"For before, the riotous rabble had boldness enough to make serious godliness a common scorn, and call them all Puritans and Precisians that did not care as little for God and Heaven and their souls as they did; especially if a man were not fully satisfied with their undisciplined, disorderly churches, or Lay Chancellor's excommunications, &c., then no name was bad enough for him. And the Bishop's Articles enquiring after such, and their courts and the High Commission grievously afflicting those that did but fast and pray together, or go from an ignorant drunken reader, to hear a godly able preacher at the next parish, &c. This kept religion among the vulgar under either continual reproach or terror, encouraging the rabble to despise it and revile it, and discouraging those that else would own it. And experience telleth us, that it is a lamentable impediment to men's conversion, when it is a way everywhere spoken against, and prosecuted by superiors, which they must embrace; and when at their first approaches they must go through such dangers and obloquy as is fitter for confirmed Christians to be exercised with, than unconverted sinners or young beginners: Therefore, though Cromwell gave liberty to all sects among us, and did not set up any party alone by force, yet this much gave abundant advantage to the Gospel, removing the prejudices and the terrors which hindered it; especially considering that godliness had countenance and reputation also, as well as liberty; whereas before, if it did not appear in all the fetters and formalities of the times, it was the way to common shame and ruin." * "Life," p. 86. THE PROTECTORATE. 53 CHAPTER III. The Protectorate.-Incentives to assassinate the Protector.-Royalist Plot concocted in France.-Cromwell's deportment to the French Government.-His Foreign Policy generally. First Parliament of the Protectorate.-Cromwell's speech on opening the Session.-Parliament questions the Protector's authority.-The Parliament House closed.-Cromwell requires a Pledge from Members.-Recusant Members excluded. Subsequent Temper of the Parliament.-Cromwell dissolves the Parliament.Royalist Risings organised.-Failure of Risings in the West and North.-Resistance to Taxation.-The Major-Generals.-Severities against Papists and Episcopalians. -Tolerance to Sects. THE Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, who had been inaugurated on the 16th of December, 1653, had, some four months afterwards, entered upon the occupation of the royal palaces of Whitehall and of Hampton Court. Warwick, the Cavalier, who, in 1640, had looked upon a gentleman speaking in Parliament "very ordinarily apparelled," yet lived as, he records, to see this very gentleman, "having had a better tailor, and more converse among good company," appear at Whitehall "of a great and majestic deportment and comely presence.”* The same courtier says, speaking of a period when the dignity of Oliver was further confirmed, "And now he models his house, that it might have some resemblance unto a Court; and his liveries, and lacqueys, and yeomen of the guard are known who they belong to by their habit.”† There was something more went to the making of the Protector Oliver than "a better tailor; " or than "liveries and lacqueys and yeomen of the guard;" something higher even than "more converse among good company." There had been fourteen years of such experience as belonged to no other man in his time. "I was by birth a gentleman; living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation." More than this: "My manner of life, which was to run up and down the nation, had given me to see and know the temper and spirits of all men." Thus he spoke to his first Parliament with a dignified modesty. Out of his own courage, sagacity, and abiding sense that his destiny was in the hands of a supreme di"Memoirs," p. 248. t Ibid., p. 382. * Such recting power, had a great ruler been made-one who “alone remained to conduct the government and to save the country." is the panegyric of Milton. When our most eloquent historian described Cromwell as "the greatest prince that has ever ruled England," we had reached that state of historical counter-balance, that we could stop to inquire whether the familiar words of usurper, traitor, hypocrite, fanatic, dissembler, as applied to this prince, were not the merest echoes of the united hatred of cavalier and republican, of libertine and sceptic, which it would be well to lay aside after two centuries of abuse and misrepresentation. We shall endeavour to relate the events of the Protectorate, without being wholly carried away by our sense of the unquestionable superiority of this man over the most eminent of his contemporaries. We shall seek to regard him as the man best qualified to stand between the restoration of the monarchy and unmitigated despotism; as one who in his own manifestations of arbitrary power was ever striving to establish a system of constitutional liberty; as one who upheld the supremacy of the laws at a time when in the absence of such a ruler the State might have been plunged into the depths of anarchy and bloodshed. Oliver did many things that are repugnant to the principles of just freedom under an established government; but it may be honestly asked whether his example can justify that species of revolutionary despotism which seeks only to govern by the sword, without a persistent struggle to make the civil authority ultimately supreme. The Protectorate of Oliver was a constant attempt to unite the executive authority of one with the legislative control of many. He laboured to accomplish in his own day what time only could perfect, after many reverses. enough to have founded a dynasty, the problem might have been Had he lived long more quickly solved. The partial and temporary despotism of the Protectorate is gone; the liberty and toleration which it proposed as its final objects remain. We may apply to the history of this crisis the words of Cromwell's own earnest conviction: are all our Histories, and other traditions of actions in former times, "What but God manifesting Himself, that He hath shaken, and tumbled down, and trampled upon, everything that he hath not planted?" † We may especially apply these memorable words, so characteristic of their utterer, and yet so universal in their truth, to the whole history of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. After the Macaulay," History," vol. i. c. ii. † Cromwell-Speech iv. "Carlyle," vol iii. p. 89. INCENTIVES TO ASSASSINATE THE PROTECTOR. 