As at the trial of the King, so in the ejection of Parliament, Cromwell had been thrown back on the employment of military force. Legality was clearly against him on both occasions. Yet it must not be forgotten that he was the last to concur in the employment of force; and that there was much to be said for his assertion that the sitting members were no Parliament. Reduced by the flight of Royalists to the King in 1642 and by Pride's Purge in 1648, they had, after an existence of twelve years and a half, little remaining to them of that representative character which is the very being of a Parliament. At all events, this time, at least, Cromwell was secure of popular favour. Not a single voice was raised in defence of the expelled members. In the evening some wag scrawled on the door of the Parliament House: "This House to be let unfurnished". The Parliament disappeared amidst general derision. For all that, the work before Cromwell was one of enormous—perhaps even of hopeless—difficulty. Without Parliament or King, the nation was thrown upon its own resources to reconstruct its institutions as best it might. It was inevitable that in such stress of storm it should hark back to the old paths, and should see no prospect of settled government, save in the restoration of the throne, or at least in the election of another Parliament. Yet this was the very thing that Cromwell and all who were associated with him most dreaded. It was but too probable that such a solution would sweep away not only Puritanism, but all hope of political reform. Everything for which the army had fought and for which the nation had suffered was at stake, and it was not in human nature—certainly not in Cromwell's nature—to make such a sacrifice without a struggle. That such a struggle could only be prolonged with the support of the army was self-evident. Cromwell, however, was the last of men to desire to establish a purely military government, and the army, to do it justice, was commanded by men who were, for the most part, desirous to support their general in the experiment of establishing a civil government which would have dispensed with the interference of military power. The tragedy—the glorious tragedy—of Cromwell's subsequent career lay in the impossibility of permanently checking the instincts of military politicians to intervene in favour of those guarantees regarded by them as indispensable for the maintenance of the cause which they had so long upheld with all their might.

Distrust of the constituencies was the prominent feature of Cromwell's next move. The compromise offered by him of the temporary establishment of a non-elective body to prepare a basis of settlement whilst Parliamentary institutions remained in abeyance, was now adopted by the officers. Lambert,—who advocated a scheme for establishing a Council of State, apparently with provision for the increased independence of the executive, together with the election of a Parliament with restricted functions,—was unable to enforce his views. A small Council of State was established to carry on current affairs, but it was in the Council of Officers that the main question of the constitution was to be determined. Cromwell, after some hesitation, rallied to a very different scheme which had been suggested by Harrison, the brilliant soldier who dreaded to see the government in the hands of any but the Saints. Cromwell, however, whilst accepting Harrison's views on the whole, determined to modify them, in order to make the new assembly something more than a group of pious fanatics. He was consequently now anxious that it should include notable personages—even Fairfax was suggested—who had contended against the King, but who had no connection with the extreme sections of the community which found favour in Harrison's eyes. It was eventually resolved that the Council of Officers should invite nominations from the Congregational Churches in each county, reserving to itself the power of rejecting persons so named, and also of adding names which found no place on the list. On June 8 the persons finally selected received writs issued in the name of Cromwell as Lord General. An attempt had been made to secure the inclusion not only of Fairfax but of Vane, but neither of them would accept a place in the new assembly.

On July 4 the nominees of the army took their seats at Westminster. Cromwell, at all events, threw himself entirely into the spirit of the occasion. In a long speech he manifested his delight at seeing the government at last entrusted to the hands of the godly. No such authority, he proclaimed triumphantly, had ever before been entrusted to men on the ground that they owned God and were owned by Him. For once the emotional side of his nature had gained the upper hand over his practical common-sense. In long detail he told of the misconduct of the late Parliament, and repelled the idea that he had had any intention of substituting his own authority for that of the discarded House. It had been incumbent on him and his colleagues 'not to grasp at the power ourselves, or to keep it in military hands, no, not for a day, but, as far as God enabled us with strength and ability, to put it into the hands of proper persons that might be called from the several parts of the nation'. "This necessity," he proceeded to aver; "and I hope we may say for ourselves, this integrity of concluding to divest the sword of all power in the civil administrations, hath been that that hath moved us to put you to this trouble." Then, enlarging on the providential character of the mission of the members of the new assembly, he urged them with many Scriptural quotations to take up their authority as men whom God had placed as rulers of the land. What, then, was to be said of that ideal of elected Parliaments, which had sunk so deeply into the minds of that generation? "If it were a time," he suggested, "to compare your standing with those that have been called by the suffrages of the people—which who can tell how soon God may fit the people for such a thing? None can desire it more than I! Would all were the Lord's people; as it was said, 'Would all the Lord's people were prophets': I would all were fit to be called." In time, indeed, this might be possible when the good and religious conduct of this assembly had won the people to the love of godliness. "Is not this the likeliest way to bring them to their liberties?" Finally, after much enforcement of the encouragements held forth by the Prophets and the Psalmists, he resigned all the power provisionally exercised by himself into the hands of his hearers, announcing to them that their power also was to be provisional. They were to hold it only till November 3, 1654, and then to give place to a second assembly to be elected by themselves—an assembly which was to sit for no more than a year, in which time it was to make provision for the future government of the country.

Contrary, as it would seem, to the intention of those by whom it had been called, the new assembly audaciously assumed the name of Parliament. Its real position being that of a mere body of nominees, Lilburne was once more brought into the field. In 1649 Lilburne had been tried and acquitted, but had subsequently been banished by the Long Parliament, which had added to its sentence a declaration that he would be guilty of felony if he, at any time, returned to England. He now reappeared in London, where he was sent to prison, again tried, and again acquitted. The line taken by him and his followers was that the so-called Parliament now in existence was no Parliament at all, as it was not elected by the people. With Cromwell's full consent, Lilburne was retained in confinement, being ultimately removed to Jersey, where no writ of habeas corpus could deliver him.

For a time Lilburne's attack consolidated the alliance between the Lord General and the nominees to whom political power had been entrusted. Yet it was not long before Cromwell's practical sense took alarm at their proceedings. It was indeed not the case, as has often been said, that the majority of the members were mere enthusiasts, but the enthusiasts settled down to Parliamentary work, seldom absenting themselves from the House, and being always ready to vote when a division was called; whilst those who distrusted them could not always be brought to a due sense of the importance of their Parliamentary duties, and were apt to be led away by interest or pleasure from supporting their opinions by their votes. Two questions were soon found to divide the parties, that of law reform, more especially the reform of Chancery, and that of a religious organisation other than compulsory uniformity under Bishops or Presbyters. On both these questions Cromwell was intensely interested, and there can be little doubt that if the nominated Parliament had conducted itself with due regard for practical exigencies, it would have retained his good-will to the end. Unfortunately this was not the case. It proposed a total abolition of the Court of Chancery, thus handing over to the hostile judges of the Common Law that system of equity which had been growing up with beneficial results for generations, whilst it also took in hand with a light heart the codification of the law, though not a single practising lawyer had a seat in the House, in the hope that 'the great volumes of law would come to be reduced into the bigness of a pocket book'. No wonder that Cromwell dropped into a friend's ear the words: "I am more troubled now with the fool than with the knave". No wonder either that in September he drew aside from Harrison, under whose influence he had decided in favour of summoning the nominees, and that he listened with greater respect to Lambert, the military representative of constitutionalism and the determined opponent of political fanaticism.

