Chapter 5

OLIVER'S FIRST PROTECTORATE CONTINUED: SEPT. 3, 1654-JUNE 26, 1657.

Oliver's First Protectorate extended over three years and six months in all, or from December 16, 1653 to June 26, 1657. The first nine months of it, as far as to September 1654, have been already sketched; and what remains divides itself very distinctly into three Sections, as follows:--

Section I:--_From Sept._ 3, 1654 _to Jan._ 22, 1654-5. This Section, comprehending four months and a half, may be entitled OLIVER AND HIS FIRST PARLIAMENT.

Section II:--_From Jan._ 22, 1654-5 _to Sept._ 17, 1656. This Section, comprehending twenty months, may be entitled BETWEEN THE PARLIAMENTS, OR THE TIME OF ARBITRARINESS.

Section III:--_From Sept._ 17, 1656 _to June_ 26, 1657. This Section, comprehending nine months, may be entitled OLIVER AND THE FIRST SESSION OF HIS SECOND PARLIAMENT.

We map out the present chapter accordingly.

SECTION I.

OLIVER AND HIS FIRST PARLIAMENT: SEPT, 3, 1654-JAN. 22, 1654-5.

MEETING OF THE FIRST PARLIAMENT OF THE PROTECTORATE: ITS COMPOSITION: ANTI-OLIVERIANS NUMEROUS IN IT: THEIR FOUR DAYS' DEBATE IN CHALLENGE OF CROMWELL'S POWERS: DEBATE STOPPED BY CROMWELL: HIS SPEECH IN THE PAINTED CHAMBER: SECESSION OF SOME FROM THE PARLIAMENT: ACQUIESCENCE OF THE REST BY ADOPTION OF _THE RECOGNITION_: SPIRIT AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE PARLIAMENT STILL MAINLY ANTI-OLIVERIAN: THEIR FOUR MONTHS' WORK IN REVISION OF THE PROTECTORAL CONSTITUTION: CHIEF DEBATES IN THOSE FOUR MONTHS: QUESTION OF THE PROTECTOR'S NEGATIVES: OTHER INCIDENTAL WORK OF THE PARLIAMENT: QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION AND OF THE SUPPRESSION OF HERESIES AND BLASPHEMIES: COMMITTEE AND SUB-COMMITTEE ON THIS SUBJECT: BAXTER'S PARTICIPATION: TENDENCY TO A LIMITED TOLERATION ONLY, AND VOTE AGAINST THE PROTECTOR'S PREROGATIVE OF MORE: CASE OF JOHN RIDDLE, THE SOCINIAN.--INSUFFICIENCY NOW OF OUR FORMER SYNOPSIS OF ENGLISH SECTS AND HERESIES: NEW SECTS AND DENOMINATIONS: THE FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN: THE RANTERS: THE MUGGLETONIANS AND OTHER STRAY FANATICS: BOEHMENISTS AND OTHER MYSTICS: THE QUAKERS OR FRIENDS: ACCOUNT OF GEORGE FOX, AND SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF THE QUAKERS TO THE YEAR 1654.--POLICY OF THE PARLIAMENT WITH THEIR BILL FOR A NEW CONSTITUTION: PARLIAMENT OUTWITTED BY CROMWELL AND DISSOLVED: NO RESULT.

Before the 3rd of September, 1654, the day fixed by the Constitutional Instrument for the meeting of the First Parliament of the Protectorate, the 460 newly elected members, or the major part of them, had flocked to Westminster. They were a gathering of the most representative men of all the three nations that could be regarded as in any sense adherents of the Commonwealth. All the Council of State, except the Earl of Mulgrave and Lord Lisle, had been returned, some of them by two or three different constituencies. Secretary Thurloe had been returned; Cromwell's two sons, Richard and Henry, had been returned, Henry as member for Cambridge University; several gentlemen holding posts in his Highness's household had been returned. Of the old English peers, there had been returned the Earl of Salisbury, the Earl of Stamford, and Lord Dacres; and of the titular nobility there were Lord Herbert, Lord Eure, Lord Grey of Groby, and the great Fairfax. Among men of Parliamentary fame already were ex-Speaker Lenthall, Whitlocke, Sir Walter Earle, Dennis Bond, Sir Henry Vane _Senior_, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Thomas Scott, William Ashurst, Sir James Harrington, John Carew, Robert Wallop, and Sir Thomas Widdrington; and of Army or Navy men, of former Parliamentary experience or not, there were Colonels Whalley, Robert Lilburne, Barkstead, Harvey, Stapley, Purefoy, Admiral Blake, and ex-Major-General Harrison. Some of these had been returned by two constituencies. Bradshaw was a member, with two of the Judges, Hale and Thorpe, and ex-Judge Glynne. Lawyers besides were not wanting; and Dr. Owen, though a divine, represented Oxford University. One missed chiefly, among old names, those of Sir Henry Vane _Junior_, Henry Marten, Selden, Algernon Sidney, and Ludlow; but there were many new faces. Among the thirty members sent from Scotland were the Earl of Linlithgow, Sir Alexander Wedderburn, Colonel William Lockhart, the Laird of Swinton, and the English Colonels Okey and Read. Ireland had also returned military Englishmen in Major-General Hardress Waller, Colonels Hewson, Sadler, Axtell, Venables, and Jephson, with Lord Broghill, Sir Charles Coote, Sir John Temple, Sir Robert King, and others, describable as Irish or Anglo-Irish.[1]

[Footnote 1: Complete list gives in Parl. Hist, III. 1428-1433.]

The 3rd of September, selected as Cromwell's "Fortunate Day," chancing to be a Sunday, the Parliament had only a brief meeting with him that day, in the Painted Chamber, after service in the Abbey, and his opening speech was deferred till next day, On Monday, accordingly, it was duly given, but not till after another sermon in the Abbey, preached by Thomas Goodwin, in which Cromwell found much that he liked. It was a political sermon, on "Israel's bringing-out of Egypt, through a Wilderness, by many signs and wonders, towards a Place of Rest,"--Egypt interpreted as old Prelacy and the Stuart role in England, the Wilderness as all the intermediate course of the English Revolution, and the Place of Rest as the Protectorate or what it might lead to. Goodwill seems to have described with special reprobation that latest part of the Wilderness in which the cry had arisen for sheer Levelling in the State and sheer Voluntaryism in the Church; and Cromwell, starting in that key himself, addressed the Parliament, with noble earnestness, in what would now be called a highly "conservative" speech. Glancing back to the Barebones Parliament and beyond, he sketched, the proceedings of himself and the Council and the great successes of the Commonwealth during the intervening eight months and a half, and hopefully committed to the Parliament the further charge of Order and Settlement throughout the three nations, Then he withdrew. That same day they chose Lenthall for their Speaker, and Scobell for their Clerk.[1]

[Footnote 1: Cromwell's Second Speech (Carlyle, III. 16-37); Commons Journals of dates.]

Cromwell's hopes were blasted. The political division of the population of the British Islands was now into OLIVERIANS, REPUBLICAN IRRECONCILABLES, PRESBYTERIANS, and STUARTISTS, the two last denominations hardly separable by any clear line, Now, in this new Parliament, though there were many staunch Oliverians, and no avowed Stuartists, the Republican Irreconcilables and the Presbyterians together formed a majority. They needed only to coalesce, and the Parliament called by Oliver's own writs would be an Anti-Oliverian Parliament. And this is what happened.

No sooner was the House constituted, with about 320 members present out of the total 460, than it proposed for its first business what was called "The Matter of the Government"; by which was meant a review of that document of forty-two Articles, called the _Government of the Commonwealth_, which was the constitutional basis of the Protectorate. On Thursday, Sept. 7, accordingly, they addressed themselves to the vital question of the whole document as propounded in the first of the Articles. "Whether the House shall approve that the Government shall be in one Single Person and a Parliament": such was the debate that day in Grand Committee, after a division on the previous question whether they should go into Committee. On this previous question 136 had voted _No_, with Sir Charles Wolseley and Mr. Strickland (two of the Council of State) for their tellers, but 141 had voted _Yea_, with Bradshaw and Colonel Birch for their tellers. In other words, it had been carried by a majority of five that it fell within the province of the House to determine whether the Single-Person element in the Government of the Commonwealth, already introduced somehow as a matter of fact, should be continued. On this subject the House debated through the rest of that sitting, and the whole of the next, and the next, and the next,--i.e. till Monday, Sept 11. Bradshaw, Hasilrig, and Scott took the lead for the Republicans, not that they hoped to unseat Cromwell, but that they wanted to assert the paramount authority of Parliament, and convert the existing Protectorship into a derivative from the House then sitting. Lawrence, Wolseley, Strickland, and others of the Council of State, describable as the ministerial members, maintained the existing constitution of the Protectorate, and pointed out the dangers that would arise from plucking up a good practical basis for mere reasons of theory. Matthew Hale interposed at last with a middle motion, substantially embodying the Republican view, but affirming the Protectorship at once, and reserving qualification. All in all, there was great excitement, much confusion, and an outbreak from some members of very violent language about Cromwell.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates: Parl. Hist. III. 1445; Godwin, IV. 116-125.]

What might have been the issue had a vote come on can only be guessed. Things were not allowed to go that length. On Tuesday, Sept, 12, the members, going to the House, found the doors locked, soldiers in and around Westminster Hall, and a summons from the Lord Protector to meet him again in the Painted Chamber. Having assembled there, they listened to Cromwell's "Third Speech." It is one of the most powerful of all his speeches. It began with a long review of his life in general and the steps by which he had recently been brought to the Protectorship. It proceeded then to a recitation of what he called "the witnesses" to his Government, or proofs of its validity--the Witness _above_, or God's manifest Providence in leading him to where he was; the Witness _within_, or his own consciousness of integrity; and the Witnesses _without_, or testimonies of confidence he had received from the Army, the Judges, the City of London, other cities, counties and boroughs, and public bodies of all sorts. "I believe," he said, "that, if the learnedest men in this nation were called to show a precedent, equally clear, of a Government so many ways approved of, they would not in all their search, find it." Then, coming to the point, he asked what right the present Parliament had to come after all those witnesses and challenge his authority. Had they not been elected under writs issued by him, in which writs it was expressly inserted, by regulation of Article XII. of the Constitutional Instrument of the Protectorate, "That the persons elected shall not have power to alter the Government as it is hereby settled in one Single Person and a Parliament"? On this point he was very emphatic. "That _your_ judgments, who are persons sent from all parts of the nation under the notion of approving this Government--for _you_ to disown or not to own it; for _you_ to act with Parliamentary authority especially in the disowning of it, contrary to the very fundamental things, yea against the very root of this Establishment; to sit and not own the Authority by which you sit:--is that which I believe astonisheth more men than myself." A revision of the Constitution of the Protectorate in _circumstantials_ he would not object to, but the _fundamentals_ must be left untouched. And let those hearing him be under no mistake as to his own resolution. "The wilful throwing away of this Government, such as it is, so owned of God, so approved by men, so witnessed to in the fundamentals of it as was mentioned above, were a thing which,--and in reference not to _my_ good, but to the good of these Nations and Posterity,--I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave, and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto." He had therefore called them now that they might come to an understanding. There was a written parchment in the lobby of the Parliament House to which he requested the signatures of such as might see fit. The doors of the Parliament House would then be open for all such, to proceed thenceforth as a free Parliament in all things, subject to the single condition expressed in that parchment. "You have an absolute Legislative Power in all things that can possibly concern the good and interest of the public; and I think you may make these Nations happy by this settlement." With so much great work before them, with the three nations looking on in hope, with foreign nations looking on with wonder or worse feelings, had they not a great responsibility?[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle's Cromwell, III. 37-61.]

Bradshaw, Hasilrig, and others, would not sign the document offered them, which was a brief engagement "to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector and the Commonwealth," and not to propose alteration of the Government as "settled in a single Person and a Parliament." The Parliament, therefore, lost these leaders; but within an hour "The Recognition," as it came to be called, was signed by a hundred members, and the number was raised to 140 before the day was over, and ultimately to about 300. And so, with this goodly number, the House went on. But the Anti-Oliverian leaven was still strong in it. This appeared even in the immediate dealings of the House with the Recognition itself. They first (Sept, 14) declared that it should not be construed to comprehend the whole Constitutional Instrument of the Protectorate, but only the main principle of the first Article; and then (Sept. 18) they converted the Recognition into a resolution of their own, requiring all members to sign it, Next, in order to get rid of the stumbling-block of the First Article altogether, they resolved (Sept. 19) that the Supreme Legislative authority was and did reside in "One Person and the People assembled in Parliament," and also (Sept. 20) that Oliver Cromwell was and should he Lord Protector for life, and that there should be Triennial Parliaments. Thus free to advance through the rest of the Forty-two Articles at their leisure, they made that thenceforward almost their sole work. Through the rest of September, the whole of October, and part of November, the business went on in Committee, with the result of a new and more detailed Constitution of the whole Government in sixty Articles instead of the Forty-two. A Bill for enacting this Constitution, passed the first reading on the 22nd of December, and the second on the 23rd; it then went back into Committee for amendments; and in January 1654-5 the House was debating these amendments and others.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates given and of Nov. 7, and Godwin, IV, 130-132.]

In the long course of the total debate perhaps the most interesting divisions had been one in Committee on October 16, and one in the House on November 10. In the first the question was whether the Protectorship should be hereditary, and it had been carried by 200 votes to 60 that it should _not_. This was not strictly an Anti-Oliverian demonstration; for, though Lambert was the mover for a hereditary Protectorship in Cromwell's family, many of the undoubted Oliverians voted in the majority, nor does there seem to be any proof that Lambert had acted by direct authority from Cromwell. More distinctly an Anti-Oliverian vote had been that of Nov. 10, which was on a question of deep interest to Cromwell: viz. the amount of his prerogative in the form of a negative on Bills trenching on fundamentals. In his last speech he had himself indicated these "fundamentals," which ought to be safe against attack even by Parliament--one of them being Liberty of Conscience, another the Control of the Militia as belonging to the Protector _in conjunction with_ the Parliament, and a third the provision, that every Parliament should sit but for a fixed period. In all other matters he was content with a negative for twenty days only; but on bills trenching on these fundamentals he required a negative absolutely. The question had come to the vote in a very subtle form. The motion of the Opposition was that Bills should become Law without the Protector's consent after twenty days, "provided that such Bills contain nothing in them contrary to such matters wherein the Parliament shall think fit to give a negative to the Lord Protector," while the amendment of the Oliverians or Court-party altered the wording into "wherein the Single Person and the Parliament shall declare a negative to be in the Single Person," thus giving Cromwell himself, and not the Parliament only, a right of deciding where a negative should lie. On this question the Oliverians were beaten by 109 votes to 85, and the decision would probably have caused a rupture had not the Opposition conceded a good deal when they went on to settle the matters wherein Parliament _would_ grant the Protector a negative.[1]

[Footnote 1: Journals of dates and Godwin, IV. 134-139.]

As we have said, almost the sole occupation of the Parliament was this revision of the flooring on which itself and the Protectorate stood. They did, however, some little pieces of work besides. They undertook a revision of the Ordinances that had been passed by the Protector and his Council, and also of the Acts of the Barebones Parliament; and they proposed Bills of their own to supersede some of these,--especially a new Bill for the Ejection of Scandalous Ministers, and a new Bill for Reform of the Court of Chancery. But of all the incidental work undertaken by this Parliament none seems to have been undertaken with so much gusto as that which consisted in efforts for the suppression of Heresy and Blasphemy. Here was the natural outcome of the Presbyterianism with which the Parliament was charged, and here also the Parliament was very vexatious to the soul of the Lord-Protector.

After all, this portion of the work of the Parliament can hardly be called incidental. It was part and parcel of their main work of revising the Constitution, and it was inter-wrought with the question of Cromwell's negatives. Article XXXVII. of the original Instrument of the Protectorate had guaranteed liberty of worship and of preaching outside the Established Church to "such as profess faith in Jesus Christ," and Cromwell, in his last speech, had noted this as one of the "fundamentals" he was bound to preserve. How did the Parliament meet the difficulty? Very ingeniously. They said that the phrase "such as profess faith in Jesus Christ" was a vague phrase, requiring definition; and, the whole House having formed itself into a Committee for Religion, and this Committee having appointed a working sub-Committee of about fourteen, the sub-Committee was empowered to take steps for coming to a definition. Naturally enough, in such a matter, the sub-Committee wanted clerical advice; and, each member of the sub-Committee having nominated one divine, there was a small Westminster Assembly over again to illuminate Parliament on the dark subject. Dr. Owen and Dr. Goodwin were there, with Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Stephen Marshall, Mr. Vines, Mr. Manton, and others. Mr. Richard Baxter had the honour of being one, having been asked to undertake the duty by Lord Breghill, when the venerable ex-Primate Usher had declined it; and it is from Baxter that we have the fullest account of the proceedings. When he came to town from Kidderminster, he found the rest of the divines already busy in drawing up a list of "fundamentals of faith," the profession of which was to be the necessary title to the toleration promised. Knowing "how ticklish a business the enumeration of fundamentals was," Baxter tried, he says, to stop that method, and suggested that acceptance of the Creed, the Lord's P[r]ayer, and the Decalogue would be a sufficient test. This did not please the others; Baxter almost lost his character for orthodoxy by his proposal; Dr. Owen, in particular, forgetful of his own past, was now bull-mad for the "fundamentals." They were drawn out at last, either sixteen or twenty of them in all, and handed to Parliament through the sub-Committee. Thus illuminated, Parliament, after a debate extending over six days (Dec. 4-15, 1654), discharged its mind fully on the Toleration Question. They resolved that there should certainly be a toleration for tender consciences outside the Established Church, but that it should not extend to "Atheism, Blasphemy, damnable Heresies to be particularly enumerated by this Parliament, Popery, Prelacy, Licentiousness or Profaneness," nor yet to "such as shall preach, print, or avowedly maintain anything contrary to the fundamental principles of Doctrine held forth in the public profession,"--said "fundamental principles" being the "fundamentals" of Dr. Owen and his friends, so far as the House should see fit to pass them. They were already in print, with the Scriptural proofs, for the use of members, and the first of them _was_ passed the same day. It was "That the Holy Scripture is that rule of knowing God, and living unto Him, which whoso does not believe cannot be saved." The others would come in time. Meanwhile it was involved in the Resolution of the House that the Protector himself should have no veto on any Bills for restraining or punishing Atheists, Blasphemers, damnable Heretics, Papists, Prelatists, or deniers of any of the forthcoming Christian fundamentals.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of days given; Neal, IV. 97-100; Baxter's Life, 197-205. On this visit to town, Baxter had the honour to preach before Cromwell, having never done so till then, "save once long before when Cromwell was an inferior man among other auditors." He had also the honour of two long interviews with Cromwell, the first with one or two others present, the second in full Council. They seem to have been reciprocally disagreeable. On both occasions, according to Baxter, Cromwell talked enormously for the most part "slowly" and "tediously" to Baxter's taste, but with passionate outbreaks against the Parliament. On the second occasion the topic was Liberty of Conscience, and what was being done in the Subcommittee and by the Divines on the subject. Baxter ventured to hint that he had put his views on paper and that it might save time if his Highness would read them. "He received the paper after, but I scarce believe that he ever read it; for I saw that what he learned must be from himself--being more disposed to speak many hours than to hear one, and little heeding what another said when he had spoken himself." Cromwell had made up his mind about Baxter long ago (Vol. III. p. 386), but had apparently now given him another trial, on the faith of his reputed liberality on the Toleration question. But Baxter did not gain upon him.]

As if to show how much in earnest they were on this whole subject, the House had at that moment the notorious Anti-Trinitarian John Biddle in their custody. Since 1644, when he was a schoolmaster in Gloucester, this mild man had been in prison again and again for his opinions, and the wonder was that the Presbyterians had not succeeded in bringing him to the scaffold in 1648 under their tremendous Ordinance of that year. His Socinian books were then known over England and even on the Continent, and he would certainly have been the first capital victim under the Ordinance if the Presbyterians had continued in power. At large since 1651, he had been living rather quietly in London, earning his subsistence as a Greek reader for the press, but also preaching regularly on Sundays to a small Socinian congregation. In accordance with the general policy of the Government since Cromwell had become master, he had been left unmolested. The orthodox had been on the watch, however, and another Socinian book of Biddle's, called _A Two-fold Catechism_, published in 1654, had given them the opportunity they wanted. For this book Biddle had been arrested on the 12th of December, and he had been brought before the House on his knees and committed to prison on the 13th. The views which the House were then formulating on the Limits of Toleration in the abstract may be said therefore to have been illustrated over Mr. Biddle's body in the concrete. His case came up again on the 15th of January, when the House, after hearing with horror some extracts from his books, ordered them to be burnt by the hangman, and at the same time instructed a Committee to prepare a Bill for punishing him. The punishment, if the Presbyterians could succeed in falling back on their Parliamentary Ordinance of May 1648, was to be death.[1]

[Footnote 1: Wood's Ath. III. 593-598; Commons Journals of dates.]

It was really of very great consequence to the Commonwealth of the Protectorate what theory of Toleration should be adopted into its Constitution, whether the Parliament's or Cromwell's. For the ferment of religious and irreligious speculation of all kinds in the three nations was now something prodigious, and there were widely diffused denominations of dissent and heresy that had not been in existence ten years before, when the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly first discussed the Toleration Question. Our synopsis of the English sects and Heresies of 1644 (Vol. III. 143-159) is not, indeed, wholly out of date for 1654, but it would require extensions and modifications to adjust it accurately to the latter year. There had been the natural flux and reflux of ideas during the intervening decade, the waning of some sects and singularities that had no deep root, the interblending of others, and new bursts in the teeming chaos. _Atheists_, Sceptics_, _Mortalists_ or _Materialists_, _Anti-Scripturists_, _Anti-Trinitarians_ or _Socinians_, _Arians_, _Anti-Sabbatarians_, _Seekers_, and _Divorcers_ or _Miltonists_: all these terms were still in the vocabulary of the orthodox, describing persons or bodies of persons of whose opinions the Civil Magistrate was bound to take account. Sects, on the other hand, that had been on the black list ten years ago had now been admitted to respectability. _Baptists_ or _Anabaptists_, _Antinomians, _Brownists_, nay even INDEPENDENTS generally, had been regarded in 1644 as dark and dangerous schismatics; but now, save in the private colloquies or controversial tracts of Presbyterians, no feeling of horror attached to those names. INDEPENDENTS, indeed, were now the Lords of the Commonwealth, and _Anabaptists_ and _Antinomians_ were in high places, so that the most orthodox Presbyterians found themselves side by side with them in private gatherings and committees. In the Established Church of the Protectorate there was to be a comprehension of Presbyterians, Independents, and such Baptists and other really Evangelical Sectaries as might be willing; and, accordingly, the question of mere Toleration outside the Established Church no longer concerned the Evangelical sects lying immediately beyond ordinary Independency. If, from objection to the principle of an Establishment, they chose to remain outside, they would have toleration there as a matter of course. To make up, however, for this removal of so many of the old Sectaries from all practical interest in the question on their own account, there were new religious denominations of such strange ways and tendencies, such unknown relations to anything hitherto recognised as Orthodoxy or as Heresy, that the poor Civil Magistrate, or even the coolest Abstract Tolerationist, in contemplating them, might well be puzzled. The following is a list of the chief of these new Sects that had sprung up since 1644:--

FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN:--At first sight this does not appear a new sect, but merely a continuation of the old MILLENARIES or CHILIASTS (Vol. III, pp. 152-153), who believed that the Personal Reign of Christ on Earth for a thousand years was approaching. The change of name, however, indicates greater precision in the belief, and also greater intensity. According to the wild system of Universal Chronology then in vogue, the past History of the World, on this side of the Flood, had consisted of four great successive Empires or Monarchies--the Assyrian, which ended B.C. 531; the Persian, which ended B.C. 331; the Macedonian, or Greek Empire of Alexander, which was made to stretch to B.C. 44; and the Roman, which had begun B.C. 44, with the Accession of Augustus Cæsar, and which had included, though people might not see how, all that had happened on the Earth since then. But this last Monarchy was tottering, and a Fifth Universal Monarchy was at hand. It was that foreshadowed in Rev. xx.: "And I saw an Angel come down from Heaven, having the key of the Bottomless Pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the Dragon, that great serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the Bottomless Pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season. And I saw Thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the worship of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished." This prophecy was the property of all Christians, and might receive different interpretations. The literal interpretation, favoured by some theologians, was that, at some date fast approaching, Christ would reappear visibly on Earth, accompanied by the re-embodied souls of dead saints and martyrs, while the rest of the dead slept on, and that in the glorious reign of Righteousness and the subjugation of all Evil thus begun for a thousand years men then living, or the true saints among them, might partake. This interpretation, though scouted by the more rational theologians, had seized on many of the more fervid English Independents and Sectaries, so that they had begun to see, in the great events of their own time and land, the dazzling edge of the near Millennium. The doctrine had caught the souls of Harrison and other men of action, hitherto classed as Anabaptists or Seekers. Now, so far there was no harm in it, nor could any of the orthodox who rejected it for themselves dare to treat it as one of the heresies to be restrained by the Civil Magistrate. Evidently, however, there was a root of danger. What if the Fifth-Monarchy men should make it part of their faith that the saints could accelerate the Fifth Monarchy, and that it was their duty to do so? Then their tenet might have strange practical effects upon English politics. Already, in the time of the Barebones Parliament, there had been warnings of this, the Fifth-Monarchy men there, or outside the Parliament, having distinguished themselves by an ultra-Republicanism which verged on Communism, and also by their zeal for pure Voluntaryism in Religion and the abolition of a paid Ministry and all express Church machinery. The fact had not escaped Cromwell, and in his speech at the opening of the present Parliament he had taken notice of it. In that very speech he had singled out for remark "the mistaken notion of the Fifth Monarchy." It was a notion, he admitted, held by many good and sincere men; nay it was a notion he honoured and could find a high meaning in. "But for men, on this principle, to betitle themselves that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people, and determine of property and liberty and everything else,--upon such a pretension as this: truly they had need to give clear manifestations of God's presence with them, before wise men will receive or submit to their conclusions." If they were notions only, he added, they were best left alone; for "notions will hurt none but those who have them." But, when the notions were turned into practice, and proposals were made for abrogation of Property and Magistracy to smooth the way for the Fifth Monarchy, then one must remember Jude's precept as to the mode of dealing with the errors of good men. "Of some have compassion," Jude had said, "making a difference; others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire."[1]

[Footnote 1: Hearne's _Ductor Historicus_, 1714 (for the old doctrine of the Four Monarchies); Thomason Pamphlets; Carlyle's Cromwell, III. 24-27.--The Fifth Monarchy notion was by no means an upstart oddity of thought among the English Puritans of the seventeenth century. It was a tradition of the most scholarly thought of mediæval theologians as to the duration and final collapse of the existing Cosmos; and it may be traced in the older imaginative literature of various European nations. Thus the Scottish Sir David Lindsay's long poem entitled _Monarchy, or Ane Dialogue betwix Experience and one Courtier of the Miserable Estate of the World_, the date of which is 1553, is a moralized sketch of the whole previous history of the world, according to the then accepted doctrine of the Four past Secular Monarchies, with a glance around at the Europe of Lindsay's own time as already certainly in the dregs of "The Latter Days," and an anticipation, as if with assured personal belief, of a glorious Fifth Monarchy, or miraculous reconstitution of the whole Universe into a new Heaven and Earth, to begin probably about the year 2000.]

RANTERS:--"These made it their business," says Baxter, "to set up the Light of Nature under the name of _Christ in Man_, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, the Scripture, and the present Ministry, and our worship and ordinances; and called men to hearken to Christ within them. But withal they conjoined a cursed doctrine of Libertinism, which brought them to all abominable filthiness of life. They taught, as the FAMILISTS, (see Vol. III. p. 152), that God regardeth not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart, and that to the pure all things are pure ... I have seen myself letters written from Abington, where among both soldiers and people this contagion did then prevail, full of horrid oaths and curses and blasphemy, not fit to be repeated by the tongue or pen of man; and this all uttered as the effect of knowledge and a part of their Religion, in a fanatic strain, and fathered on the Spirit of God." The Ranters, in fact, seem to have been ANTINOMIANS (see Vol. III. 151-152) run mad, with touches from FAMILISM and SEEKERISM greatly vulgarized. Of no sect do we hear more in the pamphlets and newspapers between 1650 and 1655, though there are traces of them of earlier date. The pamphlets about them generally take the form of professed accounts of some of their meetings, with reports of their profane discourses and the indecencies with which they were accompanied. There are illustrative wood-cuts in some of the pamphlets; and, on the whole, I fancy that some low printers and booksellers made a trade on the public curiosity about the Ranters, getting up pretended accounts of their meetings as a pretext for prurient publications. There is plenty of testimony, however, besides Baxter's word, that there was a real sect of the name pretty widely spread in low neighbourhoods in towns, and holding meetings. Among Ranters named in the pamphlets I have noticed a T. Shakespeare. "The horrid villainies of the sect," says Baxter, "did not only speedily extinguish it, but also did as much as ever anything did to disgrace all sectaries, and to restore the credit of the ministry and the sober unanimous Christians;" and this, or the transfusion of Ranterism into equivalent phrenzies with other names, may account for the fact that after a while the pamphlets about the Ranters cease or become rare. Clearly, in the main, the regulation of such a sect, so long as it did last, was a matter of police; and the only question is whether there were any tenets mixed up with Ranterism, or held by some roughly called Ranters, that were capable of being dissociated, and that were in fact in some cases dissociated, from offences against public decency. Exact data are deficient, and there were probably varieties of Ranters theologically. Pantheism, or the essential identity of God with the universe, and his indwelling in every creature, angelic, human, brute, or inorganic, seems to have been the belief of most Ranters that could manage to rise to a metaphysics--with which belief was conjoined also a rejection of all essential distinction between good and evil, and a rejection of all Scripture as mere dead letter; but from a so-called "Carol of the Ranters" I infer that Atheism, or at least Mortalism or Materialism (see Vol. III. p. 156-157), had found refuge among some of the varieties. Thus:--

"They prate of God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they grossly lie That say there's hope of immortality. Let them but tell us what a soul is: then We shall adhere to these mad brainsick men."[1]

[Footnote 1: Baxter's Life, 76-77; and Thomason Pamphlets _passim_. The pamphlet last quoted is in Vol. 485 (old numbering). I have also used a quotation from another pamphlet in Barclay's _Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_ (1876), pp. 417-418.]

STRAY FANATICS: THE MUGGLETONIANS:--Sometimes confounded with the Ranters, but really distinguishable, were some crazed men, whose crazes had taken a religious turn, and whose extravagances became contagious.--Such was a John Robins, first heard of about 1650, when he went about, sometimes as God Almighty, sometimes as Adam raised from the dead, with the power of raising others from the dead. He had raised Cain and Judas, and other personages of Scripture, forgiving their sins and blessing them; which personages, changed in character, but remembering their former selves quite well, went about in Robins's company and were seen and talked with by various people. He could work miracles, and in dark rooms would exhibit himself surrounded with angels, and fiery serpents, and shining lights, or riding in the air. He had been sent to Bridewell, and his supernatural powers had left him.--One heard next, in 1652, of two associates, called John Reeve and Ludovick Muggleton, who professed to be "the two last Spiritual Witnesses (Rev. xi.) and alone true Prophets of the Lord Jesus Christ, God alone blessed to all eternity." They believed in a real man-shaped God, existing from all eternity, who had come upon earth as Jesus Christ, leaving Moses and Elijah to represent him in Heaven--also in the mortality of the soul till the resurrection of the body; and their chief commission was to denounce and curse all false prophets, and all who did not believe in Reeves and Muggleton. They visited Robins in Bridewell and told _him_ to stop his preaching under pain of eternal damnation; but they favoured some eminent Presbyterian and Independent ministers of London with letters to the same effect. They dated their letters "from Great Trinity Lane, at a Chandler's shop, against one Mr. Millis, a brown baker, near Bow Lane End;" and the editor of _Mercurius Politicus_, who had received one of their letters so dated, had the curiosity to go to see them, with some friends of his, in the end of August 1653. He found them "at the top of an old house in a cockloft," and made a paragraph of them thus:--"They are said to be a couple of tailors: but only one of them works, and that is Muggleton; the other, they say, writes prophecies. We found two women there whom they had convinced; whom we questioning, they said they believed all. Besides there was an old country plain man of Essex, who said he had been with them twice before; and, being asked whether he were of the same opinion and did believe them, he answered, Truly he could not tell what to say, but he was come to have some discourse with them in private." Two mouths after this interview (Oct. 1653), they were brought before the Lord Mayor and Recorder for their letters to ministers, and sentenced to six months of imprisonment each. But they were to be farther heard of in the world. Muggleton indeed to as late as 1698, when he died at the age of ninety, leaving a sect called THE MUGGLETONIANS, who are perhaps not extinct yet.--Among those who attached themselves to Reeves and Muggleton was a Thomas Tany, who called himself also "Theauro John," and professed to be the Lord's High Priest. They would have nothing to do with him, and put him on their excommunicated list. Whether because this preyed on the poor man's mind or not, he was found in the lobby of the Parliament House on Saturday, Dec. 30. 1654, with a drawn sword, slashing at members, and knocking for admittance. The House, who were then in the midst of their debate on the proper Limits of Toleration, ordered him to be brought to the bar:--"Where," say the journals, "being demanded by Mr. Speaker what his name was, answered' _Theeror John_'; being asked why he came hither, saith, He fired his tent, and the people were ready to stone him because he burnt the Bible--which he acknowledgeth he did. Saith it is letters, not life. And he drew his sword because the man jostled him at the door. Saith he burnt the Bible because the people say it is the Word of God, and it is not; it deceived _him_. And saith he burnt the sword and pistols and Bibles because they are the Gods of England. He did it not of himself; and, being asked who bid him do it, saith God.' And thereupon was commanded to withdraw." He was sent into custody immediately.--Stray fanatics like Robins, Reeves, Muggleton, and Theauro John, seem to have been not uncommon through England.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 313-317; Mercurius Politicus, No. 167 (Aug. 18-25, 1653); Commons Journals, Dec. 30, 1654; Barclay's _Religious Societies_, pp. 421-422.]

