at his arraignment, pleaded that he had taken orders in the church of Rome, but was innocent of any treason.  The recorder advised him to withdraw his plea, and gave him four hours for consideration.  But Southworth still owned that he was a Catholic and in orders; judgment of death was pronounced; and the protector, notwithstanding the urgent solicitations of the French and Spanish ambassadors, resolved that he should suffer.  It was not that Cromwell approved of sanguinary punishments in matters of religion, but that he had no objection to purchase the good-will of the godly by shedding the blood of a priest.  The[a] fate of this venerable man[a] excited the sympathy of the higher classes.  Two hundred carriages and a crowd of horsemen followed the hurdle on which he was drawn to the place of execution.  On the scaffold, he spoke with satisfaction of the manner of his death, but at the same time pointed out the inconsistency of the men who pretended to have taken up arms for liberty of conscience, and yet shed the blood of those who differed from them in religious opinions.  He suffered the usual punishment of traitors.[1]

The intelligence of the late revolution had been received by the military in Ireland and Scotland with open murmurs on the part of some, and a suspicious acquiescence on that of others.  In Ireland, Fleetwood knew not how to reconcile the conduct of his father-in-law with his own principles, and expressed a wish to resign the government of the island; Ludlow and Jones, both stanch republicans, looked on the protector as a hypocrite and an apostate, and though the latter was more cautious in his language, the

[Footnote 1:  Thurloe, ii. 406.  Whitelock, 592.  Challoner, ii. 354.  Knaresborough’s Collections, MS.]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1654 June 23.]

former openly refused to act as civil commissioner under the new constitution; and in most of the garrisons several of the principal officers made no secret of their dissatisfaction:  in one case they even drew up a remonstrance against “the government by a single person.”  But Cromwell averted the storm which threatened him, by his prudence and firmness.  He sent his son Henry on a visit to Fleetwood, that he might learn the true disposition of the military; the more formidable of his opponents were silently withdrawn to England; and several of the others found themselves suddenly but successively deprived of their commands.  In most cases interest proved more powerful than principle; and it was observed that out of the numbers, who at first crowded to the Anabaptist conventicle at Dublin as a profession of their political creed, almost all who had any thing to lose, gradually abandoned it for the more courtly places of worship.  Even the Anabaptists themselves learned to believe that the ambition of a private individual could not defeat the designs of the Lord, and that it was better for men to retain their situations under the protector, than, by abandoning them, to deprive themselves of the means of promoting the service of God, and of hastening the reign of Christ upon earth.[1]