It is true, that even this measure might not have answered to the views of the Republicans, but it was their only chance.

To remain as they were, the last remnant that military violence had spared, and therefore respected by no party; to remain, ready to be overthrown at the first difference that arose between themselves and the army, was certain destruction.

In this state, however, the parliament did remain during the first year of their administration, 1648.

In 1649, Cromwell and the army were employed in Ireland; in 1650, against the Scotch Presbyterians, who had made a very injudicious attempt to restore royalty, or rather the covenant and royalty; and had persuaded the young king (afterwards Charles the Second) to commit himself, very thoughtlessly, to the disposal of their intolerance and fanaticism. In both these campaigns Cromwell and the army were victorious. In 1651, the young king was defeated at Worcester. This defeat of his enemy was what Cromwell declared to be the last crowning mercy of the Lord; that is, it was the finishing step to his own power, and the cause of the Republicans was now more than ever hopeless.

They seem to have had an opportunity in 1649, when Cromwell was in Ireland, to have made some effort for the establishment of their civil authority, but they lost it. In the mean time, petitions with respect to the settlement of the nation were continually presented to them instead of attending, however, to the public expectations, and the duties of their situation, they contented themselves with returning, like other unwise governments, sometimes menaces, punishments, and statutes of high treason, sometimes plausible answers to gain time, and occasionally debating the question of their dissolution, and of a new representation; but, on the whole, coming to no decision on the subject, while it was their best policy to do so. When at last they did come to a vote, in November, 1651, after the power of Cromwell was finally established, their resolution only was, "that they would dissolve themselves three years afterwards, in 1654 ; " a resolution that could satisfy no one, but much the contrary.

They had, therefore, not chosen to make a common cause with the public, and being thus without support from within

and from without, Cromwell took a few soldiers with him, expelled them from the House, and locked up the doors of it, as soon as he found them an encumbrance to his ambition. He first, indeed, acquainted them, "that the Lord had done with them."

The public, who never favor those who have no visible merits to produce, still less those who have seemed attentive chiefly to their own selfish interests, saw this new act of military violence with indifference, and probably with pleasure.

Certainly these Republicans, after a trial of three years, bad entirely failed as politicians and had established no republic.

But they had great merits in endeavouring to introduce improvements into the law. The laudable efforts of the long parliament on this subject have never been properly acknowledged. The state of all the real landed property of this kingdom is, at this moment, materially influenced by the happy effect of their legislative provisions; and those men of property who inquire, will find, that their estates have been as much indebted, as themselves, to these parliamentary leaders, for any freedom that belongs to them; both the one and the other were emancipated from feudal manacles.

Cromwell now alone remained, supreme and unresisted; and thus at length terminated, in the usurpation of a military chief, the original struggle between the king and parliament.

And this, as I have already announced at the beginning of this lecture, has been always considered as the necessary issue of any successful appeal to arms on the part of the people; a position to which I do not indiscriminately assent, and on which I shall, therefore, offer some observations in my next lecture.

TOWARDS the conclusion of my last lecture, we had arrived at the usurpation of Cromwell; and this usurpation of a military chief, I then observed, has been always considered as the natural issue of any successful appeal to arms on the part of the people.

This position, it appears to me, has been always laid down too broadly and indiscriminately. The question seems to admit of a distinction, and it is this:

If a people have been long subject to all the evils of an arbitrary government, and at last break out into insurrection, it is to be expected, no doubt, that the last favorite of the army, who survives the contest, will gradually procure for himself the power which the former sovereigns had abused and lost. There is no material shock here given to those habits of thinking and feeling, which, notwithstanding all the intermediate troubles, must still form the genuine character of the great body of the nation; but the case is materially altered, if we suppose a people, before, possessed of constitutional rights, and endeavouring to defend or enlarge them, in opposition to those who would limit or destroy them. Here the event, if the popular party succeed, seems more naturally to be, the ultimate strengthening and enlarging of the prior constitutional privileges, under some form of government similar to the former one.

In this case a usurpation is either not attempted, as in the instances of Switzerland and Holland, and, in our own times, of America, or, if attempted, the usurper finds himself impeded with such political difficulties, at every movement which he makes, that the continuance of his power is always

a matter of uncertainty; and the original and irremediable disposition of the people, the result of their former better government, is sure at last to prevail, either over himself, or over his successors.

In illustration of this general reasoning, may be cited the difficulties which Cromwell had to overcome, while he was endeavouring to seize the power of the state, and still more while he was laboring to retain it.

I will give a general representation of them. Together they form a strong testimony to the permanent nature of the English mixed constitution, particularly of the monarchical part of it; and they go far to prove that the usurpation of Cromwell was not, as has been generally supposed, a successful one.

These are the principal topics of reflection to which I would at present wish to excite your attention. Hume and Millar, and the regular historians and writers, will supply you with many others.

Cromwell had to subdue, not only the royalists, but the Presbyterians; and this, not merely by force, but by the most extraordinary performances of cant and hypocrisy that human nature ever yet exhibited.

But why? Because these descriptions of men bore fresh upon their minds the impression of the constitution of England, and were only solicitous, according to the best of their judgment, to support or improve that constitution.

By the same arts and means were the Independents, the Republicans, to be overpowered by the usurper, and for the some reason. They too were impressed with the original stamp which had been received from the popular part of this constitution; and they had only deviated from it because they thought that the monarchical part had been found, from trial, incompatible with the interests of the country.

That a military usurper, that any single person should rule, was not in the contemplation or wishes, probably, of any one disinterested Englishman at the time.

And it is here that may be found the great proof of the talents of Cromwell, which is not only, as Mr. Hume states, that he could rise from a private station to a high authority in the army; but still more, that he could afterwards bend the

refractory spirits, and direct the disordered understandings of all around him, to the purposes of his own ambition, to the elevation of himself to the protectorate, in violation of all his former professions and protestations, public and private, and in defiance of all the men of principle and intrepidity, who had been so long his associates and friends in the parliament and in the army.

The gross and ignorant soldiers might, indeed, be well content, that he who gave them pay and plunder should have every thing to dispose of; and in their idolatry of a successful general, they might, for a time, forget their country, and those forms of established authority to which they had once been accustomed. But still, it was these coarse and brute instruments upon which Cromwell could alone depend; and, after all, as the mass of an army must always be managed through the medium of its officers, it was here (in this management of the officers) that his extraordinary powers were exhibited in a manner so striking. Some he could make his creatures by mere bribery, by lucrative posts and expectations but the rest, and not unfrequently many of the common soldiers themselves, he was obliged to cajole, by every art and labor of hypocrisy ; to surround and bewilder them with a tempest of fanaticism, of sighs and prayers, of groans and ejaculations; in short, to elevate and involve his heroes and himself in a cloud, till he was able there to leave them, and himself to descend and take undisturbed possession of the earth.

Whoever reads the history of these times, cannot well believe that this military usurper, daring and powerful as his abilities were, both in the cabinet and in the field, could possibly have succeeded, if the religious principle had not unfortunately found its way into every part of the dispute between the king and his people, and so disturbed the natural tendency of things, as to render any achievement practicable, which could well be conceived by a man of military skill and fanaticism united. But observe his progress.

When the young king had been finally defeated at Worcester, when the Republicans had been turned out of the House of Commons, when Cromwell, with his council of officers, was left alone on the stage, and when it would generally be said, that the natural termination of the contest had