held stubbornly out, disease thinned his army,
where there was scarce an officer who had not been sick, and the general
himself was arrested by illness. At last the tempestuous weather drove
him into winter quarters at Cork with his work half done. The winter of
1649 was one of terrible anxiety. The Parliament was showing less and
less inclination to dissolve itself, and was meeting the growing
discontent by a stricter censorship of the press and a fruitless
prosecution of John Lilburne. English commerce was being ruined by the
piracies of Rupert's fleet, which now anchored at Kinsale to support the
Royalist cause in Ireland. The energy of Vane indeed had already
re-created a navy, squadrons of which were being despatched into the
British seas, the Mediterranean, and the Levant; and Colonel Blake, who
had distinguished himself by his heroic defence of Taunton during the
war, was placed at the head of a fleet which drove Rupert from the Irish
coast, and finally blockaded him in the Tagus. But even the energy of
Vane quailed before the danger which now broke on England from the
Scots. "One must go and die there," the young king cried at the news of
Ormond's defeat before Dublin, "for it is shameful for me to live
elsewhere." But his ardour for an Irish campaign cooled as Cromwell
marched from victory to victory; and from the isle of Jersey, which
alone remained faithful to him of all his southern dominions, Charles
renewed the negotiations with Scotland which his hopes from Ireland had
broken. They were again delayed by a proposal on the part of Montrose to
attack the very Government with whom his master was negotiating; but the
failure and death of the Marquis in the spring of 1650 forced Charles to
accept the Presbyterian conditions; and while an army was raised in the
North, the young king prepared to cross to his Scottish dominions.

[Sidenote: Cromwell in Scotland.]

Dismayed as they were, the English leaders resolved to anticipate the
danger by attacking the new enemy in his own home; but the Lord-General
Fairfax, while willing to defend England against a Scotch invasion,
scrupled to take the lead in an invasion of Scotland. The Council
recalled Cromwell from Ireland, but his cooler head saw that there was
yet time to finish his work in the west. During the winter he had been
busily preparing for a new campaign, and it was only after the storm of
Clonmell and the overthrow of the Irish army under Hugh O'Neill in th