BOEHMENISTS AND OTHER MYSTICS:--Of the German Mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) there had been a _Life_ in English since 1644, with a catalogue of his writings, and since then translations of some of the writings themselves had appeared at intervals, mostly from the shop of one publisher, Humphrey Blunden. The interest in "the Teutonical Philosopher" thus excited had at length taken form in a small sect of professed BOEHMENISTS, propounding the doctrine of the Light of Nature, i.e. of a mystic intuitional revelation in the soul itself of all true knowledge of divine and human things. Of this sect Baxter says that they were "fewer in number," and seemed "to have attained to greater meekness and conquest of passions," than the other sects. The chief of them was Dr. Pordage, Rector of Bradfield, in Berks, with his family. They held "visible and sensible communion with angels" in the Rectory, on the very walls and windows of which there appeared miraculous pictures and symbols; and the Doctor himself, besides alarming people with such strange phrases as "the fiery deity of Christ dwelling in the soul and mixing itself with our flesh," was clearly unorthodox on many particular points.[1]--Boehme's system included a mystical physics or cosmology as well as a metaphysics or theosophy, and some of his English followers seem to have allied themselves with the famous Astrologer William Lilly, whose prophetic Almanacks, under the title of _Merlinus Anglicus_, had been appearing annually since 1644. But indeed all sorts of men were in contact with this quack or quack-mystic. He had been consulted by Charles I as to the probable issue of events; he had been consulted and feed by partisans of the other side: his Almanacks, with their hieroglyphics and political predictions, had a boundless popularity, and were bringing him a good income; he was the chief in his day of those fortune-telling and spirit-auguring celebrities who hover all their lives between high society and Bridewell. As he had adhered to the Parliamentarians and made the stars speak for their cause, he had hitherto been pretty safe; but the leading Presbyterian and Independent ministers, as we have seen (ante IV, p. 392), had recently called upon Parliament to put down his bastard science. Gataker had attacked "that grand impostor Mr. William Lilly" in an express publication.[2]--Is it in a spirit of mischief that Baxter names THE VANISTS, or disciples of Sir Henry Vane the younger, as one of the recognised sects of this time? That great Republican leader, it was known, with all his deep practical astuteness and the perfect clearness and shrewdness of his speeches and business-letters, carried in his head a mystic Metaphysics of his own which he found it hard to express. It was a something unique, including ideas from the Antinomians, the Anabaptists, and the Seekers, he had been so much among, with something also of the Fifth-Monarchy notion, and with the theory of absolute Voluntaryism in Religion, but all these amalgamated with new ingredients. Burnet tells us that, though he had taken pains to find out Vane's meaning in his own books, he could never reach it, and that, as many others had the same experience, it might be reasonable to conclude that Vane had purposely kept back the key to his system. Friends of Vane had told Burnet, however, that "he leaned to Origen's notion of a universal salvation of all, both of devils and the damned, and to the doctrine of pre-existence." Even when Cromwell and Vane had been close friends, calling each other "Fountain" and "Heron" in their private letters. Vane had been in possession of such peculiar lights, or of others, beyond Cromwell's apprehension. "Brother Fountain can guess at his brother's meaning," he had written to Cromwell in Scotland August 2, 1651, with reference to some troublesome on-goings in the Council of State during Cromwell's absence, begging him not to believe ill-natured reports about "Brother Heron" in connexion with them, and adding, "Be assured he answers your heart's desire in all things, except he be esteemed even by you in principles too high to fathom; which one day, I am persuaded, will not be so thought by you, when, by increasing with the increasings of God, you shall be brought to that sight and enjoyment of God in Christ which passes knowledge." If this to Cromwell, what to others? Three years had passed, and Vane was now in compulsory retirement. His _Retired Man's Meditations_ had not yet been published. Such Vanists, therefore, as there were in 1654 must have imbibed their knowledge of them from Sir Henry's conversation or indirectly. Among these Baxter mentions Peter Sterry, one of Cromwell's favourite preachers, and afterwards known as a mystic on his own account. Of Sterry's preaching, already notoriously obscure, Sir Benjamin Rudyard had said that "it was too high for this world and too low for the other," and Baxter puns on the association of Vane and Sterry, asking whether _Vanity_ and _Sterility_ had ever been more happily conjoined. But the sect of the VANISTS existed perhaps mainly in Baxter's fancy.[3]

[Footnote 1: Stationers' Registers from 1644 to 1654; Baxter, 77-78; Neal, IV. 112-113.]

[Footnote 2: Engl. Cycl. Art. _Lilly_; Stationers' Registers of date June 10, 1653 (Gataker's Tract) and of other dates (Lilly's Almanacks).]

[Footnote 3: Baxter, 74-76; Milton Papers by Nickolls, 78-79; Wood's Ath. III, 578 et seq. and IV. 136-138.]

QUAKERS OR FRIENDS:--Who can think of the appearance of this sect in English History without doing what the sect itself would forbid, and reverently raising the hat? And yet in 1654 this was the very sect of sects. It was about the Quakers that there had begun to be the most violent excitement among the guardians of social order throughout the British Islands.--It was then six or seven years since they had first been heard of in any distinct way, and four since they had received the name QUAKERS. A Derbyshire Justice of the Peace, it is said, first invented that name for them, because they seemed to be fond of the text Jer. v. 22, and had offended him by addressing it to himself and a brother magistrate: "Fear ye not me? saith the Lord; will ye not tremble at my presence?" But Robert Barclay's account of the origin of the name in his _Apology for the Quakers_ (1675) is probably more correct, though not inconsistent. He says it arose from the fact that, in the early meetings of "The Children of the Light," as they first called themselves, violent physical agitations were not unfrequent, and conversions were often signalized by that accompaniment. There was often an "inward travail" in some one present; "and from this inward travail, while the darkness seeks to obscure the light, and the light breaks through the darkness, which it will always do if the soul gives not its strength to the darkness, there will be such a painful travail found in the soul that will even work upon the outward man, so that often-times, through the working thereof, the body will be greatly shaken, and many groans and sighs and tears, even as the pangs of a woman in travail, will lay hold of it: yea, and this not only as to one, but ... sometimes the power of God will break forth into a whole meeting, and there will be such an inward travail, while each is seeking to overcome the evil in themselves, that by the strong contrary workings of these opposite powers, like the going of two contrary tides, every individual will be strongly exercised as in a day of battle, and thereby trembling and a motion of body will be upon most, if not upon all, which, as the power of Truth prevails, will from pangs and groans end with a sweet sound of thanksgiving and praise. And from this the name of _Quakers_, i.e. _Tremblers_, was first reproachfully cast upon us; which though it be none of our choosing, yet in this respect we are not ashamed of it, but have rather reason to rejoice therefore, even that we are sensible of this power that hath oftentimes laid hold of our adversaries, and made them yield to us, and join with us, and confess to the Truth, before they had any distinct and discursive knowledge of our doctrines."--The Quakers, then, according to this eminent Apologist for them, _had_, from the first, definite doctrines, which might be distinctly and discursively known. What were they? They hardly amounted to any express revolution of existing Theology. In no essential respect did any of their recognised representatives impugn any of the doctrines of Christianity as professed by other fervid Evangelical sects. The Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the natural sinfulness of men, propitiation by Christ alone, sanctification by the Holy Spirit, the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures--in these, and in other cardinal tenets, they were at one with the main body of their contemporary Christians. Though it was customary for a time to confound them with the Ranters, they themselves repudiated the connexion, and opposed the Ranters and their libertinism wherever they met them. Wherein then lay the distinctive peculiarity of the Quakers? It has been usual to say that it consisted in their doctrine of the universality of the gift of the Spirit, and of the constant inner light, and motion, and teaching of the Spirit in the soul of each individual believer. This is not sufficient. That doctrine they shared substantially with various other sects,--certainly with the Boehmenists and other Continental Mystics, not to speak of the English Antinomians and Seekers. Nay, in their first great practical application of the doctrine they had been largely anticipated. If the inner motion or manifestation of the Spirit in each mind, in interpretation of the Bible or over and above the Bible, is the sole true teaching of the Gospel, and if the manifestation cometh as the Spirit listeth, and cannot be commanded, a regular Ministry of the Word by a so-called Clergy is an absurdity, and a hired Ministry an abomination! So said the Quakers. In reaching this conclusion, however, they had only added themselves to masses of people, known as Brownists, Seekers, and Anabaptists, who had already, by the same route or by others, advanced to the standing-ground of absolute Voluntaryism. What did distinguish the early Quakers seems to have been, in the first place, the thorough form of their apprehension of that doctrine of the Inner Light, or Immediate Revelation of the Spirit, which they held in common with other sects, and, in the second place, their courage and tenacity in carrying out the practical inferences from that doctrine in every sentence of their own speech and every hour of their own conduct. As to the form in which they held the doctrine itself Barclay will be again our best authority. "The testimony of the Spirit," he says, "is that alone by which the true knowledge of God hath been, is, and can only be, revealed; who, as by the moving of his own Spirit he converted the Chaos of this world into that wonderful Order wherein it was in the beginning, and created Man a living Soul to rule and govern it, so by the same Spirit he hath manifested himself all along unto the sons of men, both Patriarchs, Prophets, and Apostles: which revelations of God by the Spirit, whether by outward voices and appearances, dreams, or inward objective manifestations in the heart, were of old the formal object of their faith and remain yet so to be,--since the object of the Saints' faith is the same in all ages, though set forth under divers administrations." This Inner Light of the Spirit, seizing men and women at all times and places, and illuminating them in the knowledge of God, was, Barclay elsewhere explains, something altogether supernatural, something totally distinct from natural Reason. "That Man, as he is a rational creature, hath Reason as a natural faculty of his soul, we deny not; for this is a property natural and essential to him, by which he can know and learn many arts and sciences, beyond what any other animal can do by the mere animal principle. Neither do we deny that by this rational principle Man may apprehend in his brain, and in the notion, a knowledge of God and spiritual things; yet, that not being the right organ, ... it cannot profit him towards salvation, but rather hindereth." And what of the use and value of the Scriptures? "From these revelations of the Spirit of God to the saints have proceeded the Scriptures of Truth, which contain (1) A faithful historical account of the actings of God's people in divers ages, with many singular and remarkable providences attending them; (2) A prophetical account of several things, whereof some are already past and some yet to come; (3) A full and ample account of all the chief principles of the doctrine of Christ ... Nevertheless, because they are only a declaration of the fountain, and not the fountain itself, therefore they are not to be esteemed the principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary rule of faith and manners. Nevertheless, as that which giveth a true and faithful testimony of the first foundation, they are and may be esteemed a secondary rule, subordinate to the Spirit, from which they have all their excellency and certainty." So much for the _form_ of the central principle of Early Quakerism, so far as it can be expressed logically. But it was in the resolute application of the principle in practice that the Early Quakers made themselves conspicuous. They were not Speculative Voluntaries, waiting for the abolition of the National Church, and paying tithes meanwhile. They were Separatists who would at once and in every way assert their Separatism. They would pay no tithes; they called every church "a steeple-house"; and they regarded every parson as the hired performer in one of the steeple-houses. Then, in their own meetings for mutual edification and worship, all their customs were in accordance with their main principle. They had no fixed articles of congregational creed, no prescribed forms of prayer, no ordinance of baptism or of sacramental communion, no religious ceremony in sanction of marriage, and no paid or appointed preachers. The ministry was to be as the spirit moved; all equally might speak or be silent, poor as well as rich, unlearned as well as learned, women as well as men; if special teachers did spring up amongst them, it should not be professionally, or to earn a salary. Yet, with all this liberty among themselves, what unanimity in the moral purport of their teachings! Their restless dissatisfaction with the Established Church and with all known varieties of Dissent, their passion for a full reception of Christ at the fountain-head, their searchings of the Scriptures, their private raptures and meditations, their prayers and consultations in public, had resulted in a simple re-issue of the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount. Quakerism, in its kernel, was but the revived Christian morality of meekness, piety, benevolence, purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and passivity. There were to be no oaths: Yea or Nay was to be enough. There were to be no ceremonies of honour or courtesy-titles among men: the hat was to be taken off to no one, and all were to be addressed in the singular, as _Thou_ and _Thee_. War and physical violence were unlawful, and therefore all fighting and the trade of a soldier. Injuries to oneself were to be borne with patience, but there was to be the most active energy in relieving the sufferings of others, and in seeking out suffering where it lurked. The sick and those in prison were to be visited, the insane and the outcast; and the wrongs and cruelties of law, whether in death-sentences for mere offences against property, or in brutal methods of prison-treatment, were to be exposed and condemned. For the rest, the Friends were to walk industriously and domestically through the world, honest in their dealings, wearing a plain Puritan garb, and avoiding all vanities and gaieties.--Had it been possible for such a sect to come into existence by mere natural growth, or the unconcerted association of like-minded persons in all parts of the country at once, even then, one can see, there would have been irritation between it and the rest of the community. The refusal to pay tithes, the refusal of oaths in Courts of Law or anywhere else, the objection to war and to the trade of a soldier, the _Theeing_ and _Thouing_ of all indiscriminately, the keeping of the hat on in any presence, would have occasioned constant feud between any little nucleus of Quakers and the society round about it. But the sect had not formed itself by any such quiet process of simultaneous grouping among people who had somehow imbibed its tenets. It had come into being, and in fact had shaped its tenets and become aware of them, through a previous fervour of itinerant Propagandism such as had hardly been known since the first Apostles and Christian missionaries had walked among the heathen. The first Quaker, the man in whose dreamings by himself, aided by scanty readings, the principles of the sect had been evolved, and in whose conduct by himself for a year or two the sect had practically originated, was the good, blunt, obstinate, opaque-brained, ecstatic, Leicestershire shoemaker, George Fox, the Boehme of England. From the year 1646, when he was two and twenty years of age, the life of Fox had been an incessant tramp through the towns and villages of the Midlands and the North, with preachings in barns, in inns, in market-places, outside courts of justice, and often inside the steeple-houses themselves, by way of interruption of the regular ministers, or correction of their doctrine after the hours of regular service. Extraordinary excitements had attended him everywhere, paroxysms of delight in him with tears and tremblings, outbreaks of rage against him with hootings and stonings. Again and again he had been brought before justices and magistrates, to whose presence indeed he naturally tended of his own accord for the purpose of lecturing them on their duties, and to whom he was always writing Biblical letters. He had been beaten and put in the stocks; he had been in Derby jail and in several other prisons, charged with riot or blasphemy; and in these prisons he had found work to his mind and had sometimes converted his jailors. And so, by the year 1654, "the man with the leather breeches," as he was called, had become a celebrity throughout England, with scattered converts and adherents everywhere, but voted a pest and terror by the public authorities, the regular steeple-house clergy whether Presbyterian or Independent, and the appointed preachers of all the old sects. By this time, however, he was by no means the sole preacher of Quakerism. Every now and then from among his converts there had started up one fitted to assist him in the work of itinerant propagandism, and the number of such had increased in 1654 to about sixty in all. Richard Farnsworth, James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Thomas Aldam, John Audland, Francis Howgill, Edward Burrough, Thomas Taylor, John Camm, Richard Hubberthorn, Miles Halhead, James Parnel, Thomas Briggs, Robert Widders, George Whitehead, Thomas Holmes, James Lancaster, Alexander Parker, William Caton, and John Stubbs, of the one sex, with Elizabeth Hooton, Anna Downer, Elizabeth Heavens, Elizabeth Fletcher, Barbara Blaugden, Catherine Evans, and Sarah Cheevers, of the other sex, were among the chief of these early Quaker preachers after Fox. They had carried the doctrines into every part of England, and also into Scotland and Ireland; some of them had even been moved to go to the Continent. Wherever they went there was the same disturbance round them as round Fox himself, and they had the same hard treatment--imprisonment, duckings, whippings. It is necessary that the reader should remember that in 1654 Quakerism was still in this first stage of its diffusion by a vehement propagandism carried on by some sixty itinerant preachers at war with established habits and customs, and had not settled down into mere individual Quietism, with associations of those who had been converted to its principles, and could be content with their own local meetings. In the chief centres, indeed, there were now fixed meetings for the resident Quakers, the main meeting place for London being the Bull and Mouth in St. Martin's-le-Grand; but Fox and most of his coadjutors were still wandering about the country.--There was already an extensive literature of Quakerism, consisting of printed letters and tracts by Fox himself, Farnsworth, Nayler, Dewsbury, Howgill, and others, and of invectives against the Quakers and their principles by Presbyterians and Independents; and some of the letters of the Quakers had been directly addressed to Cromwell. There had also, some time in 1654, been one interview between the Lord Protector and Fox. Colonel Hacker, having arrested Fox in Leicestershire, had sent him up to London. Brought to Whitehall, one morning early, when the Lord Protector was dressing, he had said, on entering, "Peace be on this House!" and had then discoursed to the Protector at some length, the Protector kindly listening, occasionally putting a question, and several times acknowledging a remark of George's by saying it was "very good," and "the truth." At parting, the Protector had taken hold of his hand, and, with tears in his eyes, said "Come again to my house! If thou and I were but an hour of the day together, we should be nearer one to another. I wish no more harm to thee than I do to my own soul." Outside, the captain on guard, informing George that he was free, had wanted him, by the Protector's orders, to stay and dine with the household; but George had stoutly declined.[1]

[Footnote 1: Sewel's _History of the People called Quakers_ (ed. 1834), I, I--136; Rules and Discipline of the Society of Friends (1834), _Introduction_; Baxter, 77; Neal, IV. 31-41; Pamphlets in Thomason Collection; Robert Barclay's _Apology for the Quakers_ (ed. 1765), pp. 4, 48, 118, 309-310. This last is a really able and impressive book--far the most reasoned exposition even yet, I believe, of the principles of early Quakerism. Though not written till twenty years after our present date, it was the first accurate and articulate expression, I believe, of the principles that had really, though rather confusedly, pervaded the Quaker teachings and writings at that date.--There are many particles of information about the early Quakers, and about other contemporary English sects, in _The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth_, published in 1878, the posthumous work of a second Robert Barclay, two hundred years after the first. But the book, though laborious, is very chaotic, and shows hardly any knowledge of the time of which it mainly treats.]

Such were the more recent sects and heresies for which, as well as for those older and more familiar, the First Parliament of the Protectorate had been, with the help of Dr. Owen and his brother-divines, preparing a strait-jacket. Of that Parliament, however, and of all its belongings, the Commonwealth was to be rid sooner than had been expected.

It had been the astute policy of the Parliament to concentrate all their attention upon the new Constitution for the Protectorate, and to neglect and postpone other business until the Bill of the Constitution had been pushed through and presented to Cromwell for his assent. In particular they had postponed, as much as possible, all supplies for Army and Navy and for carrying on the Government. By this, as they thought, they retained Cromwell in their grasp. By the instrument under which they had been called, he could not dissolve them till they had sat five months,--which, by ordinary counting from Sept. 3, 1654, made them safe till Feb. 3, 1654-5. But, if they could contrive that it should be Cromwell's interest not to dissolve them then, there was no reason why they should not sit on a good while longer, perhaps even till near Oct. 1656, the time they had themselves fixed for the meeting of the next Parliament. To postpone supplies, therefore, till after the general Bill of the Constitution in all its sixty Articles should have received Cromwell's assent, to wrap up present supplies and the hope of future supplies as much as possible in the Bill itself, was the plan of the Anti-Oliverians. The Bill, it will be remembered, had passed the second reading on Dec. 23, had then gone into Committee for amendments, and had come back to the House with these amendments. On the 10th of January, 1654-5, when the Bill was almost ready to be engrossed, it was moved by the Oliverians that there should be a conference about it with the Protector; but the motion was lost by 107 votes to 95. Among various subsequent divisions was one on the 16th on the question whether the Bill should become Law even if the Lord Protector should refuse his assent, and the Anti-Oliverians negatived the putting of the question by eighty-six votes to fifty-five. The next day, after another division, it was resolved thus: "That this Bill entitled _An Act Declaring and Settling the Government of the Commonwealth_, &c., be engrossed in order to its presentment to the Lord Protector for his consideration and assent," and that, if "the Lord Protector and the Parliament shall not agree thereunto and to every Article thereof, then the Bill shall be void and of none effect." Cromwell having thus been shut up to accept all or none, the Bill passed the third and conclusive reading on Friday, Jan. 19. Then all depended on Cromwell, who would have twenty days to make up his mind. He had made up his mind already, and did not mean to wait for the parchment. The Bill included provisions striking, as he conceived, at the root of his Protectorate, e.g. one for depriving him and the Council of State of that power of interim legislation which they had hitherto exercised with so much effect, and others withholding the negative he thought his due on future Bills affecting fundamentals. He was, besides, wholly disgusted with the spirit and conduct of the Parliament. Accordingly, having bethought himself that, in the payment of the soldiers and sailors, a month was construed as twenty-eight days only, he let the Saturday and Sunday after the third reading of the Bill pass quietly by, and then, on Monday the 22nd, having summoned the House to meet him in the Painted Chamber, addressed them in what counts as the Fourth of his Speeches, told them their time was up that day, and dissolved them. Their Constitutional Bill of Sixty Articles disappeared with them; and they had not, in all the five months, sent up a single Bill to Cromwell for his assent.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Godwin, IV. 148-157; Carlyle, III. 70-95.]

SECTION II.

BETWEEN THE PARLIAMENTS, OR THE TIME OF ARBITRARINESS: JAN. 22, 1654-55--SEPT. 17, 1656.

AVOWED "ARBITRARINESS" OF THIS STAGE OF THE PROTECTORATE, AND REASONS FOR IT.--FIRST MEETING OF CROMWELL AND HIS COUNCIL AFTER THE DISSOLUTION: MAJOR-GENERAL OVERTON IN CUSTODY: OTHER ARRESTS: SUPPRESSION OF A WIDE REPUBLICAN CONSPIRACY AND OF ROYALIST RISINGS IN YORKSHIRE AND THE WEST: REVENUE ORDINANCE AND MR. CONY'S OPPOSITION AT LAW: DEFERENCE OF FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS: BLAKE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: MASSACRE OF THE PIEDMONTESE PROTESTANTS: DETAILS OF THE STORY AND OF CROMWELL'S PROCEEDINGS IN CONSEQUENCE: PENN IN THE SPANISH WEST INDIES: HIS REPULSE FROM HISPANIOLA AND LANDING IN JAMAICA: DECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN AND ALLIANCE WITH FRANCE: SCHEME OF THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND BY MAJOR-GENERALS: LIST OF THEM AND SUMMARY OF THEIR POLICE-SYSTEM: DECIMATION TAX ON THE ROYALISTS, AND OTHER MEASURES _IN TERROREM_: CONSOLIDATION OF THE LONDON NEWSPAPER PRESS: PROCEEDINGS OF THE COMMISSION OF EJECTORS AND OF THE COMMISSION OF TRIERS: VIEW OF CROMWELL'S ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF ENGLAND, WITH ENUMERATION OF ITS VARIOUS COMPONENTS: EXTENT OF TOLERATION OUTSIDE THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH: THE PROTECTOR'S TREATMENT OF THE ROMAN CATHOLICS, THE EPISCOPALIANS, THE ANTI-TRINITARIANS, THE QUAKERS, AND THE JEWS: STATE OF THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS UNDER THE PROTECTORATE: CROMWELL'S PATRONAGE OF LEARNING: LIST OF ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS ALIVE IN 1656, AND ACCOUNT OF THEIR DIVERSE RELATIONS TO CROMWELL: POETICAL PANEGYRICS ON HIM AND HIS PROTECTORATE.--NEW ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND: LORD BROGHILL'S PRESIDENCY THERE FOR CROMWELL: GENERAL STATE OF THE COUNTRY: CONTINUED STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE RESOLUTIONERS AND THE PROTESTERS FOR KIRK-SUPREMACY: INDEPENDENCY AND QUAKERISM IN SCOTLAND: MORE EXTREME ANOMALIES THERE: STORY OF "JOCK OF BROAD SCOTLAND": BRISK INTERCOURSE BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND LONDON: MISSION OF MR. JAMES SHARP.--IRELAND FROM 1654 TO 1656.--GLIMPSE OF THE COLONIES.

This long stretch of twenty months was to be another period of the government of the Commonwealth by the Lord Protector and the Council of State on their own responsibility and without a Parliament. In the circumstances in which the late Parliament had left them, without supplies and without a single concluded and authoritative enactment, they could only fall back on the original Instrument of the Protectorate, amending its defects by their own ingenuity as exigencies occurred, with a suggestion now and then snatched, for the sake of quasi-Parliamentary countenance, from the wreck of the late Constitutional Bill. Hence a character of "arbitrariness" in Cromwell's government throughout this period greater perhaps than in any other of his whole Protectorate. For that, however, he was prepared. At the first meeting of the Council after the Dissolution of Parliament (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 1654-5) there were present, I find, His Highness himself, and thirteen out of the eighteen Councillors, viz.: Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Viscount Lisle, Lambert, Desborough, Fiennes, Montague, Sydenham, Strickland, Sir Charles Wolseley, Skippon, Jones, and Rous; and it was then "ordered by his Highness and the Council that Friday next be set apart for their seeking of God, and that Mr. Lockyer, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Denn, and Mr. Sterry, be desired then to give their assistance." In entering on the new period of their Government, the Protector and the Council thought a day of special prayer very fitting.[1]

[Footnote 1 Council Order Book of date.--Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, having shown Anti-Oliverian tendencies in the late Parliament, did not reappear in the Council after the Dissolution, and had virtually ceased to be a member. Colonel Mackworth had died Dec. 26, 1654. The three other members not present at the meeting of Jan. 23, 1664-5 were Fleetwood, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and Richard Mayor. Fleetwood was in Ireland; Pickering's absence was accidental, and he was in his place very regularly afterwards; Mayor did not attend steadily.]

In the Dissolution Speech Cromwell, rebuking the Parliament for their inattention to what he considered their real duty, had compared them to a tree under the shadow of which there had been a too thriving growth of other vegetation. Interpreting the parable, he had explained to them that there was at that moment a new and very complex conspiracy against the Commonwealth, that the Levellers at home had been in correspondence with the Cavaliers abroad, that their plans were laid and their manifestos ready, that commissioners from Charles Stuart had arrived and stores of arms and money had been collected, and also (worst of all) that there had been tamperings with the Army by Commonwealth men of higher note than the mere Levellers. He did not believe, he said, that any then in Parliament were in the Cavalier interest in the connexion, but he was not sure that they were all perfectly clear of the connexion on all its sides. At all events, he knew that their policy of starving the Army had given the enemy their best opportunity. Fortunately, he had already some of the chief home-conspirators in custody, and the Cavalier part of the plot might explode when it liked.[1]

[Footnote 1: Speech IV (Carlyle, III 75-81.)]

The chief of those in custody when Cromwell spoke was the Republican Major-General Overton. He had been under suspicion before, as we have seen, but had cleared himself sufficiently to Cromwell, and had been sent back to Scotland as second in command to Monk (Sept. 1654). Since then, however, he had relapsed into the Anti-Oliverian mood, and had become, it was believed, the head of the numerous Anti-Oliverians or Republicans in Monk's Army, The proposal was to seize Monk, make Overton the commander-in-chief, and march into England, But, information having been received in time, there had been the necessary arrests of the guilty officers (Dec. 1654). Most of them had been kept in Edinburgh to be dealt with by Monk; but the chiefs had been sent at once to London, and among them Overton, whose arrest had taken place at Aberdeen. He was committed to the Tower Jan. 16, 1654-5. The clue having thus been furnished, further investigation had disclosed more. In concert with the Anti-Oliverian movement in the Army of Scotland, and depending on that movement for help, there had been plottings in England, in which Harrison, Colonel Okey, Colonel Alured, Colonel Sexby, Adjutant-General Allen, Admiral Lawson, Major John Wildman, Lord Grey of Groby, Carew, and even Bradshaw, Hasilrig, and Henry Marten, were, or were said to be, more or less involved. The aim seems to have been a combination of the Anabaptist Levellers with the more eminent Republicans,--the Levellers, or some of them, quite willing to combine also with the Royalists, and indeed in confidential negotiation with them. How the scheme, or medley of schemes, would have turned out in the working, was never to be known. It was frustrated by the arrest, in January and February, of most of the suspected. The most important arrest was that of Major Wildman, the undoubted chief of the Levelling section of the conspiracy. When arrested in Wiltshire, he was found in the act of dictating a "Declaration of the Free and Well-affected People of England now in arms against the tyrant Oliver Cromwell, Esq." He was imprisoned in Chepstow Castle. Sexby, the most active man after Wildman in the Levelling or Anabaptist section of the conspiracy, escaped and went abroad. Adjutant-General Allen, and others less deeply implicated, were dismissed from their posts in the Army. Harrison was confined in the Isle of Portland, Carew in St. Mawes, in Cornwall, and Lord Grey of Groby in Windsor Castle. None of all the Republicans, higher or lower, it was remarked, suffered any punishment beyond such seclusion or dismissal from the service. Clemency on that side was always Cromwell's policy.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 158-165; Carlyle, III. 66-70 and 98-99; Whitlocke, IV. 182-188 (Wildman's Proclamation); Life of Robert Blair, 319.]

Much sharper was Cromwell's method of dealing with the attempted invasion and insurrection of the Royalists independently. Hopes had risen high at the Court of the Stuarts, and the preparations had been extensive. Charles himself had gone to Middleburg, with the Marquis of Ormond and others, to be ready for a landing in England; Hull had been thought of as the likeliest landing-place; commissioned pioneers of the enterprise were already moving about in various English counties. Of all this Thurloe had procured sufficient intelligence through his foreign spies, and the precautions of the Protector and Council had been commensurate. The projected Overton revolt in Scotland and the Wildman-Sexby plot in England having been brought to nothing, the Royalists had to act for themselves. Two abortive risings in March, 1654-5, exhausted their energy. One was in Yorkshire, where Sir Henry Slingsby and Sir Richard Malevrier appeared in arms, but were immediately suppressed. The other was in the West, and was more serious. On the night of Sunday, the 11th of March, a body of 200 Cavaliers, headed by Sir Joseph Wagstaff, one of Charles's emissaries from abroad, took possession of the city of Salisbury, The assizes were to be held in the city the next day, and Chief Justice Rolle, Judge Nicholas, and the High Sheriff, had arrived and were in their beds. They were seized; and next morning Wagstaff issued orders for hanging them, but was stopped in the act by the remonstrances of Colonel John Penruddock and others. From Salisbury, finding no encouragement among the citizens, the insurgents moved westward till they reached South Molton in Devonshire, where they were overtaken on the night of Wednesday, March 14, by Captain Unton Crook. There was a brief street-fight, ending in the defeat of the Royalists, and the capture of Penruddock and about fifty more. Wagstaff escaped. Of the contemporary insurgents in the north there had meanwhile escaped Malevrier and also Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who had come from abroad to head the Royalist insurrection generally, had gone to the north, but had not awaited the actual upshot. He lay concealed in London for a time, and got to Cologne at last. In the trials which ensued those who suffered capitally were Penruddock, beheaded at Exeter, a Captain Hugh Grove and several others at other places in the West, and two or three at York. Many of the inferior culprits, capitally convicted, had their lives spared, but were sent in servitude to Barbadoes.[1]

[Footnote 1: Clarendon, 824-827; Whitlocke, IV. 188; Godwin, IV. 167-169; Carlyle, III. 99-100.]

Revenue had been one of the first cares of the Protector and Council in resuming power after the Dissolution. By a former ordinance of theirs of June 1654 (Vol. IV. p. 562), the assessment for the Army and Navy had been renewed for three months at the rate of £120,000 per month, and for the next three months at the lowered rate of £90,000 per month. This ordinance had expired at Christmas 1654; and, though the Parliament had then passed a Bill for extending the assessment for three months more at £60,000 per month, the Bill had never been presented to Cromwell for his assent. On the 8th of February, 1654-5, therefore, a new Ordinance by his Highness and Council fixed the assessment for a certain term at £60,000 per month. This acceptance of the reduction proposed by the Parliament gave general satisfaction; and there is evidence that at this time Cromwell and the Council let themselves be driven to various shifts of economy rather than overstrain their power of ordinance-making in the unpopular particular of supplies. But, indeed, it was on the question of the validity of this power generally, all-essential as it was, that they encountered their greatest difficulties. A merchant named Cony did more to wreck the Protectorate by a suit at law than did the Cavaliers by their armed insurrection. Having refused to pay custom duty because it was levied only by an ordinance of the Lord Protector and Council of March, 1654, and not by authority of Parliament, he had been fined £500 by the Commissioners of Customs, and had been committed to prison for non-payment. On a motion for a writ of _habeas corpus_ his case came on for trial in May 1655. Maynard and two other eminent lawyers who were his counsel pleaded so effectively that they were committed to the Tower for what was called language destructive to the Government. Cony himself then went on with the pleading, and so sturdily that Chief Justice Rolle was non-plussed, and had to confess as much to Cromwell. It was only by delay, and then by some private management of Cony, that a decision was avoided which would have enabled the whole population legally to defy every taxing ordinance of the Protectorate. Similarly the Ordinance of August 1654 for regulating the Court of Chancery, and even the Ordinance of Treason under which the late insurgents had been tried, had brought the Protectorate into collision with the consciences of Lawyers and Judges. There were such remonstrances to Cromwell on the subject that he had to re-arrange the whole Bench. He removed Rolle and two other Judges, appointing Glynne and Steele in their stead, and he deprived Whitlocke and Widdrington of their Commissionerships of the Great Seal, compensating them after a while by Commissionerships of the Treasury. For all this "arbitrariness" Cromwell avowed, in the simplest and most downright manner, the plea of absolute necessity. The very existence of his Protectorate was at peril; and that meant, he declared, the existence of the Commonwealth.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 174-183; Whitlocke, through April, May, June, and July, 1655.]

