REGAL FORMS AND CEREMONIAL OF THE SECOND PROTECTORATE: THE PROTECTOR'S FAMILY: THE PRIVY COUNCIL: RETIREMENT OF LAMBERT: DEATH OF ADMIRAL BLAKE: THE FRENCH ALLIANCE AND SUCCESSES IN FLANDERS: SIEGE AND CAPTURE OF MARDIKE: OTHER FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE PROTECTORATE: SPECIAL ENVOYS TO DENMARK, SWEDEN, AND THE UNITED PROVINCES: AIMS OF CROMWELL'S DIPLOMACY IN NORTHERN AND EASTERN EUROPE: PROGRESS OF HIS ENGLISH CHURCH-ESTABLISHMENT: CONTROVERSY BETWEEN JOHN GOODWIN AND MARCHAMONT NEEDHAM: THE PROTECTOR AND THE QUAKERS: DEATH OF JOHN LILBURNE: DEATH OF SEXBY: MARRIAGE OF THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM TO MARY FAIRFAX: MARRIAGES OF CROMWELL'S TWO YOUNGEST DAUGHTERS: PREPARATIONS FOR ANOTHER SESSION OF THE PARLIAMENT: WRITS FOR THE OTHER HOUSE: LIST OF CROMWELL'S PEERS.—REASSEMBLING OF THE PARLIAMENT, JAN. 20, 1657-8: CROMWELL'S OPENING SPEECH, WITH THE SUPPLEMENT BY FIENNES: ANTI-OLIVERIAN SPIRIT OF THE COMMONS: THEIR OPPOSITION TO THE OTHER HOUSE: CROMWELL'S SPEECH OF REMONSTRANCE: PERSEVERANCE OF THE COMMONS IN THEIR OPPOSITION: CROMWELL'S LAST SPEECH AND DISSOLUTION OF THE PARLIAMENT, FEB. 4, 1657-8.—STATE OF THE GOVERNMENT AFTER THE DISSOLUTION: THE DANGERS, AND CROMWELL'S DEALINGS WITH THEM: HIS LIGHT DEALINGS WITH THE DISAFFECTED COMMONWEALTH'S MEN: THREATENED SPANISH INVASION FROM FLANDERS, AND RAMIFICATIONS OF THE ROYALIST CONSPIRACY AT HOME: ARRESTS OF ROYALISTS. AND EXECUTION OF SLINGSBY AND HEWIT: THE CONSPIRACY CRUSHED: DEATH OF ROBERT RICH: THE EARL OF WARWICK'S LETTER TO CROMWELL, AND HIS DEATH: MORE SUCCESSES IN FLANDERS: SIEGE AND CAPTURE OF DUNKIRK: SPLENDID EXCHANGES OF COMPLIMENTS BETWEEN CROMWELL AND LOUIS XIV.: NEW INTERFERENCE IN BEHALF OF THE PIEDMONTESE PROTESTANTS, AND PROJECT OF A PROTESTANT COUNCIL DE PROPAGANDA FIDE; PROSPECTS OF THE CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT: DESIRE OF THE INDEPENDENTS FOR A CONFESSION OF FAITH: ATTENDANT DIFFICULTIES: CROMWELL'S POLICY IN THE AFFAIRS OF THE SCOTTISH KIRK: HIS DESIGN FOR THE EVANGELIZATION AND CIVILIZATION OF THE HIGHLANDS: HIS GRANTS TO THE UNIVERSITIES OF EDINBURGH AND GLASGOW; HIS COUNCIL IN SCOTLAND: MONK AT DALKEITH: CROMWELL'S INTENTIONS IN THE CASES OF BIDDLE AND JAMES NAYLER; PROPOSED NEW ACT FOR RESTRICTION OF THE PRESS: FIRMNESS AND GRANDEUR OF THE PROTECTORATE IN JULY 1658: CROMWELL'S BARONETCIES AND KNIGHTHOODS: WILLINGNESS TO CALL ANOTHER PARLIAMENT: DEATH OF LADY CLAYPOLE: CROMWELL'S ILLNESS AND LAST DAYS, WITH THE LAST ACTS AND INCIDENTS OF HIS PROTECTORSHIP.

Whether Cromwell's Second and Constitutionalized Protectorship was as agreeable to himself as his First had been may be doubted. He had accepted it, however, and meant to try it in all good faith. If, on the one hand, it was more limited, on the other it was attended with more of grandeur and dignity. Inasmuch as the actual Kingship had been offered him, and the new constitution was exactly that which would have gone with the Kingship, his Protectorship now, in the eyes of all the world, was equivalent to Kingship. When inducted into his First Protectorship, stately though the ceremonial had been, he had worn but a black velvet suit, with a gold band round his hat, and the chief symbol of his investiture had been the removal of his own military sword and substitution of the civil sword presented to him by Lambert. He had come into this Second Protectorship robed in purple, and holding a sceptre of massy gold. In heraldry, as well as in reality, he had taken his place among the Sovereigns of Europe.

Round about Cromwell, even through the First Protectorate, there had been, as we have abundantly seen, much of the splendour and equipage of sovereignty. The phrases "His Highness's Court" and "His Highness's Household" had become quite familiar. On all public occasions he was attended and addressed most ceremoniously; when he rode out in state it was with life-guards about him, outriders in front, and coaches following; and the Order-Books of the Council prove that his relations to the Council were regulated by careful etiquette, and that his personal attendance at any of their meetings was regarded as a distinction. One observes also, as with Cromwell's approval, and in evidence of the conservatism that had been growing upon himself, a retention or even multiplication of aristocratic forms in his court and government. He had conferred knighthoods less sparingly than at first, though still rather sparingly;¹ in mentions of any of the old nobility, whether those that had become Oliverian and were to be seen at Whitehall, or those who lived in retirement, their old titles were scrupulously preserved,—e.g. "The Marquis of Hertford," "The Earl of Warwick," "The Earl of Mulgrave," "The Lord Viscount Lisle," "The Right Honourable the Lord Broghill"; and not only were official or courtesy titles still recognised, as by calling Fleetwood "My Lord Deputy," Whitlocke "Lord Commissioner Whitelocke," Fiennes "Lord Commissioner Fiennes," and Lawrence "Lord President Lawrence," but there had been a curious extension of usage in this last particular. The Protector's sons had become respectively "The Lord Richard Cromwell" and "The Lord Henry Cromwell" in the newspapers and in public correspondence; and, for some reason or other, probably on account of places held in his Highness's Household or Ministry apart from the Council, at least two of the Councillors had of late received similar courtesy-promotion. From the beginning of 1655 Lambert had ceased to be called "Major-General Lambert," and had become "Lord Lambert," and from the beginning of 1656 "Mr. Strickland" had passed into "Lord Strickland." They are so named both in the Council Order-Books and in the Journals of the First Session of the Second Parliament.

If there had been so much of sovereign and aristocratic form in the First Protectorate, there was a natural increase of such in the Second. In the first place, the family of the Protector now lived in the reflection of that dignity of the purple which had been formally thrown round himself. The Protector's very aged Mother having died in honour and peace at Whitehall, Nov. 16, 1654, blessing him with her last words¹, the family, in the Second Protectorate, was as follows:—

HIS HIGHNESS, OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR: ætat. 58.

HER HIGHNESS, ELIZABETH, LADY PROTECTRESS.

Children and Children-in-Law.

1. THE LADY BRIDGET: ætat. 33: Ireton's widow, married to Fleetwood since 1652. FLEETWOOD, though he had been recalled from Ireland in the middle of 1655, and had been in London since then, retained his nominal Lord-Deputyship till Nov. 1657.

2. THE LORD RICHARD CROMWELL: ætat. 31: married since 1649 to DOROTHY MAYOR, daughter of Richard Mayor, Esq., of Hursley, Hants, who had been member for Hants in the Long Parliament, a fellow-Colonel with Cromwell in the Civil War, and afterwards in some of the Councils of the Commonwealth, in the Little Parliament, and in the Council of the Protectorate.—Though Lord Richard's tastes were all for a quiet country-life, with "hawking, hunting, and horse-racing," he had been in both the Parliaments of the Protectorate, and had taken some little part in the Second. His father now brought him more forward. On the 3rd of July, 1657, when the Second Protectorate was but a week old, the Lord Protector resigned his Chancellorship of the University of Oxford; and on the 18th Lord Richard was elected in his stead. He was installed at Whitehall, July 29. He was also made a Colonel, and at length he was brought into the Council. The fact is thus minuted in the Council's Books under date Dec. 31, 1657:—"The Lord Richard Cromwell did this day take the oath of a Councillor, the same being administered unto him by the Earl of Mulgrave and General Desborough, in virtue of his Highness's Commission under the Great Seal." He was immediately put on all Committees of the Council; and generally after that, when he did attend, his name was put next after the President's in the sederunt.

3. THE LORD HENRY CROMWELL: ætat. 29: in the Army since his boyhood; Colonel since 1649; Major-General and chief Commander in Ireland since the middle of 1655. At the beginning of the Second Protectorate he was still in the Government of Ireland with his military title only; but on the 24th of November 1657 he was sworn into the full Lord Deputyship in succession to Fleetwood. He had been married since 1653 to a daughter of Sir Francis Russell, of Chippenham, Cambridgeshire.

4. THE LADY ELIZABETH: ætat. 28: married in her seventeenth year to JOHN CLAYPOLE, ESQ., of a Northamptonshire family. He had been made the Lord Protector's "Master of Horse," and had therefore been known for some time by the courtesy-title of "Lord Claypole." He had been in the Second Parliament of the Protectorate; and, as Master of Horse, had figured prominently in the ceremonial of the late Installation. Lord and Lady Claypole were established in the household of the Lord Protector, at Whitehall, or at Hampton Court; and Lady Claypole was a very favourite daughter.

5. THE LADY MARY: ætat. 21. She was unmarried when the Second Protectorate began, though Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper is said to have sought her hand, and to have turned against the Protector on being refused it; but on the 18th of November 1657 she became the second wife of THOMAS BELLASIS, VISCOUNT FALCONBRIBGE, one of the old nobility. He was about thirty years of age, had been abroad, had been sounded by Lockhart in Paris as to his inclinations to the Protectorate, had given every satisfaction in that matter, and had been certified by Lockhart to the Protector as "a person of extraordinary parts." On his own account, and also because he was of an old Royalist family, his marriage with Lady Mary was thought an excellent match.

