Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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in the course of 1653–4, the ﬁrst two being of a necessarily rough and provi-

sional nature; but at the end of 1654 Petty was entrusted with what came to

be known as the ‘down survey’, which took him until 1659 but was unpreced-

ented in its thoroughness. An immediate decision was needed, however, on

where to begin settling the adventurers and members of the army. It was

taken by Cromwell and the council and conﬁrmed by much the longest act

passed by Barebone’s Parliament, which became law after seven days’ close

debate on 26 September. Irish catholic landlords who were to be transplanted,

and that was to mean the great majority of them, were to be resettled in

Connaught. The adventurers and members of the army of conquest were to

have equal shares in an area of settlement covering ten contiguous counties,

Antrim, Down, Armagh, Meath, Westmeath, King’s, Queen’s, Tipperary,

Limerick, and Waterford. The adventurers drew lots for the lands made avail-

able to them; so many had sold their interests during the long wait that they

were down now from 1,533 to 1,043. It was even more of a lottery than it

looked, for the ‘gross survey’ which the authorities had to go by until Petty

had done his work was often highly inaccurate. Many smaller investors sold

their shares without leaving England, but at least half the adventurers actual-

ly settled on their estates, for about ﬁve hundred had their ownership con-

ﬁrmed at the Restoration.

The army’s arrears presented greater problems which took years to settle,

since there were so many claimants and not enough land to satisfy them—not

even after Sligo, Leitrim, and part of County Mayo had been added to the ter-

ritory available. Ofﬁcers and men were given debentures for the sums owed

to them, but these could not be exchanged for land immediately because the

down survey took years to complete and there was clearly insufﬁcient land to

go round. Even those who held on to their debentures had to accept, under

protest, a rate discounted to 12s. 6d. in the pound (i.e. 62.5 per cent). Most

private soldiers received allocations so small that their parcels of land would

not have provided a living, and most did not want to settle in war-torn Ireland

anyway. They pined for the comforts of home, though in 1656 1,500 enlisted

for service in newly conquered Jamaica. Very many sold their debentures to

their ofﬁcers or to other speculators, and according to Petty the going rate in

1653 was only 4s. or 5s. in the pound. A total of 33,419 debentures were

issued, and about 12,000 ex-army men took their land and settled; about

7,500 had their titles conﬁrmed at the Restoration. They did not establish

the protestant yeomanry that the English government had envisaged, since

the smaller landholders were thinly spread and were apt to go native, but

ex-Cromwellian ofﬁcers became a signiﬁcant component in Ireland’s new

landlord class.

The lot of the transplanted Irish was seldom a happy one. There was just

not enough land in Connaught to give them their due under the relevant acts,

578 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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and many received very small allocations. Quite a few whose estates already

lay in Connaught suffered transplantation. The land shortage in the province

was exacerbated because quite a number of the 105 men whom the Rump’s

act totally excluded from pardon were not only spared but received land

there. How far this was due to unrecorded compacts in the interests of

clemency and future peace, and how far to bribery of the commissioners

entrusted with the allocation of the land, are questions on which historians

differ; the records are very incomplete, and of such as were taken many per-

ished in the ﬁre of 1922. But one decision did mitigate the general hardship.

The 1653 act did not specify whether the counties earmarked for settlement

by the adventurers and army members should be totally cleared or whether

only their landlords should be transplanted. Most army ofﬁcers took the hard

line, but in a pamphlet controversy early in 1655 Vincent Gookin, a settler

landlord who had sat for Ireland in Barebone’s Parliament, pleaded the case

of the Irish poor with a compassion untypical of his time. Probably through

the inﬂuence of his fellow-member Henry Cromwell, Oliver’s younger son,

who came to Ireland in 1655 as commander-in-chief at the age of twenty-

seven, it was decided that only landlords should be transplanted, though any

of their dependants who chose to accompany them were to be free to do so.

This was a practical as well as a humane decision, because the settlers needed

Irish labour to work their land, and a total clearance would have exacerbated

the land shortage in Connaught.

Politically, it was assumed by 1652 that Ireland was to be part of a union

with England, since the Rump’s bill for a new representative gave her, like

Scotland, thirty seats in future Commonwealth parliaments. But it was to be

a union on very different terms from Scotland’s, since full political rights

would be effectively restricted to the settler class and the military occupiers.

