Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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everybody, and on public occasions he conducted himself with grace and dig-

nity. He could deliver quite an effective speech, so long as someone told him

what to say, and he instinctively found the right words with which to thank

the presenters of loyal addresses and send them away glowing. But the wood-

en phrasing and conﬁned expression of his surviving letters conﬁrm that his

was hardly a towering intellect, and there is no suggestion that he had mind-

ed being kept out of any position of political or military inﬂuence until he was

thirty-two and his father’s powers were obviously declining. He had no

instinctive political ﬂair, and he lacked the sheer zest for the exercise of

authority that his ofﬁce demanded.

With all his limitations, however, he might have managed if he had been

guided by a competent and reasonably united council, and if the army’s ofﬁ-

cer corps had been unequivocally loyal to the government that employed it. If

more of his councillors had been of the calibre of Montagu, Thurloe, and

Wolseley, and if the army had taken its cue from Monck rather than Fleet-

wood and Desborough, the story might conceivably have been different. But

enough has probably been said of the mediocrity and factionalism of most of

the council, and Richard suffered fatally from his lack of standing among the

army ofﬁcers, who were in the habit of referring to him as ‘the young gentle-

man’. Not unreasonably, he looked for advice to friends and well-wishers

outside the council, including Broghill, Fauconberg (his brother-in-law),

St John, Pierrepont, and Whitelocke, but this aroused the resentment of Fleet-

wood, Desborough, and other councillors of their faction. He wanted to

bring Broghill, Fauconberg, and his brother Henry into the council, but since (by

the Petition and Advice) the appointment of new councillors required the

collective assent of the existing ones there was never a chance. It is interesting

to note how many of the men who could offer him the wisest counsel and the

most loyal service either had a royalist background or had lost their seats in

Pride’s Purge. Monck in particular sent him an admirable letter of advice

from Scotland soon after his accession, urging him to cultivate the men of

power and interest in the localities, to admit more of them to the Other

House, along with the more prudent of the old peers, to encourage moderate

Presbyterian and Independent divines to form a common front against the

blasphemies of the extremer sects, to amalgamate regiments in order to rid

the army of ‘insolent spirits’ and reduce its cost, and in all this to consult

Whitelocke, St John, Broghill, Pierrepont, and Sir Richard Onslow.

But

sound though the advice was, there was little chance of Richard being able to

follow it, even if he had the will.

Fleetwood, as Lieutenant-General and as his brother-in-law, bore a special

responsibility for maintaining Richard’s good relations with the army, and he

708 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Thurloe State Papers, VII, 387–8.

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played an ambivalent role. On 21 September he appeared at the head of over

two hundred ofﬁcers to present Richard with an address of loyalty in the name

of the armies in England, Scotland, and Ireland, but its profession of allegiance

to the Petition and Advice was qualiﬁed by a reminder that Oliver had ‘in his

armies . . . reckoned the choicest saints his chiefest worthies’, and by an exhort-

ation to ‘carry on that good old cause and interest of God and His people’.

That catch-phrase, the Good Old Cause, would soon be carrying more and

more subversive overtones. The army address also strayed into political terri-

tory by asking that vacancies in the privy council should be ‘ﬁlled up with men

of known godliness’ and ‘that a work of reformation, tending to good life and

manners, may be vigorously carried on by the hands of good magistrates’.

more serious political challenge appeared early in October in the form of a

petition from a large gathering of more junior ofﬁcers, asking that Fleetwood

should be made commander-in-chief, with power to commission all ofﬁcers

below ﬁeld rank, and that no ofﬁcer should be dismissed or cashiered unless

he was convicted by a court-martial. To give a generalissimo so much inde-

pendence of the head of state, and worse still to make all ofﬁcers potentially

immune from dismissal if their activities should threaten the state, was in-

tolerable. A commander with more sense and integrity than Fleetwood would

have let the petition go no further, but all he did was to pass it on to Richard.

‘The young gentleman’ decided to address the assembled ofﬁcers in person on

18 October, and armed with a draft prepared by Thurloe he temporarily

quieted them with an effective speech. He had commissioned Fleetwood as

Lieutenant-General of all the land forces, he said, so making him commander-

in-chief under himself, and would always consult him when granting com-

missions, and he promised that no ofﬁcer would be arbitrarily punished or

dismissed.