6. THE LADY FRANCES: ætat. 19. This, the youngest of Cromwell's children, was also unmarried at the beginning of the Second Protectorate. The fond dream of the wealthy old Gloucestershire squire, Mr. John Dutton, that his nephew and Cromwell's ward, Mr. William Dutton, Andrew Marvell's pupil at Eton with the Oxenbridges, might become the husband of the Lady Frances, as had been arranged between him and Cromwell (vol. IV. pp. 616-619), had not been fulfilled; and, the old squire himself being now dead, young Dutton was left to find another wife for himself in due time.¹ For the Lady Frances, his Highness's youngest daughter, there might well be greater destinies. There had been vague whispers, indeed, of a suggestion in certain quarters that Charles II. himself should propose for her and negotiate for a restoration, or a succession to Cromwell, accordingly; but for more than a year there had been more authentic talk of her marriage with Mr. ROBERT RICH, the only son of Lord Rich, and grandson and (after his father) heir-apparent of the Earl of Warwick. That this great and popular old Parliamentarian and Presbyterian Earl had been won round at last to the Protectorate, and that he had graced the late Installation conspicuonsly by his presence, were no unimportant facts; and the projected family-alliance was by no means indifferent to Cromwell. There were difficulties, not on the part of the young people; but at length, Nov. 11, 1657, just a week before the marriage of the elder sister to Lord Falconbridge, Lady Frances did become the wife of Mr. Rich. In the fourth month of the marriage, however. Feb. 16, 1657-8, the husband died, leaving the Lady Frances, not yet twenty years of age, a widow. She married again, and did not die till Jan. 1720-1.

OTHER RELATIVES

Worth noting among the Relatives of Cromwell alive in the Second Protectorate, were the following;—(1) The Protector's eldest surviving sister, ELIZABETH CROMWELL, ætat. 64, living at Ely, unmarried, and receiving occasional presents from her brother. She lived to 1672. (2) The Protector's sister CATHERINE, ætat. 61, first married to a Roger Whetstone, a Parliamentarian officer, and afterwards to COLONEL JOHN JONES, member of the Long Parliament for Monmouthshire, and one of the Regicides. He had been a member of the first and second Councils of the Commonwealth, had been for some time in Ireland as one of Fleetwood's Council, and was now a member of the Protector's Second Parliament. (3) The Protector's youngest sister ROBINA, formerly the wife of a Peter French, D.D., but now the wife of DR. JOHN WILKINS, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Wilkins held the Wardenship by dispensation from Cromwell, his marriage in the office being against Statute. The only child of Mrs. Wilkins, by her first marriage, became afterwards the wife of Archbishop Tillotson. (4) The Protector's niece, ROBINA, daughter of his deceased sister Mrs. Anna Sewster, and now wife of SIR WILLIAM LOCKHART. (5) The Protector's brother-in-law COLONEL VALENTINE WALTON, who had been member for Huntingdonshire in the Long Parliament, one of the Regicides, and a member of all the Councils of the Commonwealth; His first wife; Oliver's sister Margaret, being dead, he had married a second, and had for some time been less active politically and less Oliverian. (6) The Protector's brother-in-law JOHN DESBOROUGH, known as an officer of horse through the Civil Wars, and latterly as one of Cromwell's stoutest adherents through his Interim Dictatorship and Protectorate, a member of both his Parliaments, one of his Councillors, and one of his Major-Generals, though opposed to the Kingship. He was now a widower by the recent death of his wife, Cromwell's sister Jane. (7) The Protector's cousin, or father's sister's son, EDWARD WHALLEY, Colonel in the Civil Wars, one of the Regicides, and latterly member of both Parliaments of the Protectorate and one of the Major-Generals. (8) The Protector's aunt, or father's sister, Mrs. ELIZABETH HAMPDEN, mother of the famous Hampden, and now a very aged widow, living about Whitehall, with another son alive, besides grandchildren by her famous dead son, the eldest of whom, Richard Hampden, was a member of the present Parliament. (9) The Protector's cousin's son, COLONEL RICHARD INGOLDSBY, a Recruiter in the Long Parliament, one of the signers of Charles's death-warrant, and one of the members for Buckinghamshire in both Parliaments of the Protectorate. More distant kindred of the Protector were the DUNCHES of Berkshire, and the MASHAMS of Essex, the head of whom, Sir William Masham, Bart., had been member for that county in the Long Parliament, and a member of all the Councils of the Commonwealth and of the first Parliament of the Protectorate. The poet WALLER was connected with the Protector by his cousinship with the Hampdens.¹

The Protector's new Privy Council for his Second Protectorate was not constituted till Monday, July 13, 1657, more than a fortnight after his installation. Then, his Highness being present, there were sworn in, according to the new oath of fidelity provided by the Petition and Advice, Lord President Lawrence, General Desborough, Lord Commissioner Fiennes, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Viscount Lisle, Mr. Rous, Lord Deputy Fleetwood, Lord Strickland, and Mr. Secretary Thurloe. This last took his seat at the board as full Councillor by special nomination of his Highness. In the course of the next few meetings there came in Colonel Sydenham, Major-General Skippon, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and Sir Charles Wolseley, raising the number to thirteen; which completed the Council for some time, though Colonel Philip Jones and Admiral Montague afterwards took their seats, and Lord Richard Cromwell, as we have seen, was added Dec. 31. On comparing the total list with that of the Council of the First Protectorate (Vol. IV. p. 545), it will be seen that Cromwell retained all that were alive of his former Council, except Lambert, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, and Mr. Richard Mayor. Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper had been a deserter from the former Council as early as Dec. 1654, and had since then been so conspicuous in the opposition that he had been one of the ninety-three excluded from the House at the opening of the Second Parliament. Mr. Mayor, Richard Cromwell's father-in-law, though still nominally in the Council, seems to have been now in poor health and in retirement. The one extraordinary omission was that of Lambert. He had taken all but the chief part in the foundation of the First Protectorate; why was he absent from the Government of the Second? His Oliverianism, it appears, had evaporated in the late debates about the Kingship and the new constitution. Certain it is that he did not present himself at the first meeting of the new Council, and that, after an interview with Cromwell in consequence, he surrendered his two regimental colonelcies, his major-generalship, and £10 a day which he had for the last, and withdrew into private life. Still called "Lord Lambert," and with a pension of £2000 a year granted him by Cromwell, he retired to Wimbledon, where his chief amusement was the cultivation of tulips.¹

The new Council having been constituted, and having begun to hold its meetings twice or thrice a week, the administration of affairs, home and foreign, was free to go on, in his Highness's hands and the Council's, without farther Parliamentary interruption till Jan. 20, 1657-8. Foreign affairs may here have the precedence.

Blake's grand blow at the Spaniard in Santa Cruz Bay was still in all people's minds, and they were looking for the return of that hero, recalled as he had been, June 10, either for honourable repose in his battered and enfeebled state after three years at sea, or for further employment nearer home in connexion with the French-English alliance and the Flanders expedition. He was never, alas! to set foot in England. Off Plymouth, as his fleet was touching the shores, he died, utterly worn out with scurvy and dropsy, Aug. 7, 1657, aged fifty-eight. As the news spread, there was great sorrow; and on the 13th of August it was ordered by the Council, "That the Commissioners for the Admiralty and Navy do forthwith give order for the interment of General Blake in the Abbey Church at Westminster, and for all things requisite to be prepared for the funeral of General Blake in such sort as was done for the funeral of General Deane, and that they give direction for the preparing of Greenwich House for the reception of the body of General Blake, in order to his funeral." The body, having been embalmed, lay at Greenwich till Sept. 4, when it was brought up the Thames with all funereal pomp, mourning hangings on the barges and the wherries all the way, and so buried in Henry the Seventh's chapel, the Council, the great Army officers, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, and other dignitaries standing round, while a multitude thronged outside. It was observed that Lord Lambert had made a point of being present, as if to signify that the great sailor and he had always understood each other. How Blake would have farther comported himself had he lived no one really knows. At sea he had made it a principle to abstain from party-politics. "When news was brought him of a metamorphosis in the State at home, he would then encourage the seamen to be most vigilant abroad; for, said he, 'tis not our duty to mind State-affairs, but to keep foreigners from fooling us." The idea among the ultra-Republicans of using Blake's popularity to undermine Cromwell had long come to nothing.¹

Blake gone, the naval hope of England now was Admiral Montague. Since August 11 he had been cruising up and down the Channel with his fleet under general orders. The interest of the war with Spain now lay chiefly in Flanders, where the Protector's army of 6000 foot under General Reynolds was co-operating with the larger French army of Louis XIV. commanded by Turenne. Here Cromwell had, again to complain of Mazarin's wily policy. By the Treaty the great object of the expedition was to be the reduction of the coast-towns, Gravelines, Mardike, and Dunkirk; but these sieges had been postponed, and Turenne had been campaigning in the interior, the English troops obliged to attend him hither and thither, and complaining much of their bad accommodation and bad feeding. Mazarin, in fact, was studying French interests only, A peremptory communication from Cromwell through Ambassador Lockhart, Aug. 31, changed the state of matters. "I pray you tell the Cardinal from me," he said, "that I think, if France desires to maintain its ground, much more to get ground, upon the Spaniard, the performance., of his Treaty with us will better do it than anything appears yet to me of any design he hath." He offered 2000 more men from England, if necessary; but he added in a postscript, "If indeed the French be so false to us as that they would not have us have any footing on that side the water, then I desire ... that all things may be done in order to the giving us satisfaction, and to the drawing-off of our men. And truly, Sir, I desire you to take boldness and freedom to yourself in your dealing with the French on these accounts." The Cardinal at once succumbed, and the siege of Mardike by land and sea was begun Sept. 21. The place was taken in a few days, and, in terms of the Treaty, given into the possession of General Reynolds for the English. A little while afterwards, a large Spanish force under Don John of Austria, the Duke of York serving in it with four regiments of English and Irish refugees, attempted a recapture of the place; but, by the desperate fighting of the garrison and Montague's assisting fire from his ships, the attempt was foiled. The Protector had thus obtained at least one place of footing on the Continent; and, with English valour to assist the military genius of Turenne, there was prospect, late in 1657, of still more success in the Spanish Netherlands. Lockhart was again in London for consultation with Cromwell Oct. 15, and Montague was back Oct. 24, on which day he took his oath and place in the Council.¹

