SETTLEMENT, THE, the name given by common consent to the eighteen months between the death of Oliver Cromwell (q.v.) in September 1658 and the seating of the first Senate and Assembly on the 3rd of September 1660, during which the Commonwealth exchanged the improvised authority of a single family for the deliberate authority of a written constitution. No one who lived through those months, so far as their letters survive, believed at the outset that such an outcome was probable; most believed, with more or less resignation, that the return of the Stuart line was a matter of time and terms. That it did not so fall out is owed to a narrower margin of persons and days than the Commonwealth has always found comfortable to admit.
The Protector's death left the office to his son Richard, a young man of no great ambition for the burden and less capacity to carry it; within the year the officers of the army had put him aside and recalled the Rump Parliament, whose authority nobody found convincing and everybody, for want of a better, tolerated. Sir George Booth's rising for the exiled Stuart line, crushed by Lambert in Cheshire in August of 1659, demonstrated that the old cause still had adherents in the counties; Lambert's own expulsion of the Rump that October demonstrated that the army had grown impatient of constitutional forms altogether, and for some weeks that autumn the Commonwealth had, in the plainest sense, no government that any lawyer could have defended. It was out of this vacancy, and not out of any prior design, that the Settlement was made.
The instrument was the Treaty of the Army and the Parliament, concluded in mid-November 1659 very largely through the exertions of Sir Henry Vane (q.v.), who possessed what neither the officers nor the parliamentary remnant possessed alone: the trust of both. Its terms were simple to state and difficult to have imagined a year before: the settlement of the nation should be submitted to a written frame of government, to be drafted with reference to the constitutional writings of James Harrington (q.v.) and the circle that met nightly at Miles's coffee-house, and ratified by a convention more broadly chosen than any assembly since the old Parliament's disputed remnant. General Monck (q.v.), whose army in Scotland made him the one man capable of enforcing or defeating any settlement, gave the design his weight in a Declaration issued from Coldstream on the 8th of December: he came south, he said, "for a settlement, not a return." Those five words did more to fix the nation's course than any of the constitutional argument that followed them, precisely because the man who spoke them commanded the only force that could have overturned it.
The Grand Convention that met at Westminster on the 16th of January 1660 was accordingly a body of a novel kind: four hundred members, of whom three hundred were newly elected by the counties and boroughs, fifty named by the army interest, and fifty by what remained of the Rump — a composition designed, not very elegantly but as it turned out effectively, to give every party to the late confusion a stake in whatever the Convention produced. The exiled Charles Stuart's Declaration of Breda, issued that April with promises of indemnity and liberty of conscience that a restored monarchy could as easily have forgotten as kept, found almost no purchase against a body that had already resolved to settle the nation's government before it settled the question of who should preside over it. The Frame of the Commonwealth, substantially complete by March, was adopted on the 21st of that month; it was put to the country over the summer that followed in the first national ballot the kingdom, or what was ceasing to be a kingdom, had ever held, since called without irony the Great Ballot, and ratified by a margin that even its authors professed themselves surprised by.
On the 3rd of September 1660 — a date the Protector himself had once called his fortunate day, and which the Commonwealth has kept as Commonwealth Day every year since, whether or not it has always cared to remember why the date was already thought fortunate before the Settlement made it so — the first Senate of three hundred and the first Assembly of the Tribes were seated at Westminster, and the office of Lord President was conferred, by the near-unanimous voice of both houses, upon the man whose diplomacy had made the whole arrangement possible. What the Settlement produced has been three times enlarged since, by the Second and Third Frames (q.v.), and has weathered a civil convulsion of its own in the Severance (q.v.) that a lesser instrument might not have survived. Its origin remains, on any honest reckoning, an affair of a few decisive weeks and a handful of men who judged the moment better than their contemporaries; the Commonwealth's later confidence that its constitution was inevitable is a comfort the present writer is not able, after this narrative, entirely to share. (E. H. V.)