Cromwell's position was rendered difficult by his association with this ill-starred assembly. On September 14 a broadside was scattered in the streets charging him with treason to 'his Lords the people of England,' not because he had broken up the miserable remnant of the Long Parliament, but because he had stood in the way of the election of a new House, and it is highly probable that a large number of people who had nothing to do with the distribution of broadsides shared in this opinion. Still greater was the danger of an appeal to the army, with which the writers concluded. It was known that many of the soldiers, and even of the officers, were restive under the suspension of popular elections, and it was found necessary to secure submission by cashiering Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, who had formerly, as a cornet, carried off the King from Holmby House, and who now threw himself on the side of those who cried out for constitutional rights.

On the subject of Church organisation, Parliament was as subversive as on the subject of law reform, many of its members held with the Fifth Monarchy preachers, that the government of the State ought to be exclusively in the hands of the Saints, and, not unnaturally, concluded that they were themselves the Saints; thus taking a broad issue in defiance of the theory that the government ought to be administered or controlled by the elected representatives of the nation. The immediate dispute, however, turned on the unwillingness of the advanced party to continue any sort of endowment of the clergy. Cromwell, it is true, on more than one occasion had expressed himself strongly against the existing tithe system and would have been perfectly ready to concur in any plan for the removal of its abuses, or for substituting for it—as had been suggested in The Agreement of the People presented by the army—a more equitable mode of raising the money needed by the clergy. Further than that he was not likely to go, and matters were brought to a crisis by a resolution passed on November 17 for the abolition of patronage, and still more by the decision of the House on December 10—though only by a majority of two—to reject a scheme of Church-government founded in the main on the lines drawn by Owen, in which the payment of tithes was taken as a financial basis.

Some time before the last vote was taken, the principal officers, under Lambert's leadership, had had under consideration a plan of a written constitution in which the executive power was to be strengthened and conferred upon Cromwell with the title of King, whilst the legislative power was to be conferred on an elected assembly, thus embodying the ideas which had been enunciated by Cromwell in his conference with the lawyers and politicians at the end of 1651. When this constitution was complete it was shown to Cromwell, who objected to the royal title, and who seems also to have been unwilling to have anything to do with another violent dissolution. On December 10, when the vote on Church organisation was taken, Lambert and his allies found their opportunity. It is probable that they promised Cromwell that the House should be dissolved by its own action, and that, on receiving this assurance, he preferred not to be informed of the course by which this desirable end was to be attained. The course indeed was simple enough. The conservative reformers, if they chose to attend in anything like their full strength, were in a majority, and on the 12th they got up early and flocked to the House, where, before their bewildered opponents could rally in force, they immediately voted that Parliament should resign its powers into the hands of the Lord General. Then, starting for Whitehall in procession with the Speaker at their head, they announced to Cromwell the decision they had taken. Their advanced colleagues kept their seats, but upon attempting to remonstrate were expelled by a body of soldiers. As in the absence of the Speaker they could not technically be considered to be a House, those who interfered were able to aver, without literary untruthfulness, that there had been no forcible dissolution of Parliament.

In a very short time Cromwell had agreed with the officers on the constitution to be adopted under the name of The Instrument of Government. The executive power was to reside in a Lord Protector and Council, the members of which were to be appointed for life, Cromwell being named as the first Protector. The legislative power was assigned without restriction to a Parliament elected by constituencies formed, so far as the counties were concerned, upon a new franchise, the franchise in the boroughs being left in its old anomalous condition. This latter concession to prejudice was, however, of less importance, as a sweeping redistribution of seats, copied with little alteration from the scheme put forward in The Agreement of the People, largely increased the number of the county members, and disfranchised in equally large numbers the smaller boroughs which had fallen under the influence of the country gentlemen. The Parliament thus constituted was to meet once in three years and to sit at least for five months. Any Bill passed by this body was to be suspended for twenty days to give an opportunity for the Protector to explain objections he might entertain to it. If Parliament refused to listen to his objections, the Bill became law in spite of him, provided that it contained nothing contrary to the Instrument itself. The negative voice about which so much had been heard in the last years of Charles I. was, therefore, not assigned to the Protector. For all that, the control over the executive is of greater importance to the development of representative institutions than legislative independence, and in this respect the hold of Parliament over the executive was of the flimsiest description, consisting merely of the right to propose six names whenever there was a vacancy in the Council, out of which the Council would select two, and the Protector again make his choice between the two. Even the financial arrangements, through which Parliaments usually make their way to power, were settled in such a way as to debar the elected House from obtaining even indirect control. It is true that the Instrument started with the sweeping generalisation that 'no tax, charge, or imposition' was to be 'laid upon the people but by common consent in Parliament,' but this statement was followed by a clause assigning to the Protector £200,000 for civil expenses, besides as much as was needed for keeping up the navy, as well as an army of 30,000 men, and this sum, to which no definite limits were placed, was to be raised out of the customs 'and such other ways and means as shall be agreed upon by the Protector and Council'. As to the army and navy thus secured, the Protector was to dispose and order them with the consent of Parliament during its short session, but during all the rest of the three years with the consent of the Council only. It would, however, be a mistake to say that the Instrument established absolute government in England. The Protector was bound to act under the control of the Council, and though scarcely any record of the political action of that body has been preserved, there is enough to show that whilst Cromwell's personal influence over it was necessarily great, it was by no means a mere tool in his hands. The constitutional control to which the Protector was subjected was therefore a real one, though that control was in the hands of a body meeting in secret and sufficiently self-centred to make no bid for popularity by the speeches made in the course of discussions amongst its members, as a more popular assembly would have done. Finally, religious liberty was secured for all congregations which did not admit 'Popery or Prelacy'; whilst the right of issuing ordinances with the force of law was granted to the Protector and Council till the first Parliament met.