Various other matters of foreign concern occupied the Protector and his Council in the first months of the new Protectorate. There is an order in the Council Books, July 28, 1657, for the despatch of £1000 more to the Piedmontese Protestants, and for certain sums to be paid to Genevese and other ministers for trouble they had taken in that matter; and, as late as Nov. 25, there is an order for another despatch of £1500. There were, indeed, to be farther collections for the Piedmontese sufferers, and new interposition in their behalf with the Duke of Savoy. Nay, by this time, the generosity of his Highness in the Piedmontese business had led to applications from distressed Protestants in other parts of Europe. Thus, Nov. 4, his Highness being himself present in the Council, and having communicated "a petition from the pastors of several churches of the Reformed Religion in Higher Poland, Bohemia, &c., now scattered abroad through persecution in those parts, desiring some relief, and also a petition from Adam Samuel Hartmann and Paul Cyril, delegates from these exiles, together with a narrative of their condition and sufferings," it was ordered that the matter should be referred to the Committee for the Piedmontese Protestants and preparations made for another collection of money. All the while, of course, there had been the more usual and regular diplomatic business between the Protector and the various agencies of foreign powers in London. One hears especially of the arrival, Aug. 1657, of a new Ambassador-Extraordinary from Portugal, Don Francisco de Mello, of entertainments to him, and of audiences granted to him; also of much intercourse between his Highness and the Dutch Ambassador Lord Nieuport, now so long resident in England and so much regarded there. But the latter half of 1657 is also remarkable for the despatch by his Highness of three special Envoys of his own to the northern Protestant Powers. MR. PHILIP MEADOWS, appointed Envoy to Denmark as long ago as Feb. 24, 1656-7 (ante p. 294), but detained meanwhile in London, set out on his mission at last, Aug. 31; and at the same time MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM JEPHSON, distinguished for his services in Ireland, and returned as member for Cork and Youghal to both Parliaments of the Protectorate, set out as Envoy to his Swedish Majesty. He had been chosen for the important post Aug. 4. Finally, on the 18th of December, partly in consequence of the departure of the Dutch Ambassador Nieuport in the preceding month, for some temporary stay at home on private affairs, GEORGE DOWNING, ESQ. (ante pp. 43 and 191) was appointed to follow him in the capacity of Resident for his Highness in the United Provinces.¹

The general purport of these three missions of Cromwell in 1657 requires explanation. Not commercial interests merely, but also zeal for union among the Protestant Powers, had all along moved his diplomacy; and now the state of things in the north of Europe was so extraordinary that, on the one hand, the cause of Protestant union seemed in fatal peril, but, on the other hand, if it could be retrieved, it might be retrieved perhaps in a definite and magnificent form. The prime agency in bringing about this state of things had been the vast energy of the young Swedish King, Charles X. or Karl-Gustav. Cromwell had by this time contracted an especial admiration of this prince, and had begun to regard him as a kindred spirit and the armed champion of Continental Protestantism. To see him succeed to the last in his Polish enterprise, and then turn himself against Austria and her Roman Catholic clientage in the Empire, had come to be Cromwell's desire and the desire in Great Britain generally. For a time that had seemed probable. In the great Battle of Warsaw, fought July 28-30, 1656, Charles-Gustavus and his ally the Elector of Brandenburg routed the Poles disastrously; and, Ragotski, Prince of Transylvania, also abetting and assisting the Swede, "actum jam videbatur de Polonia" as an old annalist says: "it seemed then all over with Poland." But a medley of powers, for diverse reasons and interests, had been combining themselves for the salvation of Poland, or at least for driving back the Swede to his own side of the Baltic. Not merely the Austrians and the German Catholic princes were in this combination, but also the Muscovites or Russians, and, most unnatural of all, the Danes, with countenance even from the more distant Dutch. Nay, the prudent Elector of Brandenburg, hitherto the ally of the Swede, was drawn off from that alliance. This was done by a treaty, dated Nov. 10, 1656, by which the Polish King, John Casimir, yielded to the Elector the full sovereignty of Ducal Prussia or East Prussia, till then held by the Elector only by a tenure of homage to the Polish Crown. All being ready, the Danish King, Frederick III., gave the signal by declaring war against Sweden and invading part of the Swedish territories. When the news reached Cromwell, which it did Aug. 13, 1657, it affected him profoundly. He had previously been remonstrating, as we have seen, both with the Danes and the Dutch, by letters of Milton's composition (ante pp. 272-3 and 290), trying to avert such an unseemly Protestant intervention in arrest of the Swedish King's career. And now, having his two envoys, MEADOWS and JEPHSON, ready for the emergency, he despatched them at once to the scene of that new Swedish-Danish war in which what had hitherto been the Swedish-Polish war was to be at once engulphed. For Karl-Gustav had turned back out of Poland to deal directly with the Danes, and the interest was now concentrated on the struggle between these two powers—the Poles, the German Catholics, the Muscovites, the Elector of Brandenburg, the Dutch, and other powers, looking on more or less in sympathy with the Danes, and some of them ready to strike in. To end the war, if possible, by reconciling Charles X. and Frederick III, was Cromwell's first object; and, with that aim in view, Jephson was to attach himself more particularly to Charles X., whatever might be his war-track, and Meadows more particularly to Frederick III. But they might cross each other's routes, deal with other States along these routes, and work into each other's hands. RICHARD BRADSHAW, likewise, who had been sent as Envoy to the Czar of Muscovy in the beginning of the year (ante pp. 292-294), would be moving about usefully on the east of the Baltic. And, if a reconciliation between Sweden and Denmark should by any means be brought about, what then should be aimed at but a repair of the rupture between the Elector of Brandenburg and the Swedish King, so as to save the Elector from the threatened vengeance of the Swede, and then farther the aggregation of other Protestant German States, and of the Dutch, round this nucleus of a Swedish-Danish-Brandenburg alliance, for common action against Poland, Austria, and German Catholicism? Even the Muscovites, as of the Greek Church, might be brought in, or at least they might be rendered neutral. All this was in contemplation, as a tissue of ideal possibilities, when MEADOWS and JEPHSON were despatched in August, and the mission of DOWNING four months later to the United Provinces was partly in the same great interest. It may seem matter for wonder that a man of Cromwell's practical sagacity, already so deeply implicated on the Continent by his Flanders enterprise and his alliance with France, should have had such a passion for farther interference as thus to insert his hands into the apparently measureless entanglement in northern and eastern Europe. But, in the first place, his practical sagacity was not at fault. Precisely that it should not be an entanglement, but a marshalling of powers in two sets according to their true religions and political affinities, was the essence of his aspiration; there were deep tendencies towards that result; sagacity consisted in perceiving these, and practicality in promoting them. Cromwell's aspiration in connexion with the Swedish-Danish war was also, it could be proved, that of other thoughtful Protestants then contemplating the war and speculating on its chances. But, in the second place, the business of the French alliance and the Flanders enterprise was vitally inter-connected with the so-called entanglement in the north and east. The German Emperor Ferdinand III. had died in April 1657; the Empire was vacant; Mazarin had set his heart on obtaining that central European dignity for his young master, Louis XIV., and was intriguing with the Electors for the purpose; it was still uncertain whether, when the time came, a majority of the Electoral College would vote for Louis XIV. or would retain the Imperial dignity in the House of Austria by choosing the late Emperor's son Leopold. The future of Germany and of Protestantism in Germany was concerned deeply in that issue; and, whatever may have been Cromwell's feelings in the special prospect of the election of his ally Louis XIV. to the Empire, he was bound to prefer that to the election of another incarnation of Austrian Catholicism.¹

At home meanwhile things went on smoothly. Cromwell had by this time brought his Established Church into a condition highly satisfactory to himself. The machinery of the Ejectors and the Triers was still in full operation; and, on reports from the Trustees for the Maintenance of Ministers, his Highness and the Council still had the pleasure, from time to time, of ordering new augmentations of clerical stipends. The Voluntaryism which still existed in wide diffusion through the English mind had become comparatively silent; and indeed open reviling of the Established Church had been made punishable by Article X. of the Petition and Advice. Perhaps the plainest speaker now against the principle of an Established Church, or at least against the constitution of the present one, was the veteran John Goodwin of Coleman Street. "The Triers (or Tormentors) tried and cast by the Laws of God and Men" was the title of a pamphlet of Goodwin's, which had been out since May 1657, assailing the Commission of Triers. Goodwin was too eminent a Commonwealth's man, and too fair a controversialist, to be treated as a mere reviler; and it was left to the Protector's journalist, Marchamont Needham, to reply through the press. "The Great Accuser cast down, or a Public Trial of Mr. John Goodwin of Coleman Street, London, at the Bar of Religion and Right Reason," was a pamphlet by Needham, published July 31. It was dedicated "To His Most Serene Highness, Oliver, Lord Protector," &c., in such terms as these:—"Sir, It is a custom in all countries, when any man hath taken a strange creature, immediately to present it to the Prince: whereupon I, having taken one of the strangest that (I think) any part of your Highness's dominions hath these many years produced, do, with all submissiveness, make bold to present him, bound hand and foot with his own cords (as I ought to bring him), to your Highness. He need not be sent to the Tower for his mischievousness: there is no danger in him now, nor like to be henceforth, as I have handled him." In a prefixed Epistle to the Reader there is a good deal of scurrility against Goodwin. He is described as "worse than a common nuisance." He is taxed also with inconsistency, inasmuch as he had been one of those who, in Feb. 1651-2, had signed the famous Proposals of Certain Ministers to the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which the principle of an Established Church had been assumed and asserted (ante, IV. 392). In the body of the pamphlet Needham maintains that principle. "Christ left no such rules and directions," he says, "nor was it his intention to leave such, for propagating the Gospel, as exclude the Magistrate from using his wisdom and endeavours in order thereunto." He defends the Commission of Triers and the Commission of Ejectors, and more than once twits Goodwin with having taken up at last the extreme crotchets of Roger Williams the American. "A Letter of Address to the Protector occasioned by Mr. Needham's Reply to Mr. Goodwin's Book against Triers" appeared Aug. 25; but we need not follow the controversy farther. It had come to be Mr. John Goodwin's fate to be the severest public critic of Cromwell's Established Church; it had come to be Mr. Marchamont Needham's to be the most prominent defender of that institution.¹

More likely than such men as John Goodwin to be classed as open revilers of the Established Church were the Quakers. They were now very numerous, going about in England, Scotland, Ireland, and everywhere else, as before, and mingling denunciations of every form of the existing ministry with their softer and richer teachings. They were still liable, of course, to varieties of penal treatment, according to the degrees of their aggressiveness and the moods of the local authorities; but the disposition at head-quarters was decidedly towards gentleness with them. Hardly had the new Council of State been constituted when, Cromwell himself present, three of the most eminent London physicians, Dr. Wright, Dr. Cox, and Dr. Bates, were instructed "to visit James Nayler, prisoner in Bridewell, and to consider of his condition as to the state both of his mind and body in point of health"; and, from that date (July 16, 1657), his farther detention seems to have been merely for his cure. George Fox, whose circuits of preaching took him as far as Edinburgh and the Scottish Highlands, could never be in London without addressing a pious letter or two to Cromwell, or even going to see him; and another Quaker, Edward Burrough, was so drawn to Cromwell that he was continually penning letters to him and leaving them at Whitehall. During and after the Kingship question these letters were particularly frequent, the Quakers being all Contrariants on that point. "O Protector, who hast tasted of the power of God, which many generations before thee have not so much since the days of apostasy from the Apostles, take heed that thou lose not thy power; but keep Kingship off thy head, which the world would give to thee:" so had Fox written in one letter, ending, "O Oliver, take heed of undoing thyself by running into things that will fade, the things of this world that will change; be subject and obedient to the Lord God." There was something in all this that really reached Cromwell's heart, while it amused him; and, though he would begin by bantering Fox at an interview, sitting on a table and talking in "a light manner," as Fox himself tells us, he would end with some serious words. Both to Fox personally, and to the letters from him and other Quakers, his reply in substance uniformly was that they were good people, and that, for himself, "all persecution and cruelty was against his mind." Cromwell was only at the centre, however, and could not regulate the administration of the law everywhere.¹

