Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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occasional crackdowns when complaints were raised in parliament or a

royalist plot was uncovered, but it seems to have been rare for anyone to be

punished.

In the secular sphere the Cromwellian ordinances mainly sought to tie up

what the Rump or Barebone’s Parliament had left unﬁnished, rather than to

initiate new reforming policies. Many were of a routine or stopgap nature,

such as those that renewed acts that were due to lapse. Cromwell was chary

of using ordinances to break new legislative ground, partly because he had a

true respect for parliament’s paramount role in law-making and partly

because he was anxious not to prejudice the endorsement of the Protectoral

regime by the parliament due to meet in September. But the tally of ordin-

ances—no fewer than eighty-two in little more than eight months, which

were marked also by intense diplomatic activity—testiﬁes to the prodigious

amount of work that he and his councillors got through. Nor were they all of

a politically ‘safe’ nature, by any means. Most contentious was one for the

reform of Chancery. This was a problem that had occupied the Rump and

Barebone’s at intervals since 1649, and the new ordinance’s provisions were

as conservative as they well could be without failing altogether to ameliorate

what was amiss. Almost everyone except the court’s own personnel admitted

that it badly needed reform, for the delays, costs, and general impenetrability

of its procedures were notorious, but so far the professional conservatism of

lawyer-MPs and the rich pickings for Chancery’s underworked and overpaid

ofﬁcials, such as the Six Clerks, had ensured that nothing was done. The bid

by Barebone’s to abolish the court outright was unhelpful, since it would have

left no jurisdiction in equity to ﬁll the gaps where the common law’s antique

and formalized processes failed to provide remedies for palpable wrongs.

But the new ordinance raised such objections from the judges in Chancery—

Bulstrode Whitelocke, Sir Thomas Widdrington, and John Lisle, Commis-

sioners for the Great Seal, and William Lenthall, Master of the Rolls and

former Speaker—that Cromwell suspended its operation until they had been

fully considered.

More than twenty of the 1654 ordinances dealt with ﬁnance; the two most

ambitious brought all the revenues into one treasury and under the jurisdic-

tion of the Court of Exchequer. Another group dealt with matters of public

order and banned duels, cock-ﬁghting, and horse races, the latter because

they were notorious occasions for the meeting of royalist conspirators. (Bear-

baiting had already been forbidden, not very effectually, by the Long Parlia-

ment in 1642.) Another ordinance took an important step towards providing

a public postal service, and yet another towards maintaining the highways

better. Another, in response to a petition from the Lord Mayor, regulated

London’s hackney-coaches, though not so much in the interests of their

passengers as in an attempt to moderate their feuding with the Thames

588 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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watermen. Taken as a body, the Cromwellian ordinances give little support

to the stereotype of puritan repression, and convey an impression of sensible,

unbiased effort to apply practical correctives to perceived ills.

One interesting phenomenon that links England and Scotland in the 1650s

is the steep decline in prosecutions for witchcraft, though in England it began

slightly earlier and is not to be attributed there to any one change of political

regime. Before the Civil War, witchcraft trials in England had shown a very

marked fall from the early 1620s onward, partly because James I grew out of

the beliefs he had expressed in his Daemonologie of 1597, and partly because

most of the circuit judges were meeting popular credulity regarding demonic

possession with a wholesome scepticism. This trend was drastically reversed

in the mid-1640s, largely through the efforts of one man, Matthew Hopkins,

the self-appointed ‘witchﬁnder-general’ who operated in East Anglia for

three years until his timely death in 1647. Belief in the public duty to punish

witchcraft was part of the dark side of the orthodox puritanism that then pre-

vailed, and Hopkins obtained a commission of oyer and terminer, empower-

ing him to try witches. He caused about 250 to be prosecuted and about 100

to be executed, a sizeable proportion of all those who suffered death—prob-

ably not more than 500—during the two centuries (almost) in which witch-

craft was a capital offence in England. For comparison, the total number of

English catholic martyrs from Henry VIII’s reign onward was 264. Hopkins

owed his shocking success to the strength of popular beliefs in maleﬁcium and

the wartime suspension of the assizes; his death and the revival of the assizes

restored something like normality, though there was a brief wave of witch-

craft prosecutions in Kent in the early 1650s.