Even so, three of the six members for Ireland nominated to Barebone’s Par-

liament had genuine Irish roots, and they were not the only Irish sympa-

thizers among them. Civil government in Ireland was still in an inchoate state

when Cromwell assumed the Protectorship. The commissioners in Dublin to

whom the Rump had delegated authority were divided; Ludlow as a strict

republican resigned his place, and Cromwell’s son-in-law Fleetwood, who

had recently been appointed principal commissioner and acting commander-

in-chief, was made Lord Deputy in July 1654. Next month a Council of State

of six members was appointed from Westminster to assist him. Not one of

them was Irish-born, but these were provisional arrangements. The direction

of the Cromwellian government of Ireland was to change somewhat after

Henry Cromwell’s arrival in 1655, not least with regard to religious policy,

and its course will be followed later.

A New Order in Three Nations 579

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nineteen

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule

In England, during the dozen years prior to the Protectorate, each major

political turning-point had alienated a signiﬁcant section of the Long Parlia-

ment’s original adherents, and so had narrowed the basis of support for the

government of the day. When Civil War loomed, the constitutional royalists

who had helped to pass the reforms of 1641 broke with Pym and his party and

rallied to the king. In the crisis of 1648–9, most of the political presbyterians

were driven into the wilderness by Pride’s Purge and the regicide, and some of

them became royalists. In 1653, Cromwell’s expulsion of the Rump made

enemies for life of such parliamentary republicans as Haselrig, Vane, Brad-

shaw, and Marten, while the Fifth Monarchists among others were never to

forgive his elevation to the Protectorship at the end of the year.

Yet this latest turn was to bring some rallying of support. Pragmatic people

who thought that almost any government was better than none, and had

feared a drift towards anarchy while Barebone’s Parliament was tearing itself

apart, were ready to welcome a regime that combined ﬁrmness with moder-

ation and pledged itself to respect the rule of law. Most were glad to see the

strident prophets of a rule of the saints put in their place. The survival of a

national church with a publicly maintained parochial ministry was assured.

Many must have found it comforting that the constitutional balance between

Protector, Council of State, and parliament bore a recognizable resemblance

to the old trinity of king, privy council, and parliament, and many more were

relieved that the ancient common law of England was no longer under threat,

whatever reform it might face in particulars. Social conservatives were re-

assured by Cromwell’s pride in having been born a gentleman and by his

declared commitment to ‘keep up the ranks and orders of men’.

But he had a long way to go before he could live down the fact the he had

come to power as the head of an ambitious army, and win the positive sup-

port of the majority of the political nation. He would be on the way to doing

so towards the end of his life, under a constitution devised by an elected par-

liament, but the result after his death was to make his disgruntled ofﬁcers

reassert themselves against his son, to their own ruin as well as Richard’s. He

nevertheless achieved a degree of acceptance which grew over the years. Not

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 580

so long ago it was customary to account for this by portraying the Protecto-

rate over-simply as a conservative reaction, but this was at best a half-truth.

At least in its earlier years it showed a stronger impulse to reform than the

Rump had done. Although Cromwell was at heart a constitutionalist, with a

strong respect for parliament as an institution, he still believed that he had a

higher duty to promote what he called ‘the interest of the people of God’ than

to bow to the wishes of an unregenerate majority. And while he was conser-

vative to the extent of preserving a national church and respecting the rights

of tithes-holders, he upheld a broader religious liberty than any elected

parliament did in his lifetime. He strove for what he called ‘a reformation

of manners’, and he would not be afraid to employ his major-generals in

promoting it.

One must be wary, however, of generalizing too far or too soon about the

character of the Protectorate as a whole, for despite the continuity that ran

through its ﬁve-and-a-half year term it fell into distinct phases. In the ﬁrst,

which ended with the dissolution of its ﬁrst parliament, Cromwell and his

council were concerned mainly with strengthening foundations and wrap-

ping up unﬁnished business. The second was much affected by royalist con-

spiracy and by disappointment at the lack of parliamentary support, and its

most notorious feature was the regime of the major-generals. The major

change in the third phase came through the new constitution devised by the

second Protectorate parliament, which revived the civilianizing tendency of

the regime and brought it closer to the monarchy, as modiﬁed in 1641. The

brief rule of Richard Cromwell can be seen as a fourth phase, though it was

essentially a continuation of the third.

