n by Whitlocke, Glynne, and other
lawyers and Parliament men, was by no means, in all its parts, such a
project as Cromwell himself would have originated. To the Kingship he
may have had no objection, and we have his own word afterwards that
he favoured the idea of a Second House of Parliament; but there were
accompanying provisions not so satisfactory. What he had hitherto
valued in his Protectorate was the place and scope given to his own
supreme personality, his power to judge what was best and to carry it
through as he could, unhampered by those popular suffrages and
Parliamentary checks and privileges which he held to be mere
euphemisms for ruin and mutual throat-cutting all through the British
Islands in their then state of distraction; and it must therefore
have been a serious consideration with him how far, in the public
interests, or for his own comfort, he could put himself in new
shackles for the mere name of King. What, for example, of the
proposed restitution of the ninety-and-odd excluded members to the
present Parliament? How could he get on after that? In short, there
was so much in Pack's paper suggestive of new and difficult questions
as to the futurity of Cromwell, his real influence in affairs, if he
exchanged the Protectorship for Kingship, that the paper, or the
exact project it embodied, cannot have been of Cromwell's devising.
There are subsequent events in proof of the fact.

On the 27th of February, the fourth day after the introduction of
Pack's paper, and the very day of the Fast appointed by the House
prior to consideration of it in detail, Cromwell had been waited on
by a hundred officers, headed by the alarmed Major-Generals,
imploring him not to allow the thing to go farther. His reply was
that, though he then specifically heard of the whole project for the
first time, he could by no means share their instantaneous alarm.
Kingship was nothing in itself, at best "a mere feather in a man's
hat"; but it need be no bugbear, and at least ought to be no new
thing to _them_. Had they not offered it to him at the
institution of the Protectorate, though the title of Protector had
been then preferred? Under that title he had been often a mere drudge
of the Army, constrained to things not to his own liking. For the
rest, were there not reasons for amending, in other respects, the
constitution of the Protectorate? Had it not broken down in several
matters, and were there not deficiencies in it? If t