North of the border the pattern was different. The Scots were much ﬁercer

witch-hunters than the English; with about a quarter of England’s popula-

tion, they put between two and three times as many alleged witches to death,

often after extracting ‘confessions’ by torture, before parliament ﬁnally put a

stop to such savagery in both countries in 1736 (over half a century after the

last known execution for witchcraft in England). There was a minor peak in

prosecutions in 1643–4, but it was nothing to the witch craze of 1649–50,

which was exceeded in ferocity only in the early 1660s. It was at its height

between the Scots’ proclamation of Charles II and the battle of Dunbar, when

the Kirk party was straining every nerve to assert and enhance its authority.

The kirkmen summoned the faithful to atone for the backslidings that had

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 589

For excellent brief introductions to the subject, see Hirst, England in Conﬂict 1603–1660,

pp. 49–51, and The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford, 1999), under ‘witchcraft’.

The article in the latter is by J. A. Sharpe, whose Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England

1550–1750 (1996) is the best account on a much fuller scale; but for the broader picture see Keith

Thomas’s classic Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Stuart Clark, Thinking with

Demons (Oxford, 1997).

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 589

caused God to punish them with defeats in the ﬁeld; they launched a drive

against heinous sin of every kind, from fornication to ﬁshing on the sabbath,

and what could be more displeasing to the Lord than witchcraft? In contrast

with England, where parliament and government showed little or no interest

in witches after the Presbyterians lost their ascendancy, the Scottish parlia-

ment, the Committee of Estates, the privy council, and the Commission of the

Kirk all played a part in harrying them. But the strain of fanaticism was strong

at the grass roots too, for most prosecutions were initiated at parish level, in

the kirk session. How many perished in 1649–50 is impossible to say; the best

authority reckons ‘certainly many dozens, perhaps hundreds’.

All that can be

said in mitigation of these barbarities is that most of the wretched victims

were strangled at the stake before being burnt.

The horrors all but ceased upon Cromwell’s rout of the Covenanting army

and the subsequent establishment of the English ascendancy in Scotland, for

the Kirk party now had to bow to a degree of religious pluralism and could no

longer sway the agencies of the state. The four English commissioners who

went through Scotland on circuit in 1652 to administer criminal justice

showed the same scepticism towards accusations of witchcraft as the assize

judges in their own country, and they dismissed many cases for lack of

evidence.

Further progress in settling Scotland had to wait until the terms of union had

been deﬁned and Glencairn’s rising defeated. By May 1655, however, the last

embers of royalist resistance in arms had been stamped out, and Middleton

had rejoined the king in exile. In London, a strong committee of the Council

of State had spent most of March considering the civil government of Scot-

land, which it proposed to vest in a Scottish Council. Cromwell formally

approved its nine members, soon raised to ten, on 4 May, and they were all in

place in Edinburgh by mid-September. Lord Broghill, the 34-year-old son of

the Earl of Cork, was its all-important president, and Monck as commander-

in-chief was his right-hand man. Of their fellow-councillors, two were distin-

guished Scotsmen, William Lockhart and John Swinton, and the rest were

English; they included Charles Howard, the future Earl of Carlisle. Broghill

was a bold choice, for he had been a staunch royalist until six years earlier,

but Cromwell had been much impressed by the high ability that he had dis-

played in Ireland as diplomat and administrator, and his trust was not mis-

placed. The successful partnership that developed between the ex-royalists

Monck and Broghill, differing as they did in age and social background, is a

tribute to Cromwell’s breadth of view and judgement of men.

Broghill for his part had become devoted to Cromwell, but he stipulated

that he should not be required to hold the presidency for more than a year.

590 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, p. 144.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 590

His success in Scotland is the more impressive for being achieved in so short a

term. He never doubted that his prime obligation was to the Protectoral gov-

ernment, but he appreciated that a contented Scotland would be easier and

cheaper to administer, and he genuinely aimed to better the lot of the mid-

dling and lower orders of the population. He shared Cromwell’s desire to free

them from feudal burdens and give them better justice than they had had

under the hereditary jurisdictions of the magnates, and Robert Baillie and

John Nicoll, Scottish patriots both, testify to his success in gaining the

people’s admiration, even their love. Monck’s aim to establish a system of

justices of the peace was realized during Broghill’s presidency, and though

some of the JPs were English ofﬁcers the majority were Scottish lairds.