Monck’s diligence ensured that there would be no such stirrings in the

forces in Scotland, where the change of Protector brought little alteration

until the government in England was undermined. Richard was proclaimed

with due ceremony in Edinburgh and elsewhere, and the only hitch in the

smooth running of the civil administration arose through the English govern-

ment’s failure to ﬁll two vacancies on the Scottish judges’ bench. Monck had

already weeded out the disaffected elements in his forces, but to make sure he

placed a ban on all meetings of ofﬁcers and soldiers that might tend ‘to inter-

pose in public affairs’.

In Ireland too the Dublin government took Richard’s

accession in its stride, and in October Henry was rewarded for his patient

work with promotion to the ofﬁce of Lord Lieutenant, which had long been

his due. Without his father’s support he was more vulnerable to the coolness,

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 709

Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (24 vols., 1751–66), XXI, 233–4; well

discussed in Davies, Restoration of Charles II, pp. 8–10.

Dow, Cromwellian Scotland, p. 234.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 709

to say the least, of the military faction in the English council, headed by his old

adversary Fleetwood, but the Irish situation, like the Scottish, was to remain

stable until the stability of the Protectorate itself was seriously undermined by

disruptions in England.

The major political event that was to involve all three countries early in

1659 was the calling of a parliament. Since the intention of Oliver and his

council to summon one in the autumn of 1658 had been abandoned only

because of his mortal illness, and since the ﬁnancial plight that Richard inherit-

ed clearly needed a parliament to alleviate it, there is a hint of drifting gov-

ernment in the fact that three months passed after his accession before the

decision to call one was formally taken, and nearly ﬁve before it actually met.

Richard’s position stood to be greatly strengthened by a freely elected parlia-

ment’s recognition of his title and conﬁrmation of the constitution under

which it was elected, and the welcome with which most of the country had

greeted his peaceful accession gave a fair prospect that both such votes could

be secured. Thurloe feared a concerted attack on the Petition and Advice by

the commonwealthsmen, but the main reason why the council was so div-

ided on whether to hold an election, and postponed its decision so long, must

surely have been that the military faction feared opposition to its current

ascendancy and a check to the army’s bid to recover the power that had been

slipping from it since 1656. In the council the rift between the civilian and mili-

tary parties was widening, and there were rumours early in November of an

intention to purge it of all but the army men and their allies. At a council meet-

ing in December, Desborough absurdly accused Montagu of conspiring with

Fauconberg to have Fleetwood and himself seized and imprisoned in Wind-

sor Castle. Amid these broils, Oliver’s funeral was belatedly solemnized on

23 November, though he had been buried earlier. What the council had

planned as a great public pageant ended in near-ﬁasco, because the funeral

procession set off so late that Westminster Abbey was dark by the time it

arrived there, and nobody had thought to provide candles. So Oliver’s efﬁgy

was abandoned after a brief ﬂourish of trumpets, without prayers or funeral

oration or any further ceremony.

Meanwhile the effects of Richard’s conciliatory speech to the army ofﬁcers

was proving short-lived. There were far too many ofﬁcers in London who

should have been with their regiments elsewhere, and during November a

dangerous new demand was heard at their Friday meetings at St James’s,

namely that the ofﬁcers cashiered by Oliver should be reinstated. These

included not only republicans like Okey and Packer and Fifth Monarchists

like Harrison and Overton but of course Lambert, and Fauconberg for one

was positive that Lambert was covertly fanning the ofﬁcers’ discontents.

710 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Thurloe State Papers, VII, 528, 612, discussed by Davies in Restoration of Charles II,

p. 38 n. 35.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 710

These rose higher when Richard rather tactlessly gave a regiment to Mon-

tagu, who was still General at Sea, and there was a new move to restrict the

Protector’s power to grant commissions. As soon as the summoning of par-

liament was announced the leading republican politicians stepped up their

contacts with the disaffected ofﬁcers, and it was the alliance between the two

groups that gave Richard and his loyal councillors most to fear.

