the last Protector did,' the tyrant Crooked Richard! Say, I said it! A very foul chimney indeed, here got on fire. And 'MajorGeneral Harrison, the most eminent man of the Anabaptist Party, being consulted whether he would own the new Protectoral Government, answered frankly, No;-was thereupon ordered to retire home to Staffordshire, and keep quiet.*

Does the reader bethink him of those old Leveller Corporals at Burford, and Diggers at St. George's Hill, five years ago; of Quakerisms, Calvinistic Sansculottisms, and one of the strangest Spiritual Developments ever seen in any country? The reader sees here one foul chimney on fire, the Feak-Powel chimney in Blackfriars; and must consider for himself what masses of combustible material, noble fuel and base soot and smoky explosive fire-damp in the general English Household it communicates with! Republicans Proper, of the Long Parliament; Republican FifthMonarchists of the Little Parliament; the solid Ludlows, the fervent Harrisons: from Harry Vane down to Christopher Feak, all manner of Republicans find Cromwell unforgivable. To the Harrison-and-Feak species Kingship in every sort, and government of man by man, is carnal, expressly contrary to various Gospel Strictures. Very horrible for a man to think of governing men ;—whether he ought even to govern cattle; and drive them to field and to needful penfold, 'except in the way of love and persuasion,' seems doubtful to me! But fancy a Reign of Christ and his Saints; Christ and his Saints just about to come,—had not Oliver Cromwell stept in and prevented it! The reader discerns combustibles enough; conflagrations, plots, stubborn disaffections, and confusions on the Republican and Republican-Anabaptist side of things. It is the first Plot-department, which my Lord Protector will have to deal with, all his life long. This he must wisely damp down, as he may. Wisely; for he knows what is noble in the matter, and what is base in it; and would not. sweep the fuel and the soot both out of doors at once.

Tuesday, 14th February, 1653-4. At the Ship-Tavern in the Old Bailey, kept by Mr. Thomas Amps,' we come upon the second lifelong Plot-department: Eleven truculent, rather thread

*Thurloe, i., 641 ;--442, 591, 621.

bare persons, sitting over small drink there, on the Tuesday night considering how the Protector might be assassinated. Poor broken Royalist men; payless Old-Captains, most of them, or such like; with their steeple-hats worn very brown, and jackboots slit, and projects that cannot be executed. Mr. Amps knows nothing of them, except that they came to him to drink; nor do we. Probe them with questions; clap them in the Tower for a while:* Guilty, poor knaves; but not worth hanging :—disappear again into the general mass of Royalist Plotting, and ferment there.

cumstances.

The Royalists have lain quiet ever since Worcester; waiting what issue matters would take. Dangerous to meddle with a Rump Parliament, or other steadily regimented thing; safer if you can find it fallen out of rank; hopefullest of all, when it collects itself into a Single Head. The Royalists judge, with some reason, that if they could kill Oliver Protector, this Commonwealth were much endangered. In these Easter weeks, too, or Whitsun weeks, there comes from our Court (Charles Stuart's Court) at Paris,' great encouragement to all men of spirit in straitened cirA Royal Proclamation "By the King," drawn up, say some, by Secretary Clarendon; setting forth that Whereas a certain base mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Cromwell, has usurped our throne, much to our and others' inconvenience, whosoever will kill the said mechanic fellow, 'by sword, pistol, or poison,' shall have 5007. a-year settled upon him, with colonelcies in our Army, and other rewards suitable, and be a made man,— ' on the word and faith of a Christian King.'t A Proclamation which cannot be circulated except in secret; but is well worth reading by all loyal men. And so Royalist Plots also succeed one another, thick and threefold through Oliver's whole life;— but cannot take effect. Vain for a Christian King and his cunningest Chancellors to summon all the Sinners of the Earth, and whatsoever of necessitous Truculent-Flunkeyism there may be, and to bid, in the name of Heaven and of Another place, for the Head of Oliver Cromwell: once for all, they cannot have it ;~~

*

Newspapers (in Cromwelliana, p. 185).

†Thurloe, ii,, 248. 'Given at Paris 3d May (23d April by old style)

1654.

not till he has entirely done with it, and can make them welcome to their benefit from it! We shall come upon these Royalist Plots, Rebellion Plots, and Assassin Plots, in the order of time; and have to mention them, though with brevity. Oliver Protector, I suppose, understands and understood his Protectorship moderately well, and what Plots and other Hydra-coils were inseparable from it; and contrives to deal with these too, like a conscier tious inan, and not like a hungry slave.

Secretary Thurloe, once St. John's Secretary in Holland, has come now, ever since the Little-Parliament time, into decided action as Oliver's Secretary, or the State Secretary; one of the expertest Secretaries in the real meaning of the word Secretary, any State or working King could have. He deals with all these Plots; it is part of his function, supervised by his Chief. Mr. John Milton, we all lament to know, has fallen blind in the Public Service; lives now in Bird-cage Walk, still doing a little when called upon; bating no jot of heart or hope. Mr. Milton's notion is, That this Protectorate of his Highness Oliver was a thing called for by the Necessities and the Everlasting Laws; and that his Highness ought now to quit himself like a Christian Hero in it, as in other smaller things, he has been used to do.*

March 20th, 1653-4. By the Instrument of Government, the Lord Protector with his Council,† till once the First Parliament * Defensio Secunda.

