, would not have told an untruth even about Monk; and
Ludlow was then in London, knowing well what went on. Let us suppose,
however, that he exaggerated a little, and that old George was the
victim of circumstances.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates, and generally from Feb. 21
to March 16; Ludlow, 855-856.]

A large proportion of the proceedings of the House and the Council
may be described as simply a re-establishment of Presbyterianism. The
secluded members being Presbyterians to a man, there was at once an
enthusiastic recollection of the edicts of the Long Parliament
between 1643 and 1648, setting up Presbytery as the national
Religion, with a determination to revert in detail to those symbols
and forms of the Presbyterian system which the triumph of
Independency had set aside during the Commonwealth, and which had
been allowed only partially, and side by side with their contraries,
in the broad Church-Establishment of the Protectorate. The unanimity
and rapidity of the House in their votes in this direction must have
alarmed the Independents and Sectaries. It was on Feb. 29 that the
House appointed a Committee of twenty-nine on the whole subject of
Religion and Church affairs--Annesley, Ashley Cooper, Prynne, and Sir
Samuel Luke (i.e. Butler's Presbyterian "Sir Hudibras") being of the
number; and on the 2nd of March, on report from this Committee, the
Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith, as it had been under
discussion in the Long Parliament in 1646 (Vol. III. p. 512), was
again brought before the House, and passed bodily at once, with the
exception of chapter 30, "_Of Church Censures_," and chapter 31,
"_Of Synods and Councils_"--which two chapters it was thought as
well to keep still in Committee. The same day there were other
resolutions of a Presbyterian tenor. But the climax was on March 5,
in this form: "_Ordered_, That the SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be
printed and published, and set up and forthwith read in every church,
and also read once a year according to former Act of Parliament, and
that the said SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be also set up in this
House." Thus, when the bones of Alexander Henderson had been for more
than thirteen years in their tomb in Grey Friars churchyard in
Edinburgh, was the great document which he had drafted in that city
in August 1643, as a bond of religious union for the Three Kingdoms,
and only the first fortunes of which he had lived to see,
resuscitated in