It has frequently been urged that the Instrument was the earliest example of that system of fixed constitutions, of which the most notable instance is that of the United States, and must therefore rank with such constitutions rather than with the system of Parliamentary supremacy which was ultimately adopted in England. The comparison with the American constitution, however, can only stand with those who are resolved to fix their attention on similarities and to ignore differences. The Instrument, it is true, resembles the Constitution of the United States in refusing to submit the holders of executive authority to the constant control of the legislature, and in setting forth the relations between the bodies of the State in a written document. On more important points there is a world-wide distinction. In America, the whole federal constitution is redolent of popular control. Every four years the President is re-elected or replaced, and though Congress cannot dismiss a President except by a judicial impeachment, it has complete control over the finances, and can leave him without supply. Add to this the ingrained habit of the American people in giving vent to popular opinion, and in pressing it on the notice of the government which it has given to itself, and we shall find little cause to seek in the Constitution of the United States for a justification of the Instrument—a document drawn up by soldiers and endowing the chief of the State and his councillors with a lifelong tenure of office, with an abundant armed force, and with a power of taxation adequate to all ordinary requirements in time of peace. The question raised by the Instrument was not whether the national control was to be exercised indirectly through Parliament, or directly through a popular vote, but whether it should be exercised at all. The constitutional principles alike respected in England and America are diametrically opposed to those on which the government of the Protectorate was founded.

On December 16, 1653, Oliver was installed at Westminster as Lord Protector under the conditions of the Instrument. His Council consisted of seven officers and eight civilians, the most notable of the latter being Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper—better known by the title long afterwards conferred on him by Charles II. as the Earl of Shaftesbury—who had been an active member of the Councils formed after the break-up of the Long Parliament. Little as is known of his actions during this period of his life, his rallying to the Protectorate can only be explained as the result of the conviction that Oliver was in earnest in his intention of giving to the new government a preponderatingly civilian character, and of keeping it out of the hands of fanatics on one hand, and of soldiers on the other. In Thurloe, who had acted as Secretary to the Council since the spring of 1652, the Protector acquired an official whose ability was beyond dispute, who was appalled by no labours, and one who, with the aid of the network of spies whose poverty he utilised, was keen-sighted in penetrating the secrets of conspirators at home and abroad. The Protectorate was at least placed beyond immediate danger by the adhesion of the army and the fleet. Scarcely less important was the concurrence of the judges, amongst them that honourable man and eminent lawyer Matthew Hale, who had won Oliver's approbation by his services in the cause of law-reform. Hale, indeed, informed the Protector that as he was personally desirous of seeing a Royalist restoration, he could only remain on the bench on the condition that he should be excused from taking part in the trials of political prisoners. Oliver at once gave the required promise. The compromise was creditable to both the parties concerned.

The Protector, by his assumption of the government, had roused up enemies enough to make him chary of dispensing with the support of so valuable a helper. To the Royalists, who hoped to strike at a single person more easily than at a Parliament, were added the Fifth Monarchy preachers, who held that Oliver was 'the vile person to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom,' but who should 'come in peaceably and obtain the kingdom by flatteries,' as foretold by the Prophet Daniel. They were the more dangerous as they were known to have supporters in the army, especially as Harrison, who shared their opinions, had been thought of by the advanced members of the nominated Parliament as a possible substitute for Oliver in the command. The first repressive action of the Protectorate was therefore to place two of the most turbulent of the preachers under lock and key, and to deprive Harrison of his commission. Such men were only really dangerous by their hold on a portion of the army, whilst the Commonwealth's men, such as Bradshaw and Vane, though not in the least likely to head an armed resistance, were strong in the conviction which they shared with a considerable number of their countrymen, that the only possibility of defence against the evils of military rule was to be found in a recurrence to legality. It is true that with them legality consisted in the restoration of a sovereign Parliament, whilst the Royalists saw it in the restoration of the King, but if ever time and circumstances should fuse the two ideas together, a body of opinion would be created which would try to the uttermost the fabric of a government raised on other principles.

Oliver's task was necessarily conditioned by the nature of the opposition he had to encounter. His new system, if it were to have a chance of becoming permanent, would have to commend itself to that large majority of men who follow no ideals, but are content to live under any rule, whatever may have been its origin, if only the rulers confer upon them a reasonable amount of protection, and are sufficiently in sympathy with the governed to be regarded with love rather than with fear. It was this quality that had mainly helped Elizabeth to make a doubtful legal position a step in her triumphant career, and it was to Elizabeth alone amongst recent English sovereigns that Oliver looked with respect and admiration. Nor was he deficient in many of the characteristics which had made Elizabeth great. He had the same patriotism, the same skill in the selection of agents, the same impatience of partisan bitterness in Church and State, the same readiness to trust in the healing virtues of time. The chief obstacles in the way of a repetition of Elizabeth's success lay, not merely in the stain of the king's blood upon his hands, but also in his leadership of an army of which the officers shaped their conduct in accordance with distinct religious and political ideas. He had risen to power by the sympathy of these men. Was it possible to secure the sympathy of the nation without alienating the army to the support of which he must look till he could place his authority on a wider basis?

In the first and easiest portion of the task before the Protector, the redress of grievances weighing upon the people, there was no hesitation. The Instrument had conferred upon Oliver and his Council the right of issuing ordinances with the force of law up to the meeting of Parliament; and in little more than eight months no fewer than eighty-two of these ordinances had been issued subject to amendment, if Parliament chose to interfere. The Council was, in fact, like the Cabinet of to-day, far more capable of initiating legislation than a Parliament consisting of several hundred members, and that so little criticism attended these ordinances may be taken as satisfactory evidence that there was good reason for that strengthening of the government which had been the main argument of the founders of the new constitution. The ordinance for the reform of Chancery was certainly exposed to the conservative objections of the lawyers and was, no doubt, susceptible of improvement, but it aimed at the removal of acknowledged abuses, especially at accelerating the movements of a Court whose long delays had caused that wide-spread irritation which had given support even to the exaggerated proposals of the nominated Parliament.

Still more important was the adoption of the new scheme of Church government. The minister presented to a living was required to have a certificate of fitness from three persons of known godliness and integrity, one of them being a settled minister; afterwards he was to hand this certificate to certain commissioners known as Triers and to obtain their testimony that he was 'a person for the grace of God in him, his holy and unblamable conversation, as also for his knowledge and utterance, able and fit to preach the gospel'. Having become an incumbent, he was liable to expulsion by a local body of Ejectors for immorality or for holding blasphemous or atheistical opinions. As long as he was maintained in his post, he might uphold any Puritan system he pleased and organise his congregation on the Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist system, if he could persuade them to follow him. Those persons, whether lay or clerical, who objected to the system upheld in their parish church, were at liberty to form separate congregations—gathered Churches, as they were called—at their own discretion. Later on, towards the close of 1655, Oliver's tolerant spirit gave way to the return of the Jews, who had been exiled from England since the reign of Edward I. A few Unitarians were no doubt excluded from the benefits of his toleration. Moreover, the Society of Friends, now rising into importance under the leadership of George Fox, was also threatened with exclusion as presumably guilty of blasphemy, though the Protector himself not infrequently interfered on behalf of its members. Even if this had been otherwise, the Society put in no claim for participation in a legal support or even for acknowledgment by the State.