For such "arbitrariness" in some of the Protector's home-proceedings there was, most people allowed, a splendid atonement in the marvels of his foreign policy. Never had there been on the throne of England a sovereign more bent upon making England the champion-nation of the world. The deference, the sycophancy, of foreign princes and potentates to him, and the proofs of the same in letters and embassies, and in presents of hawks and horses, had become a theme for jests and caricatures among foreigners themselves. Parliaments might come and go in Westminster; but there sat Cromwell, immoveable through all, the impersonation of the British Islands. His dissolution of the late Parliament, and his easy suppression of the subsequent tumult, had but increased the respect for him abroad. Whether he would finally declare himself for Spain or for France was still the momentous question. The Marquis of Leyda, Spanish Governor of Dunkirk, had come to London to assist Cardenas in the negotiations for Spain; but Mazarin was indefatigable in his offers, through M. de Bordeaux and otherwise.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books _passim_; Guizot, II. 203.]

While the Parliament was still sitting, Cromwell had sent out two fleets, one under the command of Blake (Oct. 1654), the other under that of Penn (Dec. 1654). There was the utmost secrecy as to the destination and objects of both, but the mystery did not last long about Blake's. He had received instructions to go into the Mediterranean, make calls there on all powers against which the Commonwealth had claims, and bring them to account. Blake fulfilled his mission with his usual precision and success. His first call of any importance was on the Grand Duke of Tuscany, formerly so much in the good graces of the Commonwealth (Vol. IV. pp. 483-485), but whom Cromwell, after looking more into matters, had found culpable. Blake's demands were for heavy money-damages on account of English ships taken by Prince Rupert in 1650, and sold in Tuscan ports, and also on account of English ships ordered out of Leghorn harbour in March 1653, so that they fell into the hands of the Dutch. There was the utmost consternation among the Tuscans, and the alarm extended even to Rome, inasmuch as some of Rupert's prizes had been sold in the Papal States. A disembarcation of the English heretics and even their march to Rome did not seem impossible; and Tuscans and Romans were greatly relieved when the Grand Duke paid £60,000 and the Pope 20,000 pistoles (£14,000), and Blake retired. His next call was at Tunis, where there were accounts with the Dey. That Mussulman having pointed to his forts, and dared Blake to do his worst, there was a tremendous bombardment on the 3rd of April, 1655, reducing the forts to ruins, followed by the burning of the Dey's entire war-squadron of nine ships. This sufficed not only for Tunis, but also for Tripoli and Algiers. All the Moorish powers of the African coast gave up their English captives, and engaged that there should be no more piracy upon English vessels. Malta, Venice, Toulon, Marseilles, and various Spanish ports were then visited for one reason or another; and in the autumn of 1655 Blake was still in the Mediterranean for ulterior purposes, understood between him and Cromwell.[1]

[Footnote 1: Guizot, II. 186-198, with, documents in Appendix; Godwin, IV. 187-188; Whitlocke. IV., 206-207.]

While Blake was in the Mediterranean, one Italian potentate did a sudden act of infamy, which resounded through Europe, and for which Cromwell would fain have clutched him by the throat in his own inland capital. This was Carlo Emanuele II., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont.

In the territories of this young prince, in the Piedmontese valleys of Luserna, Perosa, and San Martino, on the east side of the Cottian Alps, lived the remarkable people known as the Vaudois or Waldenses. From time immemorial these obscure mountaineers, speaking a peculiar Romance tongue of their own, had kept themselves distinct from the Church of Rome, maintaining doctrines and forms of worship of such a kind that, after the Lutheran Reformation, they were regarded as primitive Protestants who had never swerved from the truth through the darkest ages, and could therefore be adopted with acclamation into the general Reformed communion. The Reformation, indeed; had penetrated into their valleys, rendering them more polemical for their faith, and more fierce against the Church of Rome, than they had been before. They had experienced persecutions through their whole history, and especially after the Reformation; but, on the whole, the two last Dukes of Savoy, and also Christine, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and Duchess-Regent through the minority of her son, the present Duke, had protected them in their privileges, even while extirpating Protestantism in the rest of the Piedmontese dominions. Latterly, however, there had been a passion at Turin and at Rome for their conversion to the Catholic faith, and priests had been traversing their valleys for the purpose. The murder of one such priest, and some open insults to the Catholic worship, about Christmas 1654, are said to have occasioned what followed.

On the 25th of January, 1654-5, an edict was issued, under the authority of the Duke of Savoy, "commanding and enjoining every head of a family, with its members, of the pretended Reformed Religion, of what rank, degree, or condition soever, none excepted, inhabiting and possessing estates in the places of Luserna, Lucernetta, San Giovanni, La Torre, Bubbiana, and Fenile, Campiglione, Briccherassio, and San Secondo, within three days, to withdraw and depart, and be, with their families, withdrawn, out of the said places, and transported into the places and limits marked out for toleration by his Royal Highness during his good pleasure, namely Bobbio, Villaro, Angrogna, Rorata, and the County of Bonetti, under pain of death and confiscation of goods and houses, unless they gave evidence within twenty days of having become Catholics." Furthermore it was commanded that in every one even of the tolerated places there should be regular celebration of the Holy Mass, and that there should be no interference therewith, nor any dissuasion of any one from turning a Catholic, also on pain of death. All the places named are in the Valley of Luserna, and the object was a wholesale shifting of the Protestants of that valley out of nine of its communes and their concentration into five higher up. In vain were there remonstrances at Turin from those immediately concerned. On the 17th of April, 1655, the Marquis di Pianezza entered the doomed region with a body of troops, mainly Piedmontese, but with French and Irish among them. There was resistance, fighting, burning, pillaging, flight to the mountains, and chasing and murdering for eight days, Saturday, April 24, being the climax. The names of about three hundred of those murdered individually are on record, with the ways of the deaths of many of them. Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning and starving; and not a few, women and infants especially, perished amid the snows. On the 27th of April some of the remaining Protestant pastors and others, gathered together somewhere, addressed a circular letter to Protestants outside the Valleys, stating the hard case of the survivors. "Our beautiful and flourishing churches," they said, "are utterly lost, and that without remedy, unless God Almighty work miracles for us. Their time is come, and our measure is full. O have pity upon the desolations of Jerusalem, and be grieved for the afflictions of poor Joseph! Shew the real effects of your compassions, and let your bowels yearn for so many thousands of poor souls who are reduced to a morsel of bread for following the Lamb whithersoever he goes."[1]

[Footnote 1: Morland's History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont, with a Relation of the Massacre (1658), 287-428; Guizot, II. 213-215.]

There was a shudder of abhorrence through Protestant Europe, but no one was so much roused as Cromwell. In the interval between the Duke of Savoy's edict and the Massacre he had been desirous that the Vaudois should publicly appeal to him rather than to the Swiss; and, when the news of the Massacre reached England, he avowed that it came "as near his heart as if his own nearest and dearest had been concerned." On Thursday the 17th of May, and for many days more, the business of the Savoy Protestants was the chief occupation of the Council. Letters, all in Milton's Latin, but signed by the Lord Protector in his own name, were despatched (May 25) to the Duke of Savoy himself, to the French King, to the States General of the United Provinces, to the Protestant Swiss Cantons, to the King of Sweden, to the King of Denmark, and to Ragotski, Prince of Transylvania. A day of humiliation was appointed for the Cities of London and Westminster, and another for all England. A Committee was appointed, consisting of all the Councillors, with Sir Christopher Pack and other eminent citizens, and also some ministers, to organize a general collection of money throughout England and Wales in behalf of the suffering Vaudois. The collection, as arranged June 1, was to take the form of a house-to-house visitation by the ministers and churchwardens in every city, town, and parish on a particular Lord's day, for the receipt of whatever sum each householder might freely give, every such sum to be noted in presence of the donor, and the aggregates, parish by parish, or city by city, to be remitted to the treasurers in London, who were to enter them duly in a general register. The subscription, which lagged for a time in some districts, produced at length a total of £38,097 7_s._ 3_d._--equal to about £137,000 now. Of this sum £2000 (equal to about £7500 now) was Cromwell's own contribution, while London and Westminster contributed £9384 6_s._ 11_d._, and the various counties sums of various magnitudes, according to their size, wealth, and zeal, from Devonshire at the head, with £1965 0_s._ 3_d._, Yorkshire next, with £1786 14_s._ 5_d._, and Essex next, with £1512 17_s._ 7_d._, down to Merionethshire yielding £3 0_s._ 1_d._ from her eight parishes, and Radnorshire £1 14_s._ 4_d._ from her seven. Cromwell's own donation of £2000 went at once to Geneva for immediate use; and £10,000 followed on the 10th of July, as the first instalment of the general subscription. There were similar subscriptions, it ought to be added, in other Protestant countries.[1]

[Footnote 1: Letter from Thurloe to Pell at Geneva (Vaughan's Protectorate, I. 158-159); Council Order Books, May 17, 18, 22, 23, 25, June 1 and July 8, 1655; Morland, 562-596. Morland gives an interesting abstract of the Treasurer's Accounts of the Collection; but the original accounts in a large folio book, entitled _Committee for Piedmont_ &c., are in the Record Office. The counties are arranged there alphabetically and the parishes alphabetically under each county, with the sums which the _parishes_ individually subscribed. Some parishes seem wholly to have neglected the subscription, and there are blanks opposite their names.]

At the time of the massacre Cromwell had two agents in Switzerland, viz. Mr. JOHN PELL (Vol. IV. p. 449) and the ubiquitous JOHN DURIE. They had been sent abroad early in 1654, to cultivate the friendly intercourse already begun between the Evangelical Cantons and the Commonwealth, and also to watch the progress of a struggle which had just broken out between the Popish Cantons of the Confederacy and the Evangelical Cantons. As the Evangelical Cantons were also astir about the Vaudois, whose cause was so closely connected with their own, the services of Pell and Durie were now available for that business. Cromwell, however, had thought an express Commissioner necessary, with instructions to negotiate directly with the Duke of Savoy, and had selected for the purpose Mr, SAMUEL MORLAND, an able and ingenious man, about thirty years of age, who had been with Whitlocke in his Swedish Embassy, and had been taken into the Council office on his return as assistant to Thurloe. On the 26th of May Morland left London, carrying with him the letters addressed to Louis XIV. and the Duke of Savoy. He was at La Fère in France on the 1st of June, treating with the French King and Mazarin, and was able to despatch thence a letter from the French King to Cromwell, expressing willingness to do all that could be done for the Vaudois, and explaining that he had already conveyed his views on the subject to the Duke of Savoy. Thence Morland continued his journey to Rivoli, near Turin, where he arrived on the 21st of June. He was received most politely, was entertained and driven about both at Rivoli and at Turin itself, and was admitted to a formal audience on or about the 24th. He there made a speech in Latin to the Duke, the Duchess-mother being also present, and delivered Cromwell's letter, The speech was a very bold one. He spared no detail of horror in his picture of the massacre as he had authentically ascertained it, and added, "Were all the Neros of all times and ages alive again (I would be understood to say it with out any offence to your Highness, inasmuch as we believe that none of these things was done by any fault of yours), they would be ashamed at finding that they had contrived nothing that was not even mild and humane in comparison. Meanwhile angels are horrorstruck, mortals amazed!" The Duchess-mother, replying for her son, could hardly avoid hinting that Mr. Morland had been rather rude. She was, nevertheless, profuse in expressions of respect for the Lord Protector, who had no doubt received very exaggerated representations of what had happened, but at whose request she was sure her son would willingly pardon his rebellious subjects and restore them to their privileges. During the rest of Morland's stay in Turin or its neighbourhood the object of the Duke's counsellors, and also of the French minister, was to furnish him with what they called a more correct account of the facts, and induce him to convey to Cromwell a gentler view of the whole affair. Morland kept his own counsel; but, having had a second audience, and received the Duke's submissive but guarded answer to Cromwell, and also several other papers, he left Turin on the 19th of July and proceeded, according to his instructions, to Geneva.[1]

[Footnote 1: Morland, 563-583; and Letters between Pell and Thurloe given in _Vaughan's Protectorate_.]

Meanwhile Cromwell, dissatisfied with the coolness of the French King and Mazarin, and also with the shuffling and timidity of the Swiss Cantons, had been taking the affair more and more into his own hands. He had despatched, late in July, another Commissioner, Mr. GEORGE DOWNING, to meet Morland at Geneva, help Morland to infuse some energy into the Cantons, and then proceed with him to Turin to bring matters to a definite issue. He had been inquiring also about the fittest place for landing an invading force against the Duke, and had thought of Nice or Villafranca. Blake's presence in the Mediterranean was not forgotten. All which being known to Mazarin, that wily statesman saw that no time was to be lost. While Mr. Downing was still only on his way to Geneva through France, Mazarin had instructed M. Servien, the French minister at Turin, to insist, in the French King's name, on an immediate settlement of the Vaudois business. The result was a _Patente di Gratia e Perdono_, or "Patent of Grace and Pardon," granted by Charles Emanuel to the Vaudois Protestants, Aug. 19, in terms of a Treaty at Pignerol, in which the French Minister appeared as the real mediating party and certain Envoys from the Swiss Cantons as more or less assenting. As the Patent substantially retracted the Persecuting Edict and restored the Vaudois to all their former privileges, nothing more was to be done. Cromwell, it is true, did not conceal that he was disappointed. He had looked forward to a Treaty at Turin in which his own envoys, Morland and Downing, and D'Ommeren, as envoy from the United Provinces, would have taken the leading part, and he somewhat resented Mazarin's too rapid interference and the too easy compliance of the envoys of the Cantons. The Treaty of Pignerol contained conditions that might occasion farther trouble. Still, as things were, he thought it best to acquiesce. Downing, who had arrived at Geneva early in September, was at once recalled, leaving Morland and Pell still there, to superintend the distribution of the English subscription-money among the poor Vaudois, instalment after instalment, as they arrived. The charitable work was to detain Morland in Geneva or its neighbourhood for more than a year, nor was the great business of the Piedmontese Protestants to be wholly out of Cromwell's mind to the day of his death.[1]

[Footnote 1: Morland, 605-673; Guigot, II. 220-225; Council Order Book, July 17.]

Just at the date of the happy, though not perfect, conclusion of the Piedmontese business, came almost the only chagrin ever experienced by Cromwell in the shape of the failure of an enterprise. It was now some months since he had made up his mind in private to a rupture with Spain, intending that the fact should be first announced to the world in the actions of the fleet which he had sent with sealed orders to the West Indies under Penn's command. The instructions to Penn and to General Robert Venables, who went with him as commander of the troops, were nothing less, indeed, than that they should strike some shattering blow at that dominion of Spain in the New World which was at once her pride and the source of her wealth. It might be in one of her great West-India Islands, St. Domingo, Cuba, or Porto Rico, or it might be at Cartagena on the South-American mainland, where the treasures of Peru were amassed, for annual conveyance across the Atlantic. Much discretion was left to Penn and Venables, but on the whole St. Domingo, then called Hispaniola, was indicated for a beginning. Blake's presence in the Mediterranean with the other fleet had been timed for an assault on Spain at home when the news should arrive of the disaster to her colonies.[1]

[Footnote 1: Guizot, II. 184-186; Godwin, IV. 180-194.]

Penn and Venables together were not equal to one Blake. They opened their sealed instructions at Barbadoes, one of the two or three small Islands of the West-Indies then possessed by the English, and, after counsel and preparation, proceeded to Hispaniola. The fleet now consisted of about sixty vessels, and there were about 9000 soldiers on board, some of them veterans, but most of them recruits of bad quality. They were off St. Domingo, the capital of the Island, on the 14th of April, 1655, and from that moment there was misunderstanding and blundering. Penn, Venables, and the Chief Commissioner who had been sent out with them, differed as to the proper landing point; the wrong landing point was chosen for the main body; the men fell ill and mutinied; the Spaniards, who might have been surprised at first by a direct assault on St. Domingo, resisted bravely, and poured shot among the troops from ambuscade. Two attempts to get into St. Domingo were both foiled with heavy loss, including the death of Major-General Heane and others of the best officers. The mortality from climate and bad food being also great, the enterprise on Hispaniola was then abandoned; but, dreading a return to England with nothing accomplished, Penn and Venables bethought themselves of Jamaica. Here, where they arrived May 10, they were rather more fortunate. The Spaniards, utterly unforewarned, deserted the coast, and fled inland. There was no difficulty, therefore, in taking nominal possession of the chief town, though even that was done in a bungling manner. Then, leaving the Island in charge of a portion of the troops, under Major-General Fortescue, with Vice-Admiral Goodson to sail about it with a protecting squadron, Penn hastened back to England, Venables quickly following him. They arrived in London, within a few days of each other, early in September, and were at once committed to the Tower for having returned without orders. The news of the failure of their enterprise had preceded them, and Cromwell was profoundly angry. A bilious illness which he had about this time was attributed by the French ambassador Bordeaux to his brooding over the West-Indian mischance. He was soon himself again, however, and Penn and Venables had nothing to fear. They were released after a few weeks. After all, Jamaica was better than nothing.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 195-203; Carlyle, III. 122-123; Guizot, II. 226-231; Letters of Cromwell to Vice-Admiral Goodson and Major-General Fortescue (Carlyle, III. 126-132).]

One result of the West Indian expedition was that the long-delayed alliance with France was now a settled affair. Cardenas had his pass-ports sent him, and on the 22nd of October, 1655, he left England. The Court of Madrid had already recalled him, laid an embargo on all English property in Spain, and conferred a Marquisate and pension on the Governor of Hispaniola. On the 24th of October the Treaty of Peace and Commerce between Cromwell and Louis XIV. was finally signed; and within a few days afterwards there was out in London an elaborate document entitled "_Scriptum Domini Protectoris, ex consensu atque sententia Concilii sui editum, in quo hujus Reipublica causa contra Hispanos justa esse demonstratur_" ("The Lord-Protector's Manifesto, published with the consent and advice of his Council, in which the justice of the Cause of this Commonwealth against the Spaniards is demonstrated"). Now, accordingly, the Commonwealth entered on a new era of her history. Cromwell and Mazarin were to be fast friends, and the Stuarts were to have no help or countenance any more from the French crown; while, on the other hand, there was to be war to the death between the Commonwealth and Spain, war in the new world and war in the old, and Spain was thus naturally to adopt the cause of Charles II., and employ exiled English Royalism everywhere as one of her agencies,--Of the consciousness of the Lord-Protector and the Council of this increased complexity of the foreign relations of the Commonwealth in consequence of the rupture with Spain there is a curious incidental illustration. "That several volumes of the book called _The New Atlas_ be bought for the use of the Council, and that the Globe heretofore standing in the Council Chamber be again brought thither," had been one of the Council's instructions to Thurloe at their meeting of Oct. 2. Thenceforth, doubtless, both the Globe and the Atlas were to be much in request.--More important, however, than such fixed apparatus in the Council Room was the moving instrumentality of envoys and diplomatists in the chief European cities and capitals. Above all, an able ambassador in Paris was now an absolute necessity. Nor was the fit man wanting. Among the former Royalists of the Presbyterian section that had become reconciled to the Commonwealth, and attached to the Protector by strong personal loyalty, was the Scottish WILLIAM LOCKHART, member for Lanarkshire in the late Parliament. He had been trained to arms in France in his youth, and had since then served as a Colonel among the Scots. In this capacity he had been in Hamilton's Army of the Engagement, defeated by Cromwell at Preston, and in David Leslie's subsequent Army for Charles II., defeated at Dunbar. Having received some insults from Charles, of such a kind that he had declared that "no King on earth should use him in that manner," he had snapped his connexion with the Stuarts before the Battle of Worcester; and for some time after that battle he had lived moodily in Scotland, meditating a return to France for military employment. A visit to London and an interview with Cromwell had retained his talents for the service of the Protectorate, and his affection for that service had been confirmed by his marriage, in 1654, with Robina Sewster, the orphan niece of the Protector. Altogether Cromwell had judged him to be the very man to represent the Protectorate at Paris, and be even a match for Mazarin. He was now thirty-four years of age. He was nominated to the embassy in December 1655; but he did not go to his post till the following April.--Hardly a less important appointment was that, in January 1655-6, of young Edward Montague to be one of the Admirals of the Fleet. Blake, who had been cruising off Cadiz, and on whom there was the chief dependence for action against the Spaniards at sea, had felt the responsibility too great, and had applied for a colleague. Penn, being in disgrace, was out of the question; and Montague, then a member of the Protector's Council, was chosen. He had been one of Cromwell's favourites and disciples since the days of Marston Moor and Naseby, when, though hardly out of his teens, he had distinguished himself highly as a Parliamentary Colonel. Henceforth the sea was to be his chief element; and, as Admiral or General at sea, he was to become very famous.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV, 214-217 and 298-300; Guizot, II. 231-234; Thomason copy of the Declaration against Spain, dated Nov. 9, 1655; Council Order Books, Oct. 2, 1655; Article on Lockhart in Chambers's Biographical Dictionary of Scotsmen; Carlyle, III. 309-310.]

It was just about this time of change and extension in the foreign relations of the Commonwealth that the people of England and Wales became aware that they were, and had been for some time, under an entirely new system of home-government, called _Government by Major-Generals_.

The difficulties of the home-government of the Protectorate were great and peculiar. The power of the Lord-Protector and his Council to pass ordinances had been called in question. Judges and lawyers were not only pretty unanimous in the opinion that resistance to payment of imposts not enacted by Parliamentary authority might be made good at law, and that the Ordinance for Chancery Reform was also legally invalid; they doubted even whether, in strict law, there could be proceedings for the preservation of the public peace, by courts and magistrates, under any Council ordinance about crimes and treasons. All this Cromwell had been meditating. How was revenue to be raised? How were Royalist and Anabaptist plottings to be suppressed? How were police regulations about public manners and morals to be enforced? How was the will of the Central Government at Whitehall, in any matter whatsoever, to be transmitted to any spot in the community and made really operative? Meditating these questions, Cromwell, as he expressed it afterwards, "did find out a little poor invention": "I say," he repeated, "there was a little thing invented."[1] The little invention consisted in a formal identification of the Protector's Chief Magistracy with his Headship of the Army. He had resolved to map out England and Wales into districts, and to plant in each district a trusty officer, with the title of Major-General, who should be nominally in command of the militia of that district, but should be really also the executive there for the Central Government in all things. A beginning had been made in the business as early as May 1655, when Desborough was appointed Major-General of the Militia in the six southwestern counties; and the districts had been all marked out and the Major-Generals chosen in August. But there had been very great secrecy about the scheme; and not till the 31st of October was there official announcement of the new organization. Only about mid-winter, 1655-6, did people fully realise what it meant. The Major-Generalcies then stood thus:--

[Footnote 1: Speech V. (Carlyle, III. 176).]

Person. District.

1. MAJOR-GENERAL PHILIP SKIPPON. _London._

2. MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN BARKSTEAD. _Westminster and Middlesex._

3. MAJOR-GENERAL THOMAS KELSEY. _Kent and Surrey._

4. MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM GOFFE. _Sussex, Hants, and Berks._

5. FLEETWOOD (with MAJOR-GENERAL _Oxford, Bucks, Herts,_ HEZEKIAH HAYNES as his deputy). _Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex,_ _and Cambridge._

6. MAJOR-GENERAL EDWARD WHALLEY. _Lincoln, Notts, Derby,_ _Warwick, and Leicester._

7. MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM BUTLER. _Northampton, Bedford,_ _Hunts, and Rutland._

8. MAJOR-GENERAL CHARLES WORSLEY _Chester, Lancaster, and_ (succeeded by MAJOR-GENERAL _Stafford._ TOBIAS BRIDGES).

9. LAMBERT (with MAJOR-GENERAL _York, Durham, Cumberland_ ROBERT TILBURNE and MAJOR-GENERAL _Westmorland,_ CHARLES HOWARD as his deputies). _and Northumberland._

10. MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN DESBOROUGH. _Gloucester, Wilts, Dorset,_ _Somerset, Devon, and_ _Cornwall._

11. MAJOR-GENERAL JAMES BERRY. _Worcester, Hereford, Salop,_ _and North Wales._

12. MAJOR-GENERAL DAWKINS. _Monmouthshire and_ _South Wales._[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books, as digested by Godwin, IV. 228-229.]

The powers intrusted to these Major-Generals and to their subordinate officers in the several counties were all but universal. They were to patrol the counties with horse and foot, but especially with horse. They were to guard against robberies and tumults and to bring criminals to punishment. They were to take charge of the public morals, and see the laws put in force against drunkenness, blasphemy, plays and interludes, profanation of the Lord's Day, and disorderliness generally. They were to keep a register of all disaffected persons, remove arms from their houses, note their changes of residence, and take security for the good behaviour of themselves, their families, and servants. All travellers and strangers were bound to appear before them, and give an account of themselves and their business. They were to arrest vagabonds and persons with no visible means of living. Above all, they were to see to the execution of a certain very severe and far-reaching measure which the Protector and the Council had determined to adopt in consequence of the late Royalist insurrection and conspiracy.

Either from information that had been received, or merely _in terrorem_, there had, during the past summer and autumn, been numerous arrests of persons of rank and wealth that had hitherto been allowed to live quietly in their country mansions, on the understanding that, though Royalists, they had ceased to be such, in any active sense. The Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Lindsey, the Earl of Newport, the Earl of Northampton, the Earl of Rivers, the Earl of Peterborough, Viscount Falkland, and Lords Lovelace, St. John, Petre, Coventry, Maynard, Lucas, and Willoughby of Parham, with a great many commoners of distinction, had been thus arrested. There was a general consternation among the peaceful Royalists throughout the country. It looked as if their peacefulness was to be of no avail, as if the Act of Oblivion of Feb. 1651-2 was to be a dead letter, as if Cromwell had suddenly changed his policy of universal conciliation. In reality, Cromwell had no intention of reversing his policy of universal conciliation; but he wanted to teach the lesson that Royalist insurrections and conspiracies would fall heavily on the Royalists themselves, and he wanted particularly, at that moment, to make the Royalists pay the expenses of the police kept up on their account. Under cover of the consternation caused by the numerous arrests, he introduced, in fact, a _Decimation_ upon the Royalists, i.e. an income tax of ten per cent, upon all Royalists possessing estates in land of £100 a year and upwards or personal property worth £1500. It was to be the main business of the Major-Generals to assess this tax within their bounds, and to collect it strictly and swiftly. It is astonishing with what ease they succeeded. It seems to have been even a relief to the Royalists to know definitely what their principles were to cost them, and to have arrest or the dread of it commuted into a fixed money payment. As soon as the tax was fairly in operation, all or most of those who had been arrested were liberated, and subsequent arrests by the Major-Generals themselves were only of vagabonds or suspicious persons. The only appeal from the Major-Generals was to his Highness himself and the Council.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, 223-242; Carlyle, III. 101.]

What with the vigilance of the Major-Generals in their districts, what with the edicts of the Protector and the Council for the direction of the Major-Generals, the public order now kept over all England and Wales was wonderfully strict. At no time since the beginning of the Commonwealth had there been so much of that general decorum of external behaviour which Cromwell liked to see. Cock-fights, dancing at fairs, and other such amusements, were under ban. Indecent publications that had flourished long in the guise of weekly pamphlets disappeared; and books of the same sort were more closely looked after than they had been. But what shall we say about this Order, affecting the newspaper press especially:--"_Wednesday, 5th Sept._, 1655--At the Council at Whitehall, Ordered by his Highness the Lord Protector and the Council, That no person whatever do presume to publish in print any matter of public news or intelligence without leave of the Secretary of State"? The effect of the order was that not only the indecent publications purporting to be newspapers were suppressed, but also a considerable number of newspapers proper, insomuch that the London newspaper press was reduced thenceforth to two weekly prints, authorized by Thurloe, viz. Needham's _Mercurius Politicus_, published on Thursdays, and _The Public Intelligencer_, a more recent adventure, published on Mondays. Just after the order, I note, the _Mercurius Politicus_ enlarged its size somewhat, to match with the _Public Intelligencer_, and in the first number of the new size (Sept. 22-Oct. 4, 1655) the Editor speaks with great approbation of the Order of Council "silencing the many pamphlets that have hitherto presumed to come abroad." Needham seems now to have assumed the editorship of both papers; and after the twenty-third number of the _Intelligencer_ (March 3-10, 1655-6) the publisher of it, as well as of the _Mercurius Politicus_, was Thomas Newcome. The newspaper press of the Protectorate was thus pretty well consolidated by Mr. Thurloe. There were two papers only, under one management, or rather there was a single bi-weekly newspaper with alternative names.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books of 1655 and 1658 _passim; Merc. Pol._ and _Public Intelligencer_ of dates given.]

It was part of the duty of the Major-Generals to assist, so far as might still be necessary, in the execution of the Ordinance of Aug. 1654 for the ejection of scandalous and insufficient ministers and schoolmasters (Vol. IV. p. 564 and p. 571), The County _Committees of Ejectors_ under that Ordinance had already performed their disagreeable work in part, but were still busy. On the whole, though they turned out many, they seem not to have abused their powers. "I must needs say," is Baxter's testimony, "that in all the counties where I was acquainted, six to one at least, if not many more, that were sequestered by the Committees were, by the oaths of witnesses, proved insufficient or scandalous, or both--especially guilty of drunkenness or swearing,--and those that, being able godly preachers, were cast out for the war alone, as for their opinions' sake, were comparatively very few. This, I know, will displease that party; but this is true." Baxter admits, indeed, that there were cases in which the Committees were swayed too much by mere political feeling, and ejected men from their pulpits whom it would have been better to retain. Other authorities assert the same more strongly, but rather fail in the proof. The most notorious instance produced of a blunder on the part of any of the Committees was in Berkshire. The Rector of Childrey in this county was the learned orientalist Pocock, who had lost his Professorship of Hebrew in the University of Oxford for refusing the engagement to the Commonwealth, but still held the Arabic lectureship there, because there was no one else who knew Arabic sufficiently. Not liking his look, or not seeing what Orientalism had to do with the Gospel, the rude Berkshire Committee were on the point of turning him out of his Rectory, when Dr. Owen interfered manfully and prevented the scandal. About the same time, it is said, Thomas Fuller was in some trepidation about his living of Waltham Abbey, in Essex, but acquitted himself before the Committee handsomely.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baxter, 74; Wood's Ath. IV. 319; Godwin, IV. 40-41.]

Distinct from the County Committees of Ejectors, and forming the other great constitutional power in Cromwell's Church-Establishment, was the Central or London _Committee of the Thirty-eight Triers_ (Vol. IV. p. 571). It was their duty to examine "all candidates for the public ministry," i.e. all persons presented to livings by the patrons of the same, and pass only those that were fit. Baxter's report of the work of these Triers, as done either by themselves in conclave, or by Sub-commissioners for them in the counties, is the more remarkable because he disowned the authority under which the Triers acted and was in controversy with most of them. "Though their authority was null," he says, "and though some few over-busy and over-rigid Independents among them, were too severe against all that were Arminians, and too particular in inquiring after evidences of sanctification in those whom they examined, and somewhat too lax in their admission of unlearned and erroneous men that favoured Antinomianism or Anabaptism, yet, to give them their due, they did abundance of good to the Church. They saved many a congregation from ignorant, ungodly, drunken teachers. That sort of men that intended no more in the ministry than to say a sermon as readers say their common prayers, and so patch up a few good words together to talk the people asleep with on Sunday, and all the rest of the week go with them to the ale-house and harden them in sin; and that sort of ministers that either preached against a holy life, or preached as men that never were acquainted with it; all those that used the ministry but as a common trade to live by, and were never likely to convert a soul:--all these they usually rejected, and in their stead admitted of any that were able serious preachers, and lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they were. So that, though they were many of them somewhat partial for the Independents, Separatists, Fifth Monarchy men, and Anabaptists, and against the Prelatists and Arminians, yet so great was the benefit above the hurt which they brought to the Church that many thousands of souls blessed God for the faithful ministers whom they let in." Royalist writers after the Restoration give, of course, a different picture. "Ignorant, bold, canting fellows," they say, "laics, mechanics, and pedlars," were brought into the Church by Cromwell's Triers. One may, in the main, trust Baxter.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baxter, 72; Noal, IV. 102-109.]

