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The Council of Officers and the Parliament [1659 Council in supporting Richard. Whitelock attributes the succeeding coup d'état to the Wallingford House party and ascribes it to the personal ambition of Fleetwood. But it is clear that the Commonwealth men in the army were at one with the Grandees (the Wallingford House party) in desiring to put an end to a Parliament in which the Court party were proving too strong for the Republicans. Nehemiah Bourne's account of Richard's fall distinctly states that the Republican party in the House, finding itself defeated, applied to the officers of the army. Several debates were held, but the superior officers were despondent; nor was it till the generality of the officers took heart and began to work upon the Grandees, that these began to incline towards reviving the good old cause.

Some confirmation seems to be lent to this view by the fact that the scheme of an army petition was set on foot on the very day (February 14) on which the Court party had carried the vote of Recognition in the House. On that day a committee of officers was appointed to draw heads of a petition to be presented to the Commons. The heads of the petition were resolved upon on April 2, at a great meeting of all the officers at Wallingford House. The petition itself was presented to Richard on April 6 following and was by Richard forwarded to the House on the eighth. Ostensibly the main item of the petition concerned the provision of pay for the soldiers. But the merely formal heads of the petition were immaterial. The underlying motive and mainspring of the whole was the army's jealousy of the design of the Court party in the House to vote Richard the power of the sword as General of all the armies of the Commonwealth. That scheme had the result of uniting against Richard the Grandees (who wished their commissions to be secure against Richard), the Republicans (who detested the Protectorate), and the common soldiers (who were deceived by current rumours of an impending restoration of Charles Stewart, for whom Richard was said to be only keeping the saddle warm). The course of events during the next ten days (April 8-18) can only be reconstructed with the greatest difficulty. Whitelock says that Richard advised with the Privy Council as to whether the Parliament should be dissolved or not, and that the majority were in favour of dissolving it. Ludlow on the other hand vaguely charges Richard with intriguing with the Parliament, with a view to engaging the House in his defence as against the Army Council. Nehemiah Bourne says not less vaguely that Richard intrigued with a section of the army, so as to create a party of his own there. Not one of these statements is satisfactory. The most natural explanation seems to be that, until the Parliament had completed the acceptance of the Humble Petition and Advice, every dynastic interest of his own dictated that Richard should hold by the Parliament; that, as the army became more antagonistic to the House, he was obliged to defend the Parliament against the soldiers; and that, if finally he

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threw over the Parliament, it was only as the result of the army revolt and under the pressure of sheer force.

According to this view (which is borne out by Edward Phillips' narrative in his continuation of Baker's Chronicle), Richard's change of front could only have taken place on April 21. But against this view there must be set several statements. Writing to Lockhart on April 14, Thurloe says, "His Highness a few days since said that God had revealed it to him. that he must sink with or stick to the party." Being asked who they were, he said, "The Commonwealthsmen in the House." "Who were they?" he was asked, and he answered, "Sir Arthur Heselrige and Sir Harry Vane. Charles Stewart and his family must be disowned." This highly suspicious statement would seem to indicate that Richard had begun to change possibly even before the army petition. Again, Lord Broghill says that Richard gave a commission to Fleetwood and Desborough to hold a Council of War at Wallingford House. This meeting was probably that which was held on April 13. At Richard's request Broghill attended the meeting and thwarted the designs of the Wallingford House men. He then persuaded Richard to revoke that commission, and Richard seems to have done so on the following day, going himself to Wallingford House for that purpose, and, after listening quietly to the debate for an hour, rising and dissolving that Council. Nehemiah Bourne's statement, that "they so far obeyed him as to forbear any general meeting," may refer to this particular juncture. Finally, yet another version, but probably a disingenuous one, is contained in Sir Henry Vane's words spoken in the great debate in the House on April 18, "I heard it abroad and from one in the Council Chamber I am not able to name the person that the occasion of the calling together this Council [of War] was by his Highness on purpose to try if they [the soldiers] would take commissions from him exclusive of the Parliament." In the absence of any detailed record of the proceedings of the officers during this crucial period, April 8-18, the point must be left uncertain. Thurloe's statement, if it be accepted, must be read as confirming Bourne's assertion that Fleetwood and Desborough and others went to Richard and dissuaded him from urging the point of the generalship by his courtiers in the Parliament; "which he promised them he would, and that there should be nothing done on it." If true, this must have been prior to the votes in the House on April 18.

