Thurloe, Broghill, Falconbridge, and the rest, were of the same general opinion; and parts of the Army itself, they believed, had been schooled into docility.

Monk could answer for the troops and officers in Scotland, Henry Cromwell for those in Ireland, and Lockhart for those in Flanders.

But then there was the great body of soldiers and officers in England, with London for their rendezvous.

To them abnegation of direct influence in politics was death.

It was not only their arrears that they saw endangered, but that Army privilege of debating and theorizing which had been asserted by Cromwell in the Civil War, and which Cromwell afterwards, while regulating and checking it, had never abolished.