[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals, March 10-16; Phillips, 694; Whitlocke, IV. 405-406; Wood’s Ath.  III. 1120.]

Not even yet was there any positive intimation that the Commonwealth was defunct.  No one could declare that authoritatively, and every one might hope or believe as he liked.  The all but universal conviction, however, even among the Republicans, was that the Republic was doomed, and that, if the last and worst consummation in a return of Charles Stuart was to be prevented, it could only be by consenting to some single-person Government of a less fatal kind.  O that Richard’s Protectorate could be restored!  The thing was talked of by St. John and others, but the possibility was past.  But might not Monk himself be invested with the sovereignty?  Hasilrig and others actually went about Monk with the offer, imploring him to save his country by this last means; and the chance seemed so probable that the French ambassador, M. de Bordeaux, tried to ascertain through Clarges whether Monk’s own inclinations ran that way.  Monk was too wary for either the Rumpers or the Ambassador.  He declined the offers of Hasilrig and his friends, allowing Clarges privately to inform the Council that such had been made; and, though he received the Ambassador, it was but gruffly.  “The French ambassador visited General Monk, whom he found no accomplished courtier or statesman,” writes Whitlocke sarcastically under March 24; and the ambassador’s own account is that he could get nothing more from Monk, in reply to Mazarin’s polite messages and requests for confidence, than a reiterated statement that he had no information to give.  And so, a Single Person being inevitable, and the momentary uncertainty whether it would be “Charles, George, or Richard again” being out of the way, the long-dammed torrent had broken loose.  And what a torrent!  “King Charles!  King Charles!  King Charles!” was the cry that seemed to burst out simultaneously and irresistibly over all the British Islands.  Men had been long drinking his health secretly or half-secretly, and singing songs of the old Cavalier kind in their own houses, or in convivial meetings with their neighbours; openly Royalist pamphlets had been frequent since the abolition of Richard’s Protectorate; and, since the appearance of the Presbyterian Parliament of the secluded members, there had been hardly a pretence of suppressing any Royalist demonstrations whatever.  On the evening of the 15th of March, the day before the Parliament dissolved itself, some bold fellows had come with a ladder to the Exchange in the City of London, where stood the pedestal from which a statue of Charles I. had been thrown down, and had deliberately painted out with a brush the Republican inscription on the pedestal, “Exit tyrannus, Regum ultimus,” a large crowd gathering round them and shouting “God bless Charles the Second” round an extemporized bonfire.  That had been a signal; but for still another fortnight, though all knew what all were thinking, there had been