quarters. Marshall, as the engraver of the wondrous allegorical frontispiece, was perhaps entitled to a share of the credit. He had succeeded better in this than in that portrait of Milton, for the 1645 edition of his Poems, for which Milton had punished him so savagely in his Greek epigram.1

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We have spoken of the opponents of the New Government as "silenced." The publication of the Eikon Basilike (which was followed soon by the publication of The Papers which passed at Newcastle betwixt his sacred Majesty and Mr. Alexander Henderson) shows that this was true only in a limited sense; and there is other evidence, in extraordinary quantity, that Royalism asserted its unabated strength, and now fiercer intensity, through the press. "A Handkerchief for Loyal "Mourners"; "The Subjects' Sorrow: or Lamentation upon the "Death of Britain's Josiah, King Charles, in a Sermon on Lam. “IV. 20, by Dr. Juxon, Bishop of London"; "The Devilish Conspiracy, Hellish Treason, Heathenish Condemnation, and "Damnable Murder, committed and executed by the Jews against "the Anointed of the Lord Jesus Christ, their King: as it was "delivered in a sermon, Feb. 4, by Dr. Warner, Bishop of Ro"chester":—such are the titles of three specimens of a Royalist pamphlet-literature that was now abundant. Nor must it be forgotten that the day of regular newspapers, after a humble fashion, had arrived, and that every week in London there were hawked about copies of many different news-sheets of small quarto size, all of them unlicensed, and some of them Royalist. Chief among the Royalist news-sheets at this date was the Mercurius Pragmaticus, edited by Marchamont Needham.

This Marchamont Needham, one of the first of English journalists that can now be distinctly named, had had a varied and rather discreditable history. Born in Oxfordshire in 1620, and educated at All Souls', Oxford, where he took his B.A. degree, he had come to London at the age of eighteen.

1 Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual, by Bohn, Art. Eikov Baσidiký; Commons Journals, March 16, 1648-9; also Baillie's Letters, III. 87, where, in a letter from the Scottish Commissioners at the Hague to the Commission of the Kirk in Scotland, dated April 3,

1649, they say, "Ane unhappy book, “ Εἰκὼν Βασιλική, does us much pre"judice." In the Thomason collec tion there is, with the date April 7, 1648-9, a MS. "Copy of Verses ex"plaining the Frontispiece to the King's "Book."

to be usher in Merchant Taylors' School, but had left that place for more profitable employment as a clerk, or lawyer's assistant, in Gray's Inn. In Aug. 1643, or a year after the beginning of the Civil War, while still not more than threeand-twenty years of age, he had made a great stroke in life by starting the Mercurius Britannicus, a newspaper on the popular side, in opposition to the Mercurius Aulicus, conducted at Oxford by John Birkenhead and others on the King's side. He threw into it some wit, and a great deal of scurrility and invective against the King and the Royalists, sacrificing all, says Anthony Wood, to "the beast with many heads." He became, accordingly, a great favourite with the Londoners, and seems even to have been employed occasionally in hackwork for the Parliament. In 1645, having studied physic, "in the chemical way," and begun to practise it, "by that "and his writing he maintained himself in a very genteel "fashion." An imprisonment in the Gatehouse for some offence or other had, however, disgusted him with Parliament and determined him to change his politics. After his release, having contrived an introduction to the King at Hampton Court, he had knelt before his Majesty, kissed his Majesty's hand, asked forgiveness, and received it. One of the first consequences was a pamphlet on the King's side, called The Case of the Kingdom stated. Another, even more important, was the Mercurius Pragmaticus, started Sept. 14, 1647, and continued ever since. Here Needham had striven to undo all he had formerly done in the Britannicus; and, "being very witty, satirical against the Presbyterians, and full of loyalty," the paper "made him known to and admired by the bravadoes "and wits of those times." It was, indeed, a paper of ineffable ribaldry; and there may be collected from it the choicest specimens of that buffoon rhetoric of the day against the Roundheads of all varieties, and against Cromwell and his adherents in particular, which it has pleased the Literary Fates to let pass into the language of more permanent History. Perhaps more than any other man Needham helped in the invention of those numberless nicknames for Cromwell, some of which survive. "The Brewer," "Crum-Hell," "Noll,"

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'Nod-Noll," "Copper-face," "The Town-Bull," "His Nose"ship," and latterly, with a touch of superior genius, “The "Almighty Nose" or "Nose Almighty":-such are a few of the metonymies and metaphors one or other of which always stood for Cromwell in the pages of Pragmaticus. That the paper had not been put down, and Needham extinguished, is now the wonder. By various devices for secret printing and selling, however, and by absconding from London occasionally, he had both saved himself and continued his journal, so that, in the infancy of the Commonwealth, Mercurius Pragmaticus was perhaps the sharpest literary thorn in its side. It surpassed, in talent for invective, such contemporary Royalist journals as The Man in the Moon and The Moderate, and was far cleverer than such neutral or Government papers as The Weekly Intelligencer, The Metropolitan Nuncio, and The Army's Modest Intelligencer.1

THE GOVERNMENT CONTINUED IN THE RUMP PARLIAMENT AND THE COUNCIL OF STATE THEIR FIRST ACTS: RESOLUTION FOR THE RECONQUEST OF IRELAND BY CROMWELL: HOME DIFFICULTIES: LILBURNE AND THE LONDON CONSPIRACY OF LEVELLERS: ARMY-MUTINY.— RELATIONS WITH FOREIGN POWERS: ASSASSINATION OF DORISLAUS.-SUPPRESSION OF THE LEVELLERS.

