The pay of the armies in England, Scotland, and Ireland was greatly in arrears; on all hands there were straits for money; and, whatever might be done by expedients and ingenuity meanwhile, the effective extrication could only be by a Parliament.

Not for subsidies only, however, was Cromwell willing to resort again to that agency, with all its perils.

He believed that, in consequence of what had passed since the Dissolution in January, any Parliament that should now meet him would be in a different mood towards himself from that he had recently encountered.

Then might there not be proposals, in which he and such a Parliament might agree, for constitutional changes in advance of the Articles of the _Petition and Advice_, though in the same direction of orderliness and settled and stately rule?
Was there not wide regret among the civilians that he had not accepted the Kingship; had his refusal of it been really wise; might not that question be reopened?
With that question might there not go the question of the succession, whether by nomination for one life only as was now fixed, or by perpetual nomination, or by a return to the hereditary and dynastic principle which the lawyers and the civilians thought the best?
Nor could the Second House of Parliament remain the vague thing it had been so far fashioned.

It must be amended in the points in which its weakness had been proved; and all the evidence hitherto was that it must be made truly and formally a House of Lords, if even with the reinstitution of a peerage as part and parcel of the legislative system.