55 first great contest was over, The Divine Right of Kings came back upon England with unforgotten insolence in its pretensions, although with somewhat diminished power of working immediate evil. But it perished; for the Divine Right had to stand a test which its most powerful enemy had proposed as a test of all political action: "If it be of God, He will bear it up: If it be of man it will tumble."'* In the remarkable conversation between Cromwell and Whitelocke, which preceded the dissolution of the Long Parliament, f Whitelocke, with great sagacity, had pointed out that in the assumption by Cromwell of monarchical power, "that question, wherein before so great parties of the nation were engaged, and which was universal, will by this means become in effect a private controversy only. Before it was national, what head of government we should have; now it will become particular, who shall be our governor, whether of the family of the Stuarts, or of the family of the Cromwells." Cromwell replied, "I confess you speak reason in this." The acceptance by Cromwell of the office of Protector immediately gave this character to the controversy. The great object of all the discontented Republicans or Cavaliers; the supporters of prerogative or the enemies of all government but that of the reign of the Saints; those who would have re-entered into possession of the property which had changed hands, or those who sought a division of all property whatsoever; intolerant Episcopalians, equally intolerant Presbyterians, frantic Anabaptists;-all these classes now saw an enemy in the one man in whom the ruling power was concentrated. That power had become more vigilant, more far-seeing, more difficult to shake, than the distracted authority of the Long Parliament, or of the Little Parliament. Foreign governments recognised and dreaded this commanding power, well described by the great minister of the next century: "Oliver Cromwell, who astonished mankind by his intelligence, did not derive it from spies in the cabinet of every prince in Europe: he drew it from the cabinet of his own sagacious mind. He observed facts, and traced them forward to their consequences. From what was, he concluded what must be, and he never was deceived." Foreign governments might therefore have. rejoiced to see the downfall of this man, whose soul was bent upon sustaining the glory of his country, as well as consolidating its internal peace. But he was as Cromwell-Speech iv. "Carlyle," vol. iii. p. 89. ↑ See ante, p. 25. prudent as he was watchful. He was surrounded with conspirators of every degree. The doctrine of assassination was openly preached by the Royalists abroad. From Paris, on the 23rd of April, 1654, came out a Proclamation in the name of Charles the Second, setting forth that "a certain base mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Cromwell-after he had most inhumanly and barbarously butchered our dear father, of sacred memory, his just and lawful sovereign-hath most tyrannically and traitorously usurped the supreme power over our said kingdoms.' It thus proceeds: "These are therefore, in our name, to give free leave and liberty to any man whomsoever, within any of our three kingdoms, by pistol, sword, or poison, or by any other way or means whatsoever, to destroy the life of the said Oliver Cromwell; wherein they will do an act acceptable to God and good men, by cutting so detestable a villain from the face of the earth." It further promises all sorts of rewards to “whosoever, whether soldier or other, who shall be instrumental in so signal a piece of service." This proclamation has been attributed to Hyde -perhaps unjustly. It is not clear that this incentive to assassination "on the word and faith of a Christian king" really came from Charles Stuart, though undoubtedly it came from his "Court at Paris." But it was extensively circulated, openly abroad, secretly in England; and it produced its natural effects. On the 20th of May, being Saturday—a day on which the Protector usually went to Hampton Court-his guards were to be attacked by thirty stout men, and then and there was the deed to be done, of which the perpetrator was to be honoured with knighthood, and five hundred pounds a year in land, and honourable employment. But the Protector escaped the ambuscade; for five of the royalist projectors of the plot were arrested in their beds a few hours before its intended accomplishment. Forty persons were subjected to examination as confederates with colonel John Gerard, Peter Vowell, a schoolmaster, and Somerset Fox. These three were tried before a High Court of Justice. Fox pleaded guilty, and was pardoned. The other two were executed. Of their guilt the evidence is sufficiently clear; and it is equally manifest that the plan had been communicated to Prince Rupert at Paris. Hyde protested, in a letter to Secretary Nicholas, that of the "whole matter the king knows no more than you do." There is one point connected with this plot which we give in the words of M. Guizot, who has published the documents upon which it is established: "Whatever may have been the amount of his participation in the plan for the |