, and dreading the next bolt from the Protector's hands; those
hands evidently toying with several new bolts and poising them
towards the parts of Europe for which they were intended; great
schemes, besides, for England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Colonies,
in that inventive brain! All this, we say, in July 1658, by which
time also it was known that the Protector, so far from fearing to
face a new Parliament, was ready to call one and would take all the
chances. His immediate necessity, of course, was money. His second
Parliament, at the close of its first and loyal session in June 1657,
had provided ordinary supplies for three years; but there had been no
new revenue-arrangements in the short second session, and the current
expenses for the Flanders expedition, the various Embassies, the
Court, and the whole conduct of the Government, far outran the voted
income. The pay of the armies in England, Scotland, and Ireland was
greatly in arrears; on all hands there were straits for money; and,
whatever might be done by expedients and ingenuity meanwhile, the
effective extrication could only be by a Parliament. Not for
subsidies only, however, was Cromwell willing to resort again to that
agency, with all its perils. He believed that, in consequence of what
had passed since the Dissolution in January, any Parliament that
should now meet him would be in a different mood towards himself from
that he had recently encountered. Then might there not be proposals,
in which he and such a Parliament might agree, for constitutional
changes in advance of the Articles of the _Petition and Advice_,
though in the same direction of orderliness and settled and stately
rule? Was there not wide regret among the civilians that he had not
accepted the Kingship; had his refusal of it been really wise; might
not that question be reopened? With that question might there not go
the question of the succession, whether by nomination for one life
only as was now fixed, or by perpetual nomination, or by a return to
the hereditary and dynastic principle which the lawyers and the
civilians thought the best? Nor could the Second House of Parliament
remain the vague thing it had been so far fashioned. It must be
amended in the points in which its weakness had been proved; and all
the evidence hitherto was that it must be made truly and formally a
House of Lords, if even with the reinstitution of a peerage as part
and parcel of the legislative system. Whether