For the elections, the government went back to the traditional pre-war

franchise and constituencies. Its opponents alleged that it did so in order to

manipulate the returns more easily and pack the House, but since Oliver and

his council had reportedly taken the same decision when they were contem-

plating holding elections in the autumn of 1658, this is unlikely to have been

the motive. The Petition and Advice had laid down that in the calling of par-

liaments ‘the laws and statutes be observed’ in all particulars except for the

disqualiﬁcation of royalists and catholics, and since it said nothing speciﬁc

about the franchise and the apportionment of seats, very possibly through

sheer oversight, the council probably felt that to follow the provisions of the

superseded Instrument of Government would have laid the forthcoming par-

liament’s legality open to question. At any rate there was great eagerness to

get elected, and the republicans in particular strove to secure as many seats as

they could get. They concerted their electioneering tactics in frequent meet-

ings at Sir Henry Vane’s London house. At the formal opening of parliament

on 27 January 1659 they made their hostile intentions clear. The ceremony

was performed with a decent pomp, similar to that with which Oliver had

inaugurated his last parliament, and Richard launched it with a speech that

struck many of the notes that his father had sounded: faith in the two Houses’

advice and appeals for the pay of his patient army, for the prosecution of

the war with Spain, for the care of the people of God, for the reformation of

manners at home, and for the protestant cause abroad. No doubt he was well

coached by Thurloe. He left it to Lord Keeper Fiennes to give a fuller account

of the state of foreign relations, but Fiennes roamed far beyond his brief and

talked far too long.

Many MPs, however, heard neither him nor Richard, who in the trad-

itional manner delivered their speeches in the Lords’ chamber. About 150 mem-

bers ignored Black Rod’s summons and sat tight in the Commons, either

because they did not recognize the Other House or because they challenged

Richard’s own title (in which case they rejected both). It is impossible to give

a remotely accurate breakdown of parties in Richard’s parliament, partly

because the fundamental division between supporters and opponents of his

Protectorate overlays some quite wide differences of outlook within both

sides, and partly because so many members’ views are unknown. More than

half had never sat before, and many were unusually young. The republican

veterans of the Rump strove hard and none too scrupulously to win these

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 711

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newcomers over to their own views about the paramount authority of the

people’s representatives, but though they had some success in obstructing

measures that the government wanted and needed, they quite failed to com-

mand an overall majority.

The council played into their hands by bringing before parliament a bill to

recognize Richard as Protector and the Petition and Advice as the constitu-

tion under which he and the two Houses governed. Thurloe introduced it on

1 February, but it must have emanated from a conciliar decision. It was an

open invitation to question both Richard’s authority and that of the Petition

and Advice, and the anti-Protectorists managed to hold off a second reading

for a full six days. When it was at last read again, Haselrig launched the

debate with a speech that lasted two or three hours and surveyed the course

of English history over the past thousand years, from the heptarchy onward.

He and Scot were the main leaders in a campaign of blatant ﬁlibustering,

which Richard’s supporters failed signally to counter. Not until 19 February

did the Commons ﬁnally vote to recognize Richard as Lord Protector, but only

subject to additional clauses (yet to be formulated) that would further limit his

powers and secure both parliament’s authority and the people’s liberties.

Thereafter the republicans switched their main attack to the Other House,

which they portrayed as so full of swordsmen and government ofﬁcials as to

constitute a mere extension of the Protector’s authority, at the expense of that

of the people’s representatives. Haselrig’s language became extravagant, even

by his standards. ‘If this should pass’, he said, ‘we shall next vote canvas

breeches and wooden shoes for the free people of England.’

Eventually, but

not until 28 March, the Commons did vote to transact with the Other House

as a house of parliament, but with the proviso that it should not exclude the

old peers who had been faithful to the parliamentary cause. Their admission

had long been discussed, and this proviso was not a republican victory, but

for Haselrig and his cohorts this spinning out of debate was part of an anti-

Protectorate campaign that was now shaping mainly outside parliament. For

however well versed they were in delaying tactics, they could make little head-

way against the majority of politically unattached and conservatively inclined

members who appreciated the Protectorate’s pursuit of peaceful settlement at

home and endorsed its policies abroad. Their procedural wrangles and gen-

eral obstructionism increasingly irritated the House.

They found more fertile ground outside it, in the middling and junior ranks

of the army ofﬁcers and among the millenarian and other radical sectaries.

They were helped by the tactless hostility that the moderate majority in

the Commons often displayed towards the army and the sects. William

Prynne, writing in May 1659, correctly attributed Richard’s downfall to ‘the

712 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

Diary of Richard Burton, IV, 79.

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confederated triumvirate of republicans, sectaries and soldiers’.