During the early weeks of the Protectorate the ﬁrst need was to secure it

against those, mainly the Fifth Monarchists, who were publicly denying its

legality, prophesying its early fall and inciting their ﬂocks to disobey it. Feake

and Powell were at it again immediately after their early release and were con-

sequently rearrested, though Powell escaped to Wales. John Simpson and

John Rogers were also disciplined, but Simpson was released in July on con-

dition that he did not come within ten miles of London. Anna Trapnel threw

a spectacular trance, lasting several days, in which she spouted doggerel

prophesies of Cromwell’s downfall, but then felt called by the Lord to Corn-

wall, where the local clergy reckoned her to be setting up as a second Holy

Maid of Kent and got her arrested. But without friends at Westminster or

active supporters in the army the Fifth Monarchists were ceasing to be a ser-

ious threat, especially as time passed and their prophesies went unfulﬁlled.

Harrison could still have been a danger, but early in February 1654 he was

ordered to retire to his father’s home in Staffordshire. He took his time about

obeying, but obey he did. There were still two regimental commanders with

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 581

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Fifth Monarchist convictions, Nathaniel Rich and Robert Overton, but they

were in Scotland and Hull respectively, and Cromwell took a chance on them.

There will be more to tell about Overton in the next chapter. Three other

colonels who were unhappy about the Protectorate because of their repub-

lican convictions nursed their misgivings until parliament met in September.

There was a ripple of unrest among the ofﬁcers in Ireland, on both millenar-

ian and republican grounds. Edmund Ludlow, lieutenant-general of the cav-

alry, was a rigid republican; he obstructed the proclamation of the

Protectorate in Ireland for weeks, and ceased to act as a commissioner for the

government. A ﬁrmer superior than Fleetwood, his commander-in-chief and

senior commissioner, would have made him either conform or get out, but

Fleetwood was malleable in the hands of the many Baptist ofﬁcers under his

command who shared Ludlow’s scruples, though not to the point of resigna-

tion. Cromwell was indulgent towards Fleetwood, who had married his

daughter Bridget, Ireton’s widow, and he did not have to fear serious oppos-

ition from the forces in Ireland. He let Ludlow retain his command until he

was caught circulating seditious pamphlets early in 1655. The great majority

of the army was so strongly supportive of the Protectoral regime, and he was

so unwilling to make martyrs of old comrades in arms, that he could tolerate

a few dissidents unless or until they engaged in open disobedience.

He was anxious at this stage, however, to play down the military origins of

his authority and to clothe his government with as much legal respectability

as possible. He had no difﬁculty with the judiciary, at least for the time being.

There were twelve judges in the central courts of law, and ten of them were

immediately reappointed. It is not known that the other two declined to serve;

it is likelier that Cromwell and the council held objections to them. One was

replaced by Mathew Hale, whose commission had served the cause of law

reform so well under the Rump. Hale accepted appointment on condition

that he would not have to take part in trying political prisoners, which was

readily granted; but in fact there were to be remarkably few political prison-

ers under the Protectorate. Among such as there were, some were held with-

out trial because the charges to which they were liable carried the death

penalty, which the government was reluctant to inﬂict. Throughout the Pro-

tectorate, no one suffered death for a political offence unless he planned or

engaged in armed rebellion or conspired to assassinate Cromwell. To try such

offences, the regime only twice resorted to a high court of justice (the Rump

had done so ﬁve times, in a shorter span of time), and only eight men suffered

death by these courts’ sentence. Torture was never employed by the Protect-

orate, and no civilian was ever tried by court-martial.

In Cromwell’s England, as under the monarchy, most justice and most local

administration lay in the hands of the county magistracy. The only period

when their local supremacy was seriously encroached upon by the military

582 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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was that of the major-generals, who will be considered in their place.

