A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 



fellows as the Agitators were ; ' so while Berkeley applied himself to them, 

 there 'grew great familiarities' on Ashburnham's part with Whalley, the 

 captain of the king's guard, and with Cromwell and Ireton. The two went 

 daily backwards and forwards between Woburn and Bedford, but Ashburnham 

 ' chose to speak apart with Cromwell and Ireton, alleging that they would 

 not speak freely to two at once.' ' With the encouraging messages which his 

 Majesty had (by my Lord Lauderdale and others) from the Presbyterian 

 party and the City of London, who pretended to despise the army and to 

 oppose them to death, his Majesty seemed very much erected.' At last the 

 Proposals were formally presented and his Majesty's concurrence most humbly 

 and earnestly desired. Though Cromwell had evidently been at Bedford 

 repeatedly during the past week, he is not mentioned as being present at this 

 interview. ' Not only to the astonishment of Ireton and the rest but even 

 to mine,' says Berkeley, ' the King entertained them with very tart and bitter 

 discourses, saying sometimes that he would have no man to sufFei for his sake, 

 and that he repented of nothing so much as the Bill against the Lord Strafford 

 . . . that he would have the Church established according to law by the 

 Proposals.' When the army men hoped he would waive those objections 

 the king answered : 'You cannot do without me ; you will fall to ruin if I 

 do not sustain you.' Berkeley continues : — 



Many of the Army that were present, and wished well, at least so they pretended, 

 to the Agreement, looked wishtly and with wonder upon me and Mr. Ashburnham, and I 

 as much as I durst upon his Majesty, who would take no notice of it, until I was forced to 

 step to him and whisper in his ear : ' Sir, your Majesty speaks as if you had some secret 

 strength and power that I do not know of ; and since your Majesty has concealed it from 

 me, I wish you had concealed it fi-om these men too.' His Majesty soon recollected 

 himself, and began to sweeten his former discourse with great power of language and 

 behaviour. But it was now of the latest. For Colonel Rainsborough, who of all the 

 army seemed the least to wish the Accord, in the middle of the Conference stole away and 

 posted to the Army which he inflamed against the King with all the artificial malice he 

 had. As soon as the Conference ended I followed him to Bedford, where the Army 

 then lay. 



Meeting some of the agitators Berkeley was asked ' what His Majesty 

 meant, to entertain their commissioners so harshly.' He urged that 

 Rainsborough's account had misled them; and obtained an interview with 

 Ireton and the rest of the superior officers. He asked them point blank 

 what they should do if the king accepted, and Parliament refused, the 

 Proposals, and after some fencing Rainsborough spoke out : ' If they will 

 not agree we will make them,' to which they all assented. But so far 

 was the king from accepting the Proposals that he sent for his 'learned 

 counsel,' Sir Orlando Bridgman, Philip Warwick (of Clapham, Bedfordshire) 

 and others, and instructed them with Berkeley and Ashburnham to draw 

 up an unfavourable answer. ' We easily answered the Proposals, both in 

 point of law and reason ; but we had to do with what was stronger than 

 both.' '" The ferment which the king's rejection of the ' Proposals ' aroused 

 among the soldiers at Bedford was fanned to flame by the tidings of the 

 invasion of the Houses of Parliament by a riotous London mob and the 

 flight of the Speaker and more than sixty members.'" The army head 



'" Berkeley, op. cit. 30-7 ; see also Ashburnham, Narrative (1830), ii, 90-2. 

 '** Gardiner, op. cit. iii, 1 66-9. 



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