Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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guard headed by three colonels admitted only those who could produce a cer-

tiﬁcate of the council’s approval. There was almost as much indignation

among many of the approved members as among those thus debarred, and

next day a letter of protest from seventy-nine of the latter was presented to the

Speaker by Sir George Booth, MP for Cheshire, who was to make his own

protest in arms in 1659. Nearly four days of tense and sometimes bitter

debate ensued before a vote was passed to leave it to the excluded to put their

case to the council and meanwhile to carry on with the nation’s business. It

was carried by just 125 votes to 29, a Pyrrhic victory in a House which should

have numbered 460. Many members had walked out in disgust. Bordeaux

reported home that the people were angrier at the exclusion of their repre-

sentatives than over any previous infringement of their liberties, but how far

he was aware of reactions outside London is hard to say. The government

suppressed a printed remonstrance bearing the names of ninety-eight of the

excluded (though how many of them were actually aware of it is not known),

and from October the only weekly newspapers that it allowed to appear were

the ofﬁcial Mercurius Politicus and Publick Intelligencer. There was a motion

in the House on 31 December to admit the excluded members, but the

Speaker left the chair before it was put to the vote.

The parliament, however, was by no means wholly uncooperative with the

government, as one would expect when most known opponents were shut

out of it. It quickly passed a bill to annul ‘the pretended title of Charles

Stuart’, and also a treason act that put the penalty for any threat to the Pro-

tector’s person beyond doubt. It declared its approval of the war with Spain

as just and necessary, and showed some willingness to raise the money to

ﬁnance it. It put off ﬁxing the amount, however, on receiving the welcome

news that on 8 September six smallish ships under Captain Stayner had

engaged the Spanish Plate ﬂeet off Cadiz, sinking two great galleons and cap-

turing two more. Rumour valued the silver taken at £1m., but when it was

brought home in October it was found to be worth only a quarter as much.

How far the difference was due to natural exaggeration and how far to the no

less natural tendency of pieces of eight to stick to seamen’s hands is an unan-

swerable question.

Two developments, however, opened new rifts between Cromwell and the

parliament before the end of the year. One was the cause célèbre of the Quaker

James Nayler, who celebrated his release from a spell in prison by staging a

triumphal entry into Bristol which was patently modelled on Christ’s into

Jerusalem. He rode a donkey, led by two of his many women disciples, while

others spread their garments in his path or walked beside him singing ‘Holy,

holy, holy, Lord God of Israel’. He bore a natural resemblance to popular

images of Jesus, and he emphasized it by the way he cut and combed his hair

and beard. Parliament was outraged; it appointed a committee of no fewer

648 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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than ﬁfty-ﬁve members to examine him and his followers, and they took ﬁve

weeks before they reported to the House on 5 December. Called to the bar

next day, Nayler protested that as a mere creature he claimed no special glory,

but shared the common Quaker conviction that Christ dwells in all believers.

He was convinced that he had a revelation from God, commanding him to do

what he did as a sign of Christ’s coming. The House spent nine days in hot

debate as to what to do with him, and it was much divided, as indeed were the

members closest to Cromwell. To some extent the line of division exempliﬁed

a parting of the ways, by no means altogether new, between military and non-

military Cromwellians. None denounced Nayler more ﬁercely than the sol-

diers Skippon, Boteler, and Goffe, while Lawrence, Pickering, Strickland, and

Sydenham, all civilian members of the council of state, spoke in mitigation of

his offence. Whitelocke and others took the wholly sensible line that he

should be dealt with by the ordinary courts of law, but under the 1650 Blas-

phemy Act he could be given no more than six months’ imprisonment for a

ﬁrst offence, and for the bloodthirsty majority that was nothing like enough.

But had parliament the power to act as a court of ﬁrst instance? It was highly

questionable, but in the end the House was persuaded that it inherited the

judicial powers of both the Lords and the Commons.

