d Aug. 11, 1659. After Oct.
25, 1659, there is again a gap.]

Precisely in this time of triumph after Lambert's success did the
Rumpers find leisure to address themselves to the question of the
Form of Government they were to set up in the Commonwealth before
retiring from the scene themselves. It was on the 8th of September
that, after some previous debates in the House, it was referred to a
committee of twenty-nine "to prepare something to be offered to the
House in order to the settlement of the Government of this
Commonwealth." The Committee was to sit from day to day, and to
report on or before the 10th of October. Vane was named first on the
Committee, which included also Hasilrig, Whitlocke, Marten, Neville,
Fleetwood, Sydenham, Salway, Scott, Chief Justice St. John, Downes,
Strickland, and Sir Gilbert Pickering. What a work for a Committee!
It was predetermined, of course, that the Constitution they were to
concoct was to be one suitable for a Free Commonwealth or Republic,
without King, Single Person of any other denomination, or House of
Lords; but, even within that prelimitation, what a range of
possibilities! Nor were the Committee to be perplexed only by the
varieties of their own inventiveness in the art of
constitution-making. All the theorists and ideologists of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, were on the alert to help them, Ludlow's
summary of the various proposals made within the Committee itself, or
pressed upon it from the outside, is worth quoting. "At this time,"
he says, "the opinions of men were much divided concerning a Form of
Government to be established amongst us. The great officers of the
Army, as I said before, were for a Select Standing Senate, to be
joined to the Representative of the People. Others laboured to have
the supreme authority to consist of an Assembly chosen by the People,
and a Council of State to be chosen by that Assembly, to be vested
with executive power, and accountable to that which should next
succeed, at which time the power of the said Council should
determine. Some were desirous to have a Representative of the People
constantly sitting, but changed by a perpetual rotation. Others
proposed that there might be joined to the Popular Assembly a select
number of men in the nature of the Lacedaemonian Ephori, who should
have a negative in things wherein the essentials of the Government
should be concerned, such as the exclusion of a Single Person,
touching Liberty of C