constitution which threatened, as he feared, to let in Charles, or to put all back under the power of the sword, let them at least try to avert such consequences by defining a few fundamentals which should be inviolable, and let them appoint, under the name of Conservators of Liberty, twenty-one men to be guardians of these fundamentals.  He was humoured in this; and, three fundamentals having been agreed on—­to wit, (1) Commonwealth in perpetuity, without King, Single Person, or House of Peers, (2) Liberty of Conscience, (3) Unalterability of the Army arrangements except by the Conservators—­the Assembly proceeded to ballot on a list of persons named by Ludlow as suitable for the office of Conservators.  All went as Ludlow wished for the first seven or eight on the list,—­dexterously arranged by him so because, being all men of the Wallingford-House party except Vane and Salway, these two could hardly in decency be blackballed.  But then the order of voting was broken; and, though Ludlow himself was elected, not another man of the Parliamentarian party was let in.  Actually, the Laird of Warriston, who had declared publicly against Liberty of Conscience, and Tichbourne, who had proposed to restore Richard to the Protectorship, were preferred to such men as Hasilrig and Neville, and made guardians of fundamentals in which they did not believe.  Ludlow then threw up the entire business in disgust, and resolved that it was high time for him to be back in Ireland.  Nevertheless, his afterthought of the Fundamentals and their Conservators was incorporated into Whitlocke’s Constitution as it went back to the Committee of Safety, with the ratification of the Council of Army and Navy officers, This was on the 14th of December.  The next day the nature of the new Constitution was known to all who were interested, and there was a proclamation for a Parliament to meet in February.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Whitlocke, IV. 377-380; Ludlow, 753-769; Letters of M. de Bordeaux in Guizot, II. 306 and 315.]