Note 500 — Chapter X · (continued 3)

Id. 678 et post. He wrote a letter (Jan. 21) to the gentry of Devon, who had petitioned the speaker for the re-admission of the secluded members, objecting to that measure as likely to bring in monarchy, very judicious, and with an air of sincerity that might deceive any one; and after the restoration of these secluded members, he made a speech to them (Feb. 21), strongly against monarchy; and that so ingenuously, upon such good reasons, so much without invective or fanaticism, that the professional hypocrites, who were used to their own tone of imposture, were deceived by his. Cromwell was a mere bungler to him. See these in Harris's Charles II. 296, or Somers Tracts, vi. 551. It cannot be wondered at that the royalists were exasperated at Monk's behaviour. They published abusive pamphlets against him in February, from which Kennet, in his Register, p. 53, gives quotations. "Whereas he was the common hopes of all men, he is now the common hatred of all men, as a traitor more detestable than Oliver himself, who, though he manacled the citizens' hands, yet never took away the doors of the city," and so forth. It appears by the letters of Mordaunt and Broderick to Hyde, and by those of Hyde himself in the Clarendon Papers, that they had no sort of confidence in Monk till near the end of March; though Barwick, another of his correspondents, seems to have had more insight into the general's designs (Thurloe, 852, 860, 870), who had expressed himself to a friend of the writer, probably Clobery, fully in favour of the king, before March 19.