declaration should be substituted
for the stronger abjuration oath even for members of the Council of
State. They had also complied with Monk's demands that there should
be more severe reprimand of the late Committee of Safety and
especially of Vane and Lambert. All this was to induce Monk to accept
the proffered _Self-Enlargement of the present House_, rather
than yield to the popular and Presbyterian demand for _the Long
Parliament reconstituted_. Nor were there wanting objections to
the latter plan in Monk's own mind. If a House with the secluded
members re-seated in it would confine itself to questions of present
exigency and future political order, there might be no harm. But
would it do so? With a Presbyterian majority in it, looking on all
that had been done since 1648 as the illegal acts of pretended
Governments, might it not be tempted to a revengeful revision of all
those acts? Might it not thus unsettle those arrangements for the
sale, purchase, gift, and conveyance of property upon which the
fortunes of many thousands, including the Army officers and the
soldiery in England, in Scotland, and especially in Ireland, now
depended? Would Monk's own officers risk such a consequence? To come
to some understanding with the secluded members on these points, Monk
himself, and Clarges and Gumble for him, had been holding interviews
with such of the secluded members as were in London; and matters had
been so far ripened that at length, on Saturday the 18th, by Monk's
invitation, there was a conference at his quarters between about a
dozen of the leading Rumpers and as many representatives of the
Secluded. Hasilrig was one of the Rumpers present; but, as most of
the others were of the Monk party, the conference was not unamicable.
Even the Rumpers who were favourable to the re-admission of the
Secluded, however, could only speak for themselves, and the
representatives of the Secluded could hardly undertake for their
absent brethren; and so there was no definite agreement.----Monk then
took the matter into his own hands. Having, in the course of the
Sunday and Monday, secured the concurrence of his officers, and made
a rough compact in writing with a few of the secluded members, he
marched his Army out of the City on the morning of Tuesday the 21st;
and, the secluded members having met him by appointment at Whitehall,
to the number of about sixty, he made a short speech to them, caused
a longer "Declaration" which he ha