Cromwell's Established Church of England and Wales may now be imaged with tolerable accuracy. It contained two patches of completed Presbyterian organization, one in London and the other in Lancashire. The system of Presbyteries or Classes, with half-yearly Provincial Assemblies, which had been set up by the Long Parliament in these two districts, remained undisturbed. Both in London and in Lancashire, however, the system was in a languid state; and for the rest of the country, and indeed for non-Presbyterians in London and Lancashire too, the Church or Public Ministry was practically on the principle of the Independency of Congregations. Each parish had, or was to have, its regular minister, recognised by the State, and the association of ministers among themselves for consultation or mutual criticism was very much left to chance and discretion. Ministers and deacons, however, did draw up Agreements and form voluntary Associations in various counties, holding monthly or other periodical meetings; and, as it was the rule in such associations not to meddle with matters of Civil Government, they were countenanced by the Protectorate. Baxter tells us much of the Association in Worcestershire which he had helped to form in 1653, and adds that similar associations sprang up afterwards in Cumberland and Westmorland, Wilts, Dorset, Somersetshire, Hampshire, and Essex. These Associations are to be conceived as imperfect substitutes for the regular Presbyterian organization, and most of the ministers belonging to them were eclectics or quasi-Presbyterians, like Baxter himself, making the most of untoward circumstances, while the stricter Presbyterians, who sighed for the perfect model, held aloof. Perhaps the majority of the State-clergy all over the country consisted of these two classes of Presbyterians baulked of their full Presbyterianism,--the _Rigid Presbyterians_, who would accept nothing short of the system as exemplified in London and Lancashire, and the _Eclectics_ or _Quasi-Presbyterians_ grouped in voluntary Associations. But among the State-clergy collectively there were several other varieties. There were many of the old _Church-of-England Rectors and Vicars_, still Prelatic in sentiment, and, though obliged to disuse the Book of Common Prayer, maintaining some sweet remnant of Anglicanism. Some of these, not of the High Church school, did not scruple to join the quasi-Presbyterian Associations that were liberal enough to admit them; but most found more liberty in keeping by themselves. Then there were the Independents proper, drawn from all those various Evangelical Sects, however named separately, whose principle of Independency stopped short of absolute Voluntaryism, and therefore did not prevent them from belonging to a State-Church. The more moderate of these Independents might easily enough, in consistency with their theory of Congregationalism, join the quasi-Presbyterian Associations, and some of them did so; but not very many. The majority of them were simply ministers of the State-Church, in charge of individual parishes and congregations, and consulting each other, if at all, only in informal ways. Among the Independent Sectaries of all sorts thus officiating individually in the State-Church, the difficulty, as far as one can see, must have been chiefly, or solely, with the _Baptists_. How could preachers who rejected the rite of Infant Baptism, maintained the necessity of the rebaptism of adults, and thought dipping the proper form of the rite, be ministers of parishes, or be included in any way among the State-clergy? That such ministers did hold livings in Cromwell's Established Church is a fact. Mr. John Tombes, the chief of the Anti-Pædobaptists, and himself one of Cromwell's Triers, retained the vicarage of Leominster in Herefordshire, with the parsonage of Boss in the same county, and a living at Bewdley in Worcestershire; and there are other instances. Baxter's language already quoted implies nothing less, indeed, than that Anti-Pædobaptists in considerable numbers were presented to Church-livings by the patrons and passed by the Triers; and he elsewhere signifies that he did not himself greatly object to this. "Let there be no withdrawing," he says, "from the ministry and church of that place [i.e. a parish of mixed Pædobaptists and Anti-Pædobaptists] upon the mere ground of Baptism. If the minister be an Anabaptist, let not us withdraw from him on that ground; and, if he be a Pædobaptist, let not _them_ withdraw from _us_." He even suggests that the pastor of a church might openly record his opinion on the Baptism subject, if it were contrary to that of the majority of the members, and then proceed in his pastorate all the same, and that, on the other hand, private members might publicly enter their dissent from their pastor's opinion, and yet abide with him lovingly and obediently in all other things. How far, and in how many places, this method of leaving Pædo-baptism an open question was actually in operation in the Established Church of the Protectorate, and whether Infant Baptism thus fell into complete abeyance in some parishes where Anabaptists of eminence were settled, or whether the Pædobaptist parishioners in such eases quietly avoided that result by having their children baptized by other ministers, are points of some obscurity. On the whole, the difficulty can have been felt but exceptionally and here and there, for it was obviated on the great scale by the fact that most of the real Anabaptists, preachers and people alike, were Voluntaries, disowning the State-Church altogether, and meeting only in separate congregations. Even for such, however, in localities where they were pretty numerous, there seems to have been a desire to make some provision. Thus on March 13, 1655-56, it was ordered by His Highness and the Council "that it be referred to General Desborough, Major-General for the County of Devon, to take care that the Church under the form of Baptism at Exeter have such one of the public meeting-places assigned to them for their place of worship as is best in repair, and may with most conveniency be spared and set apart for that use." The Exeter Baptists may have thought it not inconsistent with their principles to accept so much of State favour. Not the public buildings, so much as the Tithes and Lay Patronage with which they were connected, were the abominations of the State-Church in the eyes of the Anabaptist Voluntaries. For let it not be forgotten that Cromwell's ardent passion for a Church-Establishment under his Protectorate had come more and more to involve, in his reasonings, the preservation of the Tithe-system and the continuance of lay Patronage. The legal patrons of livings retained their right of nominating to vacancies; the Triers only checked that right by examination of nominees and the rejection of the unfit. Cromwell himself combined in his own person, to a most extraordinary extent, the functions both of Patron and Trier. "It is observable that, his Highness having near one half of the livings in England, one way or other, in his own immediate disposal by presentation, he seldom bestoweth one of them upon any man whom himself doth not first examine and make trial of in person, save only that, at such times as his great affairs happen to be more urgent than ordinary, he useth to appoint some other to do it in his behalf; which is so rare an example of piety that the like is not to be found in the stories of Princes." We have not exaggerated, it will be seen, Cromwell's personal anxiety about his Established Church. That, indeed, is farther proved, in a very interesting manner, by certain entries in the Order Books of his Council which become more and more frequent in this middle section of his Protectorate. They refer to "augmentations of ministers' stipends." Thus, in December 1655, there is an order for the augmentation of the stipends of seventy-five ministers in different counties, all in one batch; and succeeding entries in 1656 show the steady progress of the same work by repeated orders for other augmentations, batch after batch. Clearly Cromwell had resolved that there should be a systematic increase of the salaries of the parochial clergy all over England, beginning with those who needed it most. The details of the business were managed by that body of "Trustees for maintenance of ministers" which had been appointed by Ordinance in Sept. 1654 (Vol. IV. p. 564); but the final Orders for Augmentations came from the Protector and Council, and there was no part of his work in which the Protector seemed to have more pleasure.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baxter, 96-97 and 180-188; Wood's Ath. III. 1083; Council Order Books of dates; Neal, IV. Chap. 3; Marchamont Needham's Book against John Goodwin, entitled _The Great Accuser Cast Down_, published in July 1657. The information about Cromwell's practice in his patronage of livings is from the last. The book was dedicated to Cromwell.]

But what of that Toleration of Dissent from the Established Church which he professed to be equally dear to him? That Cromwell was faithful still to the principle of Liberty of Conscience, to the fullest extent of his past professions, there can be no doubt. It may be more doubtful whether his past professions pledged him to a theory of Toleration as absolute as that which had been advocated eleven or twelve years before by Roger Williams and John Goodwin, and then adopted by the Army Independents generally, and which was still upheld by the main body of the Anabaptists. The evidence, however, rather favours the idea that he had already been in sympathy even with this extreme theory of Toleration, and so that now, though he had bitterly disappointed his old Anabaptist associates by declaring himself for the Civil Magistrate's Authority in matters of Religion, he still cherished the extreme theory of Toleration as it might be applied round about his Established Church. In his heart, I believe, he was for persecuting nobody whatsoever, troubling nobody whatsoever, for mere religious heresy, even of the kinds he himself most abhorred. But, though this might be his private ideal, his difficulties publicly and practically were enormous. The other unlimited Tolerationists in England were Anabaptists and the like, detesting his Established Church as incompatible with true Toleration, and in league for battering it down. Through the rest of the community there was but little voice for Toleration. The frantic and idiotic stringency of the Presbyterians of 1644-6 was now, indeed, rather out of fashion, and a certain mild babble about a Limited Toleration was common in the public mouth. But the old leaven was at work in many quarters; occasional pamphlets from the Presbyterian camp still wailed lamentably about "the effects of the present Toleration, especially as to the increase of Blasphemy and Damnable Errors;" and some Presbyterian booksellers had recently published _A Second Beacon Fired_, in which they insidiously tried to work upon the Lord Protector's new Conservative and State-Church instincts; by denouncing the books of some leading Anabaptists and other heretics, hostile to his Government, and humbly adjuring him to "do what might be expected from Christian magistrates" in such flagrant cases. In the late Parliament there had been much of this Presbyterian spirit, and it had been proved abundantly that the Protector's idea of Toleration would have been voted down by the national representatives. Then what a harassing definition of proper Christian Toleration had come even from Cromwell's favourite Independents, Messrs. Owen and the rest, with their twenty fundamentals! Add the difficulties arising from the nature of some of the current heresies themselves, as tending directly to the defamation of his government, the subversion of laws and institutions, and the disturbance of the peace.[1]

[Footnote 1: Various Thomason Pamphlets of 1654-1656. The _Second Beacon Fired_ was published in Oct. 1654 by six London booksellers--Luke Fawne, John Rothwell, Samuel Gellibrand, Thomas Underhill, Joshua Kirton, and Nathaniel Webb. Two of them, Rothwell and Underhill, had published for Milton in former days. The heretics chiefly denounced are Biddle, Dell, Farnworth, Norwood, Braine, John Webster, and Feake. John Goodwin replied to the booksellers in _A fresh Discovery of the High Presbyterian Spirit, or the Quenching of "The Second Beacon Fired_," published in Jan. 1654-5, and so found himself in a new quarrel. There was a reply called _An Apology for the Six Booksellers_.]

A very fair amount of Liberty of the Press, though not to newspapers, nor to publications clearly immoral, seems to have been allowed by Cromwell. Through 1655 and 1656 there were books and pamphlets of the most various kinds, and advocating the most various opinions. There were Episcopalian books and Anabaptist books, arguments for Tithes and arguments against Tithes, Fifth Monarchy tracts, Quaker Tracts and Anti-Quaker Tracts, in extraordinary profusion. Prynne would publish one day _The Quakers unmasked and clearly detected to be but the spawn of Romish frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English nation_, and George Fox would print the next day _The Unmasking and Discovery of Antichrist, with all the False Prophets, by the true light which comes from Christ Jesus_. Nor, of course, was there, any interference with the religious meetings of any of the ordinary Puritan sects, Baptists or whatever else, that chose to form separatist congregations. Even those who so far passed the bounds that they were called Ranters or Fanatics were quite safe in their own conventicles; and altogether one has to conclude that much that went by the still worse names of Blasphemy, Atheism, Infidelity, and Anti-Christianism, had as quiet a life under the Protectorate as in any later time. Practically, all that is of interest in the enquiry as to the amount of Religious Toleration under Cromwell's Government lies in what is known of his dealings with five denominations of Dissenters from his Established Church--the Papists, the Episcopalians, the Socinians or Anti-Trinitarians, the Quakers, and the Jews.

(1) _The Papists._ Papists might be Papists under Cromwell's government in the sense that there was no positive compulsion on them to abjure their creed and profess another. The question, however, is as to open liberty of Roman Catholic worship. This question had passed through Cromwell's mind, and the results of his ruminations upon it appear most succinctly in one of his letters to Mazarin. After the Treaty made with France, the Cardinal very naturally pressed the subject of a toleration for Catholics in England, the rather as Cromwell was always so energetic for a toleration of Protestants in Catholic countries. "Although I have this set home to my spirit," Cromwell wrote in reply, "I may not (shall I tell you I _cannot_?) at this juncture of time, and as the face of my affairs now stands, answer your call for Toleration. I say _I cannot_, as to a public declaration of my sense in that point; although I believe that under my government your Eminency, in behalf of Catholics, has less reason for complaint, as to rigour on men's consciences, than under the Parliament. For I have of some, and those very many, had compassion; making a difference. Truly I have (and I may speak it with cheerfulness in the presence of God, who is a witness within me to the truth of what I affirm) made a difference; and, as Jude speaks, 'plucked many out of the fire,'--the raging fire of persecution, which did tyrannise over their consciences, and encroached by an arbitrariness of power upon their estates. And herein it is my purpose, as soon as I can remove impediments, and some weights that press me down, to make a farther progress, and discharge my promise to your Eminency in relation to that."[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle, III. 202-203. The letter is dated Dec. 26, 1656.]

(2) _The Episcopalians._ The question under this heading is not about those moderate Episcopalian divines who had conformed so far as to retain their rectories and vicarages in the Established Church, but about those Episcopalians of stronger principle, whether High Church and Arminian or not, who had been ejected from their former livings, or were trying to maintain themselves by some kind of private practice of their clerical profession in various parts of England. Against these, just at the time when the Major-Generalcies were coming into full operation, there did issue one fell Ordinance. It was published Nov. 24, 1655, under the title of _An Ordinance for Securing the Peace of the Commonwealth_, and it ordered that after Jan. 1, 1655-6 no persons should keep in their houses as chaplains or tutors any of the ejected clergy, and also that none of the ejected should teach in schools, preach publicly or privately, celebrate baptism or marriage, or use the Book of Common Prayer, under pain of being prosecuted. The Ordinance seems to have been issued merely as part and parcel of that almost ostentatious menace of severities against the Royalists by which Cromwell sought at that particular time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself that there would be great delicacy in the application of it, so as to favour such of the ejected as deserved tender treatment; and, in fact, it was never applied or executed at all. No one was prosecuted under it; and, though it was not recalled, it was understood that it was suspended by the pleasure of his Highness, and that chaplains, teachers, and preachers, of the Episcopal persuasion, might go on as before, and reckon on all the toleration accorded to other Dissenters. On this footing they did go on, ex-Bishops and future Bishops among them, with increasing security; and gradually the notion got abroad that the Protector began to have even a kindly feeling for the "good old Church." Many Royalist authorities concur to that effect. "The Protector," says one, "indulged the use of the Common-Prayer in families and in private conventicles; and, though the condition of the Church of England was but melancholy, yet it cannot be denied that they had a great deal more favour and indulgence than under the Parliament." Burnet, on the authority of Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Bishop Wilkins, who was the second husband of Cromwell's youngest sister, adds a more startling statement. "Dr. Wilkins told me," says Burnet, "he (Cromwell) often said to him (Wilkins) no temporal government could have a sure support without a national church that adhered to it, and he thought England was capable of no constitution but Episcopacy; to which he told me he did not doubt but Cromwell would have turned." Wilkins probably liked to think this after he himself had turned; but it is hardly credible in the form in which Burnet has expressed it. Yet Cromwell, in that temper of conservatism, or desire of a settled order in all things, which more and more grew upon him after he had assumed the Protectorate, had undoubtedly the old Episcopalian clergy in view as a body to be conciliated, and employed as a counterpoise to the Anabaptists. He cannot but have been aware, too, of the spontaneous movements in some of the quasi-Presbyterian Associations of the clergy for a reunion as far as possible with the more moderate Episcopalians, as distinct from the High-Church Prelatists or Laudians. Among others, Baxter was extremely zealous for such a project; and his accounts of his correspondence about it with ex-Bishop Brownrigg in 1655, and his conversations about it at the same time with ex-Primate Usher, are very curious and interesting. Baxter and many more were quite willing that there should be a restored Episcopacy after Usher's own celebrated model: i.e. an Episcopacy not professing to be _jure divino_, but only for ecclesiastical conveniency,--the Bishops to be permanent Presidents of clusters of the clergy, and to be fitted into an otherwise Presbyterian system of Classes and Provincial Synods. They were willing, moreover, in the interest of such a scheme, to reconsider the old questions of a Liturgy, kneeling at the Sacrament, and other matters of Anglican ceremonial. Enough all this to rouse the angry souls of _Smectymnuus_, Milton, and the other Root-and-Branch Anti-Prelatists who had led the English Revolution. But, as times change, men change, and it is not impossible that Cromwell, the first real mover of the Root-and-Branch Bill of 1641, may now, fifteen years later, have looked speculatively sometimes at the old trunk in the timberyard. It is certain that he treated with profound respect the man whose advice about any remodelling of Episcopacy would have been the most authoritative generally. Ex-Primate Usher had lived in London through the Commonwealth and the Protectorate with the highest honour, pensioned at the rate of £400 a year, and holding also the preachership to the Society of Lincoln's Inn. Cromwell had shown him every attention, and had consulted him on several occasions. He had retired to Reigate a short time before his death, which happened on the 21st of March, 1655-6. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, a sum of £200 having been voted for his funeral by the Protector and Council. Eight months after his death there was published from his manuscript, by his friend and former chaplain, Dr. Nicholas Bernard, that famous _Reduction of Episcopacy into the form of Synodical Government_ which had got about surreptitiously in 1641 (Vol. II. 229-230), and which was then regarded, and has been regarded ever since, as the most feasible model of a Low-Church Episcopacy adapted to Presbyterian forms.[1]

[Footnote 1: Neal, IV. 135-137 and 101-2; Burnet (ed. 1823) I. 110; Baxter, 172-178 and 206; Thomason Catalogue, Nov. 25, 1656 (date of publication of Usher's _Reduction_); Wood's Fasti, I. 446.]

(3) _Anti-Trinitarians._ The crucial test of Cromwell's Toleration policy as regarded this class of heretics, and indeed as regarded all heresies of the higher order, was the case of poor Mr. John Biddle. The dissolution of the late Parliament had been so far fortunate for him that the prosecution begun against him by that Parliament under the old Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 had been stopped and he had been set at liberty (March 1655). But it was only to get into fresh trouble. The orthodox in London were determined that he should not be at large, and it was reported to the Council on the 3rd of July that on the preceding Thursday, June 28, "in the new meeting-house at Paul's, commonly called Captain Chillingdon's church meeting-place, John Biddle did then and there, in presence of about 500 persons, maintain, some hours together, in a dispute, that Jesus Christ was not the Almighty or most High God, and hath undertaken to proceed in the game dispute the next Thursday." Cromwell himself was present at this meeting of the Council, with Lawrence, Lambert, the Earl of Mulgrave, Skippon, Rous, Sydenham, Pickering, Montague, Fiennes, Viscount Lisle, Wolseley, and Strickland. What were they to do? They ordered the Lord Mayor to stop the intended meeting, and all such meetings in future, and to arrest Biddle if necessary; and they referred the affair for farther enquiry to Skippon and Rous. The affair, it seems, could not possibly be hushed up; Biddle was committed to Poultry Compter, and then to Newgate, and his trial came on at the Old Bailey, again under the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648. Having, with difficulty, been allowed counsel, he put in legal objections, and the trial was adjourned till next term. Meanwhile London was greatly agitated. The Presbyterians and the orthodox generally were eager for Biddle's conviction; but a very considerable number of persons, including not only Biddle's own followers and free-thinkers of other sorts, but also some Independent and Baptist ministers, whose orthodoxy was beyond suspicion, bestirred themselves in his behalf. Pamphlets appeared in that interest, one entitled _The Spirit of Persecution again broken loose against Mr. John Biddle_, and a numerously signed petition was addressed to Cromwell, requesting his merciful interference. The Petition, as we learn from _Mercurius Politicus_, was very badly managed. "The persons who presented a petition some few days since to his Highness on the behalf of Biddle," says that paper under date Sept. 28, "came this day in expectation of an answer. They had access, and divers godly ministers were present. And, the Petition being read in the hearing of divers of those under whose countenance it was presented, many of them disowned it, as being altered both in the matter and title of it since they signed it, and so looked upon it as a forged thing, wherein both his Highness and they were greatly abused, and desired that the original which they signed might be produced; which Mr. Ives and some others of the contrivers and presenters of it were not able to do, nor had they anything to say in excuse of so foul a miscarriage. Whereupon they were dismissed, his Highness having opened to them the evil of such a practice [tampering with petitions after they had been signed], as also how inconsistent it was for _them_, who professed to be members of the Churches of Christ and to worship him with the worship due to God, to give any countenance to one who reproached themselves and all the Christian Churches in the world as being guilty of idolatry: showing that, if it be true which Mr. Biddle holds, to wit that our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is but a creature, then all those who worship him with the worship due to God are idolaters. His Highness showed moreover that the maintainers of this opinion of Mr. Biddle's are guilty of great blasphemy against Christ, who is God equal with the Father; and he referred it to them to consider whether any who loved the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity could give any countenance to such a person as he is." But, while the petitioners were thus dismissed with a severe lecture, Cromwell had made up his mind to save Mr. Biddle. On the 5th of October it was resolved by the Council that he should be removed to the Isle of Scilly and there shut up; and Cromwell's warrant to that effect was at once issued. In no other way could the trial have been quashed, and it was the kindest thing that could have been done for Biddle in the circumstances. He lived comfortably enough in his seclusion in the distant Island for the next two years and a half, receiving an allowance of a hundred crowns _per annum_ from Cromwell, and employing his leisure in the deep study of the Apocalypse and the preparation of a treatise against the Doctrine of the Fifth Monarchy.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books, July 3 and Oct. 5, 1655; _Merc. Pol._ Sept. 27-Oct. 4, 1655; Wood's Ath. III. 599-601; Thomason Catalogue (Tracts for and against Biddle).]

(4) _The Quakers._ There was immense difficulty with this new sect--from the fact, as has been already explained, that they had not settled down into mere local groups of individuals, asking toleration for themselves, but were still in open war with all other sects, all other forms of ministry, and prosecuting the war everywhere by itinerant propagandism. George Fox himself and the best of his followers seem by this time indeed to have given up the method of actually interrupting the regular service in the steeple-houses in order to preach Quakerism; but they were constantly tending to the steeple-houses for the purpose of prophesying there, as was the custom in country-places, after the regular service was over. Thus, as well as by their conflicts with parsons of every sect wherever they met them, and their rebukings of iniquity on highways and in market-places, not to speak of their obstinate refusals to pay tithes in their own parishes, they were continually getting into the hands of justices of the peace and the assize-judges. Take as one example of their treatment in superior courts the appearance of William Dewsbury and other Quakers before Judge Atkins at Northampton after they had been half a year in Northampton jail.--Seeing them at the bar with their hats on, the Judge told the jailor he had a good mind to fine him ten pounds for bringing prisoners into the Court in that fashion, and ordered the hats to be removed by the jailor's man. Then, after some preliminary parley, "What is thy name?" said the Judge to Dewsbury, who had made himself spokesman for all. "Unknown to the World," said Dewsbury. "Let us hear what that name is that the World knows not," said the Judge goodhumouredly. "It is," quoth Dewsbury, "known in the light, and none can know it but he that hath it; but the name the world knows me by is William Dewsbury." Then to the question of the Judge, "What countryman art thou?" the reply was, "Of the Land of Canaan." The Judge remarked that Canaan was far off. "Nay," answered Dewsbury, "for all that dwell in God are in the holy city, the new Jerusalem, which comes down from Heaven, where the soul is in rest, and enjoys the love of God in Jesus Christ, in whom the union is with the Father of Light." The Judge admitted that to be very true, but asked Dewsbury whether, being an Englishman, he was ashamed of that more prosaic fact. "Nay," said Dewsbury, "I am free to declare that my natural birth was in Yorkshire, nine miles from York towards Hull." The Judge then said, "You pretend to be extraordinary men, and to have an extraordinary knowledge of God." Dewsbury replied, "We witness the work of regeneration to be an extraordinary work, wrought in us by the Spirit of God." The conversation then turned on their preaching itinerancy, and abstinence from all ordinary callings, the Judge remarking that even the Apostles had worked with their hands. Dewsbury admitted that some of the Apostles had been fishermen, and Paul a tent-maker, but asserted that, "when they were called to the ministry of Christ, they left their callings to follow Christ whither he led them by his Spirit," and that he and his fellow-prisoners had but done the same. The end of the colloquy was that the Judge, with every wish to be lenient, could not make up his mind to discharge the prisoners. "I see by your carriage," he said, "that what my brother Hale did at the last assizes, in requiring bond for your good behaviour, he might justly do it, for you are against magistrates and ministers"; and they were remitted to Northampton jail accordingly.--If judges like Hale and Atkins had to act thus, one may imagine how the poor Quakers fared in the hands of inferior and rougher functionaries. Fines and imprisonment for vagrancy, contempt of court, or non-payment of tithes, were the ordinary discipline for all; but there were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties. For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking. The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad of James Nayler. This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as "a man of excellent natural parts," had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer of Quaker tracts. But, having come to London in 1655, he had been unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha Simmons for their chief. "Fear and doubting then entered him," say the Quaker records, "so that he came to be clouded in his understanding, bewildered, and at a loss in his judgment, and became estranged from his best friends, because they did not approve his conduct." In other words, he became stark mad, and set up for himself, as "The Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the Fairest among Ten Thousand, the Altogether Lovely." In this capacity he went into the West of England early in 1656, the admiring women following him, and chaunting his praises with every variety of epithet from the Song of Solomon, till he was clapped up in Exeter jail. Nor was Nayler the only madman among the Quakers about this time. A kind of epidemic of madness seems to have broken out in the sect, or among those reputed to belong to it. "One while," says Baxter, "divers of them went naked through divers chief towns and cities of the land, as a prophetical act: some of them have famished and drowned themselves in melancholy;" and he adds, more especially, as his own experience in Kidderminster, "I seldom preached a lecture, but going and coming I was railed at by a Quaker in the market-place in the way, and frequently in the congregation bawled at by the names of Hireling, Deceiver, False Prophet, Dog, and such like language." The Protector's own chapel in Whitehall was not safe. On April 13, 1656, "being the Lord's day," says the _Public Intelligencer_ for that week, "a certain Quaker came into the chapel in sermon time, and in a very audacious manner disturbed the preacher, so that he was fain to be silent a while, till the fellow was taken away. His Highness, being present, did after sermon give order for the sending him to a justice of peace, to be dealt with according to law."--Naturally, the whole sect suffered for these indecencies and extravagances of some of its members, and the very name _Quakerism_ became a synonym for all that was intolerable. The belief had got abroad, moreover, that "subtle and dangerous heads," Jesuits and others, had begun to "creep in among them," to turn Quakerism to political account, and "drive on designs of disturbance." Altogether the Protector and Council were sorely tried. Their policy seems, on the whole, to have been to let Quakerism run its course of public obloquy, and get into jail, or even to the whipping-post _ad libitum_, for offences against the peace, but at the same time to instruct the Major-Generals privately to be as discreet as possible, making differences between the sorts of Quakers, and especially letting none of them come to harm for their mere beliefs. "Making a difference," as by the injunction in Jude's epistle, was, as we know, Cromwell's own great rule in all cases where complete toleration was impossible, and he does not seem to have been able to do more for the Quakers. He had not, however, forgotten his interview with their chief, and may have been interested in knowing more especially what had become of _him_.--Fox, after much wandering in the West without serious mishap, had fallen among Philistines in Cornwall early in 1656, and had been arrested, with two companions, for spreading papers and for general vagrancy and contumacy. He had been in Launceston prison for some weeks, when Chief Justice Glynne came to hold the assizes in those parts. There had been the usual encounter between the Judge and the Quakers on the eternal question of the hats. "Where had they hats at all, from Moses to Daniel?" said the Chief Justice, rather rashly, meaning to laugh at the notion that Scripture could be brought to bear on the question in any way whatever. "Thou mayest read in the third of Daniel," said Fox, "that the three children were cast into the fiery furnace, by Nebuchadnezzar's command, with their coats, their hose, and _their hats on_." Glynne, though he had lost his joke, and though Fox put him further out of temper by distributing among the jurymen a paper against swearing, did not behave badly on the whole, and the issue was the simple recommitment of Fox and his friends to Launceston prison. There, however, as they would not any longer pay the jailor the seven shillings a week he demanded for the board of each, they were put into the most horrible hole in the place and treated abominably. They were in this predicament when Cromwell heard of them. "While G. Fox was still in prison, one of his friends went to Oliver Cromwell, and offered himself, body for body, to lie in prison in his stead, if he would take him and let G. Fox go at liberty. But Cromwell said he could not do it, for it was contrary to law; and, turning to those of his Council, 'Which of you,' quoth he, 'would do as much for me if I were in the same condition?'" An order was sent by Cromwell to the Governor of Pendennis Castle to enquire meantime into the treatment of the Launceston prisoners, and their release followed after a little while. It was noted also, in proof of his personal kindness towards the Quakers, that, though he received letters from some of them violently abusive of himself and his government, he never showed any anger on that account.[1]

[Footnote 1: Sewel's History of the Quakers (ed. 1834) I. 137-173; Baxter, 77 and 180; _Public Intelligencer_ of April 14-21, 1656; Council Order Book, Feb. 6, 1655-6.]

(5)_The Jews._ A very interesting incident of Cromwell's Protectorate was his attempt to obtain an open toleration for the Jews in England. Since the year 1290, when they had been banished in a body out of the kingdom under Edward I., there had been only isolated and furtive instances of visits to England or residence in England by persons of the proscribed race. Of late, however, a certain Manasseh Ben Israel, an able and earnest Portuguese Jew, settled in Amsterdam as a physician, had conceived the idea that, in the new age of liberty and other great things in England, there might be a permission for the Jews to return and live and trade freely. He had opened negotiations by letter, first with the Rump and then with the Barebones Parliament, but had at length come over to London to deal directly with the Protector. "_To his Highness the Lord Protector, &c. the Humble Addresses of Manasseh Ben Israel, Divine and Doctor of Physic, in behalf of the Jewish Nation_," were in print on the 5th of November, 1655; and they were formally before the Council on the 13th, his Highness present in person. The petition was for a general protection of such Jews as might come to reside in England, with liberty of trade, freedom for their worship, the possession of a Jewish synagogue and a Jewish cemetery in London, and a revocation of all statutes contrary to such privileges. Cromwell was thoroughly in favour of the proposal and let the fact be known; but, as it was necessary to proceed with caution, the matter was referred to a conference between the Council and twenty-eight persons outside of it, fourteen of whom were clergymen (Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Nye, Cudworth, Hugh Peters, Sterry, &c.), and the rest lawyers (St. John, Glynne, Steele, &c.), or city merchants (Lord Mayor Dethicke, Aldermen Pack and Tichbourne, &c.) There were four meetings of this Conference at Whitehall in December, Cromwell himself taking part. "I never heard a man speak so well," says an auditor of his speech at one of the meetings. On the whole, however, the Conference could not agree with his Highness. Some of the city-men objected, on commercial grounds, to the admission of the Jews; and the clergy were against it almost to a man, partly on the authority of Scripture texts, partly from fear of the effects of the importation into London of the new sect of Judaism. The Conference was discontinued; and, though the good Rabbi lingered on in London till April 1656, nothing could be done. Prejudice in the religious world was too strong. Nevertheless the Protector found means of giving effect to his own views. Not only did he mark his respect for Manasseh Ben Israel by a pension of £100 a year, to be paid him in Amsterdam; he admitted so many Jews, one by one, by private dispensation, that there was soon a little colony of them in London, with a synagogue to suit, and a piece of ground at Stepney leased for a cemetery. In effect, the readmission of the Jews into England dates from Cromwell's Protectorate.[1]

[Footnote 1: _Merc. Pol._ Nov. 1-8, 1655; Council Order Book, Nov. 13; Godwin, IV. 243-251; Carlyle, III. 136, note. Prynne opposed the Readmission of the Jews in a pamphlet, in two parts, called _A Short Demurrer to the Jews' long discontinued Remitter_ (March 1656); and Durie published, in the form of a letter to Hartlib, _A Case of Conscience: whether it be lawful to admit Jews into a Christian Commonwealth_ (June 27, 1656). I have not seen Durie's letter; but Mr. Crossley (_Worthington's Diary_, I. 83, note) reports it as moderately favourable to the Jewish claim. The letter is dated, he says, from Cassel, Jan. 8, 1655-6.]

Although making no great pretensions to learning himself, Cromwell seems to have taken especial pleasure in that part of his powers and privileges which gave him an influence on the literature and education of the country. Here, in fact, he but carried out in a special department that general notion of the Civil Magistrate's powers and duties which had led him to declare himself so strongly for the preservation and extension of an Established Church. The more thorough-going champions of Voluntaryism in that day, Anabaptists and others, had begun, as we have seen, to agitate not only for the abolition of a national Church or State-paid clergy of any kind, but also for the abolition of the Universities, the public schools, and all endowments for science or learning. But, if Cromwell had so signally disowned and condemned the system of sheer Voluntaryism in Religion, it was not to be expected that the more peculiar and exceptional Voluntaryism which challenged even State Endowments for education should find any countenance from _his_ Protectorate. Nor did it.

The two English Universities had been sufficiently Puritanized long before Cromwell's accession to the supreme power--Cambridge in 1644-5, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Manchester (III. 92-6), and Oxford in 1647-8, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Pembroke (IV. 51-52). The Earl of Manchester, who had been living in complete retirement from public affairs since the establishment of the Commonwealth, still retained the nominal dignity of the Cambridge Chancellorship; but Cromwell had already for five years been Chancellor of the University of Oxford himself, having been elected to the office in January 1650-1, after the Earl of Pembroke's death. His interest in University matters had been naturally sustained by this official connexion with Oxford, and had shown itself in various ways before his Protectorate; but his Protectorate added fresh powers to those of his mere Chancellorship for Oxford, and brought his native University of Cambridge also within his grasp. He availed himself of his powers largely and punctually in the affairs of both, and was applauded in both as the steady defender of their honours and privileges.--To rectify what might still be amiss in them, or too much after the mere Presbyterian standard of Puritanism, he had appointed, by ordinance of September 2, 1654, (Vol. IV. p. 565), a new body of Visitors for each, to inquire into abuses, determine disputes, &c. The result was that the two Universities were now in better and quieter working order than they had been since the first stormy interruption of their old routine by the Civil War. Each reckoned a number of really able and efficient men among its heads of colleges, and in its staff of professors and tutors. In Oxford there was Dr. John Owen, head of Christ Church, and all but permanently Vice-Chancellor of the University, with Dr. Thomas Goodwin, Dr. John Wilkins, Dr. Robert Harris, Dr. Thankful Owen, Dr. John Conant, Dr. Jonathan Goddard, and others, as heads of other Colleges, and Dr. Henry Wilkinson, Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, Dr. Pocock, and the mathematicians Dr. Seth Ward and Dr. John Wallis among the Professors. Cambridge boasted of such men as Dr. Ralph Cudworth, Dr. Benjamin Whichcote, Dr. John Worthington, Dr. John Lightfoot, Dr. Lazarus Seaman, Dr. John Arrowsmith, Dr. Anthony Tuckney, Dr. Henry More, and others now less remembered. And under the discipline and teaching of such chiefs there was growing up in both Universities a generation of young men as well grounded in all the older sorts of learning as any generation of their predecessors, with the benefit also of newer lights, as was to be proved by the names and appearances of many of them in English history to the end of the century. Even Clarendon admits as much. It was a wonder to him to find, in the subsequent days of his own Chancellorship of the University of Oxford, that the "several tyrannical governments mutually succeeding each other" through so many previous years had not so affected the place but that it still "yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning." He attributed this to the inherent virtues of the academic soil itself, which could choke bad seeds, cherish the good, and even defy barrenness by finding its own seeds; but it may be more reasonable to suppose that the superintendence of the Universities under the "tyrannical governments," and especially under Cromwell's as the latest of them, had not been barbaric.--The University Commissioners, it may be added, had authority to inspect Westminster School, Eton, Winchester, and Merchant Taylors'. But, indeed, there seems hardly to have been a foundation for learning anywhere in England that was not, in one way or another, brought under Cromwell's eye. In his inquiries after moneys that might still be recoverable out of the wreck of the old ecclesiastical revenues one can see that, next to the increase and better sustenance of his Established Ministry, additions to the endowed scholastic machinery of the country were always in his mind. It is clear indeed that one of those characteristics of conservatism by which Cromwell intended that his government should be distinguished from the preceding Governments of the Revolution was greater care of the surviving educational institutions of England and Wales, with the resuscitation of some that had fallen into decay. The money-difficulties were great, and less could be accomplished than he desired; but, apart from what may have been done for the refreshment of the older foundations, it is memorable that Cromwell was able to give effect to at least one very considerable design of English University extension. A College in Durham, expressly for the benefit of the North of England, with a Provostship, four Professorships, and tutorships and fellowships to match, was one of the creations of the Protectorate.[1]

[Footnote 1: Wood's Fasti Oxon. from 1654 onwards; Orme's Life of John Owen, 175-187; Clarendon, 623; Godwin, IV. 102-104 and 595; Neal, IV. 121-123; with references to Worthington's Diary by Crossley, and Cattermole's _Literature of the Church of England_.]