Throughout England and Wales the commission of the peace was an over-

whelmingly civilian body. Naturally some army ofﬁcers were appointed to it,

and some enjoyed a standing in the social hierarchy of their counties that

would have made it anomalous not to appoint them. But there were at any

one time at least 2,500 JPs in the country, and fewer than 90 of them were

serving ofﬁcers—roughly 1 justice in 30. Little more than half of these, most

of the time, held commands in the national or ﬁeld army; the rest were govern-

ors of towns, castles, and other strong points, and many felt as least as strong

a tie to their local communities as to the central government. There was an

even smaller military presence among those other agents of central authority,

the commissioners for collecting the monthly assessment. Out of about 3,000

in the whole country there were 72 serving ofﬁcers, of whom 21 held only

garrison commands.

One civil authority whose goodwill mattered greatly to Cromwell was the

corporation of the City of London, as he had acknowledged by giving it so

strong a presence at his inauguration. They repaid the compliment by mount-

ing a great reception and feast for him on 8 February 1654. Heading a large,

richly-clad cortège, he was greeted at Temple Bar with an oration by the City

Recorder, and from there all the way to Grocers Hall the streets were lined

with benches, seating the members of the livery companies. Crowds turned

out to watch the show, both in the morning and on the procession’s return to

Whitehall after dark, but they were depressingly silent.

The regime had to empower itself to punish its declared opponents, so one

of the ﬁrst of its ordinances proclaimed it to be treason to publish or preach

that the supreme power did not lie in the Protector and parliament, and the

administration in the Protector and Council of State. But no new political test

was imposed to replace the 1649 Engagement to be faithful to the Common-

wealth without a king or House of Lords, which was repealed. Hindsight

might suggest that Cromwell was keeping the way open for later assuming the

crown and creating a new second chamber, but all the indications are that

such possibilities were far from his thoughts early in 1654, or for long after.

He and the council used their temporary power to legislate by ordinance

more boldly to implement the Instrument’s provisions with regard to religion

and to speed the process of reform. Given that a broad established church was

to be maintained, the problems were to ensure that its resources were effect-

ively employed to maintain an able preaching ministry in the parishes, and

to remove those clergy who were ignorant, idle, drunken, or immoral. The

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 583

I examine the evidence more fully in ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate: a military dictator-

ship?’, in History LXXV (1990), 207–3: see esp. 215–19. For the statistics I am deeply indebted

to the unpublished Oxford D.Phil. thesis by H. M. Reece on ‘The military presence in England,

1649–60’, though my interpretation of the evidence differs somewhat from Dr Reece’s.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 583

solutions now provided were a reﬁnement upon not dissimilar schemes that

had been considered by the Rump and Barebone’s Parliament, but never

enacted. One ordinance, in March, set up a compact central body of Com-

missioners for Approbation of Ministers, who came to be known as the

triers, whose function was to approve every candidate presented to a living in

the church. A second ordinance, in August, nominated local commissioners

in each county (or group of small counties), commonly called the ejectors,

who were to identify the clergy in their areas who deserved to be removed.

Lay patronage, which Barebone’s had voted to abolish, was retained, but its

abuses were checked because every presentee had to receive the triers’

approval.

What happened when a parish living fell vacant was that the patron pre-

sented his candidate to the triers, with testimonials from three people who

knew him personally, including at least one in holy orders. Where the advow-

son had belonged to the crown, or to a bishop or dean and chapter, or to a

now-deprived royalist layman, the right to present had generally been taken

over by one or other agency of the state, and in these cases the wishes of the

parishioners were quite often consulted. The triers were an eclectic body,

including laymen as well as clergy, with Presbyterians and Independents in

roughly equal proportions and two or three Baptists as well. They were not

empowered to impose any such doctrinal test as the Thirty-Nine Articles;

Cromwell probably thought that the formulation of the ‘public profession’

envisaged in the Instrument required the sanction of parliament, as any

change in the tithes system certainly did. The triers had to satisfy themselves

of just three things: that the presentee was well grounded in the essentials of

the Christian faith, that he was competent to preach, and that his moral life

was above reproach.

As for the ejectors, they certainly made no clean sweep. Of all the parish

clergy beneﬁced in 1640, only 27 per cent were actually removed during the

next twenty years, though others retired voluntarily and many of course died.