Nayler escaped the death penalty by only ninety-six votes to eighty-two,

but parliament sentenced him to a series of savage corporal punishments in

London and Bristol, to be followed by indeﬁnite solitary conﬁnement and

hard labour. It is worth remarking that on the rare occasion when anything

deserving the name of torture was inﬂicted in England under the Common-

wealth and Protectorate, it was by order of parliament and not by the

judiciary or executive. Flogged all the way from Westminster to the City on

18 December, 310 stripes (by the hangman’s reckoning) left Nayler so weak

that the next instalment had to be postponed. Before it was executed, many

petitioners, by no means all Quakers, pleaded for the remission of the rest of

the sentence, ﬁrst (vainly) with parliament and then with Cromwell. He

immediately wrote a note to the Speaker, expressing abhorrence of the

‘crimes’ imputed to Nayler, but asking the House to let him know ‘the

grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded’.

This plain challenge

to the constitutionality of its actions caused much consternation and not a

few pleas for mercy, but parliament nevertheless voted by nearly two to one

to carry out the rest of the sentence. So before a crowd of thousands, nearly

all sympathetic, Nayler was duly branded on the forehead and bored through

the tongue with a red-hot iron. Parliament never replied to Cromwell’s

letter, but the episode helped to convince its wiser heads that the constitution

needed further deﬁning.

King or Constable? 649

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 366.

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The second bone of contention appeared while controversy over Nayler

was at its height. On Christmas Day, when the House was predictably

thin, Desborough asked its leave to bring in a bill for the continuance of the

decimation tax. He was supported by a succession of councillors and major-

generals, but opposed by others in authority, including Whitelocke and

Lenthall, on the strong grounds that the tax was contrary to the Act of Obliv-

ion. Leave for the bill was nevertheless given, but when it was introduced on

7 January Cromwell’s son-in-law John Claypole immediately moved its rejec-

tion, and one of its most eloquent opponents was Lord Broghill. With Lam-

bert on the other hand strongly defending it, no one quite knew where

Cromwell himself stood, and he was careful to hold aloof. It seems extra-

ordinary that he was not consulted about the bill. A decision on it was delayed

because the Speaker fell ill and other distractions intervened, but the several

days’ debate that it received were often angry to the point of disorder. The

contest was less between friends and opponents of the Protectorate than

between military and civilian Cromwellians, and the main issue for most

members was whether the rule of the major-generals should continue. On

29 January the bill was defeated by 124 votes to 88, and the army party took

it very badly. The majority by contrast were so pleased that on the very next

day they voted a thumping grant of £400,000 for the prosecution of the war

with Spain.

One of the interruptions that delayed the decision on the bill was the

uncovering of the assassination plot that Sexby had been hatching for some

time. His chosen hit-man was one Miles Sindercombe, an ex-quartermaster

who had been a ringleader in the Leveller mutiny of 1649. Sindercombe and

two fellow-assassins had ﬁrst planned to shoot Cromwell as he drove to the

opening of parliament, but ﬁnding him too well protected they changed their

design more than once. They ﬁnally settled on burning down Whitehall

Palace with him inside it, and it was only when the matches were already lit

on their formidable ﬁre-bomb of pitch, tar, and gunpowder that one of Sin-

dercombe’s two co-plotters informed on him. The other then revealed all he

knew, and with the three safely under lock and key Thurloe told the whole

story to the House on 19 January. The revelation that the Protector had been

dogged by assassins for months had its effect, for his sudden death would

have been a disaster for almost all the members. They all came to Whitehall

four days later to congratulate him on his escape, and in the Banqueting

House he made a modest and mercifully short speech in reply. He congratu-

lated them in turn on representing ‘the best people in the world’, fortunate in

enjoying civil rights and liberties ‘very ancient and honourable’. Then warm-

ing to a favourite theme: ‘And in the midst of this people, a people . . . that are

to God as the apple of his eye; and he says so of them, be they many or be they

few. But they are many, a people of the blessing of God, a people under his

650 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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safety and protection.’

He exhorted them to make the laws of the land as

conformable as possible to the law of God and the aspirations of God’s

people, and he closed with another invocation of the eighty-ﬁfth psalm, com-

mending to them the pairs of virtues that it linked: mercy and truth, right-

eousness and peace.