One of Broghill’s thornier problems was to moderate the ﬁerce differences

within the Kirk, especially those between Resolutioners and Protestors, and

to protect the religious liberty of protestants who wanted no part of either

faction. As soon as Glencairn’s rising was suppressed, Monck had lifted the

ban on meetings of presbyteries and synods that Colonel Lilburne had

imposed when many of them were acting as cells of conspiracy and agencies

of recruitment against the Commonwealth, but the presbyteries could not be

fully restored to their traditional role in admitting ministers to parish livings,

because so many of them were dominated by Resolutioners, who were still

praying openly for the king. Against such people, Lilburne had found a valu-

able collaborator from 1653 onward in Patrick Gillespie, the newly appointed

Principal of Glasgow University, and in March 1654, on Lilburne’s advice,

Cromwell summoned Gillespie and two other ministers of his persuasion to

London for consultation. In May Cromwell also invited two Resolutioners

and a strict Presbyterian Protester, so that he could hear all sides, but none of

the three accepted, so their case went by default. The outcome was an ordin-

ance by Protector and council, erecting a commission of ﬁfty-seven Scottish

‘triers’ with functions like those of their English counterparts. Not surpris-

ingly, most of them were the more compliant sort of Protesters, laced with a

few outright Independents, and the ordinance soon became known as ‘Gill-

espie’s charter’. For a long time it remained almost a dead letter, for the Res-

olutioners in general and the strict Presbyterians among the Protesters

denounced it as an intolerable intrusion by the state on the indefeasible spir-

itual authority of the presbyteries.

While numerous Scotsmen were still in arms for the king it was natural that

Lilburne, and Monck after him, had looked to the Protesters (or at least Gille-

spie’s party among them) as friends and the Resolutioners as enemies. The

trouble with such a policy was that the Resolutioners were in a huge major-

ity; the Protesters included only a sixth of Scotland’s parish clergy, and their

adherents included rigid Presbyterians like Johnston of Wariston who

were not friendly at all. Soon after Broghill arrived in Scotland he wrote to

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 591

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Thurloe that the main difference between the parties was that the Resolu-

tioners ‘love Charles Stuart and hate us’, while the Protesters ‘neither love

him nor us’.

He set about persuading the Resolutioners that the king was

truly beaten and that their best interests lay in coming to terms with the Pro-

tectorate. He secured their leaders’ agreement to stop their members from

praying for the king by remitting the ﬁnes already imposed on those who had

done so, whereupon the Protesters of the west, fearing a deal with their

opponents that would leave them in the cold, sent a deputation to Edinburgh

to ﬁnd how best they could register their willingness to own the present civil

power. Broghill wrung from them some kind of undertaking to put Gillespie’s

charter into execution, after which he and the Scottish Council announced

that any of the triers who had not declared themselves willing to act by

1 December would be replaced.

The story of his negotiations with the various factions is too long and com-

plicated to be told here, but his patience and diplomacy in dealing with men

whose bigotry was so alien to his own nature were exemplary. By the spring

of 1656 he had all the parties looking to the Scottish Council—and behind it

the Protectorate—to umpire their quarrels and help them defeat their oppon-

ents. His aim was to create a new party, embracing the great majority of Reso-

lutioners and the Gillespie wing of the Protesters, and in practical terms he

largely succeeded. His ﬁnal achievement, in August 1656, was to reach agree-

ment with the Resolutioners on how parish ministers were to be selected,

approved, and admitted to their beneﬁces and stipends. The terms were that

the presbyteries should nominate their candidate as of old, but must certify

the Scottish Council as to his ﬁtness, and that if approved the presentee must

engage willingly to live peaceably under the established government. It was a

triumph of common sense, for it preserved the essence of the Presbyterian sys-

tem of appointment while ensuring, with the minimum of secular interven-

tion, that the clergy were pledged to obey the civil authority. The system

worked well, and went on functioning through the remaining years of the

Protectorate.

Broghill came of a remarkable family. His elder brother, the second Earl of

Cork, suffered through his staunch royalism throughout the Civil Wars and

lived quietly on his ruined Irish estate, where through Broghill’s intercession

he obtained from Cromwell some relief from his acute ﬁnancial problems.