While it was chiefly through the organized means afforded by the Universities and Colleges that Cromwell did what he could for the encouragement of learning, his relations to the learned men individually that were living in the time of his Protectorate were always at least courteous, and in some instances peculiarly friendly.

Usher being dead (March 21, 1655-6), and also the great Selden (Nov. 20, 1654) and the venerable and learned Gataker (July 27, 1654), the following were the Englishmen of greatest literary celebrity already, or of greatest coming note in English literary history, who were alive at the midpoint of Oliver's Protectorate, and could and did then range themselves (for we exclude those of insufficient age) as his adherents on the whole, his subjects by mere compulsion, or his implacable and exiled enemies. We divide the list into groups according to that classification, as calculated for the year 1656; but the names within each group are arranged in the order of seniority:[1]--

[Footnote 1: There may be errors and omissions in the list; but, having taken some pains, I will risk it as it stands.]

ADHERENTS MORE OR LESS CORDIAL.

George Wither (_ætat_ 68). John Goodwin (_ætat_ 63). Edmund Calamy (_ætat_ 56). Thomas Goodwin (_ætat_ 56). John Lightfoot (_ætat_ 54). Edmund Waller (_ætat_ 51). John Rushworth (_ætat_ 49). Milton (_ætat_ 48). Benjamin Whichcote (_ætat_ 46). James Harrington (_ætat_ 45). Henry More (_ætat_ 42). John Wilkins (_ætat_ 42). John Owen (_ætat_ 40). John Wallis (_ætat_ 40). Ralph Cudworth (_ætat_ 39). Algernon Sidney (_ætat_ 39). Marchamont Needham (_ætat_ 36). Andrew Marvell (_ætat_ 36). Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (_ætat_ 35). William Petty (_ætat_ 33). Thomas Stanley (_ætat_ 31). John Aubrey (_ætat_ 30). Robert Boyle (_ætat_ 29). John Bunyan (_ætat_ 28). Sir William Temple (_ætat_ 27). John Tillotson (_ætat_ 26). John Howe (_ætat_ 26). Edward Phillips (_ætat_ 26). John Phillips (_ætat_ 25). John Dryden (_ætat_ 25). Henry Stubbe (_ætat_ 25). John Locke (_ætat_ 24). Samuel Pepys (_ætat_ 24). Edward Stillingfleet (_ætat_ 21).

SUBJECTS BY COMPULSION.

Ex-Bishop Hall (died Sept. 8, 1656, _ætat_ 82). John Hales (died May 19, 1656, _ætat_ 72). Robert Sanderson (_ætat_ 69). Thomas Hobbes (_ætat_ 68). Robert Herrick (_ætat_ 65). John Hacket (_ætat_ 64). Izaak Walton (_ætat_ 63). James Shirley (_ætat_ 62). James Howell (_ætat_ 62). Gilbert Sheldon (_ætat_ 58). William Prynne (_ætat_ 56). Brian Walton (_ætat_ 56). Peter Heylin (_ætat_ 56). Jasper Mayne (_ætat_ 52). Thomas Fuller (_ætat_ 52). Edward Pocock (_ætat_ 52). Sir William Davenant (_ætat_ 51). Thomas Browne of Norwich (_ætat_ 51). William Dugdale (_ætat_ 51). Henry Hammond (_ætat_ 51). Richard Fanshawe (_ætat_ 48). Aston Cockayne (_ætat_ 48). Samuel Butler (_ætat_ 44). Jeremy Taylor (_ætat_ 43). John Cleveland (_ætat_ 43). John Pearson (_ætat_ 43). John Birkenhead (_ætat_ 41). John Denham (_ætat_ 41). Richard Baxter (_ætat_ 41). Roger L'Estrange (_ætat_ 40). Abraham Cowley (_ætat_ 38). John Evelyn (_ætat_ 36). Isaac Barrow (_ætat_ 26). Anthony Wood (_ætat_ 25). Robert South (_ætat_ 23).

ACTIVE ENEMIES IN EXILE.

John Bramhall (_ætat_ 63). George Morley (_ætat_ 58). John Earle (_ætat_ 55). Sir Kenelm Digby (_ætat_ 53). Sir Edward Hyde (_ætat_ 48). Thomas Killigrew (_ætat_ 45). George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (_ætat_ 29).

The relations of Cromwell to such persons varied, of course, with their attitudes towards himself and his government.

The theologian among his adherents to whom he seems to have been drawn by the strongest elective affinity was Dr. John Owen. "Sir, you are a person I must be acquainted with," he had said to Owen in Fairfax's garden; laying his hand on his shoulder, one day in April 1649, just after he had first heard Owen preach;[1] and so, from being merely minister of Coggeshall in Essex, Owen had become Cromwell's friend and chaplain in Ireland, and had still, through his subsequent promotions, ending with the Deanery of Christ Church and the Vice-Chancellorship of Oxford, been much about Cromwell and much trusted by him. Perhaps the only difference now between them was that Owen's theory of Toleration was less broad than Cromwell's. Next to Owen among the divines of the Commonwealth, the Protector seems to have retained his liking for Dr. Thomas Goodwin, and for such other fervid or Evangelical Independents as Caryl, Sterry, Hugh Peters, and Nicholas Lockyer, with a gradual tendency to John Howe, the youngest of his chaplains. For the veteran free-lance and Arminian John Goodwin, a keen critic now of Cromwell's Commission of Triers and of other parts of his Church-policy, his liking must have been less; but Goodwin's merits were fairly appreciated, and he had at least perfect liberty to conduct his congregation as he pleased and to publish his pamphlets. So, on the other hand, eminent Presbyterian divines like Calamy, accommodated amply in Cromwell's Established Church, had all freedom and respect.--As to his dealings with non-clerical men of letters friendly to his government, we know a good deal already. Milton, of whose relations to the Protectorate we shall have to speak more at large, was his Latin Secretary; Needham was his journalist; Marvell was in his private employment and was looking for something more public. Still younger men were growing up, in the Universities or just out of them, regarding the Protectorate as now the settled order of things, in which they must pass their future lives. Cudworth, recently promoted from the mastership of Clare College, Cambridge, to that of Milton's old College of Christ's, had been asked by the Protector to recommend to him any very promising young Cambridge men he might discover;[2] and, doubtless, there had been a similar request to Owen of Oxford. Dryden, still at Cambridge, though now twenty-five years of age, and already, by his father's death, a small Northamptonshire squire of £40 a year, was looking forward, we shall find, as his family connexions with the Parliamentarians and the Commonwealth made natural, to a life in London under the great Protector's shadow.

[Footnote 1: Orme's Life of Owen (1820), p. 113.]

[Footnote 2: Life of Cudworth, as cited by Godwin, IV. 596.]

All that could be expected by divines and scholars ranking in our second category, i.e. as subjects of the Protectorate by mere compulsion, and known to be strongly disaffected to it, was protection and safety on condition of remaining quiet. This they did receive. For a month or two, indeed, after the terrible ordinance of Nov. 24, 1655, threatening the expulsion of the ejected Anglican clergy from the family-chaplaincies, schoolmasterships, and tutorships, in which so many of them had found refuge, and forbidding them to preach anywhere or use the Book of Common Prayer, there had been a flutter of consternation among the poor dispersed clerics. That Ordinance, however, as we saw, had merely been _in terrorem_ at a particular moment, and had remained a dead letter. The admirable John Hales, it is true, did resign a chaplaincy which he held near Eton rather than bring the good lady who sheltered him into trouble; and by his death soon afterwards England lost a man of whom the Protector must have had as kindly thoughts as of any of the old Anglicans. That case was exceptional. Ex-Bishop Hall, in the end of his much-battered life, lived quietly near Norwich, remembering his past losses and sequestrations under the Long Parliament rather than suffering anything more of the kind. Peter Heylin was in similar circumstances in Oxfordshire, and by no means bashful. Jeremy Taylor alternated between the Earl of Carbery's seat, called "the Golden Grove," in Caernarvonshire, near which he taught a school, and the society of his friend John Evelyn, in London or at Sayes Court in Surrey,--tending on the whole to London, where he resumed preaching, and, after a brief arrest and some little questioning, was left unmolested. Hammond was mainly at Sir John Packington's in Worcestershire; Sanderson and Fuller were actually in parochial livings, the one in Lincolnshire, the other in Essex; and Pocock was in a Professorship. Sorely vexed as such men were, and poorer in the world's goods than they had been, this was the time of the greatest literary productiveness of some of them. Old Bishop Hall had not ceased to write, but was to leave trifles of his last days to be published after the Restoration as "Shakings of the Olive Tree"; and works, or tracts and sermons, by Sanderson, Heylin, Hammond, Fuller, and Jeremy Taylor, some of them of a highly Episcopal tenor, were among the publications of the Protectorate. Fuller's _Church History of Britain_, one of the best and most lightsome books in our language, was published in 1655-6. Brian Walton's great Polyglott had not yet been carried farther than the third volume; but the Protector had continued to that scholar the material furtherance in his arduous work which had been yielded first by the Rump Government, apparently on some solicitation by Milton (Vol. IV. pp. 446, 447); and the work, when it did appear complete in six volumes folio, in 1657, was to contain handsome acknowledgment by Walton of this generosity. Of the incessant literary activity of the Presbyterian Baxter through the Protectorate we need say nothing. It is more remarkable that there was no interruption of William Prynne's interminable series of pamphlets on all sorts of public questions, and often violently against the Government. For the rest, where were the Herricks, the Shirleys, the Clevelands, and the other old Royalist wits and satirists of the lighter sort? Keeping schools, most of them, or living with friends in the country, and now and then sending out, as before, some light thing in print. Samuel Butler, a secretary or the like in private families, was yet unknown to fame, but was taking notes and sure to print them some day; and the two most placid and imperturbable men in all England were Browne of Norwich and Izaak Walton. Browne, all his best known writings published long ago, but appearing in new editions, was contented now with attending his patients; and, when Izaak Walton was not in his house in Clerkenwell (to which neighbourhood he seems to have removed after giving up his shop in Chancery Lane), he was away on some fishing ramble. His _Complete Angler, or The Contemplative Man's Recreation_ had appeared in May 1653, and a second edition of it was just out.[1]

[Footnote 1: Details in this paragraph are from various sources: e.g. Wood's; 'Ath. and Fasti and Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy under the several names, Cattermole's _Literature of the Church of England_, Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual by Bohn, and the Thomason Catalogue of Pamphlets. See also, for Jeremy Taylor, Evelyn's _Diary and Correspondence_, about date 1855-6. Evelyn was greatly concerned about Cromwell's ordinance for suppressing preaching and schoolmastering by the Anglican clergy, and about its probable results for Taylor in particular. See one of his letters to Taylor (pp. 593-4, ed. 1870).]

The number of wits and men of letters still hostile to the Protectorate to such a degree that they would undergo the hardships of exile rather than live in England was, it will have been observed, comparatively small. This arose from the fact that some who had been in exile at the death of Charles I, or even afterwards in the train of Charles II., had reluctantly lost faith in the possibility of a restoration of the Stuarts, and had returned to England, to join themselves with those whom we have classed generally as Cromwell's "subjects by compulsion." Leading cases were those of Hobbes, Sir William Davenant, and Abraham Cowley; with which, for convenience, may be associated that of the satirist Cleveland, though _he_ had never gone into exile, but had remained in England, taking the risks.--HOBBES, who had been in Paris since 1641, to be out of the bustle of the English confusions, but who had come into central connexion with the Stuart cause there by his appointment in 1646 to be tutor to young Charles, had been obliged to leave that connexion, ostensibly at least, in 1651 or 1652. The occasion is said to have been the publication of his _Leviathan_. That famous book of 1651, like its two predecessors of 1650, _Human Nature_ and _De Corpore Politico_, he had found it convenient to publish in London, where the Commonwealth authorities do not seem to have made the least objection. But by this time Hobbes's infidelity, or Atheism, or Hobbism, or whatever it was, had become a dreadful notoriety in the world; and, when Hobbes presented a fine copy of his great book to Charles II., that pious young prince had been instructed by the Royalist divines about him that it would not do to countenance either Mr. Hobbes or his books any longer. Charles retained privately all his own real regard for his old tutor, and Hobbes perfectly understood that; but the hint had been taken. Back in England at last, and permitted to live in the house of his old pupil and patron, the Earl of Devonshire, where his only annoyance was the society of the Earl's chaplain, Jasper Mayne, he had found the Protectorate comfortable enough for all his purposes, and had been publishing new books under it, including his pungent disputations with ex-Bishop Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity and with Wallis of Oxford on Mathematics.[1]--Hobbes's friend DAVENANT had for some time been less lucky. _His_ return to England had been involuntary. He had been captured at sea in 1650 on his way to Virginia (Vol. IV. p. 193), had been a prisoner in the Isle of Wight and in the Tower and in danger of trial for his life, and had been released only by strong intercession in his favour, in which Milton is thought to have helped. This result, however, had reconciled him, and Davenant too had become one of the subjects of the Protectorate. Nay he had struck out an ingenious mode of livelihood for himself under Cromwell, somewhat in his old line of business. "At that time," says Wood, "tragedies and comedies being esteemed very scandalous by the Presbyterians, and therefore by them silenced, he contrived a way to set up an Italian Opera, to be performed by declamations and music; and, that they might be performed with all decency, seemliness, and without rudeness and profaneness, John Maynard, serjeant-at-law, and several sufficient citizens, were engagers. This Italian Opera began in Rutland House in Charter-house yard, May 23, 1656, and was afterwards transferred to the Cockpit in Drury Lane." Cromwell's own fondness for music may have prompted him to this relaxation, in Davenants favour, of the old theatre-closing Ordinance of September 1642. At all events, money was coming in for Davenant, and he was not very unhappy.[2]--The Satirist JOHN CLEVELAND, as we have said, had never gone into exile. This was the more remarkable because, through the Civil War, he had adhered to the King's cause most tenaciously, not only in official employment for it, but also serving it by the circulation of squibs and satires very offensive to the Parliamentarians, and to the Scots in particular. Through the Commonwealth, however, and also into the Protectorate, he _had_ lived on in England, in obscurity and with risks, latterly somewhere in or about Norfolk, as tutor or quasi-tutor to a gentleman, on £30 a year. By ill luck, in Nov. 1655, just when the police of the Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself. "May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of their government have a claim to that which is said of the Deity: they have their centre everywhere and their circumference nowhere, It is in this confidence that I address your Highness, as knowing no place in the nation is so remote as not to share in the ubiquity of your care, no prison so close as to shut me up from the partaking of your influence." After explaining that he had been and still was a Royalist, but that he had taken no active part in affairs for about ten years, he concludes, in a clever vein of compliment, thus: "If you graciously please to extend indulgence to your suppliant in taking me out of this withering durance, you will find mercy will establish you more than power, though all the days of your life were as pregnant with victories as your twice-auspicious Third of September." The appeal to Cromwell's magnanimity was successful. Cleveland was released, came to London, and lived by his wits there till his death in May 1658.[3]--A much later returner from among the Royalist exiles than either Hobbes or Davenant was the poet COWLEY. His return was late in 1655 or early in 1656, and seems to have been attended with some mystery. He had been for years at Paris or St. Germains, in the household of Lord Jermyn, acting as secretary to his Lordship and to Queen Henrietta Maria, deciphering the secret letters that came to them, and therefore at the very heart of the intrigues for Charles II. Yet, after a temporary imprisonment, security in £1000 had been accepted in his behalf, and he had been allowed to remain in London. The story afterwards by his Royalist friends was that he had come over, by understanding with Jermyn and the ex-Queen, to watch affairs in their interest and send them intelligence, and that, the better to disguise the design, he pretended compliance with the existing powers, meaning to obtain the degree of M.D. from Oxford, and set up cautiously as a medical practitioner. It is very unlikely that such a dangerous game could have been safely tried under eyes like Thurloe's; and the fact seems to be that Cowley was honestly tired of exile and willing to comply, in a manly way, for the sake of life once more at home. One of his first acts after his return was to publish his Collected Poems in a volume of four parts. They appeared, on or about April 1656, from the shop of Humphrey Moseley, the publisher of Milton's Poems ten years before, and still always dealing, as then, in the finer literature. In a preface to the book Cowley distinctly avowed his intention to accept the inevitable, treat the controversy as at length determined against the Stuarts by the unaccountable will of God, and no longer persist in the ridiculous business of weaving laurels for the conquered. He announced at the same time that he had not only excluded from the volume all his pieces of this last kind, but had even burnt the manuscripts. In a copy of the book presented by him to the Bodleian Library at Oxford there is a "Pindarique Ode" in his own hand, dated June 26, 1656, breathing the same sentiment. The book is supposed to be addressing the great Library; and, after congratulating itself on being admitted into such a glorious company without deserts of its own, but by mere predestination, it is made to say:--

[Footnote 1: Wood's Ath. III. 1207-1212, and 972.]

[Footnote 2: Wood's Ath. III. 805-806. In Davenant's works (pp. 341-359 of folio edition of 1673) will be found, by those who are curious, a copy of _"The First Day's Entertainment at Rutland House by Declamations and Musick: after the manner of the Ancients."_ It strikes one as very proper and very heavy, but it may have been a godsend to the Londoners after their long deprivation of theatrical entertainments. The music was partly by Henry Lawes.]

[Footnote 3: _Cromwelliana_, 154; Wood's Fasti, I. 499; Godwin, IV. 240-241. There is a MS. copy of Cleveland's letter among the Thomason large quartos. It is dated "Oct. 1657;" but that, I imagine, is an error.]

"Ah! that my author had been tied, like me, To such a place and such a company, Instead of several countries, several men, And business which the Muses hate!"[1]

[Footnote 1: Wood's Fasti, II. 209-213; Johnson's Lives of the Poets, with Cunningham's Notes (1854), I. 7-12. Cowley did receive the M.D. degree at Oxford, Dec. 2, 1657, and did remain in England through the rest of Cromwell's Protectorate; and, though the Royalists welcomed him back after Cromwell's death, his compliance was to be remembered against him.]

As the Muses were returning to England in full number, and ceasing to be so Stuartist as they had been, it was natural that there should be express celebrations of the Protectorate in their name. There had been dedications of books to Cromwell, and applauses of him in prose and verse, from the time of his first great successes as a Parliamentary General; and such things had been increasing since, till they defied enumeration. In the Protectorate they swarmed. Matchless still among the tributes in verse was Milton's single Sonnet of May 1652, "_Cromwell, our chief of men_," and Milton had written no more to or about Cromwell in the metrical form since the Protectorate had begun, but had contented himself with adding to his former prose tributes in various pamphlets that most splendid and subtle one of all which flames through several pages of his _Defensio Secunda_. It is Milton now, almost alone, that we remember as Cromwell's laureate; but among the sub-laureates there were some by no means insignificant. Old George Wither, though his marvellous metrical fluency had now lapsed into doggrel and senility, had done his best by sending forth, in 1654-5, from some kind of military superintendentship he held in the county of Surrey (Wood calls it distinctly a Major-Generalship at last, but that is surely an exaggeration), two Oliverian poems, one called _The Protector: A Poem briefly illustrating the Supereminency of that Dignity,_ the other _A Rapture occasioned by the late miraculous Deliverance of his Highness the Lord Protector from a desperate danger_.[1] In stronger and more compact style, though still rather rough, Andrew Marvell, in the same year, had added to his former praises of Cromwell a poem of 400 lines, published in a broad-sheet, with the title _The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector_. It began:--

[Footnote 1: Wood's Ath. III. 762-772.]

"Like the vain curlings of the watery maze Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise, So man, declining always, disappears In the weak circles of increasing years, And his short tumults of themselves compose, While flowing Time above his head does close. Cromwell alone with greater vigour runs, Sun-like, the stages of succeeding suns; And still the day which he doth next restore Is the just wonder of the day before. Cromwell alone doth with new lustre spring, And shines the jewel of the yearly ring; 'Tis he the force of scattered Time contracts, And in one year the work of ages acts."[1]

[Footnote 1: Marvell's Works, edited by Dr. Grosart, I. 169-170.]

But the most far-blazoned eulogy at the time, and the smoothest to read now, was one in forty-seven stanzas, which appeared May 31, 1655, with the title _A Panegyric to my Lord Protector of the present greatness and joint interest of his Highness and this Nation, by E. W., Esq._ The author was Edmund Waller, still under a cloud for his old transgression, but recovering himself gradually by his wealth, his plausibility and fine manners, and his powers of versifying. Here are four of the stanzas:--

"Your drooping country, torn by civil hate, Restored by you, is made a glorious state, The seat of Empire, where the Irish come, And the unwilling Scots, to fetch their doom.

"The sea's our own; and now all nations greet, With bending sails, each vessel of our fleet; Your power extends as far as winds can blow, Or swelling sails upon the globe may go.

"Heaven, that hath placed this Island to give law To balance Europe and its states to awe, In this conjunction doth on Britain smile,-- The greatest Leader and the greatest Isle ....

"Had you some ages past this race of glory Run, with amazement we should read your story; But living virtue, all achievements past, Meets envy still to grapple with at last."[1]

[Footnote 1: Waller's Poems: date of this from Thomason's Catalogue.]

Waller's verses, if nothing else, would suggest that we ought to know something more, at this point, of the state of Scotland, Ireland, and even the Colonies, under Cromwell's Protectorate.

SCOTLAND.

After August 1654, when the Glencairn-Middleton insurrection had been suppressed (Vol. IV, p. 532), the administration of Scotland had been again for some time wholly in the hands of Monk, as the Commander-in-chief there, with assistance from the four resident English Judges and minor officials. Cromwell and his Council in London, however, had been thinking of a more regular method for the Government of Scotland; and, at length, in the end of July 1655, the following was the arrangement:

I. CIVIL ESTABLISHMENT.

COUNCIL, SITTING IN EDINBURGH.

_President of Council_ (£2000 a year): Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill.

General Monk. Major-General Charles Howard. Colonel Adrian Scroope. Colonel Cooper. Colonel Nathaniel Whetham. Colonel William Lockhart (soon afterwards Sir William, and Ambassador to France). John Swinton, Laird of Swinton (afterwards Sir John). Samuel Desborough, Esq. (brother of the Regicide).

_Chief Clerk to the Council_ (£300 a year): Emanuel Downing.

SUPREME COMMISSIONERS OF JUSTICE (in lieu of the Old Scotch Court of Session):--This was a body of Seven Judges; four of whom were English--George Smith, Edward Moseley, William Lawrence, and Henry Goodyere (the last two in the places of two of the original four of 1652),--but three of them native Scots, accustomed to Scottish law and practice. These native Judges had been added for some time already, and there had been, and were to be, changes of the persons; but one hears most of Lockhart, Swinton, Sir James Learmont, Alexander Pearson, and Andrew Ker. At hand, and helping much, though no longer now the great man he had been in Scotland, was Sir Archibald Johnstone of Warriston.

STATE OFFICERS:--Most of the state-offices of the old Scottish constitution were still kept up, but were held, of course, by the new Councillors and Judges. The _Keepership of the Great Seal_ was given to Desborough; the _Signet_ or _Privy Seal_, with the fees of the old _Secretaryship_, to Lockhart; the _Clerk Registership_ to Judge Smith; &c.

TRUSTEES OF FORFEITED AND SEQUESTRATED ESTATES:--Under this name, by the Ordinance of April 12, 1654 (Vol. IV. pp. 561-562), there was a body of seven persons, about half of them English, looking after the rents and revenues of those numerous Scottish nobles and lairds the punishment of whom, for past delinquency, by total or partial seizing of their estates, had been one of the necessary incidents of the Conquest (Vol. IV. pp. 559-561).

II. MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT.

COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, General George Monk (head-quarters Dalkeith), with Major-General Howard, Colonels Cooper, Scroope, and Whetham, and other Colonels and inferior officers, under him. The total force of horse and foot in Scotland may have been about 7000 or 8000. It was distributed over the country in forts and garrisons, the chief being those of Edinburgh, Leith, Glasgow, Stirling, Dundee, Perth, Aberdeen, Dunnottar, Burntisland, Linlithgow, Dumbarton, Ayr, Dunstaffnage, and Inverness. Everywhere the English soldiers acted as a police, and their officers superseded, or were conjoined with, the native magistrates and sheriffs in the local courts.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books of the English Council July 26, 1655, containing letter from "Oliver P." to Monk, announcing the new establishment; _Perfect Proceedings_, No. 307, publishing for the Londoners, under date July 27, the names of his Highness's new Council for Scotland; Baillie's Letters, III. 249-250; Godwin, IV. 462-3.]

Under this government Scotland was now very tranquil and tolerably prosperous. True, almost all the old poppy-heads or thistle-heads, the native nobles and notables, were gone. Those of them who had been taken at Worcester, or had been sent out of Scotland as prisoners about the same time by Monk, were still, for the most part, in durance in England; others were in foreign exile; the few that remained in Scotland, such as Argyle, Loudoun, Lothian, the Marquis of Douglas, and his son Angus, were out of sight in their country-houses, utterly broken by private debts or fines and forfeitures, and in very low esteem. Then, among many Scots of good status throughout the community, there were complaints and grumblings on account of the taxes for the support of the English Army, or on account of loss of posts and chances by the admission of Englishmen to the same, or by the promotion of such other Scots as the English saw fit to favour, Incidents of this kind, much noted at the time, had been the ejection of some Professors from the Universities by the English Visitors in 1653, and the appointments by the same visitors of men of their own choice to University posts--e.g. Mr. Robert Leighton, minister of Newbattle, to the Principalship of Edinburgh University, and Mr. Patrick Gillespie to that of the University of Glasgow. But even Baillie, whose complaints on such grounds had been bitter in 1654, and to whom the appointment of Gillespie to the Glasgow Principal-ship had been a particular private grievance, was in better spirits before 1656. Glasgow, he then reports, was flourishing. "Through God's mercy, our town, in its proportion, thrives above all the land. The Word of God is well loved and regarded; albeit not as it ought and we desire, yet in no town of our land better. Our people has much more trade in comparison than any other: their buildings increase strangely both for number and fairness." Burnet's account is that the whole country partook of this growing prosperity, which he attributes to the excellent police of the English, the trading they introduced, and the money they put in circulation. "A man may ride over all Scotland with a switch in his hand and a hundred pounds in his pocket, which he could not have done these five hundred years," was Mr. Samuel Desborough's summary account afterwards of the state of the country which he had helped to administer under the Protectorate; and Cromwell's own reference to the subject is even more interesting and precise. Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact "a very ruined nation," yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society. It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes. "The _meaner_ sort in Scotland," he said, "love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;" and "The _middle_ sort of people," he added, "do grow up there into such a substance as makes their lives comfortable, if not better than they were before." Of course, in neither of these classes, any more than from among the dispossessed nobles and lairds, can the sentiment of Scottish nationality and the pain of its abolition have been extinct. Yet one notices, towards the end of 1656, a soothing even in that respect. The Scots, all but universally, by that time, had acquired the habit of speaking deferentially of "His Highness" or "His Highness the Lord Protector"; correspondence with Charles II. had entirely ceased; the Edinburgh barristers had returned to the bar; and the Scottish clergy, pretty generally, left off praying for Charles publicly. Lord Broghill's admirable management had helped much to this reconciliation. "If men of my Lord Broghill's parts and temper be long among us," wrote Baillie, "they will make the present Government more beloved than some men wish. From our public praying for the King Broghill's courtesies, more than his threats, brought off our leading men." Baillie himself had yielded that point at last.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baillie, III. 236-321 (including letters to Spang, July 19, 1654, Dec. 31, 1655, and Sept. 1, 1656); Burnet (ed. 1823), I. 104-105; Chambers's Domestic Annals of Scotland, II. 249; Carlyle, III. 342-3 (Cromwell's Speech XVII.).]

Raging yet among the Scottish clergy, and dividing the Scottish community so far as the clergy had influence, was the controversy between the _Resolutioners_ and the _Remonstrants_ or _Protesters_ (Vol. IV. pp. 201-214, 281-284, 288-289, and 361). By a law of political life, every community, at every time, must have _some_ polarizing controversy; and this was Scotland's through the whole period of her absorption in the English Commonwealth and Protectorate. The Protesters were the Whigs, and the Resolutioners the Tories, of Scotland through that time; and the strife between the parties was all the fiercer because, Scottish autonomy being lost, it was the only native strife left for Scotsmen, and they were battened down to it, as an indulgence among themselves, by a larger and unconcerned rule overhead. General Assemblies of the Kirk being no longer allowed, it had to be conducted in Provincial Synods and Presbyteries only, or in sermons and pamphlets of mutual reproach. The exasperation was great; Church-censures and threats of such passed and repassed; all attempts at agreement failed; the best friends were parted. Leaders among the majority, or Resolutioner clergy, were Mr. Robert Douglas of Edinburgh, who had preached the coronation sermon of Charles II. at Scone, Mr. James Sharp of Crail (these two back for some time from the imprisonment in London to which Monk had sent them in 1651: Vol. IV. 296), Mr. James Wood of St. Andrews, old Mr. David Dickson, now Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh, and our perpetual friend Baillie. The minority, or Protesters, were led by such ministers as Mr. James Guthrie of Stirling, their first oracle, Mr. Patrick Giliespie of Glasgow University, Mr. John Livingston of Ancram, Mr, Samuel Rutherford of St. Andrews, and Mr. Andrew Cant of Aberdeen; with whom, as their best lay head, was Johnstone of Warriston. Peace-makers, such as Mr. Robert Blair of St. Andrews and Mr. James Durham of Glasgow, negociated between the two sides; and Mr. Robert Leighton, in his Edinburgh Principalship, looked on with saintly and philosophic indifference. He hoped that, while so many brethren "preached to the times," one brother might be allowed "to preach on eternity" and that the differences on earth would "make heaven the sweeter." In fact, however, the controversy was not merely a theoretical one. Not only was it involved whether the two last General Assemblies, of 1651 and 1652, swayed as they had been by the Resolutioners, should be recognised and their acts held valid, and what should be the spirit and constitution of the Kirk in future: present interests were also involved. It had been to the Protesters that Cromwell had turned with greatest liking and hope, both on political grounds and from spiritual sympathy, when he was fighting in Scotland; and, since the beginning of his Protectorate, _they_ had been most in favour. Early in 1654 three of their number, Mr. Patrick Gillespie, Mr. John Livingston, and Mr. John Menzies, had been summoned to London to advise the Protector; they had been there two or three months; and the effects of their advice had been visible in an ordinance about vacant Kirk-livings very favourable to the Protesters, and generally in a continued inclination towards the Protesters in the proceedings of the English Government in Scotland. The ministers and others ejected by Cromwell's visitors had been mostly of the Resolutioner species; and one of Baillie's complaints is that Protesters, whether fit or not, were put into vacant livings by the English, and that only Scotsmen of that colour were conjoined with the English in the executive and the judicatories. Till 1656 all this had been very natural. The dregs of Stuartism, and consequent antipathy to the Protectorate, had persisted till then most visibly among the Resolutioners.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baillie, _ut supra_; Life of Robert Blair, 313 _et seq._; Wodrow's Introduction to his _History_ (1721); Beattie's _Church of Scotland during the Commonwealth_ (1842), Chap. III.]

Though the Protesters were originally what we have called super-ultra-Presbyterians, it was not surprising that some of them had moved into Independency. There certainly were some Independents among the Scottish parish clergy at this time, especially about Aberdeen; and the Independents apart from the National Church had become numerous. But mere Independency now, or even Anabaptism, was nothing very shocking in Scotland; it was the increase of newer sectaries that alarmed the clergy. Quakerism had found its way into Scotland; so that there were now, we are told by a contemporary, "great numbers of that damnable sect of the Quakers, who, being deluded by Satan, drew away many to their profession, both men and women." As in England, Quaker preachers went about disturbing the regular service in churches, or denouncing every form of ministry but their own to open-air congregations, and often with physical convulsions and fits of insane phrenzy. The Church-courts and the civil authorities were much exercised by the innovation, and had begun action against the sect, the rather because many of the common people, in their weariness of the strife among their own clergy, "resetted" the Quaker preachers and said they "got as much good of them as of anybody else."[1]

[Footnote 1: The quotations are from Chambers's _Dom. Annals of Scotland_, II. 232-234.]