Things

began to go seriously wrong when the republicans and their supporters in the

army revived the petition, ﬁrst framed just over a year earlier, which had led

Oliver to dissolve his last parliament rather than let it come under debate

there. This time it was actually presented, with a roll of signatures variously

estimated between 15,000 and 40,000, by three prominent London Baptists,

Samuel Moyer, William Kifﬁn, and Josiah Berners. Moyer, who had been a

conspicuous ﬁrebrand in Barebone’s Parliament, subjected the Commons for

nearly an hour to ‘a great deal of cant language’, but whereas he had been a

consistent oppositionist Kifﬁn and Berners had hitherto sided with the Pro-

tectorate against its extremist attackers. Their appearance on this occasion

was a sign that Richard’s cultivation of conservative support was arousing

unrest at the radical end of the spectrum. The petition itself was addressed as

before ‘To the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England’, as though the

Other House had no part in it, and called upon it to restore to its elected mem-

bers ‘the supreme power and trust, which the people (the original of all just

power) commit unto them’. It also demanded that no tender consciences

should be oppressed, and that no ofﬁcers or soldiers should be cashiered

except by sentence of a court-martial. The republican MPs were clearly

expecting it, and among others not only Haselrig, Scot, Vane, and Neville

but Lambert too urged that it should receive a vote of thanks. But that motion

was lost by 202 votes to 110, and the petitioners were given a coldly non-

committal answer.

Despite their support of his petition, the republicans were not yet openly

campaigning for the outright abolition of the Protectorate, though they

would change their tune when they had sufﬁciently undermined it. For the

present they recognized that it was quite widely popular and that they were in

a minority, so one after another they declared their willingness to accept it in

a modiﬁed form, so long as it was based not on the Petition and Advice but on

the free grant of parliament, under such limitations as parliament should

impose. In particular, the Protector must have no veto over the Commons’

enactments and no absolute control over the armed forces. On the latter point

they had much support within the army, where a new remonstrance was

being agitated while the mass petition already described was being canvassed.

Lambert was reported to be fomenting it, and among other things it demand-

ed again that the army should have a commander-in-chief distinct from the

Protector. Fleetwood, Desborough, and the other ofﬁcers of general rank

should have put a stop to it, but they showed no disposition to do so. For one

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 713

W. Prynne, The Republicans and Others’ Spurious Good Old Cause Brieﬂy and Truly Ana-

tomized (13 May, 1659: British Library E983(6), p. 1.

For fuller accounts of the petition and its reception, see Firth, Last Years, II, 30–4; Davies,

Restoration of Charles II, pp. 57–9; and Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII, 20–1.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 713

thing they had no inclination to alienate the mass of middle-ranking and

junior ofﬁcers, because they needed their support for their efforts to secure

their own political ascendancy, and for another they shared their sub-

ordinates’ resentment over Richard’s habit of taking counsel from the army’s

opponents. It was no doubt on the latter’s advice that Richard went in person

to Wallingford House, Fleetwood’s palatial residence at Stoke Newington

where the senior ofﬁcers in and about London habitually met. He told them

he would part with the generalship and his life together, and shamed Fleet-

wood and Desborough into publicly repudiating the proposed remonstrance.

Neither ofﬁcer was yet engaging in open disloyalty to Richard, or conniving

actively with the republican opposition in parliament, but that would come

quite soon.

Two incidents throw light on the rise of feeling against Richard within the

army, especially among its radical puritans. One arose from a violent public

quarrel in Westminster Hall between Colonel Ashﬁeld, a leading army com-

monwealthsman (and a Baptist) whose regiment was in Scotland, and Major-

General Whalley, a conspicuously loyal supporter of the Protectorate.

Ashﬁeld reportedly dared Whalley to strike him, whereupon Whalley, as his

superior ofﬁcer, reported him to the Protector as commander-in-chief.

Richard ordered Ashﬁeld to apologize to Whalley on pain of being court-

martialled, but a deputation from the gathered churches came and pleaded

with him not to put their brother on trial. Richard forbore, but it was a pity

he did not at least follow Monck’s excellent advice to send Ashﬁeld back to

Scotland. The man’s impunity must have seemed a sign of weakness. The

other episode began when a godly cornet in the cavalry regiment of Colonel

Ingoldsby, another of Richard’s most loyal ofﬁcers, brought charges against

his major of favouring moral delinquents and browbeating honest men in the

regiment. The case came before Richard, who furiously accused the cornet of

trying to arraign his major because the latter was one of his own supporters.