His youngest brother was Robert Boyle, one of the father-ﬁgures of modern

science, and a leading spirit in the group of fellow experimentalists which he

liked to call the ‘invisible college’, and which is famous as the nucleus of the

Royal Society. Boyle chose to make his home in England in 1654, and his

592 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Thurloe State Papers, IV, 49, quoted in C. H. Firth, Last Years of the Protectorate (2 vols.,

1909), II, 95, and in Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, p. 199.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 592

Oxford lodgings were one of the regular meeting-places of this group, which

also included Seth Ward, John Wallis, and Christopher Wren. The college had

its origins in 1645, and its activities are to be linked far more with the longer-

term developments in intellectual enquiry than with any particular changes in

government; but it is not insigniﬁcant that it ﬂourished in Cromwellian Eng-

land, and in a university whose chancellor was Cromwell’s appointee and for-

mer chaplain John Owen (though Owen and the scientists were not on

friendly terms). It is not a simple matter to characterize a regime that is asso-

ciated on the one hand with major-generals and the enforcement of moral

regulation by the state, and on the other with scientiﬁc research, the enlarge-

ment of toleration, the encouragement of learning, and (as we shall see) the

only attempt to establish a new university between the Middle Ages and the

nineteenth century.

It is no easier to convey with a few broad strokes the style and spirit in

which Cromwell actually wielded his power as Protector. He has been called

a king in all but name,

but the description, while containing elements of

truth, needs to be received with caution. He willingly accepted formal consti-

tutional restraints on his authority that no previous English monarch would

have dreamt of bowing to, and which had no parallels in contemporary Euro-

pean monarchies. He seems to have had a genuine aversion to the royal title

and all the religious connotations that it carried, and he was anxious to avoid

any outward appearances that would give ammunition to those who suspected

that his rise to Protector was planned as a stage in his ascent to the throne. Yet

he was much aware of the dignity due to the British state, which in the eyes of

foreign monarchs and their diplomats he now personiﬁed, and in his dealings

with them there was no other model than the monarchical one for him to

adopt. Presidents, as heads of state, had not yet been invented. The stadhold-

erate of Holland offered no pattern to follow, not only because its powers

were quite different but because it had been closely linked with the house of

Stuart and was currently in abeyance. The Doge of Venice provided even less

of a model, being a byword for powerlessness and mere pomp.

The degree to which Cromwell assumed the outward trappings of monar-

chy changed considerably between the ﬁrst and longer constitutional phase of

the Protectorate, which was regulated by the Instrument of Government and

lasted for more than three and a half years, and the ﬁnal sixteen months that

ensued upon his second investiture under the new parliamentary constitution

of 1657. In the latter period he did assume a more regal persona, partly to

mitigate the disappointment of those who had tried to make him king, but

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 593

Roy Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All but Name 1653–1658 (Stroud, 1997), and

for what follows concerning Cromwell’s court and entourage the same author’s The Court of

Oliver Cromwell (Cambridge, 1989). Sherwood is of course by no means the only historian to

have delineated Cromwell’s authority as essentially royal.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 593

from the outset the only residences appropriate to his ofﬁce were royal

palaces, and their stafﬁng and ceremony were bound to bear some resem-

blances to a royal court. The contrast between the early Protectorate and the

preceding Commonwealth can, however, easily be exaggerated. The Rump

had been well aware of the sensitivity of foreign ambassadors and other

diplomats to the ceremonial, the accoutrements, and the whole physical ambi-

ence that they encountered when they did business with the regicide republic,

and it had been much concerned to uphold the Commonwealth’s dignity

when transacting with them. Despite its chronic ﬁnancial problems, it had

reserved to the republic’s use not only the palaces of Whitehall, St James’s,

and Hampton Court but also Somerset House, Greenwich House, Windsor

Castle, and York Manor. When it sold Charles I’s great art collection, it kept

back many treasures to embellish the rooms in the royal residences that were

still used for ofﬁcial purposes or to house senior ofﬁcers of state.

After the

battle of Worcester it had allocated Hampton Court to Cromwell’s use, but

in the dark days late in 1652, when the war at sea was going badly and its rela-

tions with the army were worsening, it decided to sell Hampton Court

(among other assets) to help ﬁll its empty coffers. Cromwell must have con-

curred, since he was on the committee for disposing of it, but on becoming

Protector he had Hampton Court repurchased. Thereafter he spent most

weekends there, from Friday to Monday. It gave him welcome relief after the

hectic activity of Whitehall, where he lived and transacted affairs of state

during the week. St James’s and Somerset House were retained mainly for the

entertainment of ambassadors and distinguished guests of the state, as they

had been under the Rump, while Windsor Castle was used mainly as a prison.

