whipped from Palace Yard to the Old Exchange, receiving three hundred and ten lashes in the way.  Some days later[d] he was again placed in the pillory; and the letter B for blasphemer was burnt on his forehead, and his tongue was bored with a red-hot iron.[1] From London the house ordered him to be conducted[e] to Bristol, the place of his offence.  He entered at Lamford’s Gate, riding on the bare back of a horse with his face to the tail; dismounted at Rockley Gate, and was successively whipped[f] in five parts of the city.  His admirers, however, were not ashamed of the martyr.  On every

[Footnote 1:  “This day I and B. went to see Naylor’s tongue bored through, and him marked on the forehead.  He put out his tongue very willingly, but shrinked a little when the iron came upon his forehead.  He was pale when he came out of the pillory, but high-coloured after tongue-boring.  He behaved himself very handsomely and patiently” (p. 266 in Burton’s Diary, where the report of these debates on Naylor occupies one hundred and forty pages).]

[Sidenote a:  A.D. 1656.  Dec. 6.] [Sidenote b:  A.D. 1656.  Dec. 16.] [Sidenote c:  A.D. 1656.  Dec. 18.] [Sidenote d:  A.D. 1656.  Dec. 27.] [Sidenote e:  A.D. 1657.  Jan. 13.] [Sidenote f:  A.D. 1657.  Jan. 17.]

occasion they attended him bareheaded; they kissed and sucked his wounds; and they chanted with him passages from the Scriptures.  On his return to London[a] he was committed to solitary confinement, without pen, ink, or paper, or fire, or candle, and with no other sustenance than what he might earn by his own industry.  Here the delusion under which he laboured gradually wore away; he acknowledged that his mind had been in darkness, the consequence and punishment of spiritual pride; and declared that, inasmuch as he had given advantage to the evil spirit, he took shame to himself.  By “the rump parliament” he was afterwards discharged; and the society of Friends, by whom he had been disowned, admitted him again on proof of his repentance.  But his sufferings had injured his health.  In 1660 he was found in a dying state in a field in Huntingdonshire, and shortly afterwards expired.[1]

While the parliament thus spent its time in the prosecution of an offence which concerned it not, Cromwell anxiously revolved in his own mind a secret project of the first importance to himself and the country.  To his ambition, it was not sufficient that he actually possessed the supreme authority, and exercised it with more despotic sway than any of his legitimate predecessors; he still sought to mount a step higher, to encircle his brows with a diadem, and to be addressed with the title of majesty.  It could not be, that vanity alone induced him to hazard the attachment of his friends for the sake of mere parade and empty sound.  He had rendered the more modest title of protector as great and as formidable as that of

[Footnote 1:  Journals, Dec. 5-17; 1659, Sept. 8.  Sewel, 260-273, 283, 393.  State Trials, v. 810-842.  Merc.  Polit.  No. 34.]