Such being the surroundings and such the internal state of the infant Commonwealth, it is not to be wondered at that the men at the centre, though they had but recently framed, or adopted from Ireton, the famous draft Agreement of the People, proposing an immediate dissolution of the existing fragment of a Parliament and a new general election after a Plebiscite

1 Notes from my readings in the Thomason Collection and in its catalogue; Wood's Ath. Oxon, III. 11801190 (Memoir of Needham). In Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, IV. 33-97, there is a most valuable chronological list of early English newspapers, with the dates in most cases of their first numbers. From this list it appears that no fewer than 170 weekly papers of various

kinds and various shades of politics had been started in England (chiefly in London) between the commencement of the Civil War in Aug. 1642 and the King's death in Jan. 1648-9. Most of these had perished after a few numbers; but some survived into the Commonwealth, and about fifteen new ones were started within the first four months of the Commonwealth.

taken on fundamentals, were very slow to carry out these proposals. Henry Marten's witty parable at a later date was quite applicable now. When the child Moses was found by Pharaoh's daughter in the ark of bulrushes, and Pharaoh's daughter wanted a nurse for it, to whom but the child's own mother, said Marten, was the office entrusted! Better, then, that the baby Commonwealth should be nursed for a while by those who had brought it into being! Such by this time was probably Ireton's own opinion. At all events, dissolution by the end of April was impossible; and the fragment of a Parliament and the Council of State set themselves manfully to do whatever was necessary for the present.1

Some of their acts, indeed, lay in the past as already done. Such was the Trial, by another special High Court of Justice, of the chief delinquents, next to the King, that had been left in their hands-the Duke of Hamilton (Earl of Cambridge in the English Peerage), the Earl of Holland, Lord Goring, Lord Capel, and Sir John Owen. The Trial had been duly concluded; and, after votes of mercy in Parliament in favour of Goring and Owen, the other three had died on the scaffold (March 9). By Hamilton's death, without male issue, his brother, the Earl of Lanark, had become the second Duke of Hamilton, and had begun to be so styled at the Hague even while we have been speaking of him there by his old name of Lanark. A few other unpardonable culprits were on the proscribed list as banished, or were reserved in prison for punishment; but on the whole the policy of the Government was not to trouble people too much for past offences.-There had been some trouble with the Law-Courts, six of the twelve Judges having declined to serve under the Commonwealth; but the difficulty had been met by new appointments and promotions, including the nomination of Whitlocke and Lisle jointly to be Commissioners of the Great Seal. The old Seal had been broken to pieces on the floor of the House by a workman brought in on purpose, and it was a new Republican seal

1 Henry Marten's parable was not propounded till 1653. See Clar. 792.

that was in the custody of these gentlemen. The Acts formally abolishing the Kingly office and the House of Peers had been passed, and ordered to be published; and there had been published also a national Republican manifesto, mainly of Whitlocke's penning, entitled, Declaration for the Satisfaction of the Kingdom [sic!] touching the late Proceedings of the Parliament, with orders that it should be translated immediately into Latin, French, and Dutch (March 17). The Earl of Warwick's tenure of the office of Lord High Admiral had been abolished, and the duties of that great office vested in the Council of State (Feb. 20), with the result, three days afterwards, that Robert Blake, Edward Popham, and Richard Dean, were appointed Generals of the Fleet of the Republic. The care of the late King's library at St. James's, now called "The Public Library," with the statues and pictures therein, had in like manner been committed to the Council of State; and there had been votes as to the disposal of the personal estates of the late King and Queen, and some votes of taxation. Other such measures, indispensable in the new adjustment of things, the reader can imagine miscellaneously for himself. We shall take affairs now in their main current.1

On the 5th of March, 1648-9, the Council of State ascertained, and on the 6th they reported to the House, that the total of the available military forces then in England and Wales was 44,373 horse and foot, that all these were needed for the service of the Republic, and that, for the maintenance of these and the relief of what troops there were then in Ireland, £120,000 a month would be necessary. It was agreed at the same time between the Council and the House that 12,000 horse and foot from the English army should be sent over to Ireland to reinforce or replace the said exhausted troops. Farther communications as to the modelling of this Army of 12,000 for Ireland having then passed between the Council of State and the House, it was recommended by the Council of State, March 15, that Lieutenant-General Cromwell

1 Commons Journals of dates given and of various others; Parl. Hist. of same months; Godwin, Vol. III. early chapters; Whitlocke, March 14-16.

Whitlocke's lapse into the word "King"dom" in his document is rather characteristic.