them at the same time of that principle of the submission of the military to the civil authority which he and they had accepted.  On this principle alone, and without a word implying desertion, of the Commonwealth, he prohibited any more meetings or agitations, and caused strict orders to that effect from the Council of State to be read at the head of every regiment.  But an ingenious device of Clarges went further than such prohibitions.  It was that as many of the officers as possible should be got to sign a declaration of their submission to the civil authority, not in general terms merely, but in the precise form of an engagement to agitate the question of Government no more among themselves, but abide the decision of the coming Parliament.  Many who could not have been brought to declare for Charles Stuart directly could save their consciences by signing a document thus conditionally in his interest; and the device of Clarges was most successful.  On the 9th of April a copy of the engagement signed by a large number of officers in or near London was in Monk’s hands, and copies were out in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for additional signatures.  As to the response from Scotland there could be little doubt.  Morgan, the commander-in-chief in Scotland, had already reported the complete submission of the Army there to the order established by the Parliament of the Secluded Members.  Only a single captain had been refractory, and he far away in the Orkneys.  From Ireland, where Coote and Broghill were now managing, the report was nearly as good.  Altogether, by the 9th of April, Monk could regard the Republicanism of the Army as but the stunned and paralysed belief of so many thousands of individual red-coats.—­It was no otherwise with the Navy.  Moored with his fleet in the Thames, or cruising with it beyond, Montague could assure Pepys in private that he knew most of his captains to be Republicans, and that he was not sure even of the captain of his own ship; and, studying a certain list which Montague had given him, Pepys could observe that the captains Montague was most anxious about were all or nearly all of the Anabaptist persuasion.  Still there was no sign of concerted mutiny; and it was a great thing at such a time that Vice-Admiral Lawson, Montague’s second in command, and the pre-eminent Republican of the whole Navy, had shown an example of obedience.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Phillips, 694-698; Skinner, 263-265; Ludlow, 865-873; Whitlocke, IV. 405-406; Pepys’s Diary, March 28-April 9.]

There was to be one dying flash for the Republic after all.  Lambert had escaped from the Tower.  It was on the night of April 9, the very day on which Monk was congratulating himself on the engagement of obedience signed by so many of his officers.  For some days no one knew where the fugitive had gone, and Monk and the Council of State were in consternation.  Proclamations against him were out, forbidding any to harbour him, and offering a reward for his capture.