That the Church thus constituted was but a Puritan Church is the charge commonly brought against the system of the Protectorate. That it was so is certainly not to be denied, but, after all, it must be remembered that, so far as opposition to Puritanism was based on definite religious grounds, and not merely on moral slackness, it was confined to a comparatively small number of Englishmen. Before the days of Laud, the clergy of the Church had been for the most part, so far as their teaching was concerned, Puritan in their ideas, and lax in their ceremonial observances, and thus the ecclesiastical changes initiated by the Long Parliament had been received by the bulk of the laity rather as the removal of innovations than as the establishment of something entirely new. The honour in which episcopacy and the Prayer Book were now held was mainly confined to the Royalist gentry and to scholars expelled from the Universities, and was therefore understood to be closely connected with political aims. Even so, there was no attempt as yet on the part of the Government to suppress the use of the Prayer Book in private houses, and there is reason to suppose that if no political disturbances had followed, no such attempt would have been made at a later time. The system of the Protectorate was undoubtedly the most tolerant yet known in England—more tolerant, indeed, than public opinion would, if left to itself, have sanctioned.

Not only by its legal reforms did the Protectorate strive to commend itself to the nation. Oliver had never thrown his heart into the Dutch war, and a little before he dissolved the Long Parliament, a great English victory in a battle which began off Portland and ended under Cape Grisnez, had secured the mastery over the Channel to the English fleet. That fleet rallied to the new Government; even Blake, who was hostile at first, accepting the result of political changes, and finally throwing in his lot with the Protectorate, on the ground that it was the business of the navy to leave politics alone, and—though the expression is not traceable on sufficient evidence to Blake's lips—'to keep foreigners from fooling us'. The wound that Blake received off Portland incapacitated him from taking a considerable part in the later battles of the war, the burden lying for the most part on Monk, who won victories off the Gabbard in June and off the Texel in July, not long after the nominated Parliament had entered on its unlucky career. In the latter conflict, Tromp, the great Dutch admiral whose ill success was due not to any failure of his powers or to any want of manliness in his crews, but to the inefficiency of the Government he served, was killed by a shot as he was entering into the battle. Even whilst the nominated Parliament was still in session, a negotiation with the Dutch had been opened, and this negotiation, which was countenanced by Oliver from the first and carried on earnestly by him as Protector, ended in a peace signed on April 5, 1654.

Those who wish to estimate the value of Oliver's foreign policy and its bearing upon the fortunes of the government he hoped to establish will do well to study at length the story of his negotiation with the Dutch, and of his contemporary excursions into the domain of Continental affairs. It is beyond doubt that he was desirous of peace with the Dutch on the ground that they were Protestants, and that he was also desirous of allying himself with other Protestant States for the protection of Protestants under persecution by Roman Catholic Governments. Yet, not only did this fail to hinder him from exacting hard terms from the Dutch, but the motive of his diplomacy is revealed in his eagerness to make an agreement with his actual enemies a step to immediate hostilities with other nations. At one time he proposed a plan for the partition between England and the Netherlands of so much of the globe as lies outside Europe whilst he was at the same time negotiating with the Governments of France and Spain, offering to make common cause with one or the other in the war then raging between them. No doubt some religious element could be imported into either quarrel. To help Spain against France, at least in the way he proposed, was to vindicate the French Protestants against a persecution to which they were to some extent exposed, in spite of the acceptance by their Government of the Edict of Nantes. To assist France against Spain was to weaken the most bigoted Roman Catholic Government in existence.

What we are here concerned with, however, is not the details of Oliver's foreign policy, but its conception as a whole. It is true that the existing position of affairs in Europe,—in which France and Spain were neutralising the forces of one another—was almost an invitation to the strong military and naval power of the Protectorate to extend its influence at the expense of one or other of the rivals; but, so far as this consideration may have played its part in bringing Oliver to a decision, it has left no traces in his recorded words. Obviously, when he undertook the negotiation with the Dutch, he had two courses before him, either to lay the foundations of a general peace, or to leave himself free to push military and naval enterprises in other directions. It was the latter course on which he resolved—a course which has gained him the admiration of a posterity prompt to recognise in Oliver the ruler who, having received from the Commonwealth an excellently organised army and navy, was the first to apply those potent instruments of conquest to the acquisition of over-sea dominion. What posterity has failed to observe is that this design was incompatible with his other design of settling the government of England on a constitutional basis. By his resolve to seek military employment for the magnificent force that he had welded together, and to find reasons for going to war with some nation or other, rather than be driven into war by the necessity of upholding the honour and interests of the country, Oliver was compelled to keep up a military and naval establishment which may not have been in excess of the taxable capacity of the nation; but which at all events imposed a burden much heavier than that to which Englishmen had been accustomed to submit. Before Parliament met, after many hesitations he had resolved to send out one fleet under Blake into the Mediterranean to enforce the release of English prisoners taken by the pirates of the Barbary coast, and another fleet under Penn to seize upon Hispaniola or some other West Indian island as a response to the refusal of Spain to allow English merchantmen to trade even with English colonies in the West Indies, as well as to various acts of violence already committed by Spanish officials in American waters.

That in both these cases Oliver was justified in seeking redress can hardly be denied. As regards Spain, he had already made a twofold demand on Cardenas, the Spanish ambassador, first, for liberty of trade in the Indies—not necessarily, so far as our information goes, for liberty of trade with Spanish possessions—and, secondly, for entire liberty of religion for English merchants and sailors in their own houses on Spanish soil and in their ships in Spanish ports—he not being satisfied with the offer of Spain to renew the stipulations of the treaty signed by Charles I., in which the Inquisition was debarred from acting against English Protestants so long as they created no scandal. Both demands were promptly rejected. "It is," replied Cardenas, "to ask my master's two eyes." Oliver's notion that he could attack a Spanish colony in the West Indies and yet remain at peace with Spain can only be explained by his admiration for Elizabethan methods, which led him to suppose that the existing Spanish Government would be as ready as that of Philip II. to put up with a system which kept peace in Europe whilst war was being waged in America. It is not, however, with problems of international morality that we are at present concerned. Before Blake could sail for the Mediterranean or Penn for the West Indies, Parliament would meet, and would be confronted with the fact that, in addition to his fleets, the Protector had on foot a land force of 57,000 men, a number exceeding by no less than 27,000 the 30,000 which the Instrument itself had laid down as the normal strength of the army. It is true that he could hardly have met his engagements with a smaller force. Ireland was only recently subdued; an insurrection against the English conquerors—known as Glencairn's rising—was in full swing in Scotland; the dread of a Royalist movement in England required the maintenance of more troops than would be needed in quieter times, whilst other regiments were already preparing for embarkation in the West Indian fleet. On the other hand, when it is remembered that it was through his command of the services of these soldiers that Oliver had been raised to power, that he could still count on their support to maintain him in it, and that he was calling upon the nation to bear the burden of enterprises which he had originated without asking its consent, can it be matter of wonder that at such a time there should be some effort on the part of a Parliament which had come to look upon itself as representing the nation to impose limits upon the burdens which had already far outgrown even the prescriptions of the Instrument itself?