John Lilburne once more, but now for the last time, and in a totally new guise! Committed to prison in 1653 by the government of the Barebones Parliament, acting avowedly not by law but simply "for the peace of this nation" (ante, IV. 508), he had been first in the Tower, then in a castle in Jersey, and then in Dover Castle. In this last confinement, which had been made tolerably easy, a Quaker had had access to him, with very marked effects. "Here, in Dover Castle," Lilburne had written to his wife, Oct. 4, 1655, "through the loving-kindness of God, I have met with a more clear, plain, and evident knowledge of God, and myself, and His gracious outgoings to my soul, than ever I had in all my lifetime, not excepting my glorying and rejoicing condition under the Bishops." Again, in a later letter: "I particularly can, and do hereby, witness that I am already dead or crucified to the very occasions and real grounds of outward wars, and carnal sword-fightings, and fleshly bustlings and contests, and that therefore confidently I now believe that I shall never hereafter be a user of the temporal sword more, nor a joiner with those that do. And this I do here solemnly declare, not in the least to avoid persecution, or for any politic ends of my own, or in the least for the satisfaction of the fleshly wills of any of my great adversaries, or for satisfying the carnal will of my poor weak afflicted wife, but by the special movings and compulsions of God now upon my soul ... and that thereby, if yet I must be an imprisoned sufferer, it may from this day forward be for the truth as it is in Jesus, which truth I witness to be truly professed and practised by the savouriest of people, called Quakers." This had not at once procured his release, for he remained in Dover Castle through at least part of 1656. At length, however, after some proposal to let him go abroad again, or to send him and his wife to the Plantations, security had been accepted for his good behaviour, and he had been allowed to live as he liked at Eltham in Kent. Here, and elsewhere, he sometimes preached, and was in much esteem among the Quakers; and here, on Saturday the 29th of August, 1657, he died. On the following Monday his corpse was removed to London and conveyed to the house called "The Bull and Mouth" at Aldersgate, the chief meeting-place of the London Quakers. "At this place, that afternoon, assembled a medley of people, among whom the Quakers were most eminent for number; and within the house a controversy Was whether the ceremony of a hearse-cloth should be cast over his coffin; but, the major part, being Quakers, not assenting, the coffin was about five o'clock in the evening brought forth into the street. At its coming out, there stood a man on purpose to cast a velvet hearse-cloth over the coffin, and he endeavoured to do it; but, the crowd of Quakers not permitting it and having gotten the body on their shoulders, they carried it away without further ceremony, and the whole company conducted it into Moorfields, and thence into the new churchyard adjoining to Bedlam, where it lieth interred." Lilburne at his death was but thirty-nine years of age. He was popular to the last with the Londoners, and there were notices of him, comic and serio-comic, long after his death. By order of Council, Nov. 4, his Highness himself present, payment of the arrears of an allowance he had of 40s. a week, with continuation of the same allowance thenceforward, was granted to his wife, Elizabeth.¹

When the subdued Lilburne thus went to his grave among the Quakers, his unsubdued successor in the trade of Anti-Cromwellian conspiracy, the Anabaptist ex-Colonel Sexby, was in the Tower, waiting his doom. He had been arrested, July 24, in a mean disguise and with a great over-grown beard, on board a ship that was to carry him back to Flanders after one of his visits to London on his desperate design of an assassination of Cromwell, to be followed by a Spanish-Stuartist invasion. What would have been his doom can be but guessed. He became insane in the Tower, and died there in that state Jan. 13, 1657-8. He had previously confessed to Barkstead, the Lieutenant of the Tower, that he had been the real mover of the Sindercombe Plot, that he had been in the pay of Spain, and also, apparently, that he was the author of Killing no Murder.¹

So quiet and even was the course of home-affairs through the first seven months of the new Protectorate that such glimpses and anecdotes of particular persons have to suggest the general history. Yet one more of the sort.

In the parish register of Bolton Percy in Yorkshire there is this entry: "George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and Mary, the daughter of Thomas, Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, of Nunappleton within this Parish of Bolton Percy, were married the 15th day of September anno Dom. 1657." This was, in fact, the marriage of the great Fairfax's only child, Marvell's former pupil, now nineteen years of age, to the Royalist Duke of Buckingham, aged thirty. The poet Cowley, who had known the Duke since their Cambridge days together, acted as his best man at the wedding, which was celebrated with great festivities at Nunappleton, Cowley contributing a poem. But surely it was a most extraordinary marriage, and, though there had been rumours of such a possibility for several years, it was heard of with surprise. The only child and heiress of the great Parliamentarian General, one of the founders of the Commonwealth, married to this Royalist of Royalists, the handsome young insurgent in the Second Civil War of 1648, the boon-companion of Charles II. for some time abroad, his boon-companion and buffoon all through his dreary year of Kingship among the Scots, his fellow-fugitive from the field of Worcester, and ever since, though less in Charles's company than before, and serving as a volunteer in the French army, yet a main trump-card in Charles's lists! How had it happened? Easily enough. The great Fairfax, with ample wealth of his own, had made most honourable and chivalrous use of the accessions to that wealth that had come in the shape of Parliamentary grants to him out of the confiscated estates of Royalists. Now, one such grant, in lieu of a money pension of £4000 a year, had been a portion of the confiscated property of the young Duke of Buckingham, including an estate in Yorkshire and York House in the Strand. The young Duke, stripped of his revenues of £25,000 a year, had been living meanwhile on the proceeds of a great collection of pictures, Titians and what not, that had been made by his father, and which had been quietly conveyed abroad for sale. But Fairfax had not forgotten the splendid young man, and had every wish to retrieve his fortunes for him. There had probably been communications to that end, not only with Buckingham himself, but even with Charles II.; and the result had been the Duke's return to England and appearance in Yorkshire, early in 1657, to woo Mary Fairfax or to complete the wooing. Who could resist him? It might have been better for Mary Fairfax had she died in her girlhood, fresh from Marvell's teaching; but now she was Duchess of Buckingham. York House and the estate in Yorkshire had been restored to her husband by gift, and Nunappleton and other Fairfax estates were to be settled on him and her for their lives, and on their heirs should there be any.¹

Naturally, the Protector might have something to say to the arrangement. The great Fairfax was a man to whom anything in reason would be granted; and, though Cromwell had no reason to believe that Fairfax favoured his Protectorate, and there had been even reports from Thurloe's foreign agents of correspondence between Fairfax and Charles II.,¹ no one could challenge Fairfax's honour or doubt his passive allegiance. But a son-in-law like Buckingham about him altered the case. Little wonder, therefore, that the marriage at Nunappleton was discussed at the Council in London. On the 9th of October, his Highness and eight more being present, it was ordered that a warrant should issue for arresting, and confining in the Isle of Jersey, George, Duke of Buckingham, who had been "in this nation for divers months without licence or authority." This led, of course, to earnest representations from Fairfax. Accordingly, Nov. 17, "His Highness having communicated to the Council that the Lord Fairfax hath made addresses to him, with some desires on behalf of the Duke of Buckingham," it was ordered "That the Resolves and Act of Parliament in the case of the said Duke be communicated to the Lord Fairfax as the grounds of the Council's proceedings touching the said Duke, and that there be withal signified to the Lord Fairfax the Council's civil respects to his Lordship's own person." The message was to be conveyed by the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Deputy Fleetwood, and Lord Strickland. Fairfax and the young couple must have made farther appeal; for, Dec. 1, his Highness "delivered in to the Council a paper containing an offer of some reasons in reference to the Duke of Buckingham his liberty," whereupon it was minuted "That the Council do declare it as their opinion that it is not consistent with their duty to advise his Highness to grant the Duke of Buckingham his liberty as is desired, nor consistent with his Highness's trust to do the same." Lord Strickland and Sir Charles Wolseley were to communicate the minute to Fairfax. Probably Fairfax had come up to town on the business. The young couple would seem to have remained in the country; nor do I find that the order for the arrest of the Duke was yet actually enforced.²

What may have disposed Cromwell not to be too harsh about the marriage was the fact that he had just celebrated the marriages of his own two youngest daughters. Lady Frances, the youngest, became Mrs. Rich on the 11th of November, and Lady Mary became Viscountess Falconbridge on the 18th.

The drift of public interest was now towards the reassembling of the adjourned Parliament on the 20th of January 1657-8. Especially there was great curiosity as to the persons that would be called by his Highness to form the Second or Upper House. That was satisfied in the course of December by the issue of his Highness's writs under the great seal (quite in regal style, with the phrases "We," "ourself," "our great seal," &c.) to the following sixty-three persons, the asterisks to be explained presently:—

*Lord Richard Cromwell (Councillor, &c.). Lord Henry Cromwell (Lord Deputy of Ireland).

Of the Titular Nobility.

The Earl of Warwick.

The Earl of Manchester.

The Earl of Mulgrave (Councillor).

The Earl of Cassilis (Scotch).

William, Viscount Say and Sele.

*Thomas, Viscount Falconbridge (son-in-law).

*Philip, Viscount Lisle (Peer's son and Councillor).

*Charles, Viscount Howard (raised to this rank by Cromwell, July 20, 1657).

Philip, Lord Wharton.

*George, Lord Eure.

*Roger, Lord Broghill (Peer's son).

*John, Lord Claypole (son-in-law and "Master of our Horse").

Great Army and Navy Officers.

*Lieutenant-General Charles Fleetwood (son-in-law and Councillor).

*Admiral, or "General of our Fleet," John Desborough (brother-in-law and Councillor: made Admiral in suecession to Blake).

*Admiral, or "General of our Fleet," Edward Montague (Councillor, and one of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury).

*Commissary-General of Horse, Edward Whalley (cousin).

Commander-in-Chief in Scotland, General George Monk.

Great State and Law Officers.

*Nathaniel Fiennes (Councillor).

Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal.

*John Lisle, ditto.

*Bulstrode Whitlocke, one of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury.

*William Sydenham (Councillor), ditto.

*Henry Lawrence (Lord President of the Council).

Oliver St. John, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas.

*John Glynne, Lord Chief Justice of the Upper Bench.

*William Lenthall, Master of the Rolls.