Not an importation like Quakerism, but of ineradicable native growth, was the crime of witchcraft; and, though that crime was known in England too, and occupied English law-courts, Scotland maintained her fearful superiority in witch-trials and witch-burnings. "There is much witchery up and down our land," wrote Baillie: "the English be but too sparing to try it, but some they execute." Against crimes of other orders the English judges were willing enough to act; and nothing is more startling to one who is new to such facts than to find how much of their business, in pious and Presbyterian Scotland, consisted in trials of cases of hideous and abnormal sexualism. But, indeed, very strange _isms_ of quite another sort, and of which mere modern theory would have pronounced the Scotland of that time incapable, lurked underneath all the piety, all the preaching, all the exercise of Presbyterian discipline, all the seeming distribution of the population universally into Resolutioners and Protesters, with interspersed Independents, Baptists, Quakers, and other vehement Christians. Bead, from the Scottish correspondence of Needham's _Mercurius Politicus_, in the number for June 26-July 3, 1656, the following account of one of the cases that had come before Judge Smith and Judge Lawrence in their Dumfriesshire circuit of the previous May:--

"Alexander Agnew, commonly called Jock of Broad Scotland," [apparently an itinerant beggar, or Edie Ochiltree, of Dumfriesshire] was tried on this indictment.--"_First_, the said Alexander, being desired to go to church, answered 'Hang God: God was hanged long since; what had _he_ to do with God? he had nothing to do with God'. _Secondly_, He answered he was nothing in God's common; God gave him nothing, and he was no more obliged to God than to the Devil; and God was very greedy. _Thirdly_, When he was desired to seek anything in God's name, he said he would never seek anything for God's sake, and that it was neither God nor the Devil that gave the fruits of the land: the wives of the country gave _him_ his meat. _Fourthly_, Being asked how many persons were in the Godhead, answered there was only one person in the Godhead, who made all; but, for Christ, he was not God, because he was made, and came into the world after it was made, and died as other men, being nothing but a mere man. _Sixthly_, He declared that he knew not whether God or the Devil had the greater power; but he thought the Devil had the greatest; and 'When I die,' said he, 'let God and the Devil strive for my soul, and let him that is strongest take it.' _Seventhly_, He denied there was a Holy Ghost, or knew there was a Spirit, and denied he was a sinner or needed mercy. _Eighthly_, He denied he was a sinner, and [said] that he scorned to seek God's mercy. _Ninthly_, He ordinarily mocked all exercise of God's worship and convocation in His name, in derision saying 'Pray you to your God, and I will pray to mine when I think time.' And, when he was desired by some to give thanks for his meat, he said, 'Take a sackful of prayers to the mill, and shill them, and grind them, and take your breakfast off them.' To others he said, 'I will give you a twopence, and [if ye] pray until a boll of meal and one stone of butter fall down from heaven through the house-rigging to you.' To others, when bread and cheese was given him, and was laid on the ground by him, he said, 'If I leave this, I will [shall] long cry to God before he give it me again.' To others he said, 'Take a bannock, and break it in two, and lay down one half thereof, and ye will long-pray to God before he put the other half to it again.' _Tenthly_, Being posed whether or not he knew God or Christ, he answered he had never had any profession, nor never would--he had never had any religion, nor never would: also that there was no God nor Christ, and that he never received anything from God, but from Nature, which he said ever reigned and ever would, and that to speak of Gods and their persons was an idle thing, and that he would never name such names, for he had shaken his cap of such things long since. And he denied that a man has a soul, or that there is a Heaven or a Hell, or that the Scriptures are the Word of God. Concerning Christ, he said that he heard of such, a man; but, for the second person of the Trinity, he had been the second person of the Trinity if the ministers had not put him in prison, and that he was no more obliged to God nor the Devil.--And these aforesaid blasphemies are not rarely or seldom uttered by him, but frequently and ordinarily in several places where he resorted, to the entangling, deluding, and seducing of the common people. Through the committing of which blasphemies, he hath contravened the tenor of the laws and acts of Parliament, and incurred the pain of death mentioned therein; which ought to be inflicted upon him with all rigour, in manner specified in the indictment.--Which indictment being put to the knowledge of an assize, the said Alexander Agnew, called Jock of Broad Scotland, was by the said assize, all in one voice, by the mouth of William Carlyle, late bailie of Dumfries, their chancellor, found guilty of the said crimes of blasphemy mentioned in his indictment; for which the commissioners ordained him, upon Wednesday, 21 May, 1656, betwixt two and four hours in the afternoon, to be taken to the ordinary place of execution for the Burgh of Dumfries, and there to be hanged on a gibbet while [till] he be dead, and all his moveable goods to be escheat."

The intercourse between Scotland and London, both by letters and by journeys to and fro, was now very brisk.[1] Not only were Lauderdale, Eglinton, Marischal, David Leslie, and a number of the other distinguished Scottish prisoners of 1651, still detained in London, in more or less strict custody, with their wives and retainers near them; but many Scots whose proper residence was in Scotland were coming to London, on visits of some length, for their own or for public business. Among these, late in 1655, was Lockhart,--to be converted, as we know, into the Protector's ambassador to the Court of France. The eccentric ex-Judge Scot of Scotstarvet had already been in London, petitioning for the remission or reduction of his fine of £1500 for former delinquency, and succeeding completely at last, "in consideration of the pains he hath taken and the service he hath done to the Commonwealth." The Earl of Lothian was in London, painfully prosecuting petitions for the recovery of certain lost family-properties. But the most remarkable apparition was that of the Marquis of Argyle. He came to London in September, 1655, and he seems to have remained there for a long while. What had brought him up was also a suit with the Protector and the Council for reparation of some portions of his lost fortunes and for favour generally; but he seems to have gone about a good deal, visiting various people. "Came to visit me." says Evelyn, the naturalist and virtuoso of Sayes Court, in his diary, under date May 28, 1656, "the old Marquis of Argyle. Lord Lothian, and some other Scotch noblemen, all strangers to me. _Note_: The Marquis took the turtle-doves in the aviary for owls." It had been his characteristic mistake through life.[2]

[Footnote 1: In the London _Public Intelligencer_ for April 12-19, 1658, among other advertisements of stage-coaches starting from "the George Inn, without Aldersgate," is one of a fortnightly stage-coach for Edinburgh, the fare £4. Something of the sort may have been running already.]

[Footnote 2: Council Order Books of the Protectorate through 1655 and 1656; _Mere. Pol._ for Sept. 27-Oct. 4, 1655; Evelyn's _Diary_ (ed. 1870), p. 248. In the Council Order Books, under date Sept. 11, 1656, is minuted an order that, in terms of an Act of the Estates of Scotland of March 16, 1649, the Marquis of Argyle shall, from and after Nov. 10, 1657, have half the excise of wines and strong waters in Scotland, but not exceeding £3000 in any one year, until he is satisfied of a debt of £145,400 Scots due to him by Scotland on public grounds.]

Any influence which the Marquis could now have with the Protector in matters of Scottish Government must have been small; but it was understood that, such as it was, it would be on the side of the Kirk party of the Protesters. And this had become of some consequence. In and through 1656, if not earlier, it had become obvious that the inclinations of the Protector to that party had been considerably shaken. The change was attributed partly to Lord President Broghill. Almost from his first coming to Scotland, this nobleman had found it desirable to win over the Resolutioners. "The President Broghill," says Baillie, "is reported by all to be a man exceeding wise and moderate, and by profession a Presbyterian: he has gained more on the affections of the people than all the English that ever were among us. He has been very civil to Mr. Douglas and Mr. Dickson, and is very intime with Mr. James Sharp. By this means we [the Resolutioners] have an equal hearing in all we have ado with the Council. Yet their way is exceeding longsome, and all must be done first at London." So far as Broghill's communications with London might serve, the Resolutioners, therefore, might count on him as their friend. And by this time he had reasons to show. Had he not succeeded, where the stern Monk had failed, in inducing the Resolutioner clergy to give up public praying for King Charles and otherwise to conform; and was it not on this ground that Monk was believed still to befriend the Protesters? But perhaps it hardly needed Broghill's representations to induce Cromwell to reconsider his Scottish policy in regard to the Kirk. That same Conservatism which had been gaining on him in the English department of his Protectorate, leading him rather to discourage extreme men while tolerating them, had begun to affect his views of Kirk parties in Scotland. The Resolutioners were numerically the larger party: if they would be reconciled, might they not be his most massive support in North Britain? It is possible that the institution of the new Scottish Council under Broghill's Presidency may have been the result of such thoughts, and that Broghill thus only took a course indicated for him by Cromwell. At all events, various relaxations of former orders, about admission to vacant livings and the like, had already been made in favour of the Resolutioners; and, in and from 1656, it was noted that extreme men in Scotland too were not to his Highness's taste, and that, contrary to what might have been expected from his former relations to Scottish Presbyterianism, his aim now was to rebuild a good and solid Established Church in Scotland mainly on the native Presbyterian principle, though under control, and to leave extravagant spirits, including even those too forward for Independency among the Scots, to the mere benefits of an outside toleration. It was not his way to proceed hurriedly, however; and, as the Protesters were religiously the men most to his liking, and must by all means be kept within the Kirk, an agreement between them and the Resolutioners was a political necessity. To this end he had again, more than once recently, requested some of the leaders of both parties to come to London for consultation, as Gillespie, Livingston, and Menzies, for the Protesters, had done before. Appeals to the Civil Power in ecclesiastical matters being against the Presbyterian theory which the parties professed in common, that suggestion had not been taken, notwithstanding the precedent, and the parties had persisted in their war of mutual invective in Scotland, each getting what it could by private dealings with the Council there,--the Resolutioners through Broghill and the Protesters through Monk. But that could not last for ever; and, in August 1656, strict Presbyterian theory had been so far waived by both parties that both had resolved on direct appeal to his Highness in London. The Resolutioners had the start. They had picked out as their fittest single emissary Mr. James Sharp of Crail, then forty-three years of age, already well acquainted with London by his former compulsory stay there, and with the advantage now of intimacy with Broghill. His Instructions, signed by three of the leading Resolutioners, were ready on the 23rd of August. They were substantially that he should clear the Resolutioners with the Protector from the misrepresentations of the Protesters, paint the Protesters in return as mainly hot young spirits and disturbers, and obtain from his Highness a restoration of Presbyterian use and wont through the whole Kirk, with preponderance to the Resolutioners, though not with a General Assembly till times were more quiet. _Per contra_, the Protesters had drawn out certain propositions to be submitted to Cromwell. They asked for a Commission for the plantation of kirks, to be appointed by his authority and to consist of those he might think fit, to administer the revenues of the Kirk according to the Acts of Assemblies and the laws of the land prior to 1651, the fatal year of the "Resolutions." They asked also for a Commission of Visitation, one half to be elected by the Resolutioners and one half by the Protesters, to have the power of "planting and purging" in parishes and of composing differences in Synods and Presbyteries. For urging these propositions a deputation to Cromwell had been thought of, and actually appointed. As it was postponed, however, Sharp was to be in London first by himself. Hence some importance for the Protesters in any counterweight there might be in Argyle's presence there already. [1]

[Footnote 1: Baillie, Letters to Spang, in 1655 and 1656, as already cited, with III. 568-573 for Instructions to Sharp and Propositions of the Protesters; Life of Robert Blair, 325-329.]

No one was more anxious for the success of Mr. Sharp's mission than the good Baillie of Glasgow University, now in his fifty-fifth year, a widower for three years, but about to marry again, and known as one of the stoutest Resolutioners and Anti-Protesters since that controversy had begun. He had had his discomforts and losses in the University under the new Principalship of Mr. Patrick Gillespie; but had been busy with his lectures and books, and the correspondence of which he was so fond. Among his letters of 1654-5, besides those to Spang, are two hearty ones to his old friend Lauderdale in his London captivity, one or two to London Presbyterian ministers, and an interesting one to Thomas Fuller, regretting that they had not been sooner acquainted, and saying he had "fallen in love" with Fuller's books and was longing for his _Church History_. This was not the only sign of Baillie's mellower temper by this time towards the Anglicans. He was inquiring much about Brian Walton, whose name had not been so much as heard of when Baillie was in London, and whose Polyglott seemed now to him the book of the age. Baxter, on the other hand, was an Ishmaelite, a man to be put down. All these matters, however, had been absorbed at length in Baillie's interest in Mr. Sharp's mission. He was to write to his old London friends, Rous, Calamy, and Ashe, urging them to help Mr. Sharp to the utmost, and he was to correspond with Sharp himself. "I pray God help you and guide you; you had need of a long spoon [in supping with a certain personage]: trust no words nor faces, for all men are liars," is the memorable ending of the first letter that Sharp in London was to receive from Baillie.[1]

[Footnote 1: Baillie, III. 234-335; with Mr. Laing's Life of Baillie.]

IRELAND.

There had been little of novelty in Ireland for some time after the proclamation of the Protectorate (Vol. IV. p. 551). Fleetwood, with the full title of "Lord Deputy" since Sept. 1654, had conducted the Government, as well as he could, with a Council of assessors, consisting, after that date, of Miles Corbet, Robert Goodwin, Colonel Matthew Tomlinson, and Colonel Robert Hammond. This last, so brought into the Protector's service after long retirement, died at Dublin in July 1655. Ludlow still kept aloof, disowning the Protectorate, though remaining in Ireland with his old military commission. Left very much to themselves, Fleetwood and his Council had carried out, as far as possible, the Acts for the Settlement of the country passed or proposed by the Rump in 1652, but not pushing too severely the great business which the Rump had schemed out, of a general and gradual cooping up of the Roman Catholics within the single province of Connaught. In the nature of things, that business, or indeed any actual prevention of the exercise of the Catholic Religion wherever Roman Catholics abounded, was impracticable. It was enough, in the Lord Protector's view, that the land lay quiet, the Roman Catholics and their faithful priests not stirring too publicly, the English soldiery keeping all under sufficient pressure, and English and Scottish colonization shooting in here and there, with Protestant preaching and Protestant farming in its track. On the whole, Fleetwood's Lord-Deputyship, if not eventful, was far from unpopular. [1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 447-449.]

It had occurred to Cromwell, however, that more could be done in Ireland, and that his son-in-law Fleetwood was perhaps not sufficiently energetic, or sufficiently Oliverian, for the purpose. Accordingly, about the same time that Fleetwood had been raised to the Lord-Deputyship, Cromwell's second son, Henry, had been appointed Major-General of the Irish Army. The good impression he had made in his former mission to Ireland (Vol. IV. p. 551) justified the appointment. Not till the middle of 1655, however, did he arrive in Ireland. His reception then was enthusiastic, and was followed by the sudden recall of Fleetwood to London, professedly for a visit only, but really not to return. The title of Lord-Deputy of Ireland was still to be Fleetwood's for the full term of his original appointment; but he was to be occupied by the duties of his English Major-Generalship and his membership of Oliver's Council at home, and the actual government of Ireland was thenceforth in the hands of Henry Cromwell. The young Governor, whose wife had accompanied him, held a kind of Court in Dublin, with Fleetwood's Councillors about him, or others in their stead, and a number of new Judges. The diverse tempers of these advisers, among whom were some Anabaptists or Anti-Oliverians, and his own doubts as to some of the instructions that reached him from his father, made his position a very difficult one; but, though very anxious and sensitive, he managed admirably. In particular, it was observed that, in matters of religion, he had all his father's liberality. It was "against his conscience," he said, "to bear hard upon any merely on account of a different judgment." He conciliated the Presbyterian clergy in a remarkable manner; the Royalists liked him; he would not quarrel with the Anabaptists; and he was as moderate as possible towards the Roman Catholics.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 449-458; _Milton Papers_ by Nickolls, 187-138; Carlyle, III. 108-109, and 133-140 (Letters from Cromwell to his son Harry).]

One of Henry Cromwell's difficulties would have been Ludlow, had that uncompromising Republican remained in Ireland. From that he was relieved. In January 1655 Fleetwood had been ordered by the Protector to make Ludlow give up his commission; and, as Ludlow questioned the legality of the demand, he had arranged with Fleetwood to go and settle the matter with the Protector himself. The Protector seeming to prefer that Ludlow should stay where he was, and having sent orders to that effect, Fleetwood was himself In England, and Henry Cromwell was in his place in Dublin, and still there seemed no chance of leave for Ludlow to cross the Channel. At length, without distinct leave, but trusting to a written engagement Fleetwood had given him, he ventured on the passage; and on Dec. 12, 1655, after the experience of a most stormy sea, he had that of a more stormy interview with the Protector and some of his Council at Whitehall. Cromwell rated him roundly for his past behaviour generally and for his return without leave, and demanded his _parole_ of submission to the established Government for the future. Some kind of _parole_ Ludlow was willing to give, declaring that he saw no immediate chance of a subversion of the Government and knew of no design for that end, but refusing to tie his hands "if Providence _should_ offer an occasion." With that Cromwell, who had begun to "carry himself more calmly" towards the end of the interview, was obliged to be content. He became quite civil to Ludlow, saying he "wished him as well as he did any of his Council," and desiring him to make "choice of some place to live in where he might have good air." Ludlow retired into Essex[1].

[Footnote 1: Ludlow's Memoirs, 481-557; Carlyle, III. 136.]

THE COLONIES.

With the exception of a factory of the London East India Company, which had been established at _Surat_ on the west coast of Hindostan in 1612, and a settlement on the _Gambia_ on the western coast of Africa, dating from 1631, all the considerable Colonies of England in 1656 were American:--I. NEW ENGLAND. The four chief New England Colonies, _Plymouth_, _Massachusetts_, _Connecticut_, and _New Haven_, confederated since 1643, together with the outlying Plantations of _Providence_ and _Rhode-Island_, &c., still belonged politically to the mother-country; and through Cromwell's Protectorate, as before, the connexion had been signified by references of various subjects to the Home-Government, discussions of these by that Government, and orders and advices transmitted in return. In the main, however, the Colonies remained independent, each with its annually elected Governor, and the Confederacy with its annually elected Board of Commissioners besides; and, while professing high admiration of Cromwell and approval generally of his rule, they were not troubled with questions of rule seriously affecting their own interests. The war with the Dutch did for some time involve them in inconveniences with their Dutch neighbours; but their dissensions were chiefly with each other, or domestically within each colony. The harsh proceedings in Massachusetts and elsewhere against Baptists and other Sectaries gave some colour to Roger Williams's assertion that, in the matter of religious toleration, New England was becoming old while Old England was becoming new; and, as soon as Quakerism had broken out in New England and Quakers had appeared there (1656), it became evident that there would be even less mercy for that sect in New England than on the other side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, with their zealous Puritanism, their energy and industry, and the abilities of their Bradfords, Bradstreets, Winslows, Winthrops, Standishes, Endicotts, Hayneses, Hopkinses, Newmans, Williamses, and other prominent governors or assistant-governors, the Confederacy and the Plantations went on prosperously towards their ultimate, though yet unforeseen, destiny in the formation of the United States. Cromwell, indeed, had a scheme which would have stopped that issue. He had a scheme for fetching all the Puritans of New England back and planting them splendidly in Ireland. Communications on the subject had passed as early as 1651, when Ireland had been just reconquered; but naturally without effect. The New Englanders were not then too numerous perhaps to have been transported to Ireland bodily; but, as one of their historians says, "they had taken root." Their increase, however, for more than a century thenceforward was to be mainly within themselves, for new arrivals from England had become scarce.[1] II. OTHER COLONIES AND SETTLEMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA. These too went on very much at their own will, though not quite unnoticed. _Virginia_, dating from 1608, and _Maryland_, dating from 1634, continued to be the favourite colonies for Royalist settlers, Anglican or Roman Catholic; but there had been recent additions of English Puritans, and of transported Scottish prisoners of war, to the population of Virginia, and the connexions with the mother-country had remained unbroken. There were commercial regulations about both Colonies by the English Council, and grants of passes to them. Canada and the other regions about the St. Lawrence, the possession of which had been contested by the English and the French in the reign of Charles I, had lapsed long ago into the hands of the French; but Major Sedgwick had wrested back for Cromwell, in 1654, the peninsula then called _Acadie_, but now _Nova Scotia_, being part of the territory that had been granted under that name by Charles to his Scottish Secretary, the Earl of Stirling, and had been colonised by Scots, to some extent, from 1625 onwards. Off the mainland, Newfoundland, which had contained an English fishing population for at least twenty years, was not neglected; and, beyond the bounds of any of the North-American Colonies or Plantations that were definitely named and recognised, there may have been stragglers knowing themselves to be subjects of the Protectorate.[2] III. THE WEST INDIES. The _Bermudas_ or _Summer Islands_ had been English since 1612, and had now a considerable population of opulent settlers, attracted by their beauty and the salubrity of the climate; _Barbadoes_, English since 1605, and with a population of more than 50,000, had been a refuge of Royalists, but had been taken for the Commonwealth in 1652, and had been much used of late for the reception of banished prisoners; such other Islands of the Lesser Antilles as _Antigua_, _Nevis_, _Montserrat_, and the _Virgin Islands_, together with _The Bahamas_, to the north of Cuba, had been colonised in the late reign; and _Jamaica_ had been Cromwell's own conquest from the Spaniards, by Penn's blunder, in 1655. The war with Spain had given new importance to those West India possessions of the Protectorate. They had become war-stations for ships, with considerable armed forces on some of them; and some of Cromwell's best officers had been sent out, or were to be sent out, to command in them. Of them all Jamaica was Cromwell's pet island. He had resolved to keep it and do his best with it. The charge of it had been given to a commission consisting of Admiral Goodson, Major-General Fortescue, Major-General Sedgwick (the recaptor of Nova Scotia from the French), and Daniel Serle, Governor of Barbadoes; and Fortescue and Sedgwick, and others in succession, were to die at their posts there. To have the rich island colonised at once with the right material was the Protector's great anxiety; and his first thoughts on that subject, as soon as he had learnt that the Island was his, had issued in a most serious modification of his former offer to the New Englanders. As they had refused to come back and colonise Ireland, would they not accept Jamaica? "He did apprehend the people of New England had as clear a call to transport themselves thence to Jamaica as they had had from England to New England, in order to the bettering of their outward condition;" besides which, their removal thither would have a "tendency to the overthrow of the Man of Sin." They should be transported free of cost; they should have lands rent-free for seven years, and after that at a penny an acre; they should be free from customs, excise, or any tax for four years; they should have the most liberal constitution that could be framed: only his Highness would keep the right of appointing the successive Governors and their Assistants. The answer of the Massachusetts people, when it did arrive, was evasive. They spoke of the reported unhealthiness of Jamaica, and they assured Ms Highness of their admiration, their gratitude, and their prayers. The answer had not been received at the date we have reached (Sept. 1656), and the Protector still cherished his idea. As it proved, the New Englanders were to remain New Englanders, and Jamaica was to be colonised slowly and with less select material.[3]

[Footnote 1: Palfrey's Hist. of New England, II. 304-415, and especially 388-390.]

[Footnote 2: Various minutes in Council Order Books from 1649 onwards; Carlyle, III, Appendix, 442-443.]

[Footnote 3: Mills's _Colonial Constitutions_ (1856), 124-133, Introd. XXXIV. et seq.; Carlyle, III. 124-133; Palfrey's _New England_, II. 390-393.]

SECTION III.

OLIVER AND THE FIRST SESSION OP HIS SECOND PARLIAMENT: SEPT. 17, 1656-JUNE 26, 1657.

SECOND PARLIAMENT OF THE PROTECTORATE CALLED: VANE'S _HEALING QUESTION_ AND ANOTHER ANTI-OLIVERIAN PAMPHLET: PRECAUTIONS AND ARRESTS: MEETING OF THE PARLIAMENT: ITS COMPOSITION: SUMMARY OF CROMWELL'S OPENING SPEECH: EXCLUSION OF NINETY-THREE ANTI-OLIVERIAN MEMBERS: DECIDEDLY OLIVERIAN TEMPER OF THE REST: QUESTION OF THE EXCLUDED MEMBERS: THEIR PROTEST: SUMMARY OF THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE PARLIAMENT FOR FIVE MONTHS (SEPT. 1656-FEB. 1656-7): ADMINISTRATION OF CROMWELL AND HIS COUNCIL DURING THOSE MONTHS: APPROACHES TO DISAGREEMENT BETWEEN CROMWELL AND THE PARLIAMENT IN THE CASE OF JAMES NAYLER AND ON THE QUESTION OF CONTINUATION OF THE MILITIA BY MAJOR-GENERALS: NO RUPTURE.--THE SEXBY-SINDERCOMBE PLOT.--SIR CHRISTOPHER PACK'S MOTION FOR A NEW CONSTITUTION (FEB. 23, 1656-7): ITS ISSUE IN THE _PETITION AND ADVICE_ AND OFFER OF THE CROWN TO CROMWELL: DIVISION OF PUBLIC OPINION ON THE KINGSHIP QUESTION: OPPOSITION AMONG THE ARMY OFFICERS: CROMWELL'S NEUTRAL ATTITUDE: HIS RECEPTION OF THE OFFER: HIS LONG HESITATIONS AND SEVERAL SPEECHES OVER THE AFFAIR: HIS FINAL REFUSAL (MAY 8, 1657): LUDLOW'S STORY OF THE CAUSE.--HARRISON AND THE FIFTH-MONARCHY MEN: VENNER'S OUTBREAK AT MILE-END-GREEN.--PROPOSED NEW CONSTITUTION OF THE _PETITION AND ADVICE_ RETAINED IN THE FORM OF A CONTINUED PROTECTORATE: SUPPLEMENTS TO THE _PETITION AND ADVICE_: BILLS ASSENTED TO BY THE PROTECTOR, JUNE 9: VOTES FOR THE SPANISH WAR,--TREATY OFFENSIVE AND DEFENSIVE WITH FRANCE AGAINST SPAIN: DISPATCH OF ENGLISH AUXILIARY ARMY, UNDER REYNOLDS, FOR SERVICE IN FLANDERS: BLAKE'S ACTION IN SANTA CRUZ BAY.--_"KILLING--NO MURDER"_: ADDITIONAL AND EXPLANATORY PETITION AND ADVICE: ABSTRACT OF THE ARTICLES OP THE NEW CONSTITUTION AS ARRANGED BY THE TWO DOCUMENTS: CROMWELL'S COMPLETED ASSENT TO THE NEW CONSTITUTION, AND HIS ASSENT TO OTHER BILLS, JUNE 26, 1657: INAUGURATION OF THE SECOND PROTECTORATE THAT DAY: CLOSE OF THE FIRST SESSION OF THE SECOND PARLIAMENT.

Willing to relieve his government, if possible, from the character of "arbitrariness" it had so long borne, Cromwell had at last resolved on calling another Parliament. The matter had been secretly deliberated in Council in May and June 1656, and the writs were out on July 10. There had ensued, throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, a great bustle of elections, the Major-Generals in England and the Councils in Scotland and Ireland exerting themselves to secure the return of Oliverians, and the Protector and his Council by no means easy as to the result. Two recent Republican pamphlets had caused agitation. One, which had been called forth by a Proclamation of a General East a month or two before, was by Sir Henry Vane, and was entitled _A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved._ It was temperate enough, approving of the government in some respects, and even suggesting the continuance of some kind of sovereignty in a single person, but containing censures of the "great interruption" of popular liberties, and appeals to the people to do their part. The other and later pamphlet (Aug. 1), directly intended to bear on the Elections, was called _England's Remembrancer,_ and was virtually a call on all to use their votes so as to return a Parliament that should unseat Oliver. The author of this second pamphlet evaded detection; but Vane was brought to task for his. He was summoned to London from his seat of Belleau in Lincolnshire, July 29; by an order of Aug. 21 he was required to give security in £5000 that he would do nothing "to prejudice the present government"; and, on his refusal, there issued a warrant, signed by Henry Lawrence, as President of the Council, for his committal to King Charles's old prison, Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. About the same time, precautions were taken with Bradshaw, Harrison, Ludlow, Lawson, Rich, Okey, Alured, and others. Bradshaw was suspended for a week or two from his Chief-Justiceship of Chester; Harrison was sent to Pendennis Castle in Cornwall; Rich to Windsor; security in £5000 was exacted from Ludlow, or rather arranged for him by Cromwell; and the others were variously under guard. Nor did leading royalists escape. Just before the meeting of the Parliament, a dozen of them, including Lord Willoughly of Parham and Sir John Ashburnham, were sent to the Tower. The Republican Overton was still there. All this new "arbitrariness" for the moment was for the purpose of sufficiently tuning the Parliament.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books through July, Aug. and Sept. 1656; Godwin, IV. 261-277; Ludlow, 568-573; Catalogue of Thomason Pamphlets.]

It met on Wednesday, Sept. 17, when the first business was attendance, with the Protector, in the Abbey Church, to hear a sermon from Dr. Owen. Among the 400 members returned from England and Wales were the Protector's eldest son, Richard Cromwell (for Cambridge University), Lord President Lawrence and at least twelve other members of the Council (Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Skippon, Jones, Montague, Sydenham, Pickering, Wolseley, Rous, Strickland, and Nathaniel Fiennes), with Mr. Secretary Thurloe, Admiral Blake, and most of the Major-Generals not of the Council (Howard, Berry, Whalley, Haynes, Butler, Barkstead, Goffe, Kelsey, and Lilburne). Other members, of miscellaneous note and various antecedents, were Whitlocke, Ingoldsby, Scott, Dennis Bond, Maynard, Prideaux, Glynne, Sir Harbottle Grimston, the Earl of Salisbury, Sir Arthur Hasilrig, Sir Anthony Irby, Alderman Sir Christopher Pack, Lord Claypole, Sir Thomas Widdrington, Ex-Speaker Lenthall, Richard Norton, Pride (now Sir Thomas), and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper,--this last long an absentee from the Council, Of the thirty members returned from the shires, burghs, or groups of such, in Scotland; about half were Englishmen: e.g. President Lord Broghill for Edinburgh, Samuel Desborough for Midlothian, Judge Smith for Dumfriesshire, the physician Dr. Thomas Clarges (Monk's brother-in-law) for Ross, Sutherland, and Cromarty, Colonel Nathaniel Whetham for St. Andrews, &c.; while among the native Scots returned were Ambassador Lockhart, Swinton, the Earl of Tweeddale, and Colonel David Barclay. Ireland had returned, among _her_ thirty (who were nearly all Englishmen), Sir Hardress Waller, Major-General Jephson, Sir Charles Coote, and several Colonels.[1]--Not a few of the chief members had been returned by more than one constituency: e.g. Lord Broghill, for Cork as well as for Edinburgh. Several of those returned cannot have been expected to give attendance, at least at first. Thus, Admirals Blake and Montague were away with their fleets, off Spain and Portugal. But Broghill did come up from Scotland to attend, and Swinton and most of the other members of the Scottish Council with him, leaving Monk once more in his familiar charge. Ambassador Lockhart also had come over, or was coming.

[Footnote 1: List of the members returned for the Second Parliament of the Protectorate in _Part. Hist._ III. 1479-1484.]

There were two rather important interventions between Dr. Owen's opening sermon to the Parliament and their settling down to business.

One was the Lord Protector's opening speech in the Painted Chamber, now numbered as Speech V, of the Cromwell series. It was very long, of extremely gnarled structure, but full of matter. The pervading topic was the war with Spain. This was justified, with approving references to the published Latin Declaration of Oct. 1655 on the subject, entitled _Scriptum Domini Protectoris, &c._ (Milton's?), and with vehement expressions of his Highness's personal abhorrence of Spain and her policy. He represented her and her allies and dependents as the anti-English and anti-Christian Hydra of the world, while France, though Roman Catholic too, stood apart from all the other Catholic powers in not being under the Pope's lash and so able to be fair and reasonable. He urged the most energetic prosecution of the war that had been begun. But with the Spanish war he connected the dangers to England from the Royalist risings and conspiracies of the last two years, announcing moreover that he had now full intelligence of a compact between Spain and Charles II., a force of 7000 or 8000 Spaniards ready at Bruges in consequence, and other forces promised by Popish princes, clients of Spain. There were English agents of the alliance at work, he said, and one miscreant in particular who had been an Anabaptist Colonel; and, necessarily, all schemes and conspiracies against the present government would drift into the Hispano-Stuartist interest. He acquitted some of the opponents of his government, calling themselves "Commonwealth's men" and "Fifth Monarchy men," from any intention of that conjunction; but so it would happen. His arrests of some such had been necessary for the public safety. He knew his system of Major-Generalships was much criticised, and thought arbitrary; but that had been necessary too, and a most useful invention. He had called this Parliament with a hope of united constitutional action with them for the future, and would recommend, in the domestic programme, under the general head of "Reformation," certain great matters to their care. There was the Sustentation of the Church and the Universities; there was Reformation of Manners; and there was the still needed Reformation of the Laws. On the Church-question he avowed, more strongly than ever before, his desire to uphold and perpetuate an Established Church. "For my part," he said, "I should think I were very treacherous if I took away Tithes, till I see the Legislative Power settle maintenance to Ministers another way." He knew that some of the ministers themselves would prefer some other form of State-provision; but, on the whole, believing that some distinct State-maintenance of the Clergy, whether by tithes or otherwise, was "the root of visible profession." he adjured the Parliament not to swerve from that. He expounded also his principle of comprehending Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and all earnest Evangelical men amicably in the Established Church, with small concern about their differences from each, other, and expressed his especial satisfaction that the Presbyterians had at length come round to this view, and given up much of their old Anti-Toleration tenet. "I confess I look at that as the blessedest thing which hath been since the adventuring upon this government." Towards the end of the speech there was just a hint that he stood on his Protectorship for life, and regarded that as a fundamental, not to be called in question. "I say, Look up to God: have peace among yourselves. Know assuredly that, if I have an interest, I am by the voice of the People the Supreme Magistrate, and, it may be, do know somewhat that might satisfy my conscience, if I stood in doubt. But it is a union, really it is a union, between you and me; and, both of us united in faith and love to Jesus Christ, and to His peculiar Interest in the world,-_that_ must ground this work. And in that, if I have any peculiar interest which is personal to myself, which is not subservient to the public end, it were not an extravagant thing for me to curse myself, because I know God will curse me if I have." After quoting the 85th Psalm, he dismissed them to choose their Speaker.[1]

[Footnote 1: Speech V.; Carlyle, III. 159-196.]