The elections to the first Protectorate Parliament were held under peculiar conditions. In the boroughs still permitted to return members the old conditions existed, but in the counties to which a redistribution of seats had transferred the electoral power, hitherto possessed by small villages under the influence of the neighbouring landowners, the Instrument had established a uniform franchise of the ownership of real or personal property worth £200. So far as we can trace any direct issue before the constituencies, the elections turned on the approval or renunciation of the policy of the advanced party in the nominated Parliament, and on this the electorate gave no uncertain sound. That party was practically swept away, and a full approbation thereby accorded to the conservative policy which had been the main strength of the appeal made to the country by the new government. It did not follow that the new constitution would meet with the same approbation. A not inconsiderable number of the Commonwealth men, such as Bradshaw and Hazlerigg, sore at their expulsion from the benches of the Long Parliament, had been returned, together with a goodly company of political Presbyterians, who might be expected to do their best to free Parliament from the shackles of the Instrument.

Under these circumstances, Oliver's speech at the opening of Parliament was a masterpiece of skill. Dwelling on the points on which he and the majority of his hearers were in agreement, he kept out of sight those on which differences might arise. He called for healing and settlement, for orderly government which might replace the confusions of the past and stem the tide of fanaticism in the present. He dwelt not on the extent of the liberty of conscience proclaimed in the Instrument, but on the restrictions imposed in that document, especially on such teachers as 'under the profession of Christ, hold forth and practise licentiousness'. He held up for acceptance the doctrine that, when such a result was to be feared, it was the duty of the magistrate to intervene. He protested against the notion that it was antichristian for a minister to receive ordination, and also against the notion that the Fifth Monarchy was about to commence, and that it was 'for men, on this principle, to betitle themselves that they are the only men to rule kingdoms, govern nations, and give laws to people, and determine of property and liberty and everything else'. Then came Oliver's appeal for support on the grounds of the difficulties he had inherited from his predecessors—troubles in Ireland and Scotland, trade with Portugal and France interrupted, as well as a war with the Dutch; after which he set forth the benefits of the Instrument, the legal and ecclesiastical reforms it had rendered possible, the peace with the Dutch, and the commercial treaties concluded with Sweden and Denmark. Finally came a hint that Parliament might well be liberal with its supplies, as in spite of the enormous burdens weighing upon it, the Government had diminished, by no less than £30,000 a month, the assessment tax by which army and navy were in part supported. It has often been doubted whether Oliver had in him the making of a Parliamentary tactician. Those who reply in the affirmative may point to this speech in defence of their opinion, especially if we accept the evidence of the Dutch ambassadors that Oliver—in words subsequently omitted from the published speech—concluded by a direct invitation to the House to take into consideration the Instrument, no doubt expecting its easy acceptance by men who were as desirous of order as himself. Confirmatory of this conclusion is the fact that when the Parliamentary debates opened and the question was asked whether the House was prepared to leave the government under the control of a single man, it was a member of the Council who demanded that all other business should be laid aside till the Instrument had been submitted to the approval of the House.

When this demand had been complied with, it became evident that the majority of the members were in favour of imposing further restrictions on the Protector which would make him no more than a tool in the hands of Parliament. Such a position Oliver absolutely declined to accept, and on its being known that Harrison had been seeking the advantage of his own party by stirring up confusion at Westminster, and had boasted that he would have 20,000 men at his back, he struck firmly and sharply. Harrison was sent for under guard, and Parliament was ordered to attend the Protector in the Painted Chamber.

The speech which the Protector delivered to the members may rank as the ablest which is known to have fallen from his lips. There can be no doubt that he would personally have preferred the retention of the Instrument as it stood, but he was aware of the objections taken to it, and all that we know leads us to believe that those objections were shared by members of his own Council. At all events, after a justification of his own conduct in relation to the preparation of the Instrument, and an argument that it had been accepted by the electors who had been bound by its terms to acknowledge the settlement of the Government in a single person and Parliament, he proceeded to offer a compromise. He was prepared to substitute for the Instrument a Parliamentary constitution, provided that four conditions were admitted as fundamentals to be handed down to posterity as unassailable. The first was that the country was to be governed by a single person and a Parliament; the second, that Parliaments were not to make themselves perpetual; the third, that liberty of conscience should be respected; the fourth, that neither Protector nor Parliament should have absolute power over the militia. It speaks volumes for Oliver's power of seeing into the heart of a situation, that whilst the Instrument of Government, and the absolute supremacy of a single House with power to defy dissolution, have alike passed into the realms of unrealised theory, every one of Oliver's fundamentals has been adopted by the nation—not indeed in any written constitution, but with the stronger and more enduring guarantee of a practice accepted beyond dispute by the conscience of the people itself. The four fundamentals on behalf of which he now appealed to the House formed the political legacy bequeathed by him to posterity.

To obtain acquiescence in this compromise, Oliver directed that no member should take his seat who refused to sign the following declaration: "I do hereby freely promise and engage to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector and the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and shall not, according to the tenor of the indentures whereby I am returned to serve in this present Parliament, propose or give my consent to alter the Government as it is settled in one person and a Parliament". Those who refused subscription were excluded from all participation in the business of the House.

The imposition of such restriction was doubtless condemnable on the principle that the will of the electorate expressed through its representatives must be taken as final in all disputes. Neither Cromwell, however, nor his opponents had recognised such a principle. Vane and Bradshaw had been ready to exclude Royalists, and other unfit persons, whilst the authors of the Instrument had imposed qualifications with a very similar object. If a test there was to be, the one now selected was not only the lightest possible, but it was one that had already been signed by each constituency on behalf of its members, without which formality they were not, according to the Instrument, entitled to take their seats. It left them perfectly at liberty to propose any amendment of the constitution, even to vote against any one of Oliver's fundamentals with the exception of the first.

