xchange in the City and other
public places. Having laid hold of some famous Royalists who had escaped
from prison, and having beheaded the DUKE OF HAMILTON, LORD HOLLAND, and
LORD CAPEL, in Palace Yard (all of whom died very courageously), they
then appointed a Council of State to govern the country. It consisted of
forty-one members, of whom five were peers. Bradshaw was made president.
The House of Commons also re-admitted members who had opposed the King's
death, and made up its numbers to about a hundred and fifty.

But, it still had an army of more than forty thousand men to deal with,
and a very hard task it was to manage them. Before the King's execution,
the army had appointed some of its officers to remonstrate between them
and the Parliament; and now the common soldiers began to take that office
upon themselves. The regiments under orders for Ireland mutinied; one
troop of horse in the city of London seized their own flag, and refused
to obey orders. For this, the ringleader was shot: which did not mend
the matter, for, both his comrades and the people made a public funeral
for him, and accompanied the body to the grave with sound of trumpets and
with a gloomy procession of persons carrying bundles of rosemary steeped
in blood. Oliver was the only man to deal with such difficulties as
these, and he soon cut them short by bursting at midnight into the town
of Burford, near Salisbury, where the mutineers were sheltered, taking
four hundred of them prisoners, and shooting a number of them by sentence
of court-martial. The soldiers soon found, as all men did, that Oliver
was not a man to be trifled with. And there was an end of the mutiny.

The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet; so, on hearing of the
King's execution, it proclaimed the Prince of Wales King Charles the
Second, on condition of his respecting the Solemn League and Covenant.
Charles was abroad at that time, and so was Montrose, from whose help he
had hopes enough to keep him holding on and off with commissioners from
Scotland, just as his father might have done. These hopes were soon at
an end; for, Montrose, having raised a few hundred exiles in Germany, and
landed with them in Scotland, found that the people there, instead of
joining him, deserted the country at his approach. He was soon taken
prisoner and carried to Edinburgh. There he was received with every
possible insult, and carried to prison in a cart, his officers going