guidance.  On the 22nd, as he was approaching Leicester, Messrs. Scott and Robinson, who had been sent from London as Commissioners from the Rump to attend him in the rest of his march, made their appearance ceremoniously and were duly received.  They had come really as anxious spies on Monk’s conduct, and were very inquisitive and loquacious; but they relieved him thenceforth of much of the trouble of answering the deputations and addresses by which he was still beset on his route.  They were with him at Northampton, where he was on the 24th; at Dunstable, where he was on the 27th; and at St. Alban’s, where he arrived on the 28th.  Here, twenty miles from London, he rested for five days, to see the issue of a very important message he had been secretly preparing for the Parliament and which he now sent on by Dr. Clarges.  It was a request to the House to clear London of all but two of the regiments then in it, on the ground that, having so recently served Fleetwood and the Wallingford-House party in their usurpation, they were not to be trusted.  The message was of a kind to surprise and perplex the House, and Monk had purposely reserved it to this late stage of his march that there might be the less time for discussion.  While waiting at St. Alban’s, he had to endure, we are told, “amongst the rest of his interruptions,” a long fast-day sermon from Hugh Peters, who had come to his quarters, with two other ministers.  Monk’s chaplain, Dr. Price, who was present at the sermon, has left an account of it.  The text was Psalm cvii. 7, “And He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation”; and Peters, in discoursing on this text, drew from it the assurance of a happy settlement of the Commonwealth at last.  “With his fingers on the cushion,” says Dr. Price, “he measured the right way from the Red Sea, through, the Wilderness, to Canaan; told us it was not forty days’ march, but God led Israel forty years through the Wilderness before they came thither; yet this was still the Lord’s right way, who led his people crinkledum cum crankledum.”  Monk’s present march was to be one of the last of the windings.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Skinner’s Life of Monk, 175-199; Phillips, 677-680; Parl.  Hist., III. 1574 (quotation from Dr. Price).]

While Monk is at St. Alban’s, we may inquire into his real intentions.  They connect themselves with the purport of those addresses with which he had been troubled along his whole route.  Not only had there been addresses from the inhabitants or authorities of the towns he passed through; but there had been letters to him at Morpeth from the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, of the City of London, followed by an address presented to him on the borders of Northamptonshire by a deputation of three commissioners from the City, two of them Aldermen.  Now, almost all the addresses had been in one strain.  Thanking Monk for what he had already done, they prayed him to earn the farther gratitude