It is clear that, although Richard had revoked his special commission for a meeting of a Council of War (to adopt Broghill's questionable terminology), the General Council of the Army did not dissolve itself. Accordingly on April 18, debating with closed doors, the Commons resolved that there should be no General Council of the Army save with the consent of the Protector and both Houses; and, secondly, that no person should have command in the Army or Navy who

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declined to pledge himself not to disturb the free meetings in Parliament.

These votes carried with them by implication that the command of the army was now to be in the Protector and the Parliament. Richard summoned the officers to Whitehall on the same day, and there with threats bade them dissolve their General Council of Officers. Three days later, on Thursday, April 21, the Mayor and Aldermen of the City presented a petition to Richard declaring their resolution to stand by him and the two Houses; but they were followed by the officers of the City trained bands with a representation in favour of the army petition. Richard sent for his Life Guards, but even his own regiment marched away and went over to the army, and all the force that Richard's friendly colonels could raise for him did not amount to three companies or two troops. Another report puts the situation more clearly. "Thursday night all the regiments here, both horse and foot, were in arms. That of the late Lord Pride marched into Whitehall without opposition. His Highness gave orders to Colonel Hacker's and other regiments to march to Whitehall for the preservation of his person; but, having before received other orders from the Lord Fleetwood, they with all the rest obeyed his Excellencie's [Fleetwood's] orders rather than those of his Highness." That night Fleetwood and Desborough were closeted with Richard till eleven o'clock, "and then declared their full satisfaction in what his Highness had then said to answer the desires of, and to live and dye with the armies."

The result of this coup d'état was quickly seen. On the following day (April 22) Richard signed a commission dissolving the Parliament. In face of the military revolt engineered by Fleetwood he had yielded to force, had thrown over the Parliament and with it the last uncertain chances of constitutionalism, and had thereby signed the death-warrant of his dynasty and of the Commonwealth. Henceforth till the Restoration anarchy and the sword prevailed in the land.

If the intention of the Wallingford House party had been to retain Richard as a tool or puppet, and with him the Protectorate, but shorn of the command of the army and shorn also of the veto, they quickly found that they could not prevail against the now rampant republicanism of the inferior officers. On the very next day (April 23) the Council of Officers sitting at Wallingford House at once took the direction of affairs, debating the settlement of the government: whether it should be by way of the Humble Petition and Advice, by a recall of the Rump, or by again a new constitution. The Grandees of the army wished for a nominal or mere figure-head Protector; but the inferior officers, who on the same day held a Council of their own at St James', demanded a republic.

On May 2 conferences began between representatives of the officers and of the remains of the Long Parliament; on the 7th the Rump reassembled at Westminster, and on the 25th Richard sent a message

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to the House conveying his formal submission to the new Government whatever this may have meant. If Richard's protectorate can be said to have terminated on any particular day or by any particular act, it was by this submission on May 25, 1659. But, as a matter of fact, from the dissolution of his Parliament on April 22 he had dropped out of view as a nonentity.

The ecclesiastical history of this period is simply a record of confusion. The key to the religious problems of the Commonwealth is to be found in the conflict between the political necessity which drove Oliver to attempt to conciliate the Presbyterians and that exalted conception of freedom and toleration which distinguished him beyond all his contemporaries. So irreconcilable were these two conflicting interests that to the end of the Commonwealth no religious settlement was ever arrived at. The triumph of the army meant that of the principle of toleration; but this victory never obtained full legislative expression, and the remains of the Presbyterian system were left cumbering the ground. Its position as the legally recognised form of national Church government was never legally abrogated; and all attempts at a religious settlement subsequent to 1649 took the form of such a definition of toleration as would secure the liberty of individual men and congregations on the one hand, and as would guard the State against the dangers of Popery and blasphemy on the other.

