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. * A Fifteen in number, which he may enlarge to Twenty-one, if he see good. Not removable any of them, except by himself with advice of the rest. 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, Manton, and others not yet quite unknown to men, were among these Clerical Triers: the acknowledged Flower of Spiritual England at that time; and intent, as Oliver himself was, with an awful 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. A Second, which completes what little he could do in the matter at present, developed itself in August following. By this August 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 * 28 August, 1654 (Scobell, ii. 335-47), Commissioners. Richard Baxter, who seldom sat, is one of the Cergy for his County: he testifies, not in the willingest manner, Jeing no friend to Oliver, That these Commissioners, of one sort and the other, with many faults, did sift out the deleterious alarming Ministers of the Gospel, and put-in the salutary in their stead, with very considerable success,-giving usable, serious Preachers who lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they were;' so that many thousands of souls blessed God' for what they had done; and grieved sore when, with the return of the Nell-Gwynn Defender, and his Four Surplices or what remained of them, it was undone again.* And so with these Triers and these Expurgators both busy, and a faithful eye to watch their procedure, we will hope the Spiritual Teaching-Apparatus of England stood now on a better footing than usual, and actually succeeded in teaching somewhat. Of the Lord Protector's other Ordinances; Ordinance 'declaring the Law of Treason,' Ordinances of finance, of Amnesty for Scotland, of Union with Scotland, and other important matters, we must say nothing. One elaborate Ordinance, in sixtyseven Articles,' for Reforming the Court of Chancery,' will be afterwards alluded to with satisfaction, by the Lord Protector himself. Elaborate Ordinance; containing essential improvements, say some ;-which has perhaps saved the Court of Chancery from abolition for a while longer! For the rest, not above Two-hundred Hackney-coaches' shall henceforth be allowed to ply in this Metropolis and six miles round it; the ever-increasing number of them, blocking up our thoroughfares, threatens to become insupportable.† April 14th, 1654. This day, let it be noted for the sake of poor Editors concerned with undated Letters, and others, his Highness removed from his old Lodging in the Cockpit, into new properly Royal Apartments in Whitehall, now ready for him,‡ and lived there henceforth, usually going out to Hampton Court on the Saturday afternoon. He has assumed somewhat of the state of a King;' due ceremonial, decent observance beseeming Baxter's Life, Part i., 72. Scobell, ii., 313; Newspapers (in Cromwelliana, p. 139). the Protector of the Commonwealth of England; life-guards, ushers, state-coaches,-in which my erudite friend knows well what delight this Lord Protector had! Better still, the Lord Protector has concluded good Treaties; received congratulatory Embassies, France, Spain itself have sent Embassies. Treaty with the Dutch, with Denmark, Sweden, Portugal:* all much to our satisfaction. Of the Portuguese Treaty there will perhaps another word be said. As for the Swedish, this, it is well known, was managed by our learned friend Bulstrode at Upsal itself; whose Narrative of that formidable Embassy exists, a really curious life-picture by our Pedant friend; whose qualities are always fat and good ;-whose parting from poor Mrs. Whitlocke at Chelsea, in those interesting circumstances, may be said to resemble that of Hector from Andromache, in some points. And now for our Two small Letters, for our First Protectorate Parliament, without waste of another word! LETTER CXXX. For my loving Brother, Richard Mayor, Esquire, at Hursley DEAR BROTHER, 'Whitehall,' 4th May, 1654. I received your loving Letter; for which I thank you and surely were it fit to proceed in that Business, you should not in the least have been put upon anything but the trouble; for indeed the land in Essex, with some money in my hand, should have gone towards it. But indeed I am so unwilling to be a seeker after the world, having had so much favor from the Lord in giving me so much without seeking; and 'am' so unwilling that men should think me so, which they will though you only appear in it (for they will, by one means or other, know it), that indeed I dare not meddle nor proceed therein. Thus I have told you my plain thoughts. * Dutch Treaty signed, 5 April, 1654; Swedish, 28 April; Portuguese, 10 July; Danish Claims settled, 3. July (Godwin, iv., 49–56). |