There is a revealing contrast between the spontaneous, informal way in

which Cromwell received and conversed with fellow-countrymen who came

before him, from the republican Edmund Ludlow to the Quaker George Fox,

and the protocol he observed on public and diplomatic occasions. He took

over the Master of Ceremonies whom the Long Parliament had employed

since late in 1643, Sir Oliver Fleming, who happened to be his distant cousin

and had learnt his job under Charles I. Fleming was openly pleased at

Cromwell’s elevation and served him well; he must have enjoyed restoring the

dignity and etiquette with which ambassadors had been received when he was

younger. The scene for such occasions was the Banqueting House in White-

hall, beneath the ceiling on which Rubens had gloriﬁed the Stuart monarchy.

Ambassadors had to come into the Protector’s presence cap in hand and

address him as Highness, and he insisted that in formal letters of state

monarchs should call him ‘brother’, to the considerable embarrassment of

594 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth,

1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997).

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 594

Mazarin and Bordeaux. Yet his concern was for his country’s status rather

than his own gloriﬁcation, and whatever resemblances his household bore to

the court of Charles I its cost to the taxpayer was a small fraction of what it

had been under the monarchy. The sum allocated to its upkeep, and endorsed

by parliament, was £64,000 a year, which was raised to £100,000 under the

new parliamentary constitution of 1657, which deliberately approximated

his ofﬁce more closely to that of a king. This charge was formally separated

from that of the civil government and its personnel in a manner that antici-

pated the modern civil list, a wholesome practice that would not be

followed again until the reign of George III. Comparisons with early Stuart

times cannot be precise, because no ﬁrm line had then been drawn between

the functions and ofﬁcers of what we would call the court and those of the

civil government; all were the king’s servants, and he remunerated them from

what was still regarded as ‘his own’—except that much of the income of many

of them came from fees and gratuities paid by the public. But a very rough

estimate of the cost of the royal court in the early 1630s, including that of the

queen’s and princes’ households, would be of the order of £250,000, plus

more than £131,000 paid from the king’s coffers in annuities and pensions,

though some of the recipients of these did render genuine political services.

This was at a time when the total ordinary revenue of the crown had averaged

less than £620,000 a year, whereas parliament in 1657 ﬁxed the Protec-

torate’s regular revenue at £1,900,000. Before Ship Money, the royal house-

hold had consumed at least half the king’s regular income; under Cromwell

the charge was more like a twentieth.

Again, we are not exactly comparing

like with like, but we should be cautious about accepting the Protector as a

king in all but name.

One pleasure on which he did not stint himself was music, which he great-

ly loved. He had the organ of Magdalen College moved from Oxford to

Hampton Court, where it accompanied the musical entertainments he gave

there, as well as solacing his leisure hours. He had an organ at Whitehall too,

and music enlivened such occasions as ambassadorial banquets. The ‘Gentle-

men of His Highness’s Music’ actually outnumbered those of Charles I,

though at least four had previously served the king, and in 1657 his council

appointed a Committee for the Advancement of Music. Secular music was

ﬂourishing in England, and from 1652 the printer and publisher John Play-

ford drove a ﬁne trade in meeting the demand for songs and instrumental

pieces for performance in the home. Nor was music-making exclusively

domestic, for despite the ban on stage plays that the Long Parliament had

imposed in 1642 the ﬁrst full-length English opera, William Davenant’s

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 595

Aylmer, King’s Servants, ch. 2 (iv), 4(v), pp. 436–7 and passim; Aylmer, State’s Servants,

pp. 322–3.

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 595

The Siege of Rhodes, was publicly performed in London in 1656. A certain

relaxation of puritan austerity was in the air, though the trend was to be

reversed during the brief regime of the major-generals. Gallants and their

ladies were resorting again to such places of pleasure as Hyde Park and the

more exclusive Mulberry Garden, while John Evelyn in 1654 ‘observed how

the women began to paint themselves, formerly a most ignominious thing,

and used only by prostitutes’.

