d, splendid man; what one may call the
Hero-Cavalier. Well, look at it; on the one hand subjects without a
King; on the other a King without subjects! The subjects without King
can do nothing; the subjectless King can do something. This Montrose,
with a handful of Irish or Highland savages, few of them so much as
guns in their hands, dashes at the drilled Puritan armies like a wild
whirlwind; sweeps them, time after time, some five times over, from
the field before him. He was at one period, for a short while, master
of all Scotland. One man; but he was a man: a million zealous men, but
_without_ the one; they against him were powerless! Perhaps of all the
persons in that Puritan struggle, from first to last, the single
indispensable one was verily Cromwell. To see and dare, and decide; to
be a fixed pillar in the welter of uncertainty;--a King among them,
whether they called him so or not.

* * * * *

Precisely here, however, lies the rub for Cromwell. His other
proceedings have all found advocates, and stand generally justified;
but this dismissal of the Rump Parliament and assumption of the
Protectorship, is what no one can pardon him. He had fairly grown to
be King in England; Chief Man of the victorious party in England: but
it seems he could not do without the King's Cloak, and sold himself to
perdition in order to get it. Let us see a little how this was.

England, Scotland, Ireland, all lying now subdued at the feet of the
Puritan Parliament, the practical question arose, What was to be done
with it? How will you govern these Nations, which Providence in a
wondrous way has given-up to your disposal? Clearly those hundred
surviving members of the Long Parliament, who sit there as supreme
authority, cannot continue for ever to sit. What _is_ to be done?--It
was a question which theoretical constitution-builders may find easy
to answer; but to Cromwell, looking there into the real practical
facts of it, there could be none more complicated. He asked of the
Parliament, What it was they would decide upon? It was for the
Parliament to say. Yet the Soldiers too, however contrary to Formula,
they who had purchased this victory with their blood, it seemed to
them that they also should have something to say in it! We will not
"For all our fighting have nothing but a little piece of paper." We
understand that the Law of God's Gospel, to which He through us has
given the victory, shall esta