Such a deliberately irenical speech was well timed, not only because of the

recent or current clashes over Nayler and the major-generals but because a

major debate on the constitution was clearly imminent. On the very day that

the House heard of the Sindercombe plot, the former Rumper John Ashe had

moved that for his better security ‘His Highness would be pleased to take

upon him the government according to the ancient constitution’. This was of

course by no means the ﬁrst proposal that Cromwell should assume the

crown, and in the present parliament Colonel Jephson had already suggested

that the Protector’s title should be made hereditary. Ashe’s motion immedi-

ately aroused both opposition and support, and since the House was already

deep in divisive business it was taken no further as it stood. But some of the

leading civilian Cromwellians were soon at work, if they were not already, on

a scheme to make Oliver king, not under the old constitution but as part of a

new one. Lord Broghill was deeply engaged in drafting it and was perhaps its

main author, but its promoters thought it best to have it set in motion by

someone not too obviously connected with the government. Sir Christopher

Packe, a recent Lord Mayor of London, readily agreed to do it, so on 23 Feb-

ruary he duly rose in the House, presented a paper, and asked to have it read.

Its purport must have been an open secret, for many members spoke vehe-

mently against even giving it a hearing, and some would have had Packe

called to the bar. Members of the council spoke on both sides, but Packe had

the support of Broghill, Whitelocke, Wolseley, and Glyn among others, and

his Remonstrance (as it was at ﬁrst styled) won a reading by 144 votes to 54.

On hearing it there was furious opposition to considering it any further, led

by Lambert, but its supporters easily outnumbered its opponents.

The Humble Petition and Advice, as this draft of a new constitution came

to be called,

began by asking Cromwell to assume the title of king, though

not on the old hereditary basis. He was to name his own successor, and how

the title should pass after that was left unstated, no doubt deliberately. Such

was the strife over the royal title that it tended to divert attention from the

other proposed changes, which represented an intelligent attempt to remedy

the defects that experience had revealed in the Instrument of Government.

The most striking was that parliament was to consist of two houses, with

the new one approximating more to a senate than to the aristocratic and

King or Constable? 651

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 389.

Text in Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, pp. 447–59.

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hereditary House of Lords. It was to consist of between forty and seventy

members, nominated by Protector and approved by the present House of

Commons, though Cromwell got this modiﬁed to give the initial choice sole-

ly to himself. The ﬁlling of future vacancies was to be subject to the approval

of ‘the Other House’ (as it came to be called) itself. This House was to have an

appellate jurisdiction over cases referred to it by inferior courts, but parlia-

ment’s criminal jurisdiction was to be conﬁned to impeachments initiated by

the Commons and adjudged by the Other House ‘according to the known

laws of the land’. This marked a reversion to traditional constitutional prac-

tice, and so did the renaming of the council of state as the privy council. In

place of the complex method of ﬁlling vacancies in it that the Instrument had

prescribed, new councillors were to be nominated by the Protector, subject to

the consent of the council itself and the subsequent approval of both Houses

of Parliament. The Protector was empowered to suspend councillors, given

just cause, but only parliament could remove them. Appointments to the

highest political and judicial ofﬁces in all three kingdoms were to be subject

to the approval of both Houses.The Petition and Advice also ﬁxed a regular

annual revenue of £1m. for the armed forces and £300,000 for the civil gov-

ernment, and it required parliamentary consent for any taxation in excess of

those ﬁgures. They were inadequate, and Cromwell subsequently negotiated

an increase in the total of £600,000.

Regarding religion the new constitution was slightly more restrictive than

the Instrument, but in practice it made little or no difference. There was to be

a confession of faith, agreed by Protector and parliament, to which clergy who

received the public maintenance must conform, but no such document was ever

promulgated. For those who dissented from it, toleration was limited to those

who accepted the basic doctrine of the trinity and acknowledged both Old

and New Testaments to be the revealed word of God; it was explicitly denied

to papists and prelatists and all who made religion a pretext for ‘horrible blas-

phemies’, or licentious practices, or disturbing the public peace. These last

exceptions were aimed mainly at Ranters and Quakers, but the authors of the

Petition and Advice had to steer a course between displeasing intolerant magis-

trates and offending Cromwell’s notorious breadth of sympathy, since their

whole enterprise was dependent on his acceptance.

Their proposals clearly pointed to a more civilian style of government, for

they promised both to increase the overall power of parliament and to dimin-

ish that of the army. Among other things, they envisaged a separation of the

ofﬁce of commander-in-chief from that of Protector after Cromwell’s death.

