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It served to countenance a belief that the sitting members were mere tools of the military, and supplied the royalists with the means of masking their Whitelock, 677. real designs under the popular pretence of vindicating the freedom of parliament.
Meeting Whitelock, who then held the great seal, he said that the "army was beginning to have a strange distaste against them; that their pride, and ambition, and self-seeking; their engrossing all places of honor and profit to themselves and their friends; their daily breaking into new and violent parties; their delays of business, and design to perpetuate themselves, and continue the power in their own hands; their meddling in private matters between party and party, their injustice and partiality; the scandalous lives of some of them, do give too much ground for people to open their mouths against them; and unless there be some power to check them, it will be impossible to prevent our ruin."
While the question was yet in debate, an event happened to hasten the departure of Charles from the Hague. Dr. Baillie, ii. 333. Carte, Letters, i. 238-263. In addition to the covenant, the commissioners required the banishment of Montrose, from which they were induced to recede, and the limitation of the king's followers to one hundred persons. Whitelock, 401. Journals, May 10.
The general coldly observed that a matter of such importance and difficulty deserved mature consideration. They separated; and Whitelock soon discovered that he had forfeited his confidence.
Whitelock replied, that, for the army, his excellency had hitherto kept and would continue to keep it in due subordination; but with respect to the parliament, reliance must be placed on the good sense and virtue of the majority. To control the supreme power was legally impossible. All, even Cromwell himself, derived their authority from it.
The attack on the stage was as offensive to the more cultured minds among the Puritan party as to the Court itself; Selden and Whitelock took a prominent part in preparing a grand masque by which the Inns of Court resolved to answer its challenge, and in the following year Milton wrote his masque of "Comus" for Ludlow Castle.
About 300 discontented persons got together in Kent, and took Sir Percival Hart's house; Colonel Blunt attacked and dispersed them with horse and foot, regained the house, and made the chief of them prisoners. Whitelock, folio 137. Vol. i., p. 15. Vol. i., p. 15; No. 82. Vol. i., p. 16. Vol. i., p. 17, 18. Vol. iii., p. 113. Bunyan's Saints' Privilege and Profit, vol. i., p. 661.
From an accidental entry in Whitelock, it would appear that the letters from Cromwell reached London on the 27th of September; on the 28th, parliament, without any cause assigned in the Journals, was adjourned to October 2nd, and on that day the official account of the massacre at Drogheda was made public.
Coke," says Whitelock in his Memorials "named the Duke to be the cause of all their miseries, and moves to goe to the King, and by word to acquaint him." Rushworth writes more fully of this speech of Coke's. "Sir Edward Cook spake freely.... Let us palliate no longer; if we do, God will not prosper us.
To the young king the defeat at Dunbar was a subject of real and ill-dissembled joy. Hitherto he had been a mere puppet in the hands of Argyle and his party; now their power was broken, and it was not impossible for him to gain the ascendancy. kingdom in twenty days. These, after a long negotiation, accepted an act of indemnity, and disbanded their forces. Baillie, ii. 356. Whitelock, 476.
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