Many had already been put out as active royalists or unbending Anglicans,

long before Cromwell became Protector. Where the ejectors took action, the

commonest grounds were habitual drunkenness, notorious immorality, fre-

quent or persistent non-residence, and unwillingness or inability to preach.

Some parsons were deprived for persisting in using the Prayer Book services,

preaching against the government, or collaborating with royalist laymen to

subvert it, but they were not very many. The fact is that the majority of the

pre-war parish clergy accommodated themselves to the successive changes of

584 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

The standard work on the fate of the clergy during the Interregnum is A. G. Matthews,

Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948). For an admirable concise treatment see Claire Cross, ‘The

Church in England 1646–1660’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum (Problems in Focus

series, 1972).

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 584

the 1640s and 1650s, and before we sneer at vicars of Bray we should con-

sider whether it was dishonourable of them if they thought it more important

to go on ministering to the spiritual needs of their ﬂocks as best they could

than to observe the strict letter of the Anglican rite. In practice, many Prayer

Book formularies were repeated from memory where parson and parish-

ioners still treasured them, and in London and some larger centres of popula-

tion elsewhere there were semi-private congregations that met regularly to

enjoy the full Anglican services and sacraments. The authorities generally

turned a blind eye to them except when the discovery of a royalist conspiracy

caused a clamp-down.

Richard Baxter, who was no upholder of the Protectorate and regarded

Cromwell as a usurper, paid a warm tribute to what the triers and ejectors

achieved in the church. ‘They saved many a congregation from ignorant,

ungodly, drunken teachers’, he wrote, and though the triers were ‘somewhat

partial’ toward Independents, ‘yet so great was the beneﬁt above the hurt

which they brought to the church, that many thousands of souls blessed God

for the faithful ministers whom they let in’.

Baxter himself, who was minis-

ter of Kidderminster in Worcestershire, led the way in providing the sort of

positive ‘propagation of the gospel’ by a collective effort of evangelization

that had been so frequently urged, but was so hard to achieve by legislation

alone. From 1653 onward he took the lead in uniting most of the clergy of

Worcestershire in a voluntary association which overrode any distinctions

between episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents in a common enter-

prise of spiritual dedication. All his associates were ‘disengaged faithful men’,

and their ﬁrst commitment was to instruct and inspire the laity. This they did

not only by preaching but by reviving the practice of catechizing, and they

also combined to regulate admission to holy communion. This did involve

exercising a degree of moral discipline over the laity, though in a much less

rigid manner than under a strict Presbyterian regime, and no one was forced

to submit to it. The example of the Worcestershire Association was followed

in at least thirteen other counties, not counting Cumberland and Westmor-

land, where a similar movement originated independently. A particular con-

cern of the association was to identify, encourage, and support suitable

candidates for ordination.

The ordinances which instituted the triers and ejectors were not the only

ones that carried on the efforts of earlier regimes towards reform in the

church, with rather more impetus. Another commissioned a new national

survey of the value and source of revenue of all beneﬁces, with a view to iron-

ing out the grosser inequalities and ensuring that for the poorer clergy a living

meant what it said. Another provided for the uniting of small parishes,

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 585

Quoted by Claire Cross in ‘The Church of England’, p. 105.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 585

especially in the older towns where they were obviously too thick on the

ground, and the sub-division of very large ones where one minister could not

possibly cope. These were widespread in the north; the parish of Whalley in

Lancashire, to take an extreme case, covered 180 square miles and included

nearly forty villages and hamlets with about 10,000 inhabitants between

them.

Such measures as these might have initiated a comprehensive rational-

ization of the church’s resources, but strong vested interests stood in the way

of change, and fact-ﬁnding in itself took time in a pre-industrial age of com-

munications. The Protectorate did not last long enough to see much progress.

Outside the broad Cromwellian national church, the separatist congrega-

tions which chose and supported their own pastors enjoyed considerable

liberty, though it was not unlimited. It did not extend to those whose teach-

ings or actions were accounted rank blasphemy, such as the anti-trinitarian

John Biddle or the Quaker James Nayler, of whom more will be said later.