William Steele, Lord Chancellor of Ireland.

Baronets.

Sir Gilbert Gerrard.

Sir Arthur Hasilrig.

*Sir John Hobart.

*Sir Gilbert Pickering (Councillor and Chamberlain to the Household).

*Sir Francis Russell (Henry Cromwell's father-in-law).

*Sir William Strickland.

*Sir Charles Wolseley (Councillor).

Knights.

*Sir John Barkstead (knighted by Cromwell Jan, 19, 1655-6).

Sir George Fleetwood (knighted by Cromwell Sept. 15, 1656).

*Sir John Hewson (Colonel, knighted by Cromwell Dec. 5, 1657).

*Sir Thomas Honeywood.

Sir Archibald Johnstone of Warriston (Scotch).

Sir William Lockhart (Ambassador, knighted by Cromwell Dec. 10, 1656).

*Sir Christopher Pack (Alderman, knighted by Cromwell Sept. 20, 1656).

*Sir Richard Onslow.

*Sir Thomas Pride (Colonel Pride, knighted by Cromwell Jan, 17, 1655-6).

*Sir William Roberts.

*Sir Robert Tichbourne (Alderman, knighted by Cromwell Dec. 10, 1656).

Sir Matthew Tomlinson (Colonel, knighted in Dublin by Lord Henry Cromwell. Nov. 25, 1657).

Others.

*James Berry (the Major-General).

John Clerke (Colonel).

*Thomas Cooper (Colonel).

John Crewe.

*John Fiennes.

*William Goffe (the Major-General).

*Richard Ingoldsby (Cousin's son and Colonel).

*John Jones (brother-in-law and Colonel).

*Philip Jones (Councillor and Colonel, and now "Comptroller of our Household").

*Richard Hampden (son of the great Hampden).

William Pierrepoint.

Alexander Popham.

*Francis Rous (Councillor and Provost of Eton).

*Philip Skippon (Councillor and Major-General).

*Walter Strickland (Councillor).

*Edmund Thomas.¹

Such were "Oliver's Peers or Lords," remembered by that name now, and so called at the time, not because they were Peers or Lords in the old sense, but because they were to be members of that "Other House" which, by Article V. of the Petition and Advice, was to exercise some of the functions of the old House of Lords. The selection was various enough, and probably as good as could be made; but there must have been great doubts as to the result. Would those of the old English hereditary nobility whom it had been deemed politic to summon condescend to sit as fellow-peers with Hewson, once a shoemaker, Pride, once a brewer's drayman, and Berry, once a clerk in some iron works? What of Manchester, recollecting his deadly quarrel with Cromwell as long ago as 1644-5, and what of Say and Sele, who had remained sternly aloof from the Protectorate from the very first, the pronounced Oliverianism of two of his sons notwithstanding? Then would Anti-Oliverian Commoners like Hasilrig and Gerrard, hating the Protector with their whole hearts, take it as a compliment to be removed from the Commons, where they could have some power in opposition, to a so-called Upper House where they would be lost in a mass of Oliverians? Farther, of the Oliverians who would have willingly taken their seats and been useful, several of the most distinguished, such as Henry Cromwell, Monk, Lockhart, and Tomlinson, were at a distance, and could not appear immediately. Finally, if, after all these deductions, a sufficient House should be brought together, it would be at the expense of a considerable weakening of the Government party in the Commons by the withdrawal of leading members thence, and this at a time when such weakening was most dangerous. For, by the Petition and Advice, were not the Anti-Oliverians excluded from last session, to the number of ninety or more, to take their seats in the Commons now, without farther let or hindrance from the Protector?

Cromwell had, doubtless, foreseen that one of the difficulties of his Second Protectorate would be the transition from the system of a Single-House Parliament, now nine years in use, to a revived form of the method of Two Houses. The experiment, however, had been, of his own suggestion and was still to his liking, Could the Second House take root, it might aid him, on the one hand, in that steady and orderly domestic policy which, he desired in general, and it might increase his power, on the other hand, to stand firmly on his own broad notion of religious toleration. At all events, the time had now come when the difficulty must be faced.

On Wednesday. Jan. 20, 1657-8; the members of the two Senses, such of them at least as had appeared, were duly in their places. Those of the new House were assembled in what tad formerly been the House of Lords, Of the sixty-three that had been summoned forty-three had presented themselves and had been sworn in by the form of oath prescribed in the Petition and Advice, They were the forty-three whose names are marked by asterisks in the preceding list of those summoned. When it is considered that from seven to ten of those not asterisked there (e.g. Henry Cromwell, Monk, Steele, Lockhart, and Tomlinson) would certainly have taken their places but for necessary and distant absence, and might take them yet, the House mast be called, so far, a very successful one. It had failed most conspicuously, as had been expected, in one of its proposed ingredients. Of the old English Peers there had come in only Visconnt Falconbridge and Lord Eure; Warwick, Manchester, Say and Sele, Wharton, even Mulgrave, were absent. More ominous still was the absence of the Anti-Oliverian commoner Sir Arthur Hasilrig, He had not yet come to town, and there was much speculation what course he would take if he did come. Would he regard himself as still member for Leicester in the Commons House, though he had been excluded thence in September 1656, as he had before been driven from the same seat in the First Parliament of the Protectorate; and would he reclaim that seat now rather than go into the Upper House? Meanwhile for most of those who had been excluded in Sept. 1658 along with Hasilrig there was no such dilemma; and, accordingly, they had mustered, in pretty large number, to claim their seats in the Commons, The only formality with which they had to comply now was the prescribed oath of the Petition and Advice, by which they, as well as the members of the Upper House, were to swear, among other things, "to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector," &c., and not to "contrive, design, or attempt anything against his person or lawful authority." It is evident that Cromwell trusted a good deal to the effects of this oath; for he had taken care that there should be stately commissioners in the lobby of the Commons from a very early hour in the morning to swear the members as they came in. As many as 150 or 180 members in all, the formerly excluded and the old sitters together, seem to have been in the House, thus sworn, about the time when the forty-three were assembled in the adjacent Other House. The Commons had then resumed business, on their own account, as met after regular adjournment. They had appointed a Mr. John Smythe to be their Clerk, in lieu of Mr. Henry Scobell, now made general "Clerk of the Parliament" and transferred to the Other House, and they had fixed that day week as a day of prayer for divine assistance, when the Usher of the Black Rod appeared to summon them to meet his Highness in the Other House. Arranging that the Sergeant-at-Arms should carry the mace with him, and stand by the Speaker with the mace at his shoulder through the whole interview with his Highness, the House obeyed the summons.¹

Cromwell's speech to the two Houses (Speech XVI.) opened significantly with the words "My Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons." It was a very quiet speech, somewhat slowly and heavily delivered, with "peace" for the key-word. He represented the nation as now in such a nourishing state, especially in the possession of a settled and efficient Public Ministry of the Gospel, and at the same time of ample religious liberty for all, that nothing more was needed than oblivion of past differences, and a hearty co-operation of the two Houses with each other, and with himself. Apologizing for being too ill to discourse more at length, he asked Lord Commissioner Fiennes to do so for him. The speech of Fiennes was essentially a continuation in the same strain, but with a gorgeousness and variety of metaphor, Biblical and poetical, in description of the new era of peace and its duties, utterly beyond the bounds of usual Parliamentary oratory even then, and to which Cromwell and the rest, with all their experience of metaphor from the pulpit, must have listened with astonishment. "Jacob, speaking to his son Joseph, said I had not thought to have seen thy face, and lo! God hath showed me thy seed, also: meaning his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. And may not many amongst us well say some years hence We had not thought to have seen a Chief Magistrate again among us, and lo! God hath shown us a Chief Magistrate in his Two Houses of Parliament? Now may the good God make them like Ephraim and Manasseh, that the Three Nations may be blessed in them, saying God made thee like these Two Houses of Parliament, which two, like Leah and Rachel, did build the House of God! May you do worthily in Ephrata, and be famous in Bethlehem!" There was more of the same kind, including a comparison of the new constitution of the Petition and Advice to the perfected eduction of the orderly universe out of chaos. It was the speech of a Puritan Jean Paul.¹

Which of the two Houses was Ephraim and which Manasseh in Fiennes's own fancy does not appear; but the Commons had already voted themselves to be Ephraim, and the Other House to be the questionable Manasseh. The Anti-Oliverians among them, now in the majority or nearly so, had resolved that their best policy, bound as they were by oath to the Protectorate and the new Constitution of the Petition and Advice generally, would be to question the powers of the new House as defined in the constituting document. The definition had been rather vague. The meaning had certainly been that the new House should be a legislative House, standing in very much the same relation to the Commons as the old House of Lords had done, and not merely a Judicial High Court for certain classes of cases, with general powers of advice to the Commons in the conduct of weighty affairs. This, however, was what the Anti-Oliverians in the Commons contended; and on this contention, if possible, they were to break down the Other House and so make a gap in the new Constitution. They had made a beginning even in the small matter of the relative claims of Mr. Smythe, their own new Clerk, and Mr. Scobell, as general "Clerk of the Parliament," to the possession of certain documents; but they found a better opportunity when, at their third sitting (Jan. 22, afternoon), they were informed that "some gentlemen were at the door with a message from the Lords." The message was merely a request that the Commons would join the Lords in an address to his Highness asking him to appoint a day of humiliation throughout the three nations; but, purporting to be from "the Lords," it cut very deep. By a majority of seventy-five to fifty-one it was resolved "That this House will send an answer by messengers of their own," i.e. that they would take time to consider the subject. Two more days passed, the House transacting some miscellaneous business, but nursing its resolution for a split; and, on Monday the 25th, lo! Sir Arthur Hasilrig among them, standing up prominently and insisting on being sworn and admitted to his seat. He had disdained the summons to the Other House, and his proper place was here! With some hesitation, he was duly sworn, and so was added to the group of Anti-Oliverian leaders already in the House. He, Thomas Scott, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, John Weaver, Sergeant Maynard, and one or two others, were thenceforth to head the opposition within doors. Outside there were in process of signature certain great petitions to the Commons House intended to widen the difference between it and the Protector.¹

