Ever since Richard’s fall, to which he had so largely contributed, Fleetwood had comported himself as a dignified and sweet-mannered man, more acceptable in the highest place than Lambert, but uneasy in his mind, and uncomfortable in his relations to Lambert.  He was a deeply religious man, which Lambert was not; and it was observed that on late occasions in the Council of Officers, when bad news made some sudden resolution necessary, and Lambert would have been, ready with one, Fleetwood’s one resource had been “Gentlemen, let us pray.”  One thinks of Fleetwood’s brother-in-law, poor Henry Cromwell, and what he might have been in Fleetwood’s place.  He, the man of real fitness, was in seclusion in Cambridgeshire, rejected where he was most needed, and indeed, though he did not yet fully know it, foreclosed already, at the age of thirty-one, by his own honourable fidelity to his father’s ashes, from all farther career or employment in any English world.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Phillips, 674-676; Whitlocke, IV. 378-380; Skinner, 170-178; Thurloe, VII. 797-798 (Letter of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Scott, &c., to Fleetwood); Guizot, II. 54-57; Letters of M. de Bordeaux in Appendix to Guizot, II. 307-318.]

It was close on Christmas, and the anarchy in London had become indescribable.  “I wished myself out of these daily hazards, but knew not how to get free of them,” is Whitlocke’s entry in his diary for Dec. 20; and, under Dec. 22, he writes, “Most of the soldiery about London declared their judgment to have the Parliament sit again, in honour, freedom, and safety; and now those who formerly were most eager for Fleetwood’s party became as violent against them, and for the Parliament to sit again.”  In other words, the soldiers of Fleetwood’s own London regiments were tired of being insulted and jeered at, and had come to the conclusion, with their brethren everywhere else, that Lambert’s coup d’etat of Oct. 13 had been a blunder and that the Rump must be reinstated.—­In these circumstances, Whitlocke, after consultation with Lord Willoughby of Parham, the Presbyterian Major-General Browne, and others, thought himself justified in going to Fleetwood with a very desperate project.  It was evident, Whitlocke told him, that Monk’s design was to bring in the King; if so, the King’s return was inevitable; and, if the King should return by Monk’s means, the lives and fortunes of all in the Wallingford-House connexion were at the King’s or Monk’s mercy.  Would not Fleetwood be beforehand with Monk, and himself be the agent of the unavoidable restoration?  He might adopt either of two plans, an indirect or a direct.  The indirect plan would be to fraternize with the City, declare for “a full and free Parliament”—­not that Parliament for which Whitlocke was preparing writs, but the fuller and freer one, unfettered by Wallingford-House “qualifications,” for which the Royalists had been astutely calling out,—­and then either take the field with his forces under that