Chapter VIII: Section II (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCOTLAND.

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

I. CIVIL ESTABLISHMENT.

COUNCIL, SITTING IN EDINBURGH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IRELAND.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE COLONIES.