At this point the Protector interposed. On the afternoon of the same day on which Hasilrig had taken his seat (Jan. 25) the Commons were summoned to the Banqueting House in Whitehall, to listen to another speech from his Highness (Speech XVII.), addressed to them and the Other House together. It opened with the phrase "My Lords and Gentlemen of thee Two Houses of Parliament," to obviate any objections there might be to the form of opening in the speech of five days before; and it was conceived in the same spirit of respectfulness to both Houses and anxiety for their support. But it expounded, more strongly and at more length than the former speech, the pressing reasons for unanimity now. It surveyed, first, the state of Europe generally, dwelling on the ominous combination of Roman Catholic interests everywhere, and the perils to the Protestant Cause from the disputes among the Protestant Powers, and especially from the hostility of the Danes and the Dutch to the heroic King of Sweden, who had "adventured his all against the Popish Interest In Poland." It declared the vital concern of Great Britain in all this, if only because an invasion of Great Britain in behalf of the Stuarts was a settled part of the Anti-Protestant programme. "You have accounted yourselves happy in being environed with a great Ditch from all the world beside. Truly, you will not be able to keep your Ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma." Then, turning to the state of affairs at home, he insisted on the necessity of a general union in defence of the existing settlement. One Civil War more, he said, would throw the nation into a universal confusion, with or without a restoration of the Stuarts, and, if with such a restoration, then with consequences to some that they did not now contemplate. He made no express reference to the proceedings in the Commons of the last few days, but implored both Houses to abstain from dissensions, stand on the basis to which he and they had sworn, and join with him in real work.¹

The appeal to the Commons was in vain. After three or four more meetings, they resumed, Jan. 29, the subject of the answer to be returned to the message of the 22nd from the Other House. By a vote of eighty-four to seventy-eight they resolved to go into Grand Committee on the subject. This having been done, they resolved, Jan. 30, "That the first thing to be debated shall be the Appellation to be given to the persons to whom the answer shall be made." On this one point there was a protracted debate of four days, the oppositionists insisting that the appellation should be simply "The Other House," as in the Petition and Advice, and the Oliverians contending that that was no name at all, that it had been employed in the Petition and Advice only as a blank to be afterwards filled up, and that the proper name would be "The House of Lords." In one of two divisions on Feb. 3 the votes were eighty-seven against eighty-six; in the other they were ninety-three against eighty-seven. These divisions, however, were merely incidental, and the debate was still going on fiercely on Thursday, Feb. 4. Scott had spoken and was trying to speak again in defiance of rule, with Hasilrig backing him, when "Mr. Speaker informed the House that the Usher of the Black Rod was at the door with a message from his Highness." Hasilrig seems to have been still on his feet when the Black Rod, having been admitted, delivered his message: "Mr. Speaker, His Highness is in the Lords House, and desires to speak with you." Thither they adjourned, and there his Highness briefly addressed the two Houses once again (Speech XVIII.). Or rather he addressed both Houses only through about half of his speech; for, at a particular point, he turned deliberately to the Commons and proceeded thus: "I do not speak to these Gentlemen, or Lords, or whatsoever you will call them; I speak not this to them, but to you. You advised me to come into this place [the Second Protectorship], to be in a capacity by your advice. Yet, instead of owning a thing, some must have I know not what; and you have not only disjointed yourselves but the whole Nation, which is in likelihood of running into more confusion in these fifteen or sixteen days that you have sat than it hath been from the rising of the last session to this day. Through the intention of devising a Commonwealth again, that some people might be the men that might rule all! And they are endeavouring to engage the Army to carry that thing. And hath that man been true to this Nation, whosoever he be, especially that hath taken an oath, thus to prevaricate? These designs have been made among the Army, to break and divide us. I speak this in the presence of some of the Army: that these things have not been according to God, nor according to truth, pretend what you will. These things tend to nothing else but the playing of the King of Scots' game (if I may so call him); and I think myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent it. That which I told you in the Banqueting House was true: that there are preparations of force to invade us, God is my witness, it hath been confirmed to me since, not a day ago, that the King of Scots hath an Army at the water's side, ready to be shipped for England. I have it from those who have been eyewitnesses of it. And, while it is doing, there are endeavours from some who are not far from this place to stir up the people of this town into a tumulting—what if I said into a rebellion? And I hope I shall make it appear to be no better, if God assist me. It hath been not only your endeavour to pervert the Army while you have been sitting, and to draw them to state the question about a Commonwealth; but some of you have been listing of persons, by commission of Charles Stuart, to join with any insurrection that may be made. And what is like to come upon this, the enemy being ready to invade us, but even present blood and confusion? And, if this be so, I do assign it to this cause: your not assenting to what you did invite me to by your Petition and Advice, as that which might prove the Settlement of the Nation. And, if this be the end of your sitting, and this be your carriage, I think it high time that an end be put to your sitting. And I DO DISSOLVE THIS PARLIAMENT. And let God be judge between you and me!"¹

Thus, after a second session of only sixteen days, the Second Parliament of the Protectorate was at an end. Cromwell's explanation of his reasons for dissolving it is perfectly accurate. Through the first session the Parliament, as a Single House Parliament, had, by the exclusion of about ninety of those returned to it, been a thoroughly Oliverian body, and its chief work had been a reconstitution of the Protectorate on a definite basis; but through the second session this Parliament, though nominally the same, had been split into two Houses, the House of Lords wholly Oliverian, but the House of Commons, by the loss of a number of its former members and the readmission of the excluded, turned into an Anti-Oliverian conclave. Fourteen folio pages of the Commons Journals are the only remaining formal records of the short and unfortunate Session. Oliver's Lords can have had little more to do than meet and look at each other.

There was to be no Parliament more while Cromwell lived. For seven months onwards from Feb. 4, 1657-8, he was to govern, one may say, more alone than ever, more as a sovereign, and with all his energies in performance of the sovereignty more tremendously on the strain.

There was still, of course, the Council, now essentially a Privy Council, meeting twice or thrice a week, or sometimes on special summons, and with this novelty in the public style and title of the councillors, that those of them who had been in the Upper House of the late Parliament retained the name of "Lords." Lord President Lawrence, Lord Richard Cromwell, Lord Fleetwood, Lord Montague, Lord Commissioner Fiennes, Lord Desborough, Lord Viscount Lisle, the Earl of Mulgrave, Lord Rous, Lord Skippon, Lord Pickering (alias "The Lord Chamberlain"), Lord Strickland, Lord Wolseley, Lord Sydenham, Lord Jones (alias "Mr. Comptroller"), and Mr. Secretary Thurloe: such would have been the minute of a complete sederunt of the Council when, it resumed duty after the dissolution of the Parliament. There never was such a complete sederunt: ten out of the sixteen was the average attendance, rising sometimes to twelve. Occasionally Cromwell came to one of their meetings; but generally they transacted business among themselves to his order, and communicated with him privately. A few of the Councillors were more closely in his confidence than the rest; Whitlocke, though not of the Council, was often consulted about special affairs; and the man-of-all-work, closeted with his Highness daily, was Mr. Secretary Thurloe. His Highness had, moreover, a private secretary, Mr. William Malyn, who had been with him already for several years.¹

As Cromwell had intimated in his Dissolution Speech, his first labour after the dissolution was to attack that vast complication of dangers of which he had already sure knowledge, and which he declared to have been caused, or brought to a head, by the wretched conduct of the Commons through their sixteen days of session, and by the positive treason of some of their number. He had described the dangers as gathering from two quarters, though they were already interrelated and would run together at last. There was "the King of Scots' game," or the plot of a Royalist commotion in conjunction with a threatened invasion of the Spanish-Stuartist Army; and there was the design of a great insurrection of Old Commonwealth's men for a subversion of the Protectorate and a return to the pure Single-House Republic. Of the first danger he had said, "I think myself bound before God to do what I can to prevent it"; the second he had denounced as rebellion, saying, "I hope I shall make it appear to be no better, if God assist me." For three or four months he was to be engaged in making good these words; but he had begun already. On February 6, at a great meeting of the Army-officers in the Banqueting House, he had discoursed to them impressively for two hours, abashing two or three that had been tampered with, and receiving from the rest assurances of their eternal fidelity. Ludlow says that, for several nights successively, before or after this meeting, Cromwell himself took the inspection of the watch among the soldiers at Whitehall.¹

As always, Cromwell's tenderness towards the Republicans or Old Commonwealth's men appeared now in his dealings with the new commotion on that side. Colonel Packer and Captain Gladman, two disaffected officers in his own regiment of horse, appear to have been merely dismissed from their commands; and one hears besides of but a few arrests, with no farther consequences than examination before the Council and temporary imprisonment. Harrison was again arrested, the Fifth-Monarchy men having, of course, lent themselves to the agitation, and Harrison having this time, Whitlocke says, been certainly "deep in it." Among the others arrested were Mr. John Carew, the Regicide and Councillor under the Commonwealth, John Portman, who had been secretary to Blake in the Fleet, a Hugh Courtney, and John Rogers, a preacher. There seems to have been no thought of any proceedings against Hasilrig, Scott, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, and the other Anti-Cromwellian leaders in the late Parliament. This, however, is less remarkable than that, with information in Cromwell's possession that some of the members of the Parliament, nominally Commonwealth's men, had actually commissions from Charles II. and were enlisting persons under such commissions for any possible insurrection whatever, he had contented himself with announcing the fact in his Dissolution Speech and so merely signifying to the culprits that their lives were in his hands.¹

The Royalist project and its ramifications were really very formidable. A Spanish Army of about 8000 men, with Charles II. and his refugees among them, was gathered about Bruges, Brussels, and Ostend, with vessels of transport provided; and the burst of a great Royalist Insurrection at home, in Sussex, London, and elsewhere, was to coincide with the invasion from abroad. The Duke of Ormond himself had come to London in disguise, to observe matters and make preparations. He was in London for three weeks, living in the house of a Roman Catholic surgeon in Drury Lane, till Cromwell, who knew the fact, generously sent Lord Broghill to him with a hint to be gone. This was early in March, some days after a proclamation "commanding all Papists and other persons who have been of the late King's party or his son's to depart out of the cities of London and Westminster," and another proclamation forbidding such persons living in the country to stir more than five miles from their fixed places of abode. On the 12th of that month the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of the City of London met his Highness and the Army-officers by appointment at Whitehall, where his Highness explained to them at length the nature of the crisis, informed them particularly of the strength of the Flanders army of invasion, Ormond's visit, &c., and solemnly committed to them the safety of the City. The response of the City authorities was extremely loyal.¹