It is impossible here to enter into details of the constitutional debates which followed. It is sufficient to say that the basis which Parliament proposed to substitute for the Instrument was the revival of the negative voice, so that no constitutional innovation could be made without the Protector's consent. Of the four fundamentals, the first two—the one relating to the position of the single person and the other refusing to Parliament the right of perpetuating itself—were accepted without opposition. The other two raised greater difficulties. The House was very far from being anxious to extend religious liberty as widely as the Protector desired, but it ultimately agreed to a form of words which practically left the decision in his hands. The absolutely insurmountable difficulty was found in the disposal of the army. In the first place, Parliament held out for the diminution of the numbers of the regular forces to the 30,000 men allowed by the Instrument, and required that if more were needed they should be raised in the form of a militia which would fall more readily under the influence of the local gentry. In the second place, the House resolved to limit its grant of supply to the taxation required for the maintenance of the army for a term of five years only, thus reserving to itself the ultimate financial control which spells sovereignty. Cromwell's whole soul recoiled from the acceptance of a scheme which would render nugatory the proposed constitutional restrictions of Parliamentary omnipotence, by enabling Parliament, at the end of the assigned term, to stop the supplies without which the army could not be maintained; unless indeed, when that term reached its end, the Protector chose to employ his army to crush the Parliament of 1659 as he had employed it to crush the Parliament of 1653. Parliamentary supremacy or military despotism were the alternatives which Oliver or his successor would have to face in the not very distant future.

If two men ride on one horse, one of them must ride in front, and this sober physical truth is equally applicable to the realm of politics. No paper constitution, however deserving of veneration, can prevent there being some force in every nation capable of making itself supreme if it chooses to do so. It may be the constituencies, as in England at the end of the nineteenth century; the people consulted in mass, as in the United States; or the army, as in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. Such supremacy may be subjected to the checks of written or unwritten constitutions, and may be thus thrust into the background till called forth by some special crisis; but in the long run it is impossible to prevent supreme power from exerting itself. The defect of Oliver's fourth fundamental was that it sought to divide the control of the army, or, in other words, Sovereignty, between Protector and Parliament, at a time when the Protector was powerless to act in defiance of the army. It is useless to deny that he was perfectly in the right in hesitating to hand over supreme power to a Parliament uncontrolled by the nation, and capable of using its financial authority to demolish any system of government that might stand in the way of the ambitions of its members. It is equally undeniable that, as he was unable to depend on the nation as a whole, he had nothing to fall back upon except a Protectorate which, in reality, was controlled by the will of the leading officers, who found in the provisions of the Instrument which they had themselves originated the means of perpetuating their own power by securing—irrespective of the concurrence of Parliament or nation—the levy of taxes, the amount of which was fixed by the Protector and Council alone.

Oliver having once made up his mind to refuse his consent to the new constitution, was anxious to hasten the dissolution of the Parliament. The Instrument having provided that the House should sit for five months, he opportunely remembered that the months by which the army's pay was regulated were lunar months; and on January 22, 1655, when five lunar months were expired, he pronounced its dissolution. The speech in which he announced his determination was stamped with vexation of spirit at the failure of his hopes, a vexation in itself by no means unjustifiable. The tragedy of the situation lay in the undoubted fact that however much they might differ on the means to be pursued, the end at which Protector and Parliament aimed was identical, namely, the conversion of the military into the civil state. Parliament had counted it well done to leave Oliver in possession for five years, whilst Oliver, conscious of his own rectitude of purpose, and ignoring the consideration that at the end of five years he might no longer be living, and that the Protectorate might have passed by demise into less worthy hands, complained that he was not trusted. Why, he asked, had they not come to him to talk the matter over? Why indeed, except that Parliaments have their pride as well as Protectors, and that this one had come to the conclusion that it was its duty to settle the constitution rather than to accept a settlement from a knot of soldiers. If it did not seek an opportunity to discuss such grave questions with Oliver in person, at least it had had the advantage of listening to what might be presumed to be his views when promulgated by those members of his Council who were also members of the House.

In an elaborate defence of the Instrument, Oliver put his finger on the real ground of offence. "Although," he declared in speaking of the rights of the Protector, "for the present the keeping up and having in his power the militia seems the most hard, yet, if it should be yielded up at such a time as this when there is as much need to keep this cause by it—which is evidently at this time impugned by all the enemies of it—as there was to get it, what would become of all? Or if it should not be equally placed in him and the Parliament, but yielded up at any time, it determines the Power," i.e., hinders the exercise of authority by the person in possession of power, "either from doing the good he ought, or hindering Parliaments from perpetuating themselves, or from imposing what religion they please on the consciences of men, or what government they please upon the nation; thereby subjecting us to dis-settlement in every Parliament, and to the desperate consequences thereof: and if the nation shall happen to fall into a blessed peace, how easily and certainly will their charge be taken off, and their forces disbanded; and then, where will the danger be to have the militia thus stated?"

It was impossible for the Protector to put his case more convincingly. Yet, admirable as a criticism pointing out the danger likely to follow on the adoption of the proposals of Parliament, Oliver's reasoning pre-supposed the acceptance by Parliament of his own conviction that an armed minority had the right to impose its principles on the unarmed majority—the very belief which the authors of the Parliamentary constitution were most determined to resist. Even if it had been possible for any Puritan party to look for a solution of the problem in an appeal to the unfettered judgment of the nation, it is evident that Oliver would never have agreed to such an arbitration. On the one side was the resolve to get what appeared to be the right thing done, if necessary by force. On the other side was the resolve to eliminate the element of force by subordinating it to the rule of Parliaments. For the moment the decisive word rested with Oliver. "I think myself bound," he said in conclusion, "as in my duty to God, and to the people of these nations, for their safety and good in every respect—I think it my duty to tell you that it is not for the profit of these nations, nor for common and public good for you to continue longer, and therefore I do declare unto you, that I do dissolve this Parliament."