A very different sort of entertainment from that of Davenant’s opera was

the weekly dinner at Whitehall that Cromwell gave to the army ofﬁcers in and

around London. He probably enjoyed these relaxed and sometimes convivial

occasions, for they kept him in touch with old comrades and helped him to

keep his ﬁnger on the pulse of the army. They helped too by making the ofﬁ-

cers feel they were still valued, for their General Council had taken a sharp cut

in the political inﬂuence that it had wielded on and off since 1647. In 1653

alone it (or most of it) had endorsed the dissolution of the Rump, selected the

members of Barebone’s Parliament, and given its vital approval to the Instru-

ment of Government. Since then it had quite quickly sunk into obscurity, and

no one knows how often it met. It resurfaced occasionally at moments of

crisis, such as the challenge to the Protectorate by certain republican colonels

during the sitting of the forthcoming parliament, but it never recovered any

signiﬁcant political initiative during Cromwell’s lifetime. The role of the mili-

tary in government was to increase signiﬁcantly under the major-generals in

1655–7, but their regime derived its authority entirely from the Protector and

his council, and bore no resemblance to the collective claims to a political role

that the army had asserted between 1647 and 1649. When the General Coun-

cil did resume regular and frequent meetings in the spring of 1659, it would

be a sure sign that Richard Cromwell’s grip on the reins was slipping and that

the Commonwealth’s days were numbered.

In examining the face that the Protectorate presented to the world, it is

interesting to compare the vindications that were published by its two chief

ofﬁcial apologists during the ﬁrst half of 1654. It is hard to imagine two

defenders of the same regime more different in their attitudes and arguments

than Marchamont Nedham and John Milton, especially since both had quite

recently been upholding the superior virtues of a republic. Part, but only part,

of the differences lay in the audiences that they were addressing. Nedham’s

A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth was aimed at the educated

British public, and it ran to ﬁfty-two pages of good plain English. Milton in

his Second Defence of the English People was writing for an international

readership of scholars and political specialists, and he spread himself to three

596 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Diary of John Evelyn, under 11 Dec. 1654; p. 87 in the selection edited by Guy de la

Bédoyère (Woodbridge, 1995).

ch18-19.y8 27/9/02 11:57 AM Page 596

times that length, in highly rhetorical Latin. Nedham, it will be remembered,

saluted the Protectoral constitution as a perfect embodiment of mixed gov-

ernment, comprising the virtues of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy

while obviating the abuses to which each form was subject.

Milton by con-

trast scarcely concerned himself with constitutional matters, apart from

praising Cromwell for spurning the title of king. Throwing consistency to the

winds, he hailed Cromwell as the sole saviour of his cause and country. What,

he asked, could be more just, more expedient, more pleasing to God and

agreeable to reason, than the rule of the man most ﬁt to rule? Fifteen pages of

full-throated panegyric sustained the eulogy. Yet though Milton had nothing

to say about formal limitations to the Protector’s power, it is clear that his

acceptance of it was not without reservations—clear from the names of the

Commonwealth’s heroes whom he celebrated alongside Cromwell, including

the unbending republicans Bradshaw and Robert Overton, and clearer still in

the advice he tendered on the self-restraints that Cromwell should observe in

exercising his God-given authority. Chief among these was to refrain from

employing it in anything that concerned religion and the church, since they by

their nature lay outside the scope of the civil magistrate.

Milton must have

known of Cromwell’s commitment to a publicly maintained parochial clergy,

to which he himself was totally opposed, and his failure to inﬂuence him on

this, together with the monarchical direction of the constitutional changes in

1657, were gradually to alienate the poet from the regime he served.

Milton’s views on church and state were diametrically opposed to those of

Thomas Hobbes, who had published his Leviathan in 1651. Hobbes main-

tained that the civil sovereign, if he was a Christian, had the right and duty

not only to regulate the temporalities of the national church but to appoint

pastors and determine what doctrine might be taught and preached. It is

interesting that the two greatest political philosophers of their time, Hobbes

and James Harrington, both had strongly royalist connections and sympa-

thies—Harrington was a groom of the bedchamber to Charles I throughout

his captivity—but both lived and wrote untroubled in Cromwell’s England.

Hobbes, who had dwelt in Paris throughout the Civil Wars, chose to return

home at the end of 1651, and engaged in vigorous controversy with members

of the invisible college. Both men came more under threat after the Restor-

ation than they ever had been under the Protectorate; Harrington indeed

spent a spell in the Tower.

One aim on which Cromwell and Milton were agreed was a protestant for-

eign policy, with an alliance between Britain and the United Provinces as its

cornerstone. The prospects had not been good while Barebone’s Parliament

The First Phase of Cromwellian Rule 597

Above, p. 567.

Complete Prose Works of John Milton (8 vols., New Haven, 1953–82), IV, 666–8.

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