On the principle that the country could not afford for ever this periodical trouble of a Royalist Conspiracy, and that some examples of severity might make the present upheaving the last of the kind, Cromwell had resolved on a few such examples. His information, through Thurloe and otherwise, was unerring. He knew, and had known for some time, who were the members of the so-called "Sealed Knot," i.e. that secret association of select Royalists resident in England who were in closest correspondence with Hyde and the other Councillors of Charles abroad, and were chiefly trusted by them for the management of the cause at home, Indeed, Sir Richard Willis, one of the chiefs of the "Sealed Knot," had for some time been in understanding with Cromwell, pledged to him by a peculiar compact, and revealing to him all that passed among the Royalists. Hence, before the end of April, some of the members of the "Sealed Knot," and a number of leading Royalists besides, had been lodged in the Tower. Among them were Colonel John Russell (brother of the Earl of Bedford), Colonel John White, Sir William Compton, Sir William Clayton, Sir Henry Slingsby (a prisoner in Hull since the Royalist rising of 1654-5, but negotiating there desperately of late to secure the officers and the town itself for Charles), Sir Humphrey Bennett, Mr. John Mordaunt (brother of the Earl of Peterborough), Dr. John Hewit (a London Episcopal clergyman), Mr. Thomas Woodcock, and a Henry Mallory. It was part of the understanding with Willis that several of the prisoners, Willis's particular friends, should be ultimately released. For trial were selected Slingsby, Clayton, Bennett, Mordaunt, Woodcock, Mallory, and Dr. Hewit. The trials were in Westminster Hall, in May and June, before a great High Court of Justice, consisting of all the judges, some of the great state officers, and a hundred and thirty commissioners besides, all in conformity with an Act of the late Parliament prescribing the mode of trial for such prime offences. Five of the seven were either acquitted or spared: only Slingsby and Dr. Hewit were brought to the scaffold. They were beheaded on Tower Hill, June 8. Much influence was exerted in behalf of Hewit; but, besides that he had been deeply implicated, he had been contumacious in the Court, challenging its competency, and refusing to plead. Prynne had stood by him, and prepared his demurrer.—From the evidence collected in Dr. Hewit's case it appeared that he, if not Ormond, had been calculating on the co-operation of Fairfax, Lambent, Sir William Waller, and a great many other persons of name, up and down the country, not included among those whom Cromwell had seen fit to arrest. As Thurloe distinctly says, "It's certain Sir William Waller was fully engaged," the omission, of that veteran commander from the number must have been an act of grace. About Lambert the speculation seems to have been absurd; and, though Cromwell must have known that Fairfax was now inclining generally towards a Restoration, he cannot have believed anything stronger at present in his case. There was no public reference to such high personages; nor, with the exception of some friendly expostulation by the Protector with a young Mr. John Stapley of Sussex (son of Stapley the Regicide and Councillor of the Commonwealth), who had been lured into the business, was any account taken of the other miscellaneous persons in Hewit's list of reputable sympathisers. It was enough for Cromwell to know who had swerved so far, and to have made examples of Hewit himself and Slingsby.—These two would have been the only victims but for a wild sub-conspiracy in the City of London while the trials of Hewit and Slingsby were in progress. A few desperate cavaliers about town, the chief of whom were a Sir William Leighton, a Colonel Deane, and a Colonel Manley, holding commissions from Charles, had met several times at the Mermaid Tavern and elsewhere, and had arranged for a midnight tumult on Saturday the 15th of May. They were to attack the guard at St. Paul's, seize the Lord Mayor, raise a conflagration near the Tower, &c. The hour had come, and the conspirators were in the Mermaid Tavern for their final arrangements, when lo! the trainbands on the alert all round them and Barkstead riding through the streets with a train of five small cannon. A good many were arrested, thirty of them London prentices. Six of the principals were condemned July 2, of whom one was hanged, two were hanged, drawn, and quartered, and three were reprieved. For the prentices there was all clemency.¹

Though the prosecutions of the Royalist plotters were not concluded till the beginning of July, all real danger from the plot itself had been over in March or April, when Ormond was back in Bruges with the report that his mission had been abortive and that Cromwell was too strong. We must go back, therefore, for the other threads of our narrative.

The death of Mr. Robert Rich, Cromwell's son-in-law since the preceding November, had occurred Feb. 16, 1657-8, only twelve days after the dissolution of the Parliament. Cromwell, saddened by the event himself, had found time even then to write letters of condolence and comfort to the young man's grandfather, the Earl of Warwick. The Earl's reply, dated March 11, is extant. "My pen and my heart," it begins, "were ever your Lordship's servants; now they are become your debtors. This paper cannot enough confess my obligation, and much less discharge it, for your seasonable and sympathising letters, which, besides the value they deserve from so worthy a hand, express such faithful affections, and administer such Christian advice, as renders them beyond measure welcome and dear to me." Then, after pious expression at once of his grief and of his resignation, he concludes with words that have a historical value. "My Lord," he says, "all this is but a broken echo of your pious counsel, which gives such ease to my oppressed mind that I can scarce forbid my pen being tedious. Only it remembers your Lordship's many weighty and noble employments, which, together with your prudent, heroic, and honourable managery of them, I do here congratulate as well as my grief will give me leave. Others' goodness is their own; yours is a whole country's, yea three kingdoms'—for which you justly possess interest and renown with wise and good men: virtue is a thousand escutcheons. Go on, my Lord; go on happily, to love Religion, to exemplify it. May your Lordship long continue an instrument of use, a pattern of virtue, and a precedent of glory!" On the 19th of April 1658, or not six weeks after the letter was written, the old Earl himself died. By that time the louring appearances had rolled away, and Cromwell's "prudent, heroic, and honourable managery" had again been widely confessed.¹

Through all the turmoil of the proceedings against the plotters Cromwell had not abated his interest in his bold enterprise in Flanders, or in his alliance with the French generally. That alliance having been renewed for another year (March 28, 1658), reinforcements were sent to the English auxiliary army to fit it for farther work in the Netherlands. Sir John Reynolds, the first commander of that army, having been unfortunately drowned in returning to England on a short leave of absence (Dec. 5, 1657), the Governorship of Mardike had come into the hands of Major-General Morgan, while the command in the field had been assigned to Lockhart, hitherto the Protector's Ambassador only, though soldiering had been formerly his more familiar business. In conjunction with Turenne, Lockhart had been pushing on the war, and at length (May 1658) the two armies, and Montagu's fleet, were engaged in the exact service which Cromwell most desired, and Lockhart had been always urging. This was the siege of Dunkirk, with a view to the possession of that town, as well as Mardike, by the English. To be near the scene of such important operations, Louis XIV. and Cardinal Mazarin had taken up their quarters at Calais; and, not to miss the opportunity of such near approach of the French monarch to the shores of England, Cromwell despatched his son-in-law Viscount Falconbridge on a splendid embassy of compliment and congratulation. He landed at Calais on the 29th of May, was received by both King and Cardinal with such honours as they had never accorded to an ambassador before, and returned on the 3rd of June to make his report. The very next day there was a tremendous battle close to Dunkirk between the French-English forces under Turenne and Lockhart and a Spanish army which had come for the relief of the besieged town under Don John of Austria and the Prince of Condé, with the Dukes of York and Gloucester in their retinue. Mainly by the bravery of Lockhart's "immortal six thousand," the victory of the French and English was complete; and, though the Marquis of Leyda, the Spanish Governor of Dunkirk, maintained the defence valiantly, the town had to surrender on the 14th of June, two days after the Marquis had been mortally wounded in a sally. Next day, according to the Treaty with Cromwell, the town was at once delivered to Lockhart, Louis XIV. himself, who was on the spot, handing him the keys. Already, while that event was unknown, and merely to reciprocate the compliment of Falconbridge's embassy to Calais, there had been sent across the Channel, in the name of Louis XIV., the Duke de Crequi, first Gentleman of his Bedchamber, and M. Mancini, the nephew of Cardinal Mazarin, "accompanied by divers of the nobility of France and many gentlemen of quality." Met at Dover by Fleetwood and an escort, they arrived in London June 16, and remained there till the 21st, having audiences with his Highness, delivering to him letters from Louis and the Cardinal, and entertained by him with all possible magnificence. While they were there, a special envoy joined them, announcing the capture of Dunkirk; and so the joy was complete. There was nothing the French King would not do to show his regard for the great Protector; and, but for his Majesty's illness at that moment from small-pox, the Cardinal himself would have come over instead of sending his nephew. And why should there not be a renewal of the Treaty after the expiry of the present term, to secure another year or two of that co-operation of the English Army and Fleet with Turenne which had led already to such excellent results? What if Ostend, as well as Dunkirk and Mardike, were to be made over to the Protector? These were suggestions for the future, and meanwhile new successes were added to the capture of Dunkirk. Town after town in Flanders, including Gravelines at last, yielded to Turenne, or other generals, and received French garrisons, and through the summer autumn the Spaniards were so beset in Flanders that an expedition thence for the invasion of England in the interest of Charles Stuart, or in any other interest, was no longer even a possibility.¹

While thus turning to account the alliance with the only Catholic power with which there could be safe dealing, the Protector clung firmly to his idea of a League among the Protestant Powers themselves. If Burnet's information is correct, it was about this time that he contemplated the institution in London of "a Council for the Protestant Religion in opposition to the Congregation De Propaganda Fide at Rome." It was to sit at Chelsea College: there were to be seven Councillors, with a large yearly fund at their disposal; the world was to be mapped out into four great regions; and for each region there was to be a Secretary at £500 a year, maintaining a correspondence with that region, ascertaining the state of Religion in it, and any exigency requiring interference. That remained only a project; but meanwhile there was the agency of Jephson with the King of Sweden, of Meadows with the King of Denmark, of Downing with the United Provinces, and of other Envoys here and there, all working for peace among the Protestant States and joint action against the common enemy. In the Council Order Books for May 1658 one comes also upon new considerations of the old subject of the Protestants of the Piedmontese valleys, with a fresh remittance of £3000 for their relief, and an advance at the same time of £500 out of the Piedmontese Fund for the kindred purpose of relieving twenty distressed Bohemian families. Indeed in that month his Highness was again at white heat on the subject of his favourite Piedmontese. The Treaty of Pignerol, by which the persecuting Edict of 1655 had been recalled and liberty of worship again yielded to the poor Vaudois (ante pp. 43-44), had gradually been less and less regarded; there were new troubles to the Vaudois from the House of Savoy; there were even signs of a possible repetition in the valleys of all the former horrors. How to prevent that was a serious thought with Cromwell amid all his other affairs; and he made his most effective stroke by an immediate appeal to the French King. On the 26th of May there went to his Majesty one of Milton's Latin State Letters in the Protector's name, adjuring him, by his own honour and by the faith of their alliance, to save the poor Piedmontese and secure the Treaty which had been made in their behalf by former French intervention; and on the same day there went a letter to Lockhart urging him to his utmost diligence in the matter, and suggesting that the French King should incorporate the Piedmontese valleys with his own dominion, giving the Duke of Savoy some bit of territory with a Catholic population in exchange. Reaching Louis XIV. and Lockhart at the moment of the great success before Dunkirk, these letters accomplished their object. The will of France was signified at Turin, and the Protestants of the Valleys had another respite.¹

Were one asked what subject of home concern had the first place in Cromwell's attention through all the events and transactions that have hitherto been noticed, the answer must still be the same for this as for all the previous portions of his Protectorate. It was "The Propagation of the Gospel," with all that was then implied in that phrase as construed by himself.

