Also in Ireland at this time, and nominally in retirement, but a Cromwellian of the highest magnitude, was LORD BROGHILL.

(3) Abroad the most important Cromwellian by far was SIR WILLIAM LOCKHART, _Lord Ambassador to France, General, and Governor of Dunkirk;_ with whom may be remembered George Downing, Resident in the United Provinces, and Meadows and Jephson, Envoys to the Scandinavian powers.

Lockhart managed to be in England on a brief visit in December 1658.
These fifty or sixty persons, one may say, were the men on whom it mainly depended, in the first months of Richard's Protectorate, whether that Protectorate should succeed or should founder.

It has been customary, in general retrospects of the time, to represent some of them as already tired of the Commonwealth in any possible form, and scheming afar off for the restoration of the Stuarts.

This, however, is quite a misconstruction .-- Monk, who is chiefly suspected, and who did now, from his separate station in the north, watch events in an independent manner, had certainly as yet no thought of the kind imagined.