History has pronounced in favour of the view taken by Oliver's antagonists. The reliance on military power in which he had found his refuge did more than all other facts put together to establish, for good or for evil, a reliance on Parliament. It is the special mark of his greatness that he put his whole heart after the dissolution of his first Parliament into an effort to avoid the appearance even of a temporary dictatorship. He shrank from being a military ruler, even under the plea of the necessity of the times. His holding back the dissolution of Parliament till the fifth month—lunar month as it was—had been accomplished, offers the key-note of the position as he judged it. The Parliamentary constitution had perished stillborn. The constitution of the Instrument was in full force, and was to be observed, even though it were to his own detriment. The Instrument enabled the Protector and Council to levy such taxation as they thought fit for 30,000 men and for a navy sufficient for defence, whilst he had now on foot some 57,000 soldiers, and, in addition to the home fleet, two others had already been despatched—the one to the Mediterranean, the other to the West Indies. Yet the Protector was able to announce that he would content himself with levying the Assessment money at the low amount of £80,000 a month on the three nations, an amount which the dissolved Parliament had fixed as sufficient for the forces named in the Instrument. Such a decision left the Government with enormous forces—as forces were in those days reckoned—which it had no visible means of paying; but it was an announcement in the most practical form, that, as soon as the existing situation would admit, the military expenditure should be brought down to the requirements of the Instrument. The announcement was accompanied by a proclamation setting forth the principles on which the Protector had decided to act on the thorny question of religious liberty. There was to be complete freedom for all who contented themselves with setting forth their opinions, without 'imposing' on the conscience of others or disturbing their worship. The last clause, which was aimed at the new Society of Friends, commonly styled Quakers by the irreverent multitude, sought to put a stop to their practice of carrying on their polemics in churches where congregations were assembled. To the exhortations of George Fox himself the Protector listened with respect. "Come again to my house," said Oliver, "for if thou and I were but an hour a day together, we should be nearer one to the other. I wish you no more ill than I do to my own soul." A reverence for genuineness, in whatever shape, was not the least admirable of Oliver's characteristics.

The clause against 'imposing' was more widely sweeping in its aims. It struck at the claims of the Roman Papacy, and the English episcopacy, as well as at the designs of the late Parliament to establish lists of opinions to which toleration should be refused. It struck also at all attempts to snatch at political power with the object of serving religious ends. Oliver's breach with Parliament had roused attacks from every quarter. There were the Fifth Monarchy men who rejected every form of secular government and whose leaders were not to be silenced except by placing them under guard. Harrison himself had to be placed under arrest. It was not work that Oliver would have chosen. "I know," wrote Thurloe, "it is a trouble to my Lord Protector to have any one that is a saint in truth to be grieved or dissatisfied with him." The Cavaliers might be regarded as hereditary enemies. In the last summer a Cavalier plot to assassinate the Protector had been discovered, and two of the plotters, Gerard and Vowel, had been executed. Whilst Parliament was still in session, Thurloe's spies—who were to be found in every land in which their services were required—brought him news of a projected insurrection, and it had been one of Oliver's charges against the members, that their delay in settling the Government had fostered the plot. In March futile attempts to rise were made in various parts of the country, the only one which gained the dignity of an actual insurrection being that in which Penruddock and others gathered in arms at Salisbury, seized the judges of assize in their beds and marched off in the hope of rallying the scattered Royalists of the west. The insurgents, however, were dispersed in Devonshire, where many of them were captured. In the end a few of the ringleaders were tried and executed, whilst a large number of their adherents were transported without legal trial to Barbados. Such procedure, whether it be counted as an evasion or as a breach of the law, was evidence of the difficulty which Oliver would increasingly feel in meeting his enemies otherwise than by the exertion of arbitrary power.

A more difficult question arose when two judges sent to try Royalist prisoners in the north doubted their competency, on the ground that an ordinance defining the offences constituting treason, which the Protector, in accordance with the Instrument, had issued before the meeting of Parliament, could not make a rebellion against the Protectorate to be High Treason. The two judges were at once dismissed, and soon afterwards Chief Justice Rolle was compelled to resign office because he was unwilling to enforce the payment of customs upon a certain Cony; whilst the three lawyers who argued on Cony's behalf—one of them being Serjeant Maynard, who lived to welcome William III.—that he was not to pay duties imposed by Protector and Council without the consent of Parliament, were sent to prison till they had apologised. One historian after another has accompanied his account of these proceedings with the observation that there was here a conflict between law and the tyrant's plea, necessity. There was nothing of the sort. The question was whether the Instrument was a valid constitution. If it was, there could be no reasonable doubt that rebels against the Protectorate were legally traitors, or that customs-duties applicable to the payment of the army and navy were legally set, not by Parliament, but by Protector and Council.

If all that Oliver and his councillors had asked of the Instrument had been to enable them to carry on the government till the lapse of three years drove them to summon another Parliament, they might have been well content. They could not, however, forget that they were the leaders of the party of reform, and the Instrument itself had deprived them of the power of initiating reforms except through Parliament. The authority to issue ordinances with the force of law had ceased with the meeting of Parliament, and all that could now be done was to urge the Commissioners of the Great Seal to carry out the ordinance for the reform of Chancery, and, upon their refusal, to replace them by others likely to be more complacent. The result was a movement in opposition to the Instrument amongst some of Oliver's partisans, by which he was hampered as well as assisted. It was natural that such a movement should also have the character of opposition to the military party from whom the Instrument had proceeded. Already in the late Parliament an unsuccessful effort had been made to confer the title of King on Oliver in the hope that the civilian element in the Government would be thereby strengthened. In the summer of 1655 a petition was circulated in the City asking the Protector to assume legislative power on the invitation of the subscribers. Oliver was far too prudent to follow such a will-of-the-wisp, and the petition was suppressed by the Council. The needs that had called it forth could not so easily be dismissed, especially as the Protector's desire to reform abuses was strongly reinforced by his need of money—a need which was dramatically exhibited when the soldiers of his guard broke into his kitchen and carried off the dinner cooked for his own table, telling him to his face that as they had not received their pay, they had taken some of it in kind.

If Oliver was to make both ends meet, it could only be by reductions in the army, and to effect these he needed the co-operation of the officers, whilst so far as Scotland and Ireland were concerned, reductions which might have been dangerous in January had ceased to be dangerous in July. Monk, who had been sent back to the north as soon as he could be spared from the Dutch war, had reduced the Highlands to submission; and Ireland, which had been earlier subjected by English arms, was now to have imposed on her that thorough-going system of English colonisation which is usually known as the Cromwellian settlement, the principles of which had, however, been laid down by preceding Governments. Those of the landowning class who were unable to prove, to the satisfaction of English judges, that they had shown constant good affection to the English Government, even if they had taken no part against England in the late war—that is to say, the great bulk of the class which had anything to lose amongst the Irish Catholics—were driven off into the devastated lands of Connaught, and their estates were divided amongst English soldiers and other Englishmen who had lent money for the support of the war upon the security of confiscated land. Henceforth there was to be in three of the Irish provinces a class of landed proprietors of English birth and the Protestant religion surrounded by peasants and labourers who were divided from them by racial and religious differences of the most extreme kind. Such an arrangement boded ill for the future peace of the country. The immediate result was untold misery to the sufferers and the kindling of hope in English bosoms that at last Ireland would be peopled by a race loyal to the institutions and religion of her conquerors.