The army reacted very promptly. The ofﬁcers of the London-based regiments

were in the habit of meeting weekly on Thursdays for prayer or discussion,

and when they so gathered on 26 February, three days after Packe presented

the Petition and Advice, they heard that the major-generals were meeting

652 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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simultaneously at Desborough’s lodgings. Contact was soon established, and

as a result a delegation of a hundred ofﬁcers waited on Cromwell next day to

voice their dismay at the new proposals and their hope that he would refuse

the crown. Lambert, who was especially piqued by the threatened superses-

sion of his brain-child the Instrument of Government, took a prominent part

in organizing the confrontation.

Cromwell received them with unconcealed anger, and in his temper he

accused them of some things unjustly: for instance, of driving him to dissolve

both the Rump and the last parliament against his better judgement. Both had

been essentially his own decisions, and the ofﬁcers must have bridled at being

told ‘that they had made him their drudge upon all occasions’. But he was

right to remind them that seven of them had brought the Instrument to him

with the title of king in it. He loved the royal title no more than they now

did—‘a feather in a man’s hat’, he called it—but it ill behoved them to startle

at it as they were doing. The Instrument, he said, had been subject to too

little debate and consultation before it was promulgated, and the last parlia-

ment’s dissection of it had convinced him that it needed amendment. The

major-generals’ regime had been their idea, and he still thought it justiﬁable,

but they themselves had undermined it. ‘You major-generals did your part

well’, he said; ‘you might have gone on. Who bid you go to the House with a

bill and there receive a foil?’ They had been impatient to call the present par-

liament; he had voted against it, but they were conﬁdent that they could ‘get

men chosen to [their] hearts’ desire’. When they failed, they (meaning pre-

sumably the military party in the council of state) abused the Instrument to

shut out whom they pleased:

And I am sworn to make good all you do, right or wrong, and because 120 are excluded

I must think them malignants or scandalous whether they are so or not. Yet now you

complain of those [who] are admitted. I have no design upon them or you. I never

courted you, nor never will . . . Next time for aught I know you may exclude 400.

It was time ‘to come to a settlement and lay aside arbitrary proceedings, so

unacceptable to the nation’. They objected to the proposed ‘Other House’, but

the Commons stood in need of ‘a check or balancing power’, as Nayler’s case

demonstrated—the same could happen to them. He asked them to choose six

or seven of them to come and speak with him at a later date, and then bade

them good night without entering into further discussion. This was a turning

point; the army’s inﬂuence in politics would never be the same again while he

lived.

King or Constable? 653

The full text of the speech has not come down to us; what survive are two synopses by ofﬁ-

cers present, both reprinted in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 417–19.

The words I have quoted in this paragraph have the ring of Cromwell’s own, but they may not

reproduce exactly what he said.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 653

The ofﬁcers were abashed by such plain speaking, and also by the rapid

progress of the Petition and Advice in the House. The members resolved to

consider it clause by clause, but to reserve the ﬁrst one, which asked

Cromwell to take the title of king, to the end. The second, whereby he was to

name his own successor, was passed unanimously on 3 March, despite an

attempt by ofﬁcer-MPs and others to get it similarly deferred. The temper of

the army was already much quieter. When the small delegation that he had

invited came to see him on the 5th the mood was conciliatory on both sides.

They assured him that the ofﬁcers were resolved to acquiesce in whatever he

should judge to be for the good of the three nations, and he in response

declared ‘his constant regard to his army, and to the ancient cause of the hon-

est people under his government’.

Two days later the article proposing the

Other House, to which Thurloe and others had expected stiff resistance, was

passed without a division. One suspects that some senior ofﬁcers rather liked

the prospect of getting a seat in the new chamber and being styled ‘lords’. The

only articles which occupied parliament for any considerable time were those

regarding religion, the revenue and the royal title itself. Desborough, Lambert,

and Fleetwood were the most vehement opponents of kingship; Whalley and

Goffe spoke against it more moderately, but the ‘kinglings’, as they were soon

called, carried it by 123 votes to 62. Probably anticipating that Cromwell

would try to accept the rest of the new constitution without changing his title,

parliament added a ﬁnal clause, declaring that if he did not consent to all its

provisions, none of them should be of force.