Then, however, there was the second intervention. It was in the lobby of the House. Some persons, acting for the Clerk of the Commonwealth in Chancery, stood there, with tickets certifying that such and such members had been duly returned and also "_approved by his Highness's Council";_ the doors of the House were guarded by soldiers; and none but those for whom the tickets had been made out were allowed to enter. About ninety-three found themselves thus excluded; among whom, were Hasilrig, Scott, Irby, Sir Harbottle Grimston, the Earl of Salisbury, Maynard, four of the six members for the city of London, and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper. The residue, who had received tickets, proceeded to constitute the House, and unanimously elected Sir Thomas Widdrington, Sergeant at Law and one of the Commissioners of the Treasury, for their Speaker. Almost the only other business that day was to thank Dr. Owen for his sermon, and order it to be printed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals, Sept. 17, 1656; and Parl. Hist. III. 1484-1487.]

The next day there was read in the House a letter to the Speaker, signed by a number of the excluded, informing him of the fact and desiring to be admitted. Through that and the two following sittings, an inquiry into the circumstances of the exclusion formed part of the proceedings. The Clerk of the Commonwealth in Chancery, being required to attend, did at last present himself, and explained that he had but obeyed orders. He had received a letter from Mr. Jessop, the Clerk of the Council, ordering him to deliver tickets only to such of the persons elected as should be certified to him as approved by the Council; and he had acted accordingly. With some reluctance, he produced the letter; and the House then resolved to ask the Council for their reasons for excluding so many members. These were given, on the 20th, by Fiennes for the Council. They were to the effect that Article XXI. of the constituting Instrument of the Protectorate, called _The Government of the Commonwealth_ (Vol. IV. pp. 542-544), required the Clerk of the Commonwealth in Chancery, for the first three Parliaments of the Protectorate, to report to the Council what persons had been returned, and empowered the Council to admit those duly qualified and to exclude others, and also that, by another clause in the same Instrument (Art. XVII.), it was required that the persons elected should be "of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation." All which being undeniable, it was resolved by the House, after debate, Sept. 22, by a majority of 125 to twenty-nine, to refer the excluded to the Council itself for any farther satisfaction they wanted, and meanwhile "to proceed with the great affairs of the nation." The House, _without_ the excluded, it will be seen, was decidedly Oliverian in the main. The excluded, or some of them, took their revenge by printing and distributing a Protest or Remonstrance addressed to the Nation, with the names of all the ninety-three attached, those of Hasilrig and Scott first. It was a document of extreme vehemence, denouncing the Protector as an armed tyrant and all who had abetted him in his last act as capital enemies to the Commonwealth, and disowning beforehand, as null and void, all that the truncated Parliament might do. Cromwell took no notice whatever of this Remonstrance. By one more stroke of "arbitrariness," bolder than any before, but allowed, he might plead, by the Instrument of his Protectorate, he had fashioned for himself a Second Parliament, likely to be more to his mind than his First.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals, Sept, 18-22, 1656; Whitlocke, IV. 274-280 (where the Remonstrance of the Excluded is given in full); Ludlow, 579-580.]

So it proved. Some of the excluded having been admitted after all, and new elections having been made in cases where members had been returned by two or more constituencies, the House went on for the first five months (Sept. 1656-Feb. 1656-7) with a pretty steady working attendance of about 220 at the maximum--which implies that, besides the excluded, there must have been a large number of absentees or very lax attenders. During these five months a large amount of miscellaneous business was done, with occasional divisions, but no vital disagreement within the House, or between it and the Protector. There was an Act for renouncing and disavowing Charles II, over again, and an Act for the safety of the Lord Protector's person and government, both made law, by Cromwell's assent, Oct. 27. There was a vote of approbation of the war with Spain, with votes of means for carrying it on. There were Bills, more formal than before, for adjusting and completing the incorporation of Scotland and Ireland with the Commonwealth. There were Committees of all sorts for maturing these and other Bills. Among the grand Committees was one for Religion. There were votes of reward to various persons for past services. The better observance of the Lord's Day was one of the subjects of discussion. Amid the minor or more private business one notes a great many _naturalizings_ of foreigners resident in England, or of persons of English descent born abroad or otherwise requiring to be naturalized. Theodore Haak and his family, Dr. Lewis Du Moulin, a number of Lawrences and Carews, and a daughter of the poet Waller, are among the scores included in such Naturalization Bills. Through all this, hardly a week, of course, without an order to Dr. Owen, Dr. Thomas Goodwin, Caryl, Nye, Sterry, Manton, or some other leading divine, to preach a special sermon, with thanks after for his "great pains," and generally a request that the sermon should be printed. On the whole, Speaker Widdrington had no light post. Indeed, in January 1656-7, the House, perceiving him to be very ill and weak, insisted on his taking leave of absence, and appointed Whitlocke as his substitute. Whitlocke acted as pro-Speaker, he tells us, from January 27 to Feb. 18, with great acceptance and rapid despatch of business. On the last of these days, however, Widdrington, though at the risk of his life, reappeared and resumed duty. A fee of £5, it seems, was due to the Speaker from every person naturalized by bill, and all such fees would have gone to Whitlocke had Widdrington remained absent. The loss to Whitlocke was made up handsomely by the House in a vote of £2000, besides repayment of £500 he had expended over his allowance in his Swedish embassy, and thanks for his many eminent services.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals over period and for dates named; Whitlocke, IV. 280-286.]

About a fortnight after the Parliament had met (Oct. 2), there had come splendid news from Blake and Montague. A Spanish fleet from the West Indies, with the ex-Viceroy of Peru and his family on board, and a vast treasure of silver, had been attacked in Cadiz bay by six English frigates under the command of Captain Stayner. Two of the ships had been taken, two burnt and sunk (the ex-Viceroy, his wife, and eldest daughter, perishing most tragically in the flames), and there had been a great capture of silver. The rejoicing in London was great, and it was renewed a month afterwards by the actual arrival of the silver from Portsmouth, a long train of waggon-loads through the open streets, on its way to the Mint, Admiral Montague himself had come with it. He was in the House Nov. 4, welcomed with thanks and applauses to his place for a while among the legislators.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates given, and Godwin, IV, 300-303.]

Legislative work being back in the hands of a Parliament, the Protector and his Council had confined themselves meanwhile to matters of administration, war, and diplomacy. Vane had been released from his imprisonment in the Isle of Wight by order of Council, Dec. 11, and permitted to return to Lincolnshire; and there had been other relaxations of the severities attending the opening of the Parliament. There had been an order of Council (Oct. 2) for the release of imprisoned Quakers at Exeter, Dorchester, Colchester, and other places, with instructions to the Major-Generals in the respective districts to see the order carried out and the fines of the poor people discharged. The business of the Piedmontese Protestants still occupied the Council, and there were letters to various foreign powers. Of new diplomatic arrangements of the Protector about this time, and through the whole session of the Parliament, account will be more conveniently taken hereafter; but Ambassador Lockhart's temporary presence in London, and his frequent colloquies with the Protector over French affairs, Spanish affairs, the movements of Charles II abroad, a rumoured dissension between Charles II. and his brother the Duke of York, and Mazarin's astute intimacy with all, are worthy of remark even now. It was on Dec. 10, 1656, that Lockhart received from his Highness the honour of knighthood at Whitehall; and on Feb. 3, 1656-7, it was settled by his Highness and the Council that Lockhart's allowance thenceforward in his Embassy should be £100 a week, i.e, about £18,000 a year in present value. Lockhart's real post being in Paris, his attendance in Parliament can have been but brief. His fellow-Scotsman, Swinton of Swinton, also gave but brief attendance. The Protector had taken the opportunity of Swinton's visit to London to show him special attention, and to promote in the Council certain very substantial recognitions of his adhesion to the Commonwealth when other Scots abhorred it, and of his good services in Scotland to it and the Protectorate since. But, as his proper place was in Edinburgh, it was ordered, Dec. 25, 1656, that he, and his fellow-members of the Scottish Council, Major-General Charles Howard and Colonel Adrian Scroope, should return thither. This was the more necessary because Lord Broghill did not mean to return to Scotland, the air of which did not suit him, but preferred employment for the future either in England or in his native Ireland. Broghill's Presidency in Scotland had now, indeed, virtually ceased, and the administration there, with the difficult steering between the Resolutioners and the Protesters of the Kirk, had been left to Monk and the rest. Nay, as we know, the hearing of that vital Scottish question had been transferred to London. Sharp, who had come to London in Broghill's train as agent for the Resolutioners, "presently got access to the Protector" and "was well liked of and accepted." But the Marquis of Argyle had weight enough yet to stop any concession to him till the other party had been heard. Accordingly, in October, 1656, a Mr. James Simson, minister of Airth, had been sent up by the Protesters, to be followed, more effectively, in January, by Mr. James Guthrie himself, Principal Gillespie of Glasgow, and three elders, of whom one was Warriston. There had been a conference and debate between Sharp and these Protesters before Cromwell, three of his Council being present, and Owen, Lockyer, Manton, and Ashe attending as representative English divines; but his Highness had not yet made up his mind. The rumour in Scotland was that Sharp was likely to succeed, and that he had driven Warriston and Gillespie very hard in the Conference, and contrived, in particular, to make Warriston, in self-defence, betray some awkward secrets. One finds, however, that Principal Gillespie was invited to preach twice before the Parliament, and thanked for his sermons, and that he had influence enough to move in the Council a suit in the interests of the University of Glasgow. Though Sharp, as Baillie advised him, was "supping with a long spoon," Cromwell had probably taken estimate of him.[1]

[Footnote 1: Council Order Books of dates given, and of others (e.g. Nov. 4 and Dec. 2, 1656, and Jan. 12 and Feb. 12, 1656-7); _Merc. Pol._ No. 340 (Dec. 11-18, 1656); Life of Robert Blair, 329-331; Baillie, III. 328-341.]

One matter In which there had been an approach to disagreement between the Parliament and the Protector was the famous _Case of James Nayler;_--Quakerism and its extravagancies were irritating the sober part of the nation unspeakably, and this maddest of all the Quakers, on account of the outrageous "blasphemies" of his recent Song-of-Simon procession through the west of England--repeated at Bristol after his release from Exeter jail--had been selected by Parliament for an example. On the 31st of October, 1856, a large committee was appointed on his case; and on the 5th of December, Nayler and others having been brought prisoners to London meanwhile, the report of the Committee was made, and there began a debate on the case, which was protracted through ten sittings, Nayler himself brought once or twice to the bar. It was easily resolved that he had been "guilty of horrid blasphemy" and was a "grand impostor and great seducer of the people": the difficult question was as to his punishment. On the 16th of December it was carried but by ninety-six votes to eighty-two that it should _not_ be death, and, after some faint farther argument on the side of mercy, this was the sentence: "That James Nayler be set on the pillory, with his head in the pillory, in the New Palace, Westminster, during the space of two hours, on Thursday next, and shall be whipped by the hangman through the streets from Westminster to the Old Exchange, London, there likewise to be set on the pillory, with his head in the pillory, for the space of two hours, between the hours of eleven and one on Saturday next--in each of the said places wearing a paper containing an inscription of his crimes: and that at the Old Exchange his tongue shall be bored through with a hot iron; and that he be there also stigmatized in the forehead with the letter B: And that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, and conveyed into and through the said city on a horse bare-ridged, with his face backwards, and there also publicly whipped the next market-day after he comes thither: And that from thence he be committed to prison in Bridewell, London, and there restrained from the society of all people, and kept to hard labour, till he be released by Parliament, and during that time be debarred from the use of pen, ink, and paper, and have no relief but what he earns by his daily labour." Though petitions for clemency had already been presented to Parliament by some very orthodox people, the first part of this atrocious sentence was duly executed Dec. 18. Then came more earnest petitions both to Parliament and the Protector, with the effect of a respite of the next part from the 20th to the 27th; between which dates this letter from the Protector was read in the House: "O.P. Right Trusty and Well-beloved, We greet you well. Having taken notice of a judgment lately given by yourselves against one James Nayler, Although we detest and abhor the giving or occasioning the least countenance to persons of such opinions and practices, or who are guilty of the crimes commonly imputed to the said person: Yet, We, being intrusted in the present Government on behalf of the People of these Nations, and _not knowing how far such Proceeding, entered into wholly without Us, may extend in the consequence of it_, Do desire that the House will let Us know the grounds and reasons whereupon they have proceeded." Two things are here to be perceived. One is that Cromwell did not approve of the course taken with Nayler. The other, and more important, is that he regarded this action of the House, without his consent, as an intrenchment on that part of his prerogative which concerned Toleration. He thought himself, by the constitution of his Protectorate, entrusted with a certain guardianship of this principle, even against Parliament; and he did not know how far Nayler's case might be made a precedent for religious persecutions. What may have been the exact reply to Cromwell from the House we do not know; but the House was not in a mood to spare Nayler. He had not satisfied the clergymen sent to confer with him. Accordingly, on the 27th, a motion to respite him for another week having been lost by 113 to 59, the second part of his punishment was inflicted to the letter; after which he was removed to Bristol to receive the rest. All that one can say is that, though Cromwell was far from pleased with the business, and even thought it a horrible one, he did not feel that he could at that time make it the occasion of an actual quarrel with the Parliament.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Carlyle III, 213-215; Sewel's _History of the People called Quakers_ (ed. 1834) I. 179-207.]

Another matter in which a disagreement might have been feared between Cromwell and his Parliament was that of _The Major-Generalships._ This "invention" of Cromwell's for the police of England and Wales generally, and specially for the collection of the Decimation or Militia Tax from the Royalists, had been so successful that he had congratulated himself on It in his opening speech to the Parliament. He, doubtless, desired that Parliament should adopt and continue it. On the 7th of January, 1656-7, accordingly, there was read for the first time "a Bill for the continuing and assessing of a Tax for the paying and maintaining of the Militia forces in England and Wales," i.e. for prolonging Cromwell's Decimation Tax of 1655, and virtually the whole machinery of the Major-Generalships. That there would be serious opposition in the House had been foreseen since Dec. 25, when there had been two divisions on the question of leave to bring in the Bill, and leave had been obtained only by eighty-eight votes to sixty-three. Among the opponents were Whitlocke and the other lawyers, all those indeed who wanted to terminate the time of "arbitrariness," and objected to a tax now on old political delinquents as contrary to the Parliamentary Act of Oblivion of Feb. 1651-2. On the other hand, the Bill was strongly supported by Lambert. Fiennes, Lisle, Pickering, Sydenham, other members of Council, and the Major-Generals themselves. It was, in fact, a Government Bill, Nevertheless, after a protracted debate of six days, the second reading of the Bill was negatived Jan. 29 by 121 to 78, and the Bill absolutely rejected by 124 to 88. Cromwell himself had helped to bring about this result. Much as he liked his "invention," he had perceived, in the course of the debate, that it must be given up; and he had given hints to that effect. The House, in short, had understood that they were left to their own free will. And so the Major-Generalships disappeared, the police of the country reverted to the ordinary magistracy, and Cromwell was to trust to Parliament for necessary supplies in more regular ways.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Godwin, IV. 327-331.]

What drew the Parliament and the Protector more closely together about this time was the explosion of a new plot against the Protector's life. At the centre of the plot was that "wretched creature, an apostate from religion and all honesty," of whom Cromwell had spoken in his opening speech as going between Charles II. and the King of Spain, and negotiating for a Spanish invasion of England. In other words, he was Edward Sexby, once a stout trooper and agitator in the Parliamentarian army (Vol. III. p. 534), afterwards Captain and even Colonel in the same, but since then one of the fiercest Anabaptist malcontents. He had been in the Wildman plot of Feb. 1654-5, but had then escaped abroad; and since then his occupation had been as described by Cromwell,--now in Flanders, now in Madrid, shuttling alliance between Spain and the Stuarts. But, though a Spanish invasion of England to restore the Stuarts was his great game, an assassination of Cromwell anyhow, whether without a Spanish invasion or in anticipation of it, was nearest to his heart. Actually he had been in London just before the meeting of the Parliament, trying to arrange for such "fiddling things"--so Cromwell had called them--as shooting him in the Park or blowing him up in his chamber at Whitehall. Before Thurloe had traces of him, he had again decamped to Flanders; but he had left a substitute in Miles Sindercombe, an old leveller and mutineer of 1647, but since then a quarter-master in Monk's Army in Scotland, and dismissed for his complicity in the Overton project. Sexby had left Sindercombe £1600; and with this money Sindercombe had been again tampering with Cromwell's guard, taking a house at Hammersmith convenient for shots at Cromwell's coach when he drove to Hampton Court, and buying gunpowder and combustibles for a nearer attempt in Whitehall. He had been, seen in the Chapel at Whitehall on the evening of January 8, and that night the sentinel on duty smelt fire just in time to extinguish a slow-match that was to explode a mass of blazing chemicals at midnight. All Whitehall having been roused, the Protector with the rest, information led at once to Sindercombe. He was arrested in his lodging, and sent to the Tower; and, his trial having followed, Feb. 9, he was convicted on evidence given by accomplices, and doomed to execution on the 14th. In the night preceding he was found dead in his bed, having poisoned himself. He had left intimation that he was under no concern about his immortal soul, having passed out of any form of religion recognising such an entity, and become a Materialist or Soul-sleeper. Meanwhile his plot had raised a ferment of new loyalty round the Protector. On the 19th of January, when Thurloe made a formal disclosure to the House of all the particulars of the plot, a general thanksgiving throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, was ordered, and it was resolved that the whole House should wait upon his Highness "to congratulate with his Highness on this great mercy and deliverance." The interview was on January the 23rd, in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, when Speaker Widdrington made the address for the House, and Cromwell replied in a most affectionate speech (_Speech_ VI.). The thanksgiving was on Feb. 20; on which day Principal Gillespie of Glasgow and Mr. Warren had the honour of preaching the special sermons before the House in St. Margaret's, Westminster. The day was wound up by a noble dinner in Whitehall, to which the whole House had been invited by the Protector, followed by a concert, vocal and instrumental, in the part of the Palace called the Cockpit.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates given, and of Feb. 18; Carlyle, III. 204-211; Godwin, IV. 331-333; _Merc. Pol._ No. 349 (Feb. 12-19, 1656-7); Whitlocke, IV. 286; Parl. Hist. III. 1490.]

Three days after the great dinner in Whitehall, i.e. on Monday, Feb. 23, 1656-7, there was an incident in the House which turned all the future proceedings of this Second Parliament of the Protectorate into a new channel. It is thus entered in the Journals:--

" ... Sir Christopher Pack [Ex-Mayor of London, knighted by Cromwell, Sept. 25, 1655, and now one of the members for the City] presented a Paper to the House, declaring it was somewhat come to his hand tending to the Settlement of the Nation and of Liberty and Property, and prayed it might be received and read; and, it being much controverted whether the same should be read without farther opening [preliminary explanation] thereof, the Question being propounded _That this Paper, offered by Sir Christopher Pack, be further opened by him before it is read,_ and the Question being put _That this Question be now put,_ it passed in the Negative. The Question being propounded _That this Paper, offered by Sir Christopher Pack, be now read,_ and the Question being put _That that Question be now put,_ the House was divided. The Noes went forth:--Colonel Sydenham, Mr. Robinson, Tellers for the Noes--with the Noes 54; Sir Charles Wolseley, Colonel Fitzjames, Tellers for the Yeas--with the Yeas 144. So it passed in the Affirmative. And, the main Question being put, it was Resolved _That this Paper, offered by Sir Christopher Pack, be now read._ The said Paper was read accordingly, and was entitled 'The Humble Address and Remonstrance of the Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses, now assembled in the Parliament of this Commonwealth.'"[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of date.]

The debate on the Paper was protracted to the evening "a candle" having been ordered in for the purpose; and it was then adjourned to the next day. In fact, for the next four months, or through the whole remainder of the session, the House was to continue the debate, or questions arising out of it, and to do little else. For, on the 24th of February, it was resolved by a majority of 100 to 44 (Lambert and Strickland tellers for the _Minority_) that the paper should be taken up and discussed in its successive parts, "beginning at the first Article after the Preamble;" and, though an attempt was made next day to throw the subject into Grand Committee, that was defeated by 118 to 63. In evidence of the momentousness of the occasion, a whole Parliamentary day was set apart for "seeking the Lord" upon it, with prayers and sermons by Dr. Owen and others; and, when the House met again after that ceremonial (Feb. 28), it was resolved that no vote passed on any part of the Paper should be binding till all should be completed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates.]

Sir Christopher Pack's paper of Feb. 23, 1656-7, entitled _The Humble Address and Remonstrance, &c._, was nothing less than a proposed address by Parliament to the Protector, asking him to concur with the Parliament in a total recast of the existing Constitution. It had been privately considered and prepared by several persons, and Whitlocke had been requested to introduce it, "Not liking--several things in it," he had declined to do so; but, Sir Christopher having volunteered, Whitlocke, Broghill, Glynne and others, were to back him. Indeed, all the Oliverians were to back him. Or, rather, there was to grow out of the business, according as the Oliverians were more hearty or less hearty in their cooperation, a new distinction of that body into _Thorough Oliverians_ and _Distressed Oliverians_ or _Contrariants_. Why this should have been the case will appear if we quote the First Article of the proposed Address after the Preamble. It ran thus: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of KING of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and exercise thereof, to hold and enjoy the same, with the rights and privileges and prerogatives justly, legally, and rightfully, belonging thereunto: That your Highness will be pleased, during your life-time, to appoint and declare the person who shall, immediately after your death, succeed you in the Government of these Nations." The rest of the Address was to correspond. Thus Article II. proposed a return to the system of two Houses of Parliament, and generally the tenor was towards royal institutions. On the other hand, the regality proposed was to be strictly constitutional. There was to be an end to all arbitrary power. There were to be free and full Parliaments once in three years at farthest; there was to be no violent interference in future with the process of Parliament, no exclusion of any persons that had been duly returned by the constituencies; and his Highness and Council were not to make ordinances by their own authority, but all laws, and changes or abrogations of laws, were to be by Act of Parliament. Oliver was to be King, if he chose, and a King with very large powers; but he was to keep within Statute.[1]

[Footnote 1: Whitlocke, IV. 286 and 289; Commons Journals of March 2, 3, and 24, 1656-7, and March 25, 1657 (whence I have recovered the original wording of Article I. of the Address).]

On March 2 and 3 the First Article of the Address was debated, with the result that it was agreed to _postpone_ any vote on the first and most important part of the Article, offering Oliver the Kingship, but with the passing of the second part, offering him, whether it should be as King or not, the power of nominating his successor. A motion for postponing the vote on this part also was lost by 120 to 63. Then, on the 5th, Article II., proposing Parliaments of _two Houses_, was discussed, and adopted without a division; after which there were discussions and adoptions of the remaining proposals, day after day, with occasional divisions about the wording, till March 24. On that day, the House, their survey of the document being tolerably complete, went back on the _postponed_ clause of the First Article, involving the all-important question of the offer of the Kingship. Through two sittings that day, and again on March 25 (New Year's Day, 1657), there was a very anxious and earnest debate with closed doors, the opposition trying to stave off the final vote by two motions for adjournment. These having failed, the final vote was taken (March 25); when, by a majority of 123 to 62, the Kingship clause was carried in this amended form: "That your Highness will be pleased to assume the name, style, title, dignity, and office of King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the respective Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, and to exercise the same according to the laws of these Nations." Then, it seemed, all was over, except verbal revision of the entire address. Next day (March 26) it was referred to a Committee, with Chief Justice Glynne for Chairman, to perform this--i.e. to "consider of the title, preamble, and conclusion, and read over the whole, and consider the coherence, and make it perfect." All which having been done that same day, and the House having given some last touches, the document was ready to be engrossed for presentation to Cromwell. By recommendation of the Committee, the title had been changed from _Address and Remonstrance_ into _Petition and Advice_.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates, and between March 5 and March 25.]

Of course, the great proposal in Parliament had been rumoured through the land, notwithstanding the instructed reticence or mysterious vagueness of the London newspapers; and, in the interval between the introduction of Sir Christopher Pack's paper and the conversion of the same into the _Petition and Advice_, with the distinct offer of Kingship in its forefront, there had been wide discussion of the affair, with much division of opinion. Against the Kingship, even horrified by the proposal of it, were most of those Army-men who had hitherto been Oliverians, and had helped to found the Protectorate. Lambert, Fleetwood, and Desborough, were at the head of this military opposition, which included nearly all the other ex-Major-Generals, and the bulk of the Colonels and inferior officers. One of their motives was dread of the consequences to themselves from a subversion of the system under which they had been acting and a return to a Constitutional and Royal system in which Cromwell and they might have to part company. This, and a theoretical Republicanism still lingering in their minds, tended, in the present emergency, almost to a reunion between them and the old or Anti-Oliverian Republicans. It had been some of the Oliverian Army-men in Parliament, at all events, that had first resisted Pack's motion. Ludlow's story is that they very nearly laid violent hands on Pack when he produced his paper; and the divisions in the Commons Journals exhibit Lambert and various Colonels, with Strickland, as among the chief obstructors of the _Petition and Advice_ in its passage through the House. Strickland, it will be remembered, was an eminent member of the Protector's own Council; and, as far as one can gather, several others of that body, besides Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, and Strickland--perhaps half of the whole number of those now habitually attending the Council--were opposed to the Kingship. On the other hand, the more enthusiastic Oliverians of the Council, those most attached to Cromwell personally, e.g. Sir Charles Wolseley, appear to have been acquiescent, or even zealous for the Kingship; and there were at least some military Oliverians, out of the Council, of the same mind. In the final vote of March 25, carrying the offer of Kingship, the tellers for the majority were Sir John Reynolds (Tipperary and Waterford), and Major-General Charles Howard (Cumberland), while those for the minority were Major-General Butler (Northamptonshire), and Colonel Salmon (Dumfries Burghs). Undoubtedly, however, the chief managers of the _Petition and Advice_ in the House from the first had been Whitlocke, Glynne, and others of the lawyers, with Lord Broghill. The lawyers had been long anxious for a constitutional Kingship: nothing else, they thought, could restore the proper machinery of Law and State, and make things safe. Accordingly, out of doors, in the whole civilian class, and largely also among the more conservative citizens, the idea of Oliver's Kingship was far from unwelcome. The Presbyterians generally, it is believed, were very favourable to it, their dispositions towards Cromwell having changed greatly of late; nor of the old Presbyterian Royalists were all averse. There were Royalists now who were not Stuartists, who wanted a king on grounds of general principle and expediency, but were not resolute that he should be Charles II. only. The real combination of elements against Oliver's Kingship consisted, therefore, of the unyielding old Royalists of the Stuart adhesion, regarding the elevation of the usurping "brewer" to the throne as abomination upon abomination, the Army Oliverians or Lambert and Fleetwood men, interested in the preservation of the existing Protectorate, and the passionate Republicans and Levellers, who had not yet condoned even the Protectorate, and whom the prospect of King and House of Lords over again, with all their belongings, made positively frantic.

How far Cromwell had been aware beforehand of such a project as that of Sir Christopher Pack's paper may be a question. That he had let it be known for some time that he was not disinclined to a revision and enlargement of the constitution of the original Protectorate may be fairly assumed; but that he had concocted Pack's project and arranged for bringing it on (which is Ludlow's representation, and, of course, that of all the Histories) is very unlikely. The project, as in Pack's paper, and as agreed upon 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 there had been a Second House of Parliament, for example, would there have been that indiscreet decision in the case of James Nayler, a decision that might extend farther than Nayler, and leave no man safe?--Thus, with the distinct information that Cromwell would not interfere with Pack's project in its course through the House, had the Officers been dismissed. It was probably in consequence of their remonstrance with Cromwell, however, that the vote on the Kingship clause of the First Article had been postponed from the 2nd of March to the 25th. The delay had been useful. Though Lambert, Fleetwood, Desborough, and the mass of the military men, still remained "contrariants," not a few of them had been shaken by Cromwell's arguments, or at least by his judgment. If _he_, whom it was their habit to trust, was prepared to take the Kingship, and saw reasons for it, why should they stand out? So, before the vote did come on, Major-Generals Berry, Goffe, and Whalley, with others, had ceased to oppose, and the Kingship clause, reserved to the last, as the keystone of the otherwise completed arch, had been carried, as we have seen, by two-thirds of the House.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 349-353; Carlyle, III. 217.]

It was on Tuesday, March 31, in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, that Speaker Widdrington, attended by the whole House, and by all the high State-officers, formally presented to Cromwell, after a long speech, the _Petition and Advice_, engrossed on vellum. The understanding, by vote of the House, was that his Highness must accept the whole, and that otherwise no part would be binding. Cromwell's answer, in language very calm and somewhat sad (_Speech_ VII.), was one of thanks, with a request for time to consider. On the 3rd of April, a Committee of the House, appointed by his request, waited on him for farther answer. It was still one of thanks: e.g. "I should be very brutish did I not acknowledge the exceeding high honour and respect you have had for me in this Paper"; but it was in effect a refusal, on the ground that, being shut up to accept all or none, he could not see his way to accept (_Speech_ VIII.). Notwithstanding this answer, which could hardly be construed as final, the House next day resolved, after two divisions, to adhere to their _Petition and Advice_, and to make new application to the Protector. On the previous question the division was seventy-seven to sixty-five, Major-Generals Howard and Jephson telling for the majority, and Major-General Whalley and Colonel Talbot for the minority; on the main question there was a majority of seventy-eight, with Admiral Montague and Sir John Hobart for tellers, against sixty-five, told by General Desborough and Colonel Hewson. A Committee having then prepared a brief paper representing to his Highness the serious obligation he was under in such a matter, there was a second Conference of the whole House with his Highness (April 8). His reply to Widdrington then (_Speech_ IX.) did not withdraw his former refusal, but signified willingness to receive farther information and counsel. To give such information and counsel, and In fact to reason out the matter thoroughly with Cromwell, the House then appointed a large Committee of _ninety-nine_, composed in the main, one must fancy, of members who were now eager for the Kingship, or at least had ceased to object. Whitlocke, Broghill, Glynne, Fiennes, Lenthall, Lord Commissioner Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley, and Thurloe, were to be the most active members of this Committee; but it included also Admiral Montague, Generals Howard, Jephson, Whalley, Pack, Goffe, and Berry, with Sydenham, Rous, the Scotch Earl of Tweeddale, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the poet Waller, and even Strickland. The Committee was appointed April 9, and the House was to await the issue.[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle, III. 218-228 (with Cromwell's _Speeches_ VII., VIII., and IX.); Commons Journals of dates.]

It seemed as if it would never be reached. The Conferences of the Committee with Cromwell between April 11 to May 8, their reasonings with him to induce him to accept the Kingship, his reasonings in reply in the four speeches now numbered X.-XIII. of the Cromwell series, his doubts, delays, avoidances of several meetings, and constant adjournments of his final answer, make a story of great interest in the study of Cromwell's character, not without remarkable flashes of light on past transactions, and on Cromwell's theory of his Protectorship and of Government in general. Speech XIII., in particular, which is by far the longest, and which was addressed to the Committee on April 21, is full of instruction. Having in his previous speeches dealt chiefly with the subject of the Kingship, and stated such various objections to the kingly title as the bad associations with it, the blasting as if for ever which it had received from God's Providence in England, and the antipathy to it of many good men, he here took up the rest of the _Petition and Advice_. Approving, on the whole, of the spirit and contents of the document, and especially of the apparent rejection in it of that notion of perpetually-sitting Single-House Parliaments which he considered the most fatal fallacy in politics, and persistence in which by the Rump had left him no option but to dissolve that body forcibly and assume the Dictatorship, he yet found serious defects in some of the Articles, and want of precision on this point and that. His criticisms of this kind were masterly examples of his breadth of thought, his foresight, and his practical sagacity, and made an immediate impression. For, at this stage of the proceedings, the belief being that he would ultimately accept the Kingship, the House, whose sittings had been little more than nominal during the great Whitehall Conferences, applied itself vigorously, by deliberations in Committee and exchanges of papers with the Protector, to such amendments of the _Petition and Advice_ as he had indicated. On April 30 sufficient intimation of such amendments was ready, and the former Committee of Ninety-nine were required to let his Highness know the same and ask him to appoint a time for his positive answer. For another week, notwithstanding two appointments for the purpose, all was still in suspense. During that week we are to suppose Cromwell either in perplexed solitary meditation, or shut up in those confidential meetings with a few of the most zealous promoters of the Kingship which Whitlocke describes. "The Protector," says Whitlocke, "often advised about this and other great businesses with the Lord Broghill, Pierrepoint, myself, Sir Charles Wolseley and Thurloe, and would be shut up three or four hours together in private discourse, and none were admitted to come in to him. He would sometimes be very cheerful with us, and, laying aside his greatness, he would be exceeding familiar with us, and by way of diversion would make verses with us, and every one must try his fancy. He commonly called for tobacco, pipes, and a candle, and would now and then take tobacco himself: then he would fall again to his serious and great business." At length, on Friday, May 8, the Parliament, assembled once more in the Banqueting House, did receive their positive answer. It was in a brief speech (Speech _XIV._) ending "I cannot undertake this Government with the title of King; and that is mine Answer to this great and weighty business."[1]

[Footnote 1: Carlyle, III. 280-301 (with Speeches X.--XIV.); Commons Journals of dates; Whitlocke, IV. 289-290.]