In any case the scheme for the plantation of Ireland would diminish the number of soldiers required to hold the country, and before the end of July the assent of the chiefs of the army in England having been obtained, the Council also sanctioned not merely a sweeping reduction in the strength of the regiments in Great Britain, but a diminution of the amount of the pay both of officers and soldiers. Once more Oliver had acted in accordance with the Instrument, and with the wishes of the dissolved Parliament. The £60,000 a month which Parliament had thought sufficient for the assessment was not exceeded, whilst the army was reduced at least approximately to the numbers accepted alike by Parliament and the Instrument. It might be hard to give a satisfactory answer to those who denied the validity of the Instrument; but, if this validity were acknowledged, it would be equally hard to refute those who argued that Oliver was doing his best to rule as a constitutional magistrate.

Would it be possible for Oliver to persist in this attitude to the end, in spite of the growing demands on the exchequer? In March, 1655, Penruddock's rising had extracted from Oliver an order for the calling out and organisation of the militia, which was, however, countermanded upon the prompt repression of the insurrection. In May, however, the officers who recommended the reduction of the army, also recommended the establishment of a militia for purposes of police, and as the summer advanced and the information which came in from Thurloe's spies announced that the Royalist plots were by no means at an end, this plan assumed greater consistency. The scheme of appointing a militia-police had at least this to be said in its favour, that the proposal had been favoured by Parliament. If Parliament had been allowed to work out its own scheme, it would probably have subjected the militia to local officers, and provided for its wants by local payments. Oliver took care to bring it into disciplinary connection with the army, by placing it under eleven Major-Generals. Taxation for its support he could not demand without infringing on the Instrument. In his perplexity he, or one of his advisers, hit upon a plan for raising supplies from the Royalists alone, who were called on to contribute a tenth of their income for the purpose. It was their refusal to submit peaceably to a settled Government which had caused the difficulty, and it was for them to bear the expense of the measures which had been necessitated by their misconduct. Such an exaction, being no general taxation, might be considered by interested parties as saving the authority of the Instrument. Of any sympathetic feeling with the Royalists whose property had been diminished by past confiscations, and whose political and religious ideals had been thrown to the ground, there was, it is needless to say, nothing in Oliver's mind. They were but enemies to be crushed, or at least to be reduced to impotence.

That the Royalists had religious ideals of their own was a provocation which made it easy to deny them the toleration which they had hitherto virtually enjoyed. The familiar cadences of the Book of Common Prayer had become to them a symbol of political as well as of religious faith, whilst the voice of the often long-winded, and sometimes irrelevant ejaculator of prayers of his own conception, stood for them as the embodiment of the forces which had conspired to murder their king, to deprive them of the broad acres sold to satisfy the demands of sequestrators, and to exclude them from all share in the public interests of the country which they loved as devotedly as any Puritan could possibly do. It was now that Oliver committed the mistake—which thousands of others in like circumstances have committed—of confounding the symbol with the cause. The use of the Common Prayer Book was proscribed as thoroughly as the mass. Noblemen and gentlemen were prohibited from entertaining the ejected clergy of their own Church as chaplains or tutors of their children. Yet, after all, the persecution was sharp only for a time, and not only was the inquisition into the religious practices of domestic life soon abandoned, but the Episcopalian clergy were led to understand that no harm should befall them so long as they abstained from thrusting themselves upon the notice of the public.

It was not only in relation to religious toleration that Oliver was driven by his position to modify his earlier principles. At one time he had fully sympathised with the Independent party in its efforts to secure the liberty of the press. Of libels on his own character and person he had been widely tolerant. Step by step the Long Parliament had imposed restrictions on the press, and these restrictions were continued under the Protectorate. At last, in October 1655, the final blow fell. Only two weekly newspapers were permitted to appear, and both these newspapers were to be edited by an agent of the Government. Milton, now incapacitated by blindness from active employment in the service of the State, must have winced at hearing that his chosen hero, who had long ago turned his back on a voluntary system of Church-government, had now turned his back on the central doctrine of the Areopagitica. Oliver, we may be sure, took all these proceedings as a matter of course. He held himself to have been placed in the seat of authority not to advance the most beneficent theories, but to keep order after the fashion of a constable in a discordant world. Neither Milton nor himself believed in the political rights of majorities. If the nation chose to raise itself up against the cause of God, so much the worse for the nation. "I say," he had announced to his first Parliament, "that the wilful throwing away of this government—so owned by God, so approved by men, so testified to in the fundamentals of it—and that in relation to the good of these nations and posterity; I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto." Oliver doubtless held that the partitioning of England into eleven districts, each under a military chief, was consistent with at least a literal observance of 'this Government,' as he himself had called it.

It is possible that if the Major-Generals had confined themselves to keeping watch over the Royalist gentry, with occasionally breaking up their religious meetings, and with driving away the chaplains and the tutors of their sons, they would have caused less irritation than they did. The army, however, or in plainer terms, the occupants of its higher posts, from the Lord Protector downwards, were the most systematic upholders of that aggressive Puritan morality, which was diluted with greater worldliness in other circles. It is no doubt untrue that Justices of the Peace, as has sometimes been suggested, were altogether inefficient during the Protectorate; but they were not loved by the Cavalier gentry, whose estates were often larger than their own; and, like all local authorities, they were hampered by the local feeling which, even amongst those who willingly accepted the Protectorate, was, though certainly not Episcopalian, far from being as acutely Puritan as was desired at head-quarters. A statute inflicting the penalty of death upon adulterers had been reduced almost to a dead letter by the unwillingness of juries to convict; and—to take an instance from the daily amusements of the people—the bear-garden at Southwark had survived the prohibition of one Puritan Government after another, till, a few weeks after the appointment of the Major-Generals, Pride, who had once blocked the doors of Parliament, slew the bears with his own hands, and closed the exhibition.

As to the Major-Generals themselves, they were soon instructed to tighten the reins of discipline, co-operating with willing and spurring unwilling magistrates to suppress not merely treason and rebellion, but vice and immorality. Their orders were to put down horse-racing, cock-fighting and other sports which brought together crowds of doubtful fidelity to the Government. They were told to promote godliness and virtue, and to see to the execution of the laws against drunkenness, blasphemy, swearing, play-acting, profanation of the Lord's Day, and so forth; and also to put down gaming-houses in Westminster and ale-houses in the country, lest evil and factious men should congregate in them. They were to keep an open eye on the beneficed clergy, calling for the ejection of those who either showed tendencies favourable to the Book of Common Prayer, or brought disgrace by laxity of conduct on the Puritanism they professed. During the first six or nine months of 1656, when these men ruled supreme, the anti-Puritan fervour which was before long to lay low both the Protectorate and the Commonwealth, ceased to be the special note of particular classes and rooted itself in general society, far outside the circle of ordinary royalism.