ermission of Parliaments for 12 years
disgusted the nation, and the House met in no good humour to give
money. It must be confessed, some late proceedings had raised such
jealousies as would be sure to discover themselves, whenever the King
should come to ask for a supply; and Mr. Waller was one of the first
to condemn those measures. A speech he made in the House upon this
occasion, printed at the end of his poems, gives us some notion of his
principles as to government.' Indeed we cannot but confess he was a
little too inconstant in them, and was not naturally so steady, as he
was judicious; which variable temper was the cause of his losing his
reputation, in a great measure, with both parties, when the nation
became unhappily divided. His love to poetry, and his indolence, laid
him open to the insinuations of others, and perhaps prevented his
fixing so resolutely to any one party, as to make him a favourite with
either. As Mr. Waller did not come up to the heighths of those who
were for unlimited monarchy, so he did not go the lengths of such as
would have sunk the kingdom into a commonwealth, but had so much
credit at court, that in this parliament the King particularly sent to
him, to second his demands of some subsidies to pay the army; and Sir
Henry Vane objecting against first voting a supply, because the King
would not accept it, unless it came up to his proportion; Mr. Waller
spoke earnestly to Sir Thomas Jermyn, comptroller of the houshold, to
save his master from the effects of so bold a falsity; for, says he, I
am but a country gentleman, and cannot pretend to know the King's
mind: but Sir Thomas durst not contradict the secretary; and his son
the earl of St. Alban's, afterwards told Mr. Waller, that his father's
cowardice ruined the King.

In the latter end of the year 1642, he was one of the commissioners
appointed by the Parliament, to present their propositions for peace
to his Majesty at Oxford. Mr. Whitelocke, in his Memorials, tells us,
that when Mr. Waller kissed the King's hand in the garden at Christ's
Church, his Majesty said to him, 'though you are last, yet you are not
the worst, nor the least in our favour.' The discovery of a plot,
continues Mr. Whitelocke, 'then in hand in London to betray the
Parliament, wherein Mr. Waller was engaged, with Chaloner, Tomkins,
and others, which was then in agitation, did manifest the King's
courtship of Mr. Waller to be for that service.'

In the beginning