Fifteen in number, which he may enarge to Twenty-one, if he see good. Not removable any of them, except by himself with advice of the rest. A very remarkable Majesty's Ministry;-of which, for its own sake and the Majesty's, take this List, as it stood in 1654:

Philip Viscount Lisle (Algernon Sidney's Brother); Fleetwood; Lambert; Montague (of Hinchinbrook); Desborow (Protector's Brother-in-law); Ashley Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury afterwards); Walter Strickland (Member for Minehead in the Long Parliament, once Ambassador in Holland); Colonel Henry Lawrence (for Westmoreland in the Long Parliament, became President of the Council); Mayor (of Hursley); Francis Rouse (our old friend; pious old Major-General Skippon; Colonels Philip Jones and Sydenham; Sirs Gilbert Pickering and Charles Wolseley, of whom my readers do not know much. Fifteer Councillors in all. To whom Nathaniel Fiennes (son of Lord Say and Sele) was afterwards added; with the Earl of Mulgrave; and another, Colonel Mackworth, who soon died (Thurloe, iii., 581) Thurloe is Secretary; and blind Milton, now with assistants. is Latin Secretary.

were got together, was empowered not only to raise monies for the needful supplies, but also to make Laws and Ordinances for the peace and welfare of these Nations ;' which latter faculty he is by no means slack to exercise. Of his Sixty Ordinances' passed in this manner before the Parliament met, which are well approved of by good judges, we cannot here afford to say much : but there is one bearing date as above, which must not be omitted. First Ordinance relating to a Settlement of a Gospel Ministry in this Nation; Ordinance of immense interest to Puritan England at that time. An object which has long been on the anvil, this same 'Settlement;' much labored at, and striven for, ever since. the Long Parliament began: and still, as all confess, no tolerable result has been attained. Yet is it not the greatest object; properly the soul of all these struggles and confused wrestlings and battlings, since we first met here? For the thing men are taught, or get to believe, that is the thing they will infallibly do the kind of 'Gospel' you settle, kind of Ministry' you settle, or do not settle, the root of all is there! Let us see what the Lord Protector can accomplish in this business.

Episcopacy being put down, and Presbytery not set up, and Church-Government for years past being all a Church-Anarchy, the business is somewhat difficult to deal with. The Lord Protector, as we find, takes it up in simplicity and integrity, intent upon the real heart or practical outcome of it; and makes a rather satisfactory arrangement. Thirty-eight chosen Men, the acknowledged Flower of English Puritanism, are nominated by this Ordinance of the 20th of March,* nominated a Supreme Commission for the Trial of Public Preachers. Any person pretending to hold a Church-living, or levy tithes or clergy-dues in England, has first to be tried and approved by these men. Thirty-eight, as Scobell teaches us: nine are Laymen, our friend old Francis Rouse at the head of them; twenty-nine are Clergy. His Highness, we find, has not much inquired of what Sect they are; has known them to be Independents, to be Presbyterians, one or two of them to be even Anabaptists ;-has been careful only of one characteristic, That they were men of wisdom, and had the root

* Scobell, ii., 279.80.

of the matter in them. Owen, Goodwin, Sterry, Marshall, Man ton, and others not yet quite unknown to men, were among these Clerical Triers: the acknowledged Flower of Spiritual Englan at that time; and intent, as Oliver himself was, with an awfu' earnestness, on actually having the Gospel taught to England.

This is the First branch or limb of Oliver's scheme for Church Government, this Ordinance of the 20th March, 1653-4. L Second, which completes what little he could do in the matter a present, developed itself in August following. By this Augus. Ordinance,* a Body of Commissioners, distinguished Puritan Gentry, distinguished Puritan Clergy, are nominated in all Counties of England, from Fifteen to Thirty in each County; who are to inquire into 'scandalous, ignorant, insufficient,' and otherwise deleterious alarming Ministers of the Gospel; to be a tribunal for judging, for detecting, ejecting them (only in case of ejection, if they have wives, let some small modicum of living be allowed them) and to sit there, judging and sifting, till gradually all is sifted clean, and can be kept clean. This is the Second branch of Oliver's form of Church-Government: this, with the other Ordinance, makes at last a kind of practicable Ecclesiastical Arrangement for England.

A very republican arrangement, such as could be made on the sudden; contains in it, however, the germ or essence of all conceivable arrangements, that of worthy men to judge of the worth of men ;—and was found in practice to work well. As indeed, any arrangement will work well, when the men in it have the root of the matter at heart; and, alas, all arrangements, when the men in them have not, work ill and not well! Of the Lay Commissioners, from fifteen to thirty in each County, it is remarked that not a few are political enemies of Oliver's: friends or enemies of his, Oliver hopes they are men of pious probity, and friends to the Gospel in England. My Lord General Fairfax, the Presbyterian; Thomas Scot, of the Long Parliament, the fanatical Republican; Lords Wharton, Say, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Colonel Robert Blake, Mayor of Hursley, Dunch of Pusey, Montague of Hinchinbrook, and other persons known to us,—are of these

* 29 August, 1654 (Scobell, ii. 335-47).