Such a problem of necessity resolved itself into a discussion, not of principle or of forms of Church government, but of a definition of fundamentals of Christian belief. So long as Parliament was not sitting, the problem hardly existed for Oliver. The religious freedom which he had won with the sword he was strong enough to keep by the sword; and under his rule a statesmanlike tolerance prevailed. But whenever Parliament was in session the ineradicable itch of the theologian-politician for a systematic definition of fundamentals instantly reappeared. During these periods it is always the Parliament which plays or tries to play the part of the divine, of the intolerant persecutor. In 1650 the Rump persecuted the Ranters. In February, 1653, it promulgated a standard of conformity and of toleration; but the scheme was rendered abortive by the ejection of the Rump. The project of the Nominated Parliament for such a declaration as would give fitting liberty, whilst discountenancing blasphemies, met a similar fate. In December, 1653, the Instrument declared for a toleration "of all professing faith in God by Jesus Christ, provided that liberty extend not to Popery and Prelacy nor be abused to the disturbance of civil peace." The attempt to define these simple words "faith in God by Jesus Christ" led Oliver's first Parliament to summon a second Assembly of Divines to draft the fundamentals of belief (November, 1654). Whilst the Independent divines (now stigmatised by Baxter as stiffly orthodox) were engaged

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[1649-55 in their congenial repressive task, the Parliament was persecuting John Biddle for heresy. But again the whole contemplated work fell to the ground when, in January, 1655, Oliver dissolved the Parliament.

In Cromwell's second Parliament the antagonism between his own large-minded tolerance and the Parliament's intolerance was still more strikingly evinced. He intervened with the object of saving James Naylor from persecution at the hands of the Commons and refused their Bill for catechising. But he accepted the scheme of fundamentals of belief as set out in the eleventh article of the Humble Petition and Advice. This is therefore the first, and down to the fall of Richard Cromwell it remained the only, legislative pronouncement of the Commonwealth period on the subject of toleration.

It is this impotent and delayed legislation which accounts for all the chaos of parochial Church affairs throughout the period. Presbytery, voluntary association, separatist congregation and sect existed side by side, with no legally enforced definition of their position. As between them all the civil power was only concerned to keep the peace, while maintaining a watchful eye on Papist and Episcopalian. And indeed, save in a disjointed, piecemeal way, the Protector's Government never made any attempt at restoring the broken machinery in the higher ranges of Church organisation. The question of tithes was never settled: the problem of providing maintenance for ministers was whittled down to the mere granting of augmentations out of certain specific funds vested ad hoc in the hands of the Plundered Ministers Committee and of the Trustees for Maintenance, a scheme comparable to the later Queen Anne's Bounty rather than to anything else. Finally, the only provision made for any trial of the fitness of ministers and for their ordination was contained in the imperfect machinery of the Committee for Scandalous Ministers and the Commissioners for Ejection and the Commissioners for Approbation or the Triers.

Confused and difficult as is the subject of the Commonwealth Church organisation, that confusion and difficulty sink into nothing by the side of the perplexity of the problem of Commonwealth finance. In 1649 the Exchequer, so far as its receipt was concerned, was completely out of joint and practically non-existent. The Customs and Excise, the former of which had constituted the main branch of Exchequer revenue, were worked through the Customs House and the Excise Office respectively. The older and more insignificant and casual sources of Crown revenue formerly received in the Exchequer had either disappeared, or were administered by a parliamentary committee styled the Committee for the King's Revenue. Many, too, of the Exchequer officials had followed the King to Oxford, carrying with them the mysterious knowledge which was necessary for the working of that ancient institution.

On the other hand, the enormously increased financial needs of