he Other House with
the Resolutions having been purposely delayed and all but refused,
the Commons adopted what farther measures they could for securing
Richard's control of the militia. Richard was advised by those around
him to empower them to seize Fleetwood and Desborough, and also
Lambert, whose conjunction with the Wallingford-House party was now
notorious. He hesitated. He had never done harm to anybody, he said,
and he would not have a drop of blood shed on his poor account. The
question now was between a forced dissolution of the
Wallingford-House council of officers and a dissolution of the
Parliament itself. That, in spite of Richard's objection to violence,
seemed on the eve of being decided by a murderous battle in the
streets of London. Fleetwood, summoned to Whitehall to see the
Protector, neglected the summons; and through the night between
Wednesday the 20th and Thursday the 21st of April there was a
rendezvous in and round St. James's, by Fleetwood's order, of all the
regiments in town. A counter-rendezvous, in Richard's name, was
attempted at Whitehall; but Whalley, Goffe, and Ingoldsby, who would
have commanded here and done their best, found that they had no
soldiers to command, the bulk of their own regiments, with some of
Richard's guards, having preferred the other rendezvous. What then
happened is told by Ludlow in a single sentence. "About noon," says
the sturdy democrat, "Colonel Desborough went to Mr. Richard Cromwell
at Whitehall, and told him that, if he would dissolve his Parliament,
the officers would take care of him, but that, if he refused to do
so, they would do it without him, and leave him to shift for
himself." There was some consultation, in which Broghill, Fiennes,
Thurloe, Wolseley, and Whitlocke, took part. Whitlocke, as he tells
us, was against a dissolution even in that extremity; but most of the
others thought it inevitable. Richard, therefore, reluctantly
yielded; but, as he declined to dissolve the Parliament in person, a
commission for the purpose, directed to Lord Commissioner Fiennes,
the Speaker of the Upper House, was drawn up by Thurloe, and
delivered in the night to Fleetwood and Desborough. Next day, Friday
the 22nd, when the message came to the Commons by the Black Rod to
attend in the House of Lords, there was the utmost possible
confusion. Some members who had gone out were recalled; all were
ordered to remain in their places; there was a wild hubbub of motions