The great debate ended just ﬁve weeks after Packe ﬁrst introduced his

Remonstrance, when Speaker Widdrington, in a long and high-ﬂown ora-

tion, presented the ﬁnal document to Cromwell in the Banqueting House on

31 March. Cromwell spoke only brieﬂy in reply. He acknowledged that par-

liament had been aiming sincerely ‘at the glory of God, the good of his

people, [and] the rights of the nation’, but it had faced him with as weighty a

decision as ever a man had had to take. He needed to give it ‘the utmost delib-

eration and consideration’, so for the present he asked only ‘that . . . I may

have some short time to ask counsel of God and of my own heart’.

Some

writers have taken this response to signify indecision, but it was probably

sound diplomacy. He must have been kept well informed of the contents of

the Petition and Advice and the debates on it, and he had little reason to fear

the army. Although most of the leading ofﬁcers continued to oppose it, a

small delegation had waited on him the evening before and told him that

many of their more moderate colleagues would accept the new constitution,

if he did, as a dispensation of providence, and Monck had assured him of the

654 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Firth, Last Years of the Protectorate, I, 138–9.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 443–4.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 654

acquiescence of the forces in Scotland. But an immediate decision would have

been bad tactics, robbing him of room for negotiation; for in spite of parlia-

ment’s intention that he should accept or reject its whole package he was

almost certainly hoping that he would not have to do either. He wanted the

constitution without the royal title.

He did not keep the House waiting long. Three days later a committee

attended him at his own request to hear his further answer. He warmly

praised parliament’s zeal for ‘the two greatest concernments that God hath in

the world’, the one being the special interest of His own people, the other ‘the

civil liberty and interest of the nation’. He deeply appreciated the high hon-

our that they had done him, but they had named him by another title than that

which he bore, and all he could say was ‘that seeing the way is hedged up so

as it is for me (I cannot accept the things offered unless I accept all), I have not

been able to ﬁnd it my duty to God and you to undertake this charge under

that title . . . Nothing must make a man’s conscience his servant; and really

and sincerely it is my conscience that guides me to this answer’.

There was

nothing indecisive or equivocal about his position, and he held to it consist-

ently. He made it clear that the proposed constitution appealed to him

strongly in every respect but one, both because of its merits and because it

emanated from a parliament, but his refusal of the crown was a matter of

conscience.

His response caused jubilation among the opponents of kingship and con-

sternation among the new constitution’s promoters, many of whom had been

over-optimistic. After debate the House voted to adhere to the Petition and

Advice and press it further, but only by seventy-eight votes to sixty-ﬁve—a

sadly thin attendance. Accordingly the Speaker and the negotiating commit-

tee went to Cromwell again on 8 April with an address inscribed on vellum.

It stated respectfully that parliament had not yet received satisfaction regard-

ing its Petition and Advice, which embodied what it judged most conducive

to the people’s good in both their spiritual and their civil concernments. It

reminded his highness of his great obligation in respect of what parliament

advised, and again desired his assent. He assured them of the very high value

he placed on parliament’s desires and advice, but advice was just that, and his

scruples about the title were (he stressed once more) deep-rooted in his con-

science. ‘Give me leave therefore to ask counsel,’ he said; ‘I am ready to ren-

der a reason of my apprehensions, which haply may be overswayed by better

apprehensions.’

There were also many other things in the Petition on Advice

on which he would like further information and satisfaction from them. He

was holding the door slightly ajar, and encouraging further negotiation over

the constitution as a whole.

King or Constable? 655

Ibid., p. 446.

Ibid., p. 454.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 655

As a result he held four more lengthy meetings with the committee between

11 and 21 April, with a week’s hiatus in the middle because he was unwell. In

them he expounded his difﬁculties over the title, and the parliament’s spokes-

men, chieﬂy Wolseley, Glyn, Fiennes, Lenthall, and Broghill, strove to con-

vince him that he should overcome them. Their chief argument was that the

whole body of the law was geared to and guaranteed by the ofﬁce of king, and

that parliament as the voice of the people had voted to restore it. Wolseley, a

prominent councillor, reminded Cromwell that he had, to his great honour,

called himself a servant of the people. ‘I hope then, sir [he said], you will give

the people leave to name their own servant; that is a due you cannot, you will

not certainly deny them.’

