Meanwhile Monk's three Commissioners had arrived at York and been in
parley with Lambert. Finding that the question of the restitution of
the Rump was involved in their instructions, he passed them on to
London, having stipulated for a truce till the result should be
known. On the 12th of November the Commissioners were in London; and
on the 15th, after three days of consultation at Wallingford House, a
treaty of nine Articles was agreed to, and signed by them on the part
of Monk and the Army in Scotland, and by Fleetwood on the part of the
Wallingford-House Council. There was great delight in Whitehall over
this result, and the Tower cannon proclaimed the happy
reconciliation between Monk and the Government. But Monk's
Commissioners had been too hasty, or had been outwitted; and Clarges,
who arrived in London that day, had come too late to stop them and
spin out the time. A pledge of both parties against Charles Stuart or
any single-person Government was in the forefront of the Treaty; and
the rest of the Articles simply admitted Monk and the officers of the
Scottish Army to a share in the Government as then going on, and in
certain arrangements which the Committee of Safety and the
Wallingford-House Council had been already devising on their own
account. Monk received the news at Haddington on the evening of Nov.
18; he returned to Edinburgh next day, "very silent and reserved";
but that day it was resolved by him, in consultation with some of his
chief officers and with Dr. Barrow, to disown the Treaty--not,
indeed, by actual rejection of any of the Articles, but on the plea
that several things had been omitted and that there must be farther
specification. For this purpose it was proposed that two
Commissioners on Monk's part should be added to the former three, and
that five Commissioners from the Army in England should meet these
and continue the Treaty at Alnwick or some other indifferent place
near Scotland. When this answer reached London, Whitlocke, who had
all along, as he tells us, protested that Monk's object was delay
only and "that the bottom of his design was to bring in the King,"
repeated more earnestly his former advice that Lambert should be
pushed on to immediate action. "His advice was not taken," says
Whitlocke, "but a new Treaty consented to by Commissioners on each
part, to be at Newcastle." From about the 20th of November that was
Lambert's headquarters, while Monk, having left a portion of his