Monk was now at Coldstream, on the Tweed, about nine miles from Berwick.  On the 13th of December he had taken leave, at Berwick, of a deputation of Scottish nobles and gentlemen, headed by the Earls of Glencairn, Tullibardine, Rothes, Roxburgh, and Wemyss, who had come from Edinburgh with certain propositions and requests.  As he was going into England, leaving Scotland garrisoned but by a poor residue of his soldiers, would he not permit the shires to raise small native forces for police purposes, or would he not at least restore to the Scottish nobility and gentry the privilege of wearing arms themselves and having their servants armed?  Farther, might he not, a little while hence, sanction a general arming, so that Scotland might have the pleasure of putting 6000 foot and 1500 horse at his disposal?  The minor requests were, within certain limits, granted easily; but against the last Monk was still very wary.  To have granted it would have been to proclaim that he was taking the Scottish nation with him in his enterprise, and so give indubitable foundation to those rumours that “the King was at the bottom of it” which were flying about already, and which it was his first care to contradict.  There must be no general arming of the Scots:  he would march into England with his own little army only!  Still, however, he did not move from Coldstream, but stuck there, exchanging messages with Lambert respecting the renewal of the Treaty.  It was now dead winter, and the snow lay thick over the whole region between the two Generals.  Monk’s personal accommodations at Coldstream were much worse than Lambert’s at Newcastle.  He was quartered in a wretched cottage, with two barns, where, on the first night of his arrival, he could find nothing for supper, and had to munch more than his usual allowance of raw tobacco instead.  But he had the means of paying his men and keeping them in good humour, while bad pay and the cold weather were demoralising Lambert’s.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Skinner’s Life of Monk, 161-168; Phillips, 674-675.]

For the restitution of the Rump Parliament, Monk’s march into England was to be quite unnecessary.  His mere pertinacity in declaring himself the champion of the Rump and making preparations for the march had disintegrated all that seemingly coherent strength of the Wallingford-House party throughout England and Ireland on which Lambert could rely when he left London in the beginning of November.  All over England and Ireland, for six weeks now, people had been talking of “Silent Old George,” as Monk’s own soldiers called him, though he was but in his fifty-second year, and speculating on his possible meaning, and on the chance that even Lambert might find him more than a match.  And such mere gossip and curiosity everywhere, mingling with previous doubtings in some quarters, and with relics of positive partisanship with the Rump in others, had gradually induced a complete whirl of public feeling.  By the middle of December, when the Wallingford-House