As regarded England and Wales, the phrase meant, all but exclusively, the sustenance, extension, and consolidation of Cromwell's Church Establishment. The Trustees for the better Maintenance of Ministers, as well as the Triers and Ejectors, were still at work; and in the Council minutes of the summer of 1658, just as formerly, there are orders for augmentations of ministers' stipends, combinations of parishes and chapelries, and the like. Substantially, the Established Church had been brought into a condition nearly approaching Cromwell's ideal; but he had still notions of more to be done for it in one direction or another, and especially in the direction of wider theological comprehension. He did not despair of seeing his great principle of concurrent endowment yet more generally accepted among those who were really and evangelically Protestant. Much would depend on the nature of that Confession of Faith which Article XI. of the Petition and Advice had required or promised as a standard of what should be considered qualifying orthodoxy for the Church of the Protectorate. For such a purpose the Westminster Confession of Faith, even though its doctrinal portions might stand much as they were, could hardly suffice as a whole. That Confession was to be recast, or a new one framed. So the Petition and Advice had provided or suggested; but it may be doubted whether Cromwell was very anxious for any such formal definition of the creed of his Established Church. He preferred the broad general understanding which all men had, with himself, as to what constituted sound Evangelical Christianity, and he had more trust in administration in detail through his Triers and Ejectors than in the application of formulas of orthodoxy. Here, however, Owen and the other Independent divines most in his confidence appear to have differed from him. They felt the want of some such confession and agreement for Association and Discipline as might suit at least the Congregationalists of the Established Church, and be to them what the Westminster Confession was to the Presbyterians. "From the first, all or at least the generality of our churches," they said, "have been in a manner like so many ships, though holding forth the same general colours, yet launched singly, and sailing apart and alone on the vast ocean of these tumultuous times, and exposed to every wind of doctrine, under no other conduct than that of the word and spirit, and their particular elders and principal brethren, without association among themselves, or so much as holding out common lights to others to know where they were." A petition to this effect, though not in these terms, having been presented to his Highness, he reluctantly yielded. He allowed a preliminary meeting of representatives of the Congregational churches in and about London to be held on June 21, 1658, and circular letters to be sent out to all the Congregational churches in England and Wales convoking a Synod at the Savoy on the 29th of September. The Confession of Faith, if any, to be drawn up by this Synod was not, of course, to be the comprehensive State Confession foreshadowed in Article XI. of the Petition and Advice, but only the voluntary agreement of the Congregationalists or Independents for themselves. In fact, to all appearance, if the harmonious comprehension of moderate Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, within one and the same Church, was to be signified by written symbols as well as carried out practically, this could be done only by a plan of concurrent confessions justifying the concurrent endowments. Even for that, it would seem, Cromwell was now prepared. Yet he was a little dubious about the policy of the coming Synod, and certainly was as much resolved as ever that Synods and other ecclesiastical assemblies should be only a permitted machinery for the denominations severally, and that the Civil Magistrate should determine what denominations could be soldered together to make a suitable State-Church, and should supervise and make fast the junctions.¹

There is very striking evidence of Cromwell's attention at this time to the spiritual needs of Scotland in particular.—Early in 1657 we left Mr. James Sharp in London as agent for the Scottish Resolutioner clergy, and Principal Gillespie of Glasgow, Mr. James Guthrie, Mr. James Simpson, and Johnstone of Warriston, with the Marquis of Argyle in the background, opposing the clever Sharp, and soliciting his Highness's favour for the Scottish Protesters or Remonstrants (ante pp. 115-116). Both deputations had remained on in London perseveringly, Sharp making interest with the Protector through Broghill; Thurloe, and the London Presbyterian ministers, while Owen, Lockyer, and the rest of the Independent ministers, with Lambert and Fleetwood, took part rather with the agents of the Protesters. Wearied with listening to the dispute personally, Cromwell had referred it to a mixed committee of twelve English Presbyterians and Independents, and at length had told both parties to "go home and agree among themselves." Sharp, Simpson, and Guthrie had, accordingly, returned to Scotland before the autumn of 1657; and, though Gillespie, Warriston, and Argyle were left behind, it was difficult to say that either party had won the advantage. Baillie, indeed, writing from Glasgow after Sharp's return, could report that the Protesters had, on the whole, been foiled, and chiefly by the instrumentality of "that very worthy, pious, wise, and diligent young man, Mr. James Sharp." But, on the other hand, the Protesters had obtained some favours. As far as one can discern, Cromwell's judgment as between the two parties of Scottish Kirkmen had come to be that they were to be treated as a Tory majority and a pugnacious Whig minority, whose differences would do no harm if they were both kept under proper control, and that both together formed such a Presbyterian body as might suitably possess, and yet divide, the Church of Scotland. For, as has been remarked already, Cromwell, in his conservatism, had come, on the whole, to be of opinion that the national clergy of Scotland must be left massively Presbyterian, and that it would not do to weld into the Scottish Establishment, as into the English, Baptists, or even ordinary professing Independents, in any considerable number. This would be bad news for those Scottish Independents and Baptists who had naturally expected encouragement under Cromwell's rule, but had already been disappointed. It would be the common policy of the Resolutioners and Protesters to keep or drive such erratic spirits out of the Kirk.¹—Whether because the long stay of the Scottish deputations in London had turned much of Cromwell's thoughts towards Scotland, or simply because his own anxiety for the "Propagation, of the Gospel" everywhere in his dominions, had led his eyes at last to that portion of Great Britain, we have now to record one of Cromwell's designs for Scotland worthy of strong mark even in the total history of his Protectorate. On Thursday, April 15, 1658, there being present In the Council the Lord President Lawrence, Lord Richard Cromwell, the Earl of Mulgrave, and Lords Meetwood, Wolseley, Sydenham, Lisle, Strickland and Jones, the following draft was agreed to:—"Oliver, by the grace of God Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, To our well-beloved Council in Scotland greeting: Whereas for about the space of one hundred years last past the Gospel, blessed be God! hath been plentifully preached in the Lowlands of the said nation, and competent maintenance provided for the ministers there, yet little or no care hath been taken for a very numerous people inhabiting in the Highlands by the establishing of a ministry or maintenance,—where the greatest part have scarce heard whether there be an Holy Ghost or not, though there be some in several parts, as We are informed, that hunger and thirst after the means of salvation,—and that there is a concealed maintenance detained in unrighteousness, and diverted from the right ends to the sole benefit of particular persons; And being also informed that there hath been much revenue for many years together in the late King's time and since concealed and detained from Us by such persons as have no right or title thereunto, and that some ministers that were acquainted with the Highland language have in a late summer season visited those parts and been courteously used by many professing there breathings after the Gospel: We do therefore, in consideration of their sad condition, the great honour and glory of God, and the good that may redound to the souls of many poor ignorant creatures, Will and Require you, with all care, industry and conveniency, to find out a way and means for the Planting of the Gospel in those parts, and that, in pursuance thereof and the better carrying on of so pious a work, our Barons of our Exchequer in Scotland do search and find out £600 per annum of concealed estates and revenues belonging to Us, or that may belong to Us and our Successors, and issue forth and pay the same unto such person or persons as by our said Council shall be nominated and appointed, out of such concealed rents or any other concealed revenues whatsoever, quarterly or half-yearly as there shall be cause, by and with their assent and approbation, to the only use and end aforesaid. For which so doing this shall be your and their warrant. Witness Ourself at our Palace at Westminster the —— day —— 1658." This does not seem to have sufficed for his Highness; for on Tuesday, May 4, the Council returned to the subject and prepared another draft, beginning, "Forasmuch as We, taking into consideration the sad condition of our People in Scotland living in the Highlands, for want of the Preaching of the Gospel and Schools of Learning for training up of youth in Learning and Civility, whereby the inhabitants of those places in their lives and whole demeanour are little different from the most savage heathens," and ending with instructions that £1200 a year, or double the sum formerly proposed, should be set apart out of still recoverable rents and revenues of alienated Chaplaincies, Deaneries, &c. of the old Popish and Episcopal Church of Scotland, and applied to the purposes of preaching and education in the Highlands. The sum, in the Scotland of that time, might go as far as £7000 or £8000 a year now, though in England it would have been worth only about £4200 of present value. Spent on an effective Gaelic mission of travelling pastors, and on a few well-planted schools, it might have accomplished a good deal.²—Since the beginning of the Protectorate there had been some care in finding new funds for the Scottish Universities as well as for the English. Principal Gillespie of Glasgow had procured a grant for the University of that city (Vol. IV. p. 565), and something had been done for University-reform in Aberdeen. Accordingly, that Edinburgh might not complain, it was now agreed, at a meeting of Council, July 15, 1658, his Highness himself present; to issue an order beginning, "Know ye that We, taking into our consideration the condition of the University of Edinburgh, and that (being but of late foundation, viz. since the Reformation of Religion in Scotland) the rents thereof are exceedingly small," and concluding by putting £200 a year at the disposal of the Town Council of Edinburgh, "being the founders and undoubted patrons of the said University," to be applied for University purposes with the advice and consent of the Masters and Regents. The gift, it appears, had been promised to Principal Leighton, when he had been in London, some time before, on one of his yearly journeys for his own bookish purposes, and certainly neither as Resolutioner nor Protester. "Mr. Leighton does nought to count of, but looks about him in his chamber," is Baillie's characteristic fancy-sketch of Leighton when he was back in Edinburgh and the £200 a year had become a certainty; but he adds that the saint had shown more temper than usual at finding that Mr. Sharp had contrived that £100 of the sum should go to Mr. Alexander Dickson (son of the Resolutioner David Dickson) who had been recently appointed to the Hebrew Professorship, and whom Leighton did not like. Indeed Baillie makes merry over the possibility that the poor £200 a year for Edinburgh might never be forthcoming, any more than the richer "flim-flams" Mr. Gillespie had obtained for Glasgow, though in them he confessed a more lively interest.³—Whether Scotland should ever actually handle the new endowments for her Universities, or the more important £1200 a year for the civilization of the Highlands, depended on the energy and ability of his Highness's Scottish Council in finding out ways and means. Broghill being still absent in England, but on the wing for Ireland, and Lockhart and others being also absent, the most active of the Councillors now left in Scotland, in association with Monk, seem to have been Lord Keeper Desborough, Swinton of Swinton, and Colonel Whetham. Since August 1656, by the Protector's orders, three had been a sufficient quorum of the Council. Monk, of course, was the real Vice-Protector. Scotland had become his home. He had lived for some years in the same house at Dalkeith, "pleasantly seated in the midst of a park," occupying all his spare time "with the pleasures of planting and husbandry"; he had buried his second son, an infant, in a chapel near; and to all appearance he might expect to spend the rest of his days where he was, a wealthy English soldier-farmer naturalized among the Scots, acquiring estates among them, and keeping them under quiet command.[4

Notes in this chapter