atesman,
unspeculative, deficient in foresight, conservative, and eminently
practical. He saw the need of administrative reform in Church and State;
but he had no sympathy whatever with the revolutionary theories which
were filling the air around him. His desire was for "a settlement" which
should be accompanied with as little disturbance of the old state of
things as possible. If Monarchy had vanished in the turmoil of war, his
experience of the Long Parliament only confirmed him in his belief of
the need of establishing an executive power of a similar kind, apart
from the power of the legislature, as a condition of civil liberty. His
sword had won "liberty of conscience"; but, passionately as he clung to
it, he was still for an established Church, for a parochial system, and
a ministry maintained by tithes. His social tendencies were simply those
of the class to which he belonged. "I was by birth a gentleman," he
told a later Parliament, and in the old social arrangement of "a
nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman," he saw "a good interest of the nation
and a great one." He hated "that levelling principle" which tended to
the reducing of all to one equality. "What was the purport of it," he
asks with an amusing simplicity, "but to make the tenant as liberal a
fortune as the landlord? Which, I think, if obtained, would not have
lasted long. The men of that principle, after they had served their own
turns, would then have cried up property and interest fast enough." To a
practical temper such as this the speculative reforms of the Convention
were as distasteful as to the lawyers and clergy whom they attacked.
"Nothing," said Cromwell, "was in the hearts of these men but 'overturn,
overturn.'" In December however he was delivered from his embarrassment
by the internal dissensions of the Assembly itself. The day after the
decision against tithes the more conservative members snatched a vote by
surprise "that the sitting of this Parliament any longer, as now
constituted, will not be for the good of the Commonwealth, and that it
is requisite to deliver up unto the Lord-General the powers we received
from him." The Speaker placed their abdication in Cromwell's hands, and
the act was confirmed by the subsequent adhesion of a majority of the
members.

[Sidenote: The Instrument of Government.]

The dissolution of the Convention replaced matters in the state in which
its assembly had found them; but there was still the same general