At a time, too, when all Doctrine does not satisfy itself with spouting, but longs to become instant Action. 'Go and tell your Protector,' said the Anabaptist Prophet, 'That he has deceived the Lord's People; that he is a perjured villain,'— 'will not reign long,' or I am deceived; will end worse than the last Protector did,' Protector Somerset who died on the scaffold, or the tyrant Crooked Richard himself! Say I said it! A very foul chimney indeed, here got on fire. And 'Major-General Harrison, the most eminent man of the 'Anabaptist Party, being consulted whether he would own 'the new Protectoral Government, answered frankly, No;' was thereupon ordered to retire home to Straffordshire, and keep quiet.

Does the reader bethink him of those old Leveller Corporals at Burford, and Diggers at St. George's Hill five years ago; of Quakerisms, Calvinistic Sansculottisms, and one of the strangest Spiritual Developments ever seen in any country? The reader sees here one foul chimney on fire, the Feak-Powel chimney in Blackfriars; and must consider for himself what masses of combustible materials, noble fuel and base soot and smoky explosive fire-damp, in the general English Household it communicates with! Republicans Proper, of the Long Parliament; Republican Fifth-Monarchists of the Little Parliament; the solid Ludlows, the fervent Harrisons: from Harry Vane down to Christopher Feak, all manner of Republicans find Cromwell unforgivable. To the Harrison-and-Feak species Kingship in every sort, and government of man by man, is carnal, expressly contrary to various Gospel Scriptures. Very horrible for a man to think of governing men; whether he ought even to govern cattle, and drive them to field and to needful penfold, except in the way of love and persuasion,' seems doubtful to me! But fancy a reign of Christ and his Saints; Christ and his Saints just about to come,-had not Oliver Cromwell stept in and prevented it! The reader discerns combustibilities enough; conflagrations, plots, stubborn disaffections and confusions, on the Republican and RepublicanAnabaptist side of things. It is the first Plot-department

which my Lord Protector will have to deal with all his life long. This he must wisely damp down, as he may, Wisely for he knows what is noble in the matter, and what is base in it; and would not sweep the fuel and the soot both out of doors at once.

Tuesday, 14th February, 1653-4. At the Ship-Tavern in the Old Bailey, kept by Mr. Thomas Amps,' we come upon the second life-long Plot-department: Eleven truculent, rather threadbare persons, sitting over small drink there, on the Tuesday night, considering how the Protector might be assassinated. Poor broken Royalist men; payless old Captains, most of them, or such like; with their steeple-hats worn very brown, and jack-boots slit, and projects that cannot be executed. Mr. Amps knows nothing of them, except that they came to him to drink; nor do we. Probe them with questions; clap them in the Tower for a while: Guilty, poor knaves; but not worth hanging:-disappear again into the general mass of Royalist Plotting, and ferment there.

The Royalists have lain quiet ever since Worcester, waiting what issue matters would take. Dangerous to meddle with a Rump Parliament; or other steadily regimented thing; safer if you can find it fallen out of rank; hopefullest of all when it collects itself into a Single Head. The Royalists judge, with some reason, that if they could kill Oliver Protector, this Commonwealth were much endangered. In these Easter weeks, too, or Whitsun weeks, there comes from our Court,' (Charles Stuart's Court,) at Paris,' great encouragement to all men of spirit in straitened circumstances, A Royal Proclamation "By the King," drawn up, say some, by Secretary Clarendon; setting forth that 'Whereas a certain base, mechanic fellow, by name Oliver Cromwell, has usurped our 'throne,' much to our and other people's inconvenience, whosoever will kill the said mechanic fellow by sword, pistol, or 'poison,' shall have £500 a-year settled upon him, with colonelcies in our Army, and other rewards suitable, and be a made man,—' on the word and faith of a Christian King.' A Proclamation which cannot be circulated except in secret; but

is well worth reading by all loyal men. And so Royalist Plots also succeed one another, thick and three-fold through Oliver's whole life ;-but cannot take effect. Vain for a Christian King and his cunningest Chancellors to summon all the Sinners of the Earth, and whatever of necessitous Truculent-Flunkeyism there may be, and to bid, in the name of Heaven and of another place, for the Head of Oliver Cromwell: once for all, they cannot have it, that Head of Cromwell;-not till he has entirely done with it, and can make them welcome to their benefit from it.

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iii., p. 318.

JAMES NAYLER AND COMPANY.