‘You talk of preaching and praying men, they are the men that go about to

undermine me’, he reportedly said, and clapping his hand on Ingoldsby’s

shoulder, added ‘Go thy way, Dick Ingoldsby, thou canst neither preach nor

pray, but I will believe thee before I believe twenty of them’.

There was something of a lull on the political front between mid-February

and the end of March. The republicans, while ostensibly courting the army,

went on obstructing the ﬁnancial measures that were needed to meet the sol-

diers’ arrears of pay, but they rarely won a vote. They were not the govern-

ment’s only opponents, for a small number of crypto-royalists had found

seats—probably fewer than a score—and they were encouraged by the exiled

714 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), pp. 30–1, fully quoted in Memoirs of

Edmund Ludlow, II, 62–3 n. 2. Ludlow gives his own account of the episode and of the

Ashﬁeld affair.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 714

court to side with the republicans. They usually did so, though not invariably.

The republicans’ best chances still lay in stirring trouble outside parliament,

and from February onward they made considerable use of the presses. In the

course of 1659 the bookseller George Thomason collected 652 separate pamph-

lets, compared with 282 in 1658. The theme of tract after tract was ‘the Good

Old Cause’—the cause for which the Civil Wars had been fought and won,

but whose purity had since been lost through the selﬁsh ambitions of section-

al interests. These pamphleteers were very coy about just what the good old

cause consisted in, because they were courting quite a range of Richard’s

political opponents, whose particular interests were not identical. Until his

regime was totally on the rocks they refrained from calling openly for its over-

throw, and despite their strong republican overtones they were generally

vague as to what speciﬁc form of government they favoured. They professed

friendship towards the army as a whole, and they sought to engage the sup-

port of radical Independents and sectaries who leaned towards an ascendan-

cy of the saints as well as that of commonwealthsmen whose republicanism

was more secular. Their prevailing tone was emotional rather than rational;

they invoked a generalized nostalgia for an imaginary time when all who

fought against the king had been united in a selﬂess common cause, and

lamented that self-regarding sectional interests had since dimmed its light.

The same sort of appeal had been sounded by Sir Henry Vane in A Healing

Question in 1656, coupled with the same evasiveness; the words ‘the good

old cause’ appear in its postscript, and Vane was almost certainly one of the

orchestrators of the 1659 campaign.

One of the ﬁrst manifestations of that campaign came in XXV Queries, a

tract that was widely circulated, and even distributed within the House of

Commons, soon after Richard’s parliament met. It asked:

Is there not an apparent necessity for those of the old parliament, the ofﬁcers and sol-

diers of the army, and all others that pretend to be friends to the good old cause, to lay

aside all personal animosities, . . . and to unite their forces together, to keep out the

common enemy, and to promote those principles of public interest, and common right

and freedom, which have been held forth from time to time in the declarations of the

parliament and army?

The Good Old Cause Dressed in its Primitive Lustre, published in mid-

February, sighed that ‘there was in those virgin days such a mutual, strict, and

lovely harmony and agreement . . . between the parliament and the honest

unbiassed people of the nation’, and identiﬁed the ‘ﬁrst and virgin-cause’ as

having consisted in parliament’s control over the armed forces and its freedom

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 715

XXV Queries (1659), reprinted in The Harleian Miscellany, ed. T. Park (1808–13), IX,

424 f.

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 715

from a monarchical veto.

This sexual imagery was not uncommon; for

instance A Call to the Ofﬁcers of the Army urged them to ‘do our ﬁrst works,

and remember the loves of our virginity’, for the cause that had once shone

with the freshness of a bride was now soiled and faded, ‘misshapen with a

strange dress, we had almost said with the attire of an harlot’.

Early in

March a longer piece entitled The Cause of God and of These Nations Sought

Out and Lifted up into Sight was more overtly republican. The cause had

reached its zenith (it afﬁrmed) in the year of Worcester, but since then public

interest had yielded to private, ‘the old spirit of the gentry brought in play

again’, and the profane pomp and vanity of the court revived. Triers were

keeping the true spirit of God from the pulpits, and the army was purged to

serve the usurpers. All was running back into the old channels of King, Lords,

and Commons, and the root cause was the present powers’ enmity to ‘the

growing light of the people of God’. The true good old cause, the cause of

God, lay not only in restoring a commonwealth, or even in civil and religious

liberty, but in a spiritual awakening that would deliver the whole creation

from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the people of God. It is

signiﬁcant that this anonymous author’s heroes were Ludlow, Okey, and

Overton, but above all Vane.