Cromwell was reluctant, however, to see them punished as harshly as his par-

liaments would have liked, and he was more indulgent towards Quakers than

most gentry magistrates. But he gave no countenance to those of them who

tried to break up the services conducted by the parish clergy in what they

called ‘steeple-houses’, and he was even ﬁrmer against so-called Ranters who

preached and practised a belief that the spirit had liberated them from the

moral code enjoined by Holy Scripture. He was not a tolerationist of the

modern kind who regards an individual’s religious convictions as entirely his

or her business, so long as they do not impinge on the rights or liberty of

others. His ideal was not a plurality of sects, tolerated out of indifference, but

a community of all who ‘had the root of the matter’ in them, in a manner tran-

scending differences over outward forms and rites. He expressed it memor-

ably in a declaration that he issued on 20 March 1654, ordering a day of

fasting and prayer for relief from a long and unseasonable drought. It urged

the people to search their hearts as to why God seemed to be withdrawing his

blessing from them, and among the questions that he urged them to ask them-

selves were these:

Is brotherly love, and a healing spirit of that force and value amongst us that it ought?

. . . Do we ﬁrst search for the kingdom of Christ within us, before we seek one without

us? . . . Do we not more contend for saints having rule in the world, than over their

own hearts? . . . Do not some of us afﬁrm ourselves to be the only true ministry, and

true churches of Christ, and only to have the ordinances in purity, excluding our

brethren, though of equal gifts? . . . Do we remember old puritan, or rather primitive

simplicity, self-denial, mercy to the poor, uprightness and justice?

It may seem strange to modern readers, and it is certainly sad, that so

586 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Derek Hirst, England in Conﬂict 1603–1660 (1999), p. 36.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 226.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 586

humane and ecumenical a concept of religious liberty excluded Roman

Catholics. There were several reasons. The catholic church claimed for Rome

a temporal authority that could and then did conﬂict with that of national

sovereigns, and a spiritual authority that set the tradition of the church and

the pronouncements of the pope on a level with Holy Scripture. Protestants

were brought up to regard any challenge to the supremacy of God’s word as

impious, and much of catholic doctrine, especially concerning the mass, as

idolatrous. This was an age in which seriously false beliefs were thought to be

literally soul-destroying. At a more mundane level, most English and Scottish

catholic peers and gentry had been royalist in the Civil War, or at best neutral,

and the Irish rebellion had greatly heightened the national prejudice against

the faith. Yet Cromwell was more reluctant than most puritan politicians to

deal harshly with catholics, partly because of his desire to heal the divisions

in the nation and partly because he sincerely disliked forcing consciences. He

evidently wanted to free them from liability to the forfeiture of two-thirds of

their estates if they defaulted on their ﬁnes for recusancy, which is what a

harsh act of 1587 subjected them to. When the Protectorate was barely a

month old the council gave two readings to an ordinance repeating this pen-

alty, but it got no further, perhaps because other business crowded it out, per-

haps because it was felt that the repeal of a statute should be left to

parliament.

Cromwell contented himself with wielding executive authority

leniently, and except when serious royalist conspiracies were under investi-

gation his government turned a surprisingly blind eye to peaceable catholic

activity. Late in 1656, when he was negotiating an alliance with France,

Cardinal Mazarin wrote to him to urge a formal toleration of catholics. He

replied that a public declaration granting them full religious freedom was

politically impossible, but claimed that they had less cause for complaint

under his government than under that of the Long Parliament. He himself, he

said, had shown compassion to ‘very many’; he had ‘plucked many out of the

ﬁre—the raging ﬁre of persecution, which did tyrannize over their con-

sciences, and encroached by an arbitrariness of power over their estates’.

hoped to do more for them as soon as he could remove certain impediments,

but in the event his second parliament was to press him in the opposite direc-

tion. Nevertheless Bordeaux assured Mazarin that catholic priests were mov-

ing freely about London, and he and other foreign diplomats testiﬁed that

the catholic laity thronged to worship in the chapels of foreign embassies,

where they heard English priests preach in their own language. There were

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 587

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic 1653–4, p. 360, cited (slightly inaccurately) in Abbott,

Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 164.

Ibid., IV, 368. See Blair Worden’s outstanding essay on ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian

Protectorate’ in W. J. Sheils (ed.), Persecution and Toleration: Studies in Church History 21

(1984).

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