banner, or else, if the forces he could rally proved too small, shut himself up in the Tower, and trust to the City itself till the effect were seen.  The other way would be to dispatch an envoy to the King at once with offers and instructions.  Whitlocke himself was equally willing to go into the Tower with Fleetwood or to be his envoy to Charles.  After some rumination, Fleetwood, as Whitlocke understood, had concluded for the latter plan, and Whitlocke was taking leave of him, with that understanding, to prepare for his journey, when they found Vane, Desborough, and Berry, in the ante-chamber.  At Fleetwood’s request Whitlocke waited there, while the new comers and Fleetwood consulted in the other room.  In less than a quarter of an hour, says Whitlocke, Fleetwood came out, telling him passionately “I cannot do it, I cannot do it.”  The reason he gave was that he had just been reminded that he was under a pledge to Lambert to take no such step without his consent.  To Whitlocke’s remonstrance that, Lambert being absent, and the matter being one of life or death, only instant action could prevent ruin to Fleetwood himself and his friends, the answer was “I cannot help it”; and so they parted.—­This was on Thursday the 22nd of December.  The next day, though Whitlocke had a call from Colonel Ingoldsby, Colonel Howard, and another, suggesting that, as Keeper of the Great Seal, he might fitly go to the King on his own account, he went on sealing writs, he tells us, for the new Wallingford-House Parliament.  Meanwhile, the uproar in the City being at its maximum, such members of the late Council of the Rump as were in town met at Speaker Lenthall’s house and issued orders for a rendezvous of Fleetwood’s regiments in Lincoln’s Inn Fields under the command of Okey, Alured, Markham, and Mosse.  Fleetwood, applied to for the keys of the Parliament house, willingly gave them up and resigned all charge.  On Saturday the 24th the mass of the soldiers were gladly at the appointed rendezvous, and were marched down Chancery Lane, where the Speaker came out to them at the Rolls, and was received with shouts of joy and repentance.  On Monday the 26th all the members of the Rump who were at hand met the Speaker in the Council-Chamber at Whitehall, and walked thence to Westminster Hall, the mace carried before them, and the soldiers and populace cheering as they passed.  They constituted the House and proceeded at once to business.  They had been excluded two months and fourteen days.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Whitlocke, IV. 380-384; Phillips, 676; Letter of M. de Bordeaux to Mazarin of Dec. 28, 1659 (English reckoning), Guizot, 318-322.]

CHAPTER I.

Second Section (continued).

THE ANARCHY, STAGE III.:  OR SECOND RESTORATION OF THE RUMP, WITH MONK’S MARCH FROM SCOTLAND:  DEC. 26, 1659—­FEB. 21, 1659-60.