mediate proceedings. Had it been merely the administration that had
come into their hands, with the defence of the Commonwealth against
the renewed danger of a Royalist outburst at home and inburst from
abroad to take advantage of the political crash, the
Wallingford-House chiefs would probably have thought it sufficient to
constitute themselves into a military Oligarchy for maintaining and
carrying on Richard's Protectorate. Fleetwood, Desborough, and
Lambert would have been a Triumvirate in Richard's name, and the only
deliberative apparatus would have been the general council of
officers continued, or a more select Council of their number
associated with a few chosen civilians. The Triumvirs might have
given such a form to the constitution as, while securing the real
power for themselves, and not abolishing Richard, would have
satisfied or beguiled for the moment the so-called Republicanism now
again rampant among the inferior Army-men. But there was no money;
Government in any form was at a deadlock until money could be raised;
and how was that to be effected? The Wallingford-House magnates did
meditate for an instant whether they should not try to raise money by
their own authority, but concluded that the experiment would be too
desperate, and that, for this reason, if for no other, some kind of
Parliament must be at once set up.--But what Parliament? Here they
had not far to seek. For the last month or more, placards on all the
walls of London, the very cries of news-boys in the streets, had been
telling them what Parliament. We have several times quoted the phrase
"The Good Old Cause," as coming gradually into use after Oliver's
death, and passing to and fro in documents and speeches. But no one
can describe now the force and frequency of that phrase in London and
throughout England in April 1659 and for months afterwards. If two
men passed you in the street, you heard the words "the good old
cause" from one of them; every second or third pamphlet in the
booksellers' shops had "The Good Old Cause" on its title-page or
running through its text; veterans rolled out the phrase sonorously
in their nightly prayers, or went to sleep mumbling it. One notes
constantly in the history of any country this phenomenon of the
expression of a great wave of feeling in some single popular phrase,
generally worn out in a few months; but the present is a peculiarly
remarkable instance. The phrase, in itself, was ambiguous. One might