But while they were arguing on a legal and polit-

ical plane, Cromwell continued to take his stand on a moral and religious one.

He was not convinced that the laws of the land were so interwoven with the

kingly ofﬁce that they could not stand without it; they could be executed

under another title, as they had been for the past eight years. ‘I am ready to

serve not as a king but as a constable’, he said, ‘for truly I have as before God

thought it often, that I could not tell what my business was . . . in the place I

stood, save by comparing it with a good constable to keep the peace of the

parish’. He spoke affectionately of the men he had raised and led in the

wars—‘such men as had the fear of God before them, and made some con-

science of what they did’—and begged ‘that there may be no hard thing put

upon me, things I mean hard of them, that they cannot swallow.’ But what

weighed most with him was a conviction that providence had pronounced

against the royal title. ‘God has seemed providentially not only to strike at the

family but at the name . . . I would not seek to set up that providence hath

destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’ Parlia-

ment’s spokesmen had not convinced him; he summed up his position on the

13th by saying ‘I do not think the thing necessary: I would not that you should

lose a friend for it’.

That speech expressed his objections to it so fully and unequivocally that it

is surprising that his contemporaries, and some modern historians, could sup-

pose that he was still undecided, and might yet accept the crown. But in

between these formal conferences he would relax very informally with some

of the champions of kingship, notably Broghill, Whitelocke, Wolseley, Pier-

repont, and Thurloe, and would smoke pipes of tobacco and play rhyming

games with them before settling down to serious discussion of the business in

hand. He does not appear to have conferred with leading army ofﬁcers

about it; he knew their mind on the matter, and he was probably still angry

with them for their recent attempt to put pressure on him. By contrast his

affability towards the kinglings ﬁlled them with excessive optimism, which

656 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 460.

Ibid., pp. 470–4.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 656

they communicated to the House, while his coolness towards the anti-

kingship party, including its army element, made it fear that its cause was

already lost.

When he next addressed the committee on 20 April, his speech was cloud-

ier than before, but he made no concession over the title. ‘I have no title to the

government of these nations,’ he said, ‘but what was taken up in a case of

necessity, and temporary, to supply the present emergency.’ Not wishing to

go over again the arguments that they had put to him at their last meeting, he

would ‘rather tell [them] what sense lies upon my heart out of the abundance

of difﬁculty and trouble that lies upon me’. But there were other things in the

Petition and Advice besides the title that he would like to discuss with them;

he was drafting a paper on them, so he asked them to meet him again

next day.

When they did so, he treated them to one of his longest speeches on record.

Its theme was ‘the providences of God, how they have led us hitherto’, and he

went over the events of the past six years at considerable length. Superﬁcial-

ly, it can be read as an essay in self-justiﬁcation, but his real purpose was to

expose the shortcomings of every previous attempt at settlement and under-

line the responsibility that lay upon them all not to waste the opportunity that

providence was now laying before them. The unspoken message was that

since they were so close to settlement now, let them not let it slip because of

disagreement over the title, a subject that he studiously avoided throughout

this long oration. He was full of praise for the Petition and Advice as a whole:

I think you have provided for the liberty of the people of God and of the nation; and I

say, he sings sweetly that sings a song of reconciliation betwixt these two interests, and

it is a pitiful fancy, and wild and ignorant, to think they are inconsistent. They may

consist, and . . . I think in this government you have made them to consist.

But there were some points in the Petition and Advice that he would like to see

modiﬁed or elucidated, and he spoke of these before handing over his ‘paper

of objections’. The most substantial of the latter concerned the revenue,

which as proposed fell far short of his government’s needs. He also expati-

ated on three of his constant objectives, about which the parliament’s pro-

posals had little or nothing to say: the regulation of the law, the reformation

of manners, and the provision throughout the three nations of a godly preach-

ing ministry.

There is no doubt of his strong and sincere desire to come to terms with the

parliament over its new constitution. It seems likely that he temporarily

diverted attention from the question of his title in the hope that by showing

how close he and parliament were to agreement over the rest of the proposals

King or Constable? 657

Ibid., p. 490. The whole speech ﬁlls pp. 484–97; that of 20 April is on pp. 480–3.

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