of the first pilot of the port.
CHAPTER 23
In which the Author, very unwillingly, is forced to write a Little History
While kings and men were thus occupied with England, which
governed itself quite alone, and which, it must be said in
its praise, had never been so badly governed, a man upon
whom God had fixed his eye, and placed his finger, a man
predestined to write his name in brilliant letters upon the
page of history, was pursuing in the face of the world a
work full of mystery and audacity. He went on, and no one
knew whither he meant to go, although not only England, but
France, and Europe, watched him marching with a firm step
and head held high. All that was known of this man we are
about to tell.
Monk had just declared himself in favor of the liberty of
the Rump Parliament, a parliament which General Lambert,
imitating Cromwell, whose lieutenant he had been, had just
blocked up so closely, in order to bring it to his will,
that no member, during all the blockade, was able to go out,
and only one, Peter Wentworth, had been able to get in.
Lambert and Monk — everything was summed up in these two
men; the first representing military despotism, the second
pure republicanism. These men were the two sole political
representatives of that revolution in which Charles I. had
first lost his crown, and afterwards his head. As regarded
Lambert, he did not dissemble his views; he sought to
establish a military government, and to be himself the head
of that government.
Monk, a rigid republican, some said, wished to maintain the
Rump Parliament, that visible though degenerated
representative of the republic. Monk, artful and ambitious,
said others, wished simply to make of this parliament, which
he affected to protect, a solid step by which to mount the
throne which Cromwell had left empty, but upon which he had
never dared to take his seat.
Thus Lambert by persecuting the parliament, and Monk by
declaring for it, had mutually proclaimed themselves enemies
of each other. Monk and Lambert, therefore, had at first
thought of creating an army each for himself: Monk in
Scotland, where were the Presbyterians and the royalists,
that is to say, the malcontents; Lambert in London, where
was found, as is always the case, the strongest opposition
to the existing power which it had beneath its eyes.
Monk had pacified Scotland, he had there formed for himself
an army, and found an asylum. The one watched the other.
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Dumas, Alexandre – Ten Years Later
Monk knew that the day was not yet come, the day marked by
the Lord for a great change; his sword, therefore, appeared
glued to the sheath. Inexpugnable, in his wild and
mountainous Scotland, an absolute general, king of an army
of eleven thousand old soldiers, whom he had more than once
led on to victory; as well informed, nay, even better, of
the affairs of London, than Lambert, who held garrison in
the city, — such was the position of Monk, when, at a
hundred leagues from London, he declared himself for the
parliament. Lambert, on the contrary, as we have said, lived
in the capital. That was the center of all his operations,
and he there collected around him all his friends, and all
the people of the lower class, eternally inclined to cherish
the enemies of constituted power.
It was then in London that Lambert learnt the support that,
from the frontiers of Scotland, Monk lent to the parliament.
He judged there was no time to be lost, and that the Tweed
was not so far distant from the Thames that an army could
not march from one river to the other, particularly when it
was well commanded. He knew, besides, that as fast as the
soldiers of Monk penetrated into England, they would form on
their route that ball of snow, the emblem of the globe of
fortune, which is for the ambitious nothing but a step
growing unceasingly higher to conduct him to his object. He
got together, therefore, his army, formidable at the same
time for its composition and its numbers, and hastened to