ave granted it would
have been to proclaim that he was taking the Scottish nation with him
in his enterprise, and so give indubitable foundation to those
rumours that "the King was at the bottom of it" which were flying
about already, and which it was his first care to contradict. There
must be no general arming of the Scots: he would march into England
with his own little army only! Still, however, he did not move from
Coldstream, but stuck there, exchanging messages with Lambert
respecting the renewal of the Treaty. It was now dead winter, and
the snow lay thick over the whole region between the two Generals.
Monk's personal accommodations at Coldstream were much worse than
Lambert's at Newcastle. He was quartered in a wretched cottage, with
two barns, where, on the first night of his arrival, he could find
nothing for supper, and had to munch more than his usual allowance of
raw tobacco instead. But he had the means of paying his men and
keeping them in good humour, while bad pay and the cold weather were
demoralising Lambert's.[1]

[Footnote 1: Skinner's Life of Monk, 161-168; Phillips, 674-675.]

For the restitution of the Rump Parliament, Monk's march into England
was to be quite unnecessary. His mere pertinacity in declaring
himself the champion of the Rump and making preparations for the
march had disintegrated all that seemingly coherent strength of the
Wallingford-House party throughout England and Ireland on which
Lambert could rely when he left London in the beginning of November.
All over England and Ireland, for six weeks now, people had been
talking of "Silent Old George," as Monk's own soldiers called him,
though he was but in his fifty-second year, and speculating on his
possible meaning, and on the chance that even Lambert might find him
more than a match. And such mere gossip and curiosity everywhere,
mingling with previous doubtings in some quarters, and with relics of
positive partisanship with the Rump in others, had gradually induced
a complete whirl of public feeling. By the middle of December, when
the Wallingford-House Government put forth their proclamation of a
new Parliament, this was so apparent that Whitlocke and his friends
at the centre might well doubt whether that Parliament would ever
meet. By that time, at all events, Lambert had begun to curse his own
folly in not having fallen upon Monk at first, and in having let
himself afterwards be deluded so long by the phantom of a renewed