had
anything to lose, or anything to fear, to be among the foremost to
bid him welcome. No longer now was it merely a rat here and there of
the inferior sort, like Downing and Morland,[1] that was leaving the
sinking ship. So many were leaving, and of so many sorts and degrees,
that Hyde and the other Councillors of Charles had ceased to count,
on their side, the deserters as they clambered up. He received now,
Hyde tells us, "the addresses of many men who had never before
applied themselves to him, and many sent to him for his Majesty's
approbation and leave to sit in the next Parliament." Between London
and Flanders messengers were passing to and fro daily, with perfect
freedom and hardly any disguise of their business. Annesley, the
President of the Council of State, was in correspondence with the
King; Thurloe, now back in the Secretaryship to the Council, was in
correspondence with him, and by no means dishonourably; and in the
meetings of the Council of State itself, though it was bound to be
corporately neutral till the Parliament should assemble, the drift of
the deliberations was obvious. The only two men whose resistance even
now could have compelled a pause were Monk and Montague. What of
them?----It was no false rumour that Montague, the Cromwellian among
Cromwellians, the man who would have died for Cromwell or perhaps for
his dynasty, had been holding himself free for Charles. Under a cloud
among the Republicans since his suspicious return from the Baltic in
September last, but restored to command by the recent vote of the
Parliament of the secluded members making him joint chief Admiral
with Monk, he was at this moment (i.e. from March 23 onwards) in the
Thames with his fleet, in receipt of daily orders from the Council
and guarding the sea-passage between them and Flanders. He had on
board with him, as his secretary, a certain young Mr. Samuel Pepys,
who had been with him already in the Baltic, had been meanwhile in a
clerkship in the Exchequer office, but had now left his house in Axe
Yard, Westminster, and his young wife there, for the pleasure and
emoluments of being once more secretary to so kind and great a
master. In cabin talk with the trusty Pepys the Lord Admiral made no
secret of his belief that the King would come in; but it was only by
shrewd observations of what passed on board, and of the strange
people that came and went, that Pepys then guessed what he afterwards
knew to be the fact. "My