6

'In the month of October, 1655,' there was seen a strange sight at Bristol in the West. A Procession of Eight Persons; one, a man on horseback, riding single; the others, men and women, partly riding double, partly on foot, in the muddiest highway, in the wettest weather; singing, all but the single rider, at whose bridle splash and walk two women: "Hosanuah! Holy, holy! Lord God of Sabaoth!" and other things, 'in a buzzing tone,' which the impartial hearer could not make out. The single-rider is a rawboned male figure, with lank hair reaching below his cheeks;' hat drawn close over his brows; 'nose rising slightly in the middle;' of abstruse ' down look,' and large dangerous jaws strictly closed: he sings not; sits there covered; and is sung to by the others bare. Amid pouring deluges, and mud knee-deep: so that the rain ran in at their necks, and they vented it at their hose and breeches:' a spectacle to the West of England and Posterity! Singing as above; answering no question except in song. From Bedminster to Ratcliffe Gate, along the streets to the High Cross of Bristol: at the High Cross they are laid hold of by the Authorities;-turn out to be James Nayler and Company. James Nayler, from Andersloe' or Ardsley 'in Yorkshire,' heretofore a Trooper under Lambert; now a Quaker and

THE WEST INDIAN INTEREST.

75

something more. Infatuated Nayler and Company; given up to Enthusiam, to Animal-Magnetism, to Chaos and Bedlam in one shape or other! Who will need to be coerced by the Major-Generals, I think;-to be forwarded to London, and there sifted and cross-questioned. Is not the Spiritualism of England developing itself in strange forms? The Hydra, royalist and sansculottic, has many heads.

Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, vol. iv., p. 35.

THE WEST INDIAN INTEREST.

The Grand Sea-Armament which sailed from Portsmouth at Christmas 1654, proved unsuccessful. It went westward; opened its Sealed Instructions at a certain latitude; found that they were instructions to attack Hispaniola, to attack the Spanish Power in the West Indies: it did attack Hispaniola, and lamentably failed; attacked the Spanish Power in the West Indies, and has hitherto realised almost nothing,-a mere waste Island of Jamaica, to all appearance little worth the keeping at such cost. It is hitherto the unsuccessfulest enterprise Oliver Cromwell ever had concern with. Desborow fitted it out at Portsmouth, while the Lord Protector was busy with his First refractory Pedant Parliament; there are faults imputed to Desborow: but the grand fault the Lord Protector imputes to himself, That he chose, or sanctioned the choice of, Generals improper to command it. Sea-General Penn, LandGeneral Venables, they were unfortunate, they were incompetent; fell into disagreements, into distempers of the bowels; had critical Civil Commissioners with them, too, who did not mend the matter. Venables lay 'six weeks in bed,' very ill of sad West-India maladies; for the rest, a covetous lazy dog, who cared nothing for the business, but wanted to be home at his Irish Government again. Penn is Father of Penn the Pennsylvanian Quaker; a man somewhat quick of temper, ‘like to break his heart' when affairs went wrong; unfit to right them again. The two Generals came voluntarily home, in the end of

last August, [1655] leaving the wreck of their forces in Jamaica; and were straightway lodged in the Tower for quitting their post.

A great Armament of Thirty, nay of Sixty ships; of Fourthousand soldiers, two regiments of whom were veterans, the rest a somewhat sad miscellany of broken Royalists, unruly Levellers, and the like, who would volunteer,-whom Venables augmented at Barbadoes, with a still more unruly set to Nine-thousand this great Armament the Lord Protector has strenuously hurled, as a sudden fiery bolt, into the dark Domdaniel of Spanish Iniquity in the far West; and it has exploded there, almost without effect. The Armament saw Hispaniola, and Hispaniola with fear and wonder saw it, on the 14th of April, 1655: but the Armament, a sad miscellany of distempered unruly persons, durst not land where Drake had landed,' and at once take the Town and Island: the Armament hovered hither and thither; and at last agreed to land some sixty miles off; marched therefrom through thick-tangled woods, under tropical heats, till it was nearly dead with mere marching; was then set upon by ambuscadoes; fought miserably ill, the unruly persons of it, or would not fight at all; fled back to its ships a mass of miserable disorganic ruin; and 'dying there at the rate of two-hundred a day,' made for Jamaica.

Jamaica, a poor unpopulous Island, was quickly taken, as rich Hispaniola might have been, and the Spaniards were driven away but to men in biliary humour it seemed hardly worth the taking or the keeping. 'Immense droves of wild cattle: cows and horses, run about Jamaica;' dusky Spaniards dwell in hatos, in unswept shealings: 80,000 hogs are killed every year for the sake of their lard, which is sold under the name of hog's-butter at Carthagena:' but what can we do with all that! The poor Armament continuing to die as if by murrain, and all things looking worse and worse to poor biliary Generals. Sea-General Penn set sail for home, whom Land-General Venables swiftly followed: leaving Vice-Admiral Goodson, Major-General Fortescue,' or almost whosoever liked, to manage in their absence, and their ruined moribund