The story in Ludlow is that to the last moment Cromwell had meant to accept, and that his sudden and unexpected refusal was occasioned by a bold stroke of the Army-men. Having invited himself to dine at Desborough's, says Ludlow, he had taken Fleetwood with him, and had begun "to droll with them about monarchy," and ask them why sensible men like them should make so much of the affair, and refuse to please the children by permitting them to have "their rattle." Fleetwood and Desborough still remaining grave, he had called them "a couple of scrupulous fellows," and left them. Next day (May 6) he had sent a message to the House to meet him in the Painted Chamber next morning; and, casually encountering Desborough again, he had told Desborough what he intended. That same day Desborough had told Pride, whereupon that resolute colonel had surprised Desborongh by saying he would prevent it still. Going to Dr. Owen on the instant, Pride had made him draft an Officers' Petition to the House. It was to the effect that the petitioners, having "hazarded their lives against monarchy," and being "still ready to do so," observed with pain the "great endeavours to bring the nation again under their old servitude," and begged the House not to allow a title to be pressed upon their General which would be destructive to himself and the Commonwealth. To this petition Pride had obtained the signatures of two Colonels, seven Lieutenant-Colonels, eight Majors, and sixteen Captains, not members of the House; and Cromwell, learning what was in progress, had sent for Fleetwood, and scolded him for allowing such a thing, the rather as Fleetwood must know "his resolution not to accept the crown without the consent of the Army." The appointment with the House in the Painted Chamber for the 7th was changed, however, into that in the Banqueting House on the 8th, the latter place, as the more familiar, being fitter for the negative answer he now meant to give.--Ludlow's story, though he cites Desborough as his chief informant, is not perfectly credible in all its details; but the Commons Journals do show that the meeting originally appointed by Cromwell on the 6th for the Painted Chamber on the 7th was put off to the 8th, and then held in the Banqueting House, and also that there was an Officers' Petition in the interim. It was brought to the doors of the House, by "divers officers of the Army," on the 8th, just as the House was adjourning to the Banqueting House; and the Journals only record that the officers were admitted, and that, a Colonel Mason having presented the Petition in their name and his own, they withdrew. The rest is guess; but two main facts cannot be doubted. One is that Cromwell's great, if not sole, reason at last for refusing the Crown was his knowledge of the persistent opposition of a great number of the Army men. The other is that he remembered afterwards who had been the chief _Contrariants_.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ludlow, 586-591; Commons Journals of dates. There had been public pamphlets against the Kingship: e.g. one by Samuel Chidley, addressed to the Parliament, and called "Reasons against choosing the Protector to be King."]

While the great question of the Kingship had been in progress there had been a detection of a conspiracy of the Fifth-Monarchy Men.

Ever since the abortive ending of the Barebones Parliament these enthusiasts had been recognisable as a class of enemies of the Protectorate distinct from the ordinary and cooler Republicans. While Vane and Bradshaw might represent the Republicans or Commonwealth's men generally, the head of the Fifth-Monarchy Republicans was Harrison. The Harrisonian Republic, the impassioned dream of this really great-hearted soldier, was the coming Reign of Christ on Earth, and the trampling down, in anticipation of that reign, of all dignities, institutions, ministries, and magistracies, that might be inconsistent with it. In the Barebones Parliament, where the Fifth-Monarchy Men had been numerous, and where Harrison had led them, they had gone far, as we know, in conjunction with the Anabaptists, in a practical attempt to convert Cromwell's interim Dictatorship, with Cromwell's assent or acquiescence, into a beginning of the great new era. They had voted down Tithes, Church-Establishments, and all their connexions, and only the steadiness of Rons, Sydenham, and the other sober spirits, in making that vote the occasion of a resurrender of all power into Cromwell's hands, had prevented the consequences. And so, Cromwell's Protectorate having come in where Harrison wanted to keep a vacuum for the Fifth Monarchy, and that Protectorate having not only conserved Tithes and an Established Church, but professed them to be parts of its very basis, Harrison had abjured Cromwell for ever. "Those who had been to me as the apple of my eye," said Harrison afterwards, "when they had turned aside, said to me, Sit thou on my right hand; but I loathed it." Through the Protectorate, accordingly, Harrison, dismissed from the Army, had been living as a suspected person, with great powers of harm; and, three or four times, when there were Republican risings, or threatenings of such, it had been thought necessary to question him, or put him under temporary arrest. The last occasion had been just before the opening of the present Parliament, when he was arrested with Vane, Rich, and others, and had the distinction of being sent as far off as Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, while Vane was sent only to the Isle of Wight, and Rich only to Windsor. The imprisonments, however, being merely precautionary, had been but short; and, at the time of the proposal of the Kingship to Cromwell, Harrison, as well as the others, was again at liberty.

That Harrison had ever practically implicated himself in any attempt to upset the Protectorate by force hardly appears from the evidence. He was an experienced soldier, and, with all his fervid notions of a Fifth Monarchy, too massive a man to stir without calculation. All that can be said is that he was an avowed enemy of Cromwell's rule, that he was looked up to by all the Fifth-Monarchy Republicans, and that he held himself free to act should there be fit opportunity. But there were Harrisonians of a lower grade than Harrison. Especially in London, since the winter of 1655, there had been a kind of society of Fifth-Monarchy Men, holding small meetings in five places, only one man in each meeting knowing who belonged to the others, but the five connecting links forming a central Committee for management and propagandism. It must have been from this Committee, I suppose, that there emanated, in Sept. 1656, a pamphlet called "_The Banner of Truth displayed, or a Testimony for Christ and against Antichrist: being the substance of several consultations holden and kept by a certain number of Christians who are waiting for the visible appearance of Christ's Kingdom in and over the World, and residing in and about the City of London_." Probably as yet these humble Fifth-Monarchy Men had not gone beyond private aspirations. At all events, Thurloe, though aware of their existence, had not thought them worth notice. But Sindercombe's Plot of Feb. 1656-7, and the subsequent proposal of the Kingship for Cromwell, had excited them prodigiously, and they had been longing for action, and looking about for leaders. Harrison was their chief hope, and they had applied to him, but also to other Republicans who were not specially Fifth-Monarchy Men, such as Rich, Lawson, and Okey. What encouragement they had or thought they had from such men one does not know; but they had fixed Thursday, April 9, the very day of the appointment of the great Committee of Ninety-nine to deal with Cromwell about the Kingship, for an experimental rendezvous and standard-raising on Mile-End-Green. This being known to Thurloe, a horse-troop or two finished the affair by the capture of about twenty of them at Shoreditch, ready to ride to Mile-End-Green, and also by the capture at Mile-End-Green itself of their intended standard, some arms, and a quantity of Fifth-Monarchy books and manifestos. Five or six of the captured, among whom was Thomas Venner, a wine-cooper, the real soul of the conspiracy, were imprisoned in the Tower, and the rest elsewhere; but, in accordance with Cromwell's lenient custom in such cases, there was no trial, or other public notice of the affair, beyond a report about it by Thurloe to the House (April 11). Harrison, however, was again arrested, with Rich, Lawson, and Major Danvers; and amongst those taken was a Mr. Arthur Squib, who had been in the Barebones Parliament, and one of Harrison's chief followers there. Squib's connexion with Venner in the present wretched conspiracy seems to have been much closer than Harrison's.[1]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 372-375; Carlyle, III. 228-229; Thomason Catalogue of Pamphlets; Commons Journals, April 11, 1657; Thurloe, I. 289.]

Cromwell had used the Venner outbreak to point a moral in one or two of his speeches on the Kingship Question. The standard taken at Mile-End-Green bore a Red Lion couchant, with the motto _Who shall rouse him up?;_ and among the tracts or manifestos taken was one called _A Standard set up, whereunto the true Seed and Saints of the Most High may be gathered together for the lamb, against the Beast and the False Prophet_. It was a fierce diatribe against Cromwell, with a scheme for the government of the Commonwealth on Fifth-Monarchy principles after his overthrow. The supreme authority was to be the Lord Jesus Christ; but there was to be an annually elected Sanhedrim or Supreme Council to represent Him, and to administer Biblical Law, and no other, with inferior elected judges for towns and counties. The Bible being the sole Law, a formal Legislature would be unnecessary; and all other magistracy besides the Sanhedrim and the Judgeships was to be abolished, and also, of course, all State ministry of Religion. Now, to Cromwell, who had read the Tract, all this furnished excellent illustration of the kind he wanted. Always frankly admitting that it might be said he had "griped at the government of the nations without a legal assent," he had never ceased to declare that this had been a sheer necessity for the nations themselves. But the _Standard set up_ of the Fifth-Monarchy insurgents of Mile-End-Green had enabled him to return to the topic with reference specifically to the Barebones Parliament and the transition thence to the Protectorate. That wild pamphlet, he had told his auditors, in Speech XII. (April 20), was by one who had been "a leading person" in the Barebones Parliament (Harrison or Squib?); and in Speech XIII. (April 21) he had dwelt on the fact again more at large, revealing a story, as he said, of his "own weakness and folly." The Barebones Parliament had been one of his own choosing; he had filled it with "men of our own judgment, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece upon that account." This he had done in his "simplicity," expecting the best results. But, as it had happened, there was a band of men in that Parliament driving even then for nothing but the principles of this wretched Fifth-Monarchy manifesto, the abolition of Church and Magistracy, and a trial of a fantastic government by the Law of Moses. Major-General Harrison and Mr. Squib had been the leaders of this band, with the Anabaptist minister Mr. Feak as their confidant out of doors; and what they did from day to day in the Parliament had been concocted in private meetings in Mr. Squib's house. "This was so _de facto:_ I know it to be true." Had he not done well in accepting the Protectorate at such a moment, and so saving the Commonwealth from the delirium of which they had just seen a new spurt at Mile-End-Green?[1]

[Footnote 1: I have taken the account of the _Standard Set Up_ from Godwin, IV. 375-378, not having seen it myself. The passages in Cromwell's speeches referring to it will be found in Carlyle, III, 260, and 276-277.]

After the Protector's refusal of the Kingship the House proceeded to adjust the new constitution they had prepared in the _Petition and Advice_ to that unavoidable fact. Not much was necessary. It was only necessary to re-shape the key-stone, by removing the word "King" from the first clause of the First Article and retaining the word "Protector": all the rest would hold good. Accordingly, after some days of debate, it was finally agreed, May 22, that the former first clause of the First Article should be cancelled, and this substituted: "That your Highness will be pleased, by and under the name and style of Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, to hold and exercise the office of Chief Magistrate of these Nations, and to govern according to this _Petition and Advice_ in all things therein contained, and in all other things according to the Laws of these Nations, and not otherwise." The remaining clause of the First Article, empowering Cromwell to appoint his immediate successor, was left untouched, as well as all the subsequent Articles. To the whole of the _Petition and Advice_, so arranged, Cromwell solemnly gave his assent in the Painted Chamber, May 25, addressing the House in a short speech, in which he expressed his thorough confidence in them in respect to those explanations or modifications of the document which they had promised in order to meet the objections he had taken the liberty of making. He did not doubt there would be "a perfecting of those things."[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates. The speech of Cromwell in assenting to the _Petition and Advice_, May 25, 1657, had been accidentally omitted in the earlier editions of Carlyle's _Cromwell;_ but it was given in the Appendix to the edition of 1657. It may stand as Speech XIV*. in the numbering.]

The "perfecting of those things" occupied a good deal of time. What was necessary was to cast the resolutions already come to in supplement to the _Petition and Advice_, or those that might yet suggest themselves, into a valid legal form; and it was agreed, June 4, that, except in as far as it might be well to pass express Bills on specific matters, the best way would be to frame and submit to his Highness a _Humble Additional and Explanatory Petition and Advice_. The due framing of this, and the preparation of the necessary Bills, were to be work for three weeks more.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of date, and afterwards.]

Meanwhile, in evidence that the Session of the Parliament up to this point, notwithstanding the great business of the _Petition and Advice_ and the Kingship question, had by no means been barren in legislation, the House had gathered up all the Bills already passed, but not yet assented to, for presentation to his Highness in a body. On the 9th of June thirty-eight such Bills, "some of the public, and the others of a more private, concernment," were presented to his Highness by the whole House, assembled in the Painted Chamber, the Speaker, "after a short and pithy speech," offering them as some grapes preceding the full vintage, and his Highness ratifying all by his assent.--Among these was one very comprehensive Act with this preamble: "Whereas, since the 20th of April, 1653, in the great exigences and necessities of these nations, divers Acts and Ordinances have been made without the consent of the People assembled in Parliament--which is not according to the fundamental laws of the nations and the rights of the People, and is not for the future to be drawn into example--yet, the actings thereupon tending to the settlement of the estates of several persons and families and the peace and quiet of the nations: Be it enacted by his Highness the Lord Protector and this present Parliament," &c. What is enacted is that about a hundred Acts and Ordinances, all duly enumerated, out of those made by the Barebones Parliament in 1653 or by Oliver and his Council after the establishment of the Protectorate in Dec. 1656, together with all acts and ordinances of the same touching customs and excise, shall by this Act be confirmed and made good, either wholly and absolutely (which is the case with nearly all) or with specified modifications--"all other Acts and Ordinances, and every branch and clause therein contained, not confirmed by these presents, which have been made or passed between the 20th day of April 1653 and the 17th day of September 1656" to be absolutely null and void. In other words, the House had been revising long and carefully the Acts of the Barebones Parliament and the arbitrary Ordinances of Oliver and his Council from Dec. 1653 onwards, with a view to adopt all that might stand and to give them new constitutional sanction. Among the Acts of the Barebones Parliament so confirmed and continued was their famous Act for the forms and ceremonial of Marriage and for the Registration of Births and Burials (Vol. IV. p. 511), except only the clause therein declaring any other marriages than as these prescribed to be illegal. Of Cromwell's own Ordinances from Dec. 1653 onwards all were preserved that, I suppose, he really cared for. Thus, of his _eighty-two_ first public Ordinances, passed between Dec. 1653 and the meeting of his First Parliament Sept. 3, 1654, _thirty-six_ were expressly confirmed; which, as most of the rest were Excise or Customs Ordinances or Orders for temporary occasion, means that substantially all his legislation on his entering on the Protectorate was to remain in force. More particularly, I may note that Nos. 7, 16, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33, 50, 54, 58, 60, 66, 67, 69, 71, 81, and 82, in our List of his first eighty-two Public Ordinances (Vol. IV. pp. 558-565) were among those confirmed. These included his Ordinances against Cockfights and Duels, his Ordinance for Reform of the Court of Chancery, his various Ordinances for the incorporation and management of Scotland, and his various Church-Establishment Ordinances for England and Wales, with his two commissions of Triers and Ejectors. Among contemporary ordinances of his also confirmed, over and above those in the main list of Eighty-two, were that for setting up Lectures in Scotland, that in favour of Glasgow University, and that for the better support of the Universities of Scotland--this last, however, limited to the Universities alone by the omission of what related to "the encouragement of public preachers" (Vol. IV. p. 565: footnote). The most noticeable Ordinances of Cromwell's _not_ confirmed are those relating to Treasons--No. 8 in the List of Eighty-two, and its appendages Nos. 12 and 49. Altogether, the Parliament had handsomely cleared Cromwell in respect of his Interim Dictatorship and what was past of his Protectorate, and he had every reason to be satisfied. But, besides this all-comprehensive Act of retrospection, several of the other Acts presented for his assent at the same time must have been very much to his mind.--There was an Act for settling lands in Scotland upon General Monk, with similar Acts for settling lands in Ireland on Fleetwood, Dr. Owen, Sir Hardress Waller, and other persons of desert; there were several Naturalization Bills in favour of a great number of foreigners and English aliens; there was "An Act for limiting and settling the prices of Wines"; and there was "An Act against Vagrants, and wandering, idle, dissolute Persons." Most welcome to Cromwell, and drawing from him a few words of special acknowledgment after his assent to all the Bills (_Speech XV._), were "Two Bills for an Assessment towards the defraying of the charge of the Spanish war and other occasions of the Commonwealth." One was for £60,000 a month from England for the three months ending June 24; the other for an assessment of £20,000 from Ireland for the same three months. These were instalments of a lump sum of £400,000, which the House had voted as long ago as Jan. 30, 1656-7, for the carrying on of the Spanish war, and the remainder of which was to be raised in other ways. The House had already before it a general Bill for the continued assessment of England, Scotland, and Ireland, for Army and Navy purposes, beyond the period specified; but that Bill had not yet passed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; Scobell's Acts and Ordinances of 1656, given in mass in his book, Part II. p. 371 et seq. See especially there, pp. 389-395.]

Army and Navy purposes, and the carrying on of the Spanish War: these, through all the bustle of the Kingship question, had still been the deepest things in Cromwell's mind. His alliance with France, settled so far by the Treaty of Peace and Commerce dated Oct. 24, 1655, but much imperilled since by Mazarin's dexterity in evasion and his occasional oscillations towards Spain, had at length, by Lockhart's exertions, been converted into a great Treaty "offensive and defensive," signed at Paris, March 23rd, 1656-7, and ratified by Louis XIV. April 30, and by Cromwell himself May 4, 1657. By this treaty it was provided that there should be joint action against Spain, by sea and land, for the reduction and capture of Gravelines, Mardyke, and Dunkirk, the three coast-towns of Spanish Flanders adjoining the French territories on the north-east. Gravelines, if taken, was to belong to France ultimately, but, if taken first, was to be held by the English till Mardyke and Dunkirk were taken--which two towns were to belong permanently to England, only with stipulation of inviolability of Roman Catholic worship for the inhabitants, and of no further English encroachments on Flanders. For the joint-enterprise France was to supply 20,000 men, and Cromwell an auxiliary army of 6000 foot (half at the expense of France), besides a fleet for coast-service. A secret article of the Treaty was that neither power should make separate peace with the Spanish Crown for the space of one year from the date of the Treaty.[1]--Cromwell had lost no time in fulfilling his part of the engagement. To command the auxiliary English army in Flanders he had selected Sir John Reynolds, who had served ably heretofore in Ireland, and was now, as we have seen, member for Tipperary and Waterford in the present Parliament, and a strong Oliverian. His commission was dated April 25; and by May 14 he and his 6000 English foot had all been landed at Boulogne. They were thought the most splendid body of soldiers in Europe, and were admired and complimented by Louis XIV., who went purposely, with Lockhart, to review them. The promised fleet of cooperation was to be under the command of young Admiral Montague, who was still, however, detained in England.[2]--Meanwhile Blake, in his wider command off the coasts of Spain itself, or wherever in the Atlantic there could be a dash at the Spaniard, had added one more to the series of his naval exploits. To intercept a rich Spanish fleet from Mexico, he had gone to the Canary Isles; he had found the fleet there, sixteen ships in all, impregnably ensconced, as it was thought, in the fortified bay of Santa Cruz in Teneriffe; and, after a council of war, in which it was agreed that, though the ships could not be taken, they might be destroyed, he had ventured that tremendous feat April 20, with the most extraordinary success. He had emerged from Santa Cruz Bay, after eleven hours of connonading and fighting, all but undamaged himself, but leaving not a ship of the Spanish fleet extant, and every fort in ruins. Not till May 28 did the news reach London; but on that day Thurloe presented a narrative of the glorious action to the House, who forthwith ordered a special thanksgiving, and a jewel worth £500 to Blake. On the 10th of June the jewel was sent, with a letter of honour from the Protector, and instructions to leave fourteen of his ships off Cadiz, and return home himself with the rest of his fleet.[3]

[Footnote 1: Godwin, IV. 540-542. But see Guizot's _Cromwell and the English Commonwealth_, II. 377 (Engl. Transl. 1854), with Latin Text of the Treaty itself in Appendix to same volume.]

[Footnote 2: Godwin, IV. 542-543; Commons Journals of May 5, 1657 (leave to Reynolds to go on the service).]

[Footnote 3: Commons Journals, May 28 and 29, 1657; Godwin, IV. 418-420; Carlyle, III. 264 and 304-305.]

"_Killing no Murder: briefly discoursed, in Three Questions, by William Allen:_" such was the title of a pamphlet in secret circulation in London in June, 1657, and still of some celebrity. It began with a letter "To His Highness, Oliver Cromwell," in this strain: "To your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people; and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life to consider with how much benefit to the world you are likely to leave it ... To hasten this great good is the chief end of my writing this paper." There follows, accordingly, a letter to those officers and soldiers of the army who remember their engagements, urging them to assassinate Cromwell. "We wish we had rather endured thee, O Charles," it says, "than have been condemned to this mean tyrant, not that we desire any kind of slavery, but that the quality of the master sometimes graces the condition of the slave." Sindercombe is spoken of as "a brave man," of as "great a mind" as any of the old Romans. At the end there is this postscript: "Courteous reader, expect another sheet or two of paper on this subject, if I escape the Tyrant's hands, although he gets in the interim the crown upon his head, which he hath underhand put his confederates on to petition his acceptance thereof." This would imply that, though not in circulation till June, the pamphlet had been written while the Kingship question was in suspense, i.e, before May 8. The name "William Allen" on the title-page was, of course, assumed. The pamphlet, hardly any one now doubts, was by Edward Sexby, the Stuartist arch-conspirator, then moving between England and the continent, and known to have been the real principal of Sindercombe's plot. Actually, when the pamphlet appeared, the desperate man was again in England, despite Thurloe's police. The pamphlet was greedily sought after, and much talked of. The sale was, of course, dangerous. A copy could not be had under five shillings.[1]

[Footnote 1: Copy of _Killing no Murder_ (first edition, much rarer than a second and enlarged edition of 1659) among the Thomason Pamphlets, with the date "June 1657" marked on it: Wood's Ath. IV. 624-5; Godwin, IV. 388-390 (where the pamphlet is assumed to have been out "early in May"); Carlyle, III, 67. After the Restoration, Sexby being then dead, the pamphlet was claimed by another.--An answer to _Killing no Murder_, under the title _Killing is Murder_, appeared Sept. 21, 1657. It was by a Michael Hawke, of the Middle Temple.]

People were still talking of _Killing no Murder_ when the First Protectorate came to a close. We have now only to take account of the circumstances of that event, and of the differences there were to be, constitutionally, between the First Protectorate and the Second.

On the 25th of June, 1657, all the details of the _Humble Additional and Explanatory Petition and Advice_ having been at length settled by the House, that supplement to the original _Petition and Advice_ was also ready for his Highness's assent. The two documents together, to be known comprehensively as _The Petition and Advice_, were to supersede the more military Instrument, called _The Government of the Commonwealth_, to which Cromwell had sworn in Dec. 1653, at his first installation, and were to be the charter of his new and constitutionalized Protectorate. The Articles of this new Constitution were seventeen in all, and deserve some attention:--Article I., as we know, confirmed Cromwell's Protectorship and empowered him to choose his successor.--Article II. provided for the calling of Parliaments of Two Houses once in three years at furthest.--Article III. stipulated for all Parliamentary privileges and the non-exclusion of any of the duly elected members except by judgment of the House of which they might be members.--Article IV., which was much the longest, determined the classes of persons who should be disqualified from being elected or voting in elections. _Universally_, all Roman Catholics were to be excluded, and all who had abetted the Irish Rebellion. Farther, in _England_, were to be excluded all who had been engaged in any war against Parliament since Jan. I, 1641-2, unless they had afterwards given "signal testimony" of their good affections, and all who, since the establishment of the Protectorate, had been engaged in any plot or insurrection against _it_. In _Scotland_ were to be excluded all who had been in arms against the Parliament of England or against that of Scotland before April 1, 1648 (old _Malignants_ and _Montrosists_), except such as had afterwards given "signal testimony," &c., and also all who, since April 1, 1648, had been in arms against the English Parliament or the Commonwealth (the _Hamiltonians_ of 1648, and the _Scottish Royalists of all varieties_ who had fought for Charles II. in 1650-51), except such as had since March 1, 1651-2, "lived peaceably"--but with the supplementary proviso, required by his Highness, that, while "having lived peaceably" since Worcester would suffice for the miscellaneous Royalists of 1650-51, who were indeed nearly the whole population of Scotland, the less pardonable _Hamiltonians_ of 1648 would have to pass much stricter tests. In _Ireland_, though Protestants generally were to be qualified, there was to be like caution in admitting such as, though faithful before March 1, 1649-50, had afterwards opposed the Commonwealth or the Protector. These disqualifications affected both voting and eligibility; but eligibility was restricted still farther. Ineligible were to be all atheistic persons, scoffers at Religion, unbelievers in the divine authority of the Bible, or other execrable heretics, all profaners of the Lord's Day, all habitual drunkards or swearers, and all who had married Roman Catholics or allowed their children to marry such. For the rest, all persons of the voting sex, over the age of twenty-one, and "of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation," were to be eligible. One farther exception had been made in the original _Petition and Advice_; to wit, all in holy orders, all ministers or public preachers. "There may be some of us, it may be, who have been a little guilty of that, who would be loath to be excluded from sitting in Parliament," Cromwell had said laughingly while commenting on this clause; and it had accordingly been defined as excluding only regular pastors of congregations. He had procured an important modification of another clause of the same Article. It had been proposed that the business of examining who had been duly elected, and the power of suspending members till the House itself should decide, should be vested in a body of forty-one commissioners to be appointed by Parliament; but, Cromwell having pointed out that this would be a clumsy process, and that the commissioners themselves might be "uncertain persons," and might "keep out good men," it was agreed that the judgment of the House itself, with a fine of £1000 on every unqualified person that might take his seat, would fully answer the purpose.--Article V. related to the Second House of Parliament, called simply "the other House." It was to consist of not more than seventy nor fewer than forty persons, qualified as by the last Article, to be nominated by the Protector and approved by the Commons House, twenty-one to be a quorum, and no proxies allowed. Vacancies were to be filled up by nominations by the Protector, approved by the House itself. The powers of the House were also defined. They were to try no criminal cases whatsoever, unless on an impeachment sent up from the Commons, and only certain specified kinds of civil cases. All their final determinations were to be by the House itself, and not by delegates or Committees.--Article VI. ruled that all other particulars concerning "the calling and holding of Parliaments" should be by law and statute, and that there should be no legislation, or suspension, or abrogation of law, but by Act of Parliament.--Article VII. guaranteed a yearly revenue of £1,300,000, whereof £1,000,000 to be for the Army and Navy, and the remaining £300,000 for the support of the Government, the sums not to be altered without the consent of Parliament, and no part of them to be raised by a land-tax. There might also be "temporary supplies" over and above, to be voted by the Commons; but on no account was his Highness to impose any tax, or require any contribution, by his own authority. By Cromwell's request it was added that his expenditure of the Army and Navy money should be with the advice of his Council, and that accounts should be rendered to Parliament.--Article VIII. settled that his Highness's Privy Council should consist of not more than twenty-one persons, seven a quorum, to be approved by both Houses, and to be irremovable but by the consent of Parliament, though in the intervals of Parliament any of them might be suspended by the Protector. It was asked that the Government should always be with the advice of the Council, and stipulated that, after Cromwell's death, all appointments to the Commandership-in-chief, or to Generalships at land or sea, should be by the future Protectors with consent of the Council.--Article IX. required that the Lord Chancellor, or Lord Keeper, or Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal, the Lord Treasurer or Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, the Judges, and all the great State-officers in England, Scotland, or Ireland, should, in cases of future appointment by the Protector and his Council, be approved by Parliament.--Article X. congratulated the Protector on his Established Church, and begged him to punish, according to law, all open revilers of the same.--Article XI. related to Religion and Toleration. The Protestant Faith, as contained in the Old and New Testaments, and as yet to be formulated in a Confession of Faith to be agreed upon between his Highness and the Parliament, was to be the professed public Religion, and to be universally respected as such; but all believers in the Trinity and in the divine authority of the Scriptures, though they might dissent otherwise in doctrine, worship, or discipline from the Established Church, were to be protected in the exercise of their own religion and worship,--this liberty not to extend to Popery, Prelacy, or the countenancing of blasphemous publications. Ministers and Preachers agreeing in "matters of faith" with "the public profession," though differing in "matters of worship and discipline," were not to be excluded from the Established Church by that difference, but might have "the public maintenance appointed for the ministry" and promotion and employment in the Church according to their abilities. None but those whose difference extended to matters of faith need remain outside the Established Church. Dissenters from the Established Church, if sufficiently right in the faith, were to have equal admission with others to all civil trusts and appointments, subject only to any disqualification for civil office attached to the ministerial profession. His Highness was requested to agree to the repeal of all laws inconsistent with these provisions.--Article XII. required that all past Acts for disestablishing or disendowing the old Prelatic Church, and appropriating the revenues of the same, should hold good.--Article XIII. required that Old Malignants, and other such classes of persons as those disqualified for Parliament in Article IV., should be excluded also from other public trusts.--Article XIV. stipulated that nothing in the _Petition and Advice_ should be construed as implying the dissolution of the present Parliament before such time as his Highness should independently think fit.--Article XV. provided that the _Petition and Advice_ should not be construed as repealing or annulling any Laws or Ordinances already in force, not distinctly incompatible with itself.--Article XVI. protected in a similar way all writs, commissions, grants, law-processes, &c., issued and in operation already, even though the wording should seem a little past date.--Article XVII. and Last requested his Highness to be pleased to take an oath of office. A form of such oath appeared in the _Additional Petition and Advice_, with another form of oath for his Highness's Councillors in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and a third for the members of either House of Parliament. This last, besides a promise to uphold and promote the true Protestant Religion, contained a special promise of fidelity to the Lord Protector and his Government. Farther, by the same _Additional Petition and Advice_, the Lord Protector was requested and empowered to issue writs calling qualified persons to the other House in convenient time before the next session of Parliament, and such persons were empowered to meet and constitute the other House at the time and place appointed without requiring farther approbation from the present Single House.[1]

[Footnote 1: The original Petition and Advice is given in full in Scobell (378-383), Whitlocke (IV. 292-301), and in Parl. Hist. (III. 1502-1511); the Additional Petition and Advice in Scobell 450-452, and Whitlocke, IV. 306-310. But see also Cromwell's Speech XIII. with Mr. Carlyle's elucidations (Carlyle, III. 279 et seq.)]

Friday, June 26, 1657, was the last day of the present Single House, and a day of high ceremonial in London. The House, having met as usual in the morning, and transacted some overstanding business, rose about two o'clock to meet his Highness in the Painted Chamber. There, with the words "The Lord Protector doth consent," the _Additional Petition and Advice_, and therefore the whole new Constitution of the Protectorate, as just described, became law, and assent was given also to a number of Bills that had passed the House since the 9th. Among these was an "Act for convicting, discovering, and repressing of Popish Recusants," an "Act for the Better Observation of the Lord's Day," and an "Act for punishing such persons as live at high rates and have no visible estate, profession, or calling, answerable thereto." There were also two Money Bills for temporary supplies: viz. one for raising £15,000 from Scotland, to go along with the £180,000 from England, and the £20,000 from Ireland, voted for the three months just ended, and another general and prospective one, assessing England at £35,000 a month, Scotland at £6000 a month, and Ireland at £9000 a month, for the next three years. All these assents having been received, there was an adjournment to Westminster Hall for the solemn installation of his Highness in his Second Protectorate.--The Hall had been magnificently prepared, and contained a vast assemblage. The members of the House, the Judges in their robes, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen in their robes, and other dignitaries, were ranged in the midst round, a canopied chair of state. It was the royal chair of Scotland, with the mystic coronation-stone underneath it, brought for the purpose from the Abbey. In front of the chair was a table, covered with pink-coloured Geneva velvet fringed with gold; and on the table lay a large Bible, a sword, the sceptre, and a robe of purple velvet, lined with ermine. His Highness, having entered, attended by his Council, the great state officers, his son Richard, the French Ambassador, the Dutch Ambassador, and "divers of the nobility and other persons of great quality," stood, beside the chair under the canopy. The Speaker, assisted by the Earl of Warwick, Whitlocke, and others, then attired his Highness in the purple velvet robe; after which he delivered to him the richly-gilt Bible, girt him with the sword, and put the gold sceptre into his hand. His Highness then swore the oath of office, administered to him by the Speaker, After that, the Speaker addressed him in a well-turned speech. "You have no new name," he said, "but a new date now added to the old name: the 16th of December is now changed into the 26th of June." He explained that the robe, the Bible, the sword, and the sceptre were presents to his Highness from the Parliament, and dwelt poetically on the significance of each. "What a comely and glorious sight," he concluded, "it is to behold a Lord Protector in a purple robe, with a sceptre in his hand, a sword of justice girt about him, and his eyes fixed upon the Bible! Long may you prosperously enjoy them all, to your own comfort, and the comfort of the people of these three Nations!" His Highness still standing, Mr. Manton offered up a prayer. Then, the assemblage giving several great shouts, and the trumpets sounding, his Highness sat down in the chair, still holding the sceptre. Then a herald stood up aloft, and signalled for three trumpet-blasts, at the end of which, by authority of Parliament, he proclaimed the Protector. There were new trumpet-blasts, loud hurrahs through the Hall, and cries of "God save the Lord Protector." Once more there was proclamation, and once more a burst of applauses. Then, all being ended, his Highness, with his robe borne up by several young persons of rank, passed with his retinue from the Hall by the great gate, where his coach was in waiting. And so, with the Earl of Warwick seated opposite to him in the coach, his son Richard and Whitlocke on one side, and Viscount Lisle and Admiral Montague on the other, he was driven through the crowd to Whitehall, surrounded by his life-guards, and followed by the Lord Mayor and other dignitaries in their coaches.--There was a brief sitting of the House after the Installation. It was agreed to recommend to his Highness to "encourage Christian endeavours for uniting the Protestant Churches abroad," and also to recommend to him to take some effectual course "for reforming the government of the Inns of Court, and likewise for placing of godly and able ministers there"; and it was ordered that the Acts passed by the House should be printed collectively, and that every member should have a copy. Then, according to one of the Acts to which his Highness had that day assented, the House adjourned itself for seven months, i.e. to Jan. 20, 1657-8.[1]

[Footnote 1: Commons Journals of June 26, 1657; Parl. Hist. III. 1514-1518 (Reprint of the authorized contemporary account of the Installation-Ceremony, which had a frontispiece by Hollar); Whitlocke, IV. 303-305; Guizot's Cromwell, II. 337-339 (where some of the particulars of the Installation seem to be from French eye-witnesses).]