Robert Overton was very much in the news. He had been held a prisoner

since 1654, but on a petition from his sister the Commons had sent for him

from Jersey. He was warned to enter London quietly, but his fellow,

commonwealthsmen and millenarians stage-managed a hero’s welcome for

him. At Brentford 1,500 supporters turned out to greet him, and 400 or 500

horsemen carrying laurel branches escorted to Westminster—not to

Lambeth, whither he had been directed—the coach in which he sat crowned

with laurels and bowing to the acclaim of the crowds. When the Commons

heard his case a few days later, Thurloe and other government speakers tried

in vain to justify his imprisonment, and he was triumphantly released.

The literature of the good old cause, as one would expect, had a lot to say

about liberty for tender consciences, but it was a matter on which the parlia-

mentary republicans did not all speak with one voice. Early in Richard’s Pro-

tectorate a conference of about 200 representatives of 120 Independent (i.e.

Congregational) churches had met at the Savoy and deputed six ministers

including Owen, Nye, and Thomas Goodwin to draw up a confession of faith.

It was an ecumenical document, minimizing the differences between Inde-

pendents and Presbyterians at home and seeking the fullest concord with the

churches’ brethren in New England. Published in October 1658, it was fol-

lowed by local initiatives towards an accommodation between Independents

716 The Collapse of the Good Old Cause 1658–1660

The tract was by R. Fitz-Brian, and has never been reprinted; the press-mark of the British

Library copy is E968(6).

By ‘S.R. H.W. R.P.’: British Library E968(8).

ch25-26.y8 27/9/02 12:14 PM Page 716

and Presbyterians, though without prejudice to peaceable sectaries. It urged

the churches to give all their support to Richard and his government, and in

its preface John Owen thanked God for a regime that ‘vouchsafed a forbear-

ance and mutual indulgence unto saints of all persuasions that . . . hold fast

the necessary foundations of faith and holiness’.

Its deﬁnition of doctrine

was considerably less restrictive than the Westminster Confession of a decade

earlier, and in particular it declared that the civil magistrate had no authority

to dictate what people believed, beyond punishing the publication of gross

blasphemies and errors that could imperil their souls. Even this, however, was

more than many would allow—and not only extreme sectaries but the poet

Milton, who published A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes in

February 1659. That power, in Milton’s book, should be as near to nil as

made no difference.

The prevailing attitude in Richard’s parliament was less liberal than the

Savoy Declaration, and one reason was that the gentry’s animosity against

the Quakers, as subverters of social order as well as religious truth, was at its

height. The Commons held long debates early in April on a declaration order-

ing a day of national fasting and humiliation. It attributed the current dearth,

the decay of trade and the high mortality among both men and cattle to God’s

wrath at the many blasphemies and damnable heresies that were abroad, and

(most provocatively) at the failure of the civil magistrate to punish them. It

specially deplored the ‘crying up the light in the hearts of sinful men, as the

rule and guide of all their actions’. This was a direct allusion to the Quakers’

doctrine of the inner light, and an incitement to JPs to be more severe on them.

In fact there were 140 Quakers in prison at the end of Richard’s brief rule, not

counting 21 who had died in gaol, compared with 115 at the beginning, no

doubt because of the cessation of his father’s frequent interventions to curb

the gentry’s intolerance. At much the same time the Commons were debating

in grand committee the adoption of a ‘public profession’ of the nation’s faith,

and ordered that it should consist of the doctrinal articles of the Westminster

Confession. According to a well-informed reporter no minister was to

receive the public maintenance unless he subscribed it. As in Oliver’s time,

parliament wanted a more strictly deﬁned national church and a narrower

range of tolerance outside it, but whereas the old Protector had used his large

powers to preserve a very wide liberty of conscience, the new one’s notorious

aversion to preaching and praying men strengthened the fear that toleration

was under threat. When some London Quakers presented a petition early in

April on behalf of their brethren in prison, member after member inveighed

against them, and one moved that they should be whipped home as

vagrants.

The Overthrow of the Protectorate 717

A. G. Matthews (ed.), The Savoy Declaration of Faith and Order, 1658 (1959), p. 56.

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