subject, if I escape the Tyrant’s hands, although he gets in the interim the crown upon his head, which he hath underhand put his confederates on to petition his acceptance thereof.”  This would imply that, though not in circulation till June, the pamphlet had been written while the Kingship question was in suspense, i.e, before May 8.  The name “William Allen” on the title-page was, of course, assumed.  The pamphlet, hardly any one now doubts, was by Edward Sexby, the Stuartist arch-conspirator, then moving between England and the continent, and known to have been the real principal of Sindercombe’s plot.  Actually, when the pamphlet appeared, the desperate man was again in England, despite Thurloe’s police.  The pamphlet was greedily sought after, and much talked of.  The sale was, of course, dangerous.  A copy could not be had under five shillings.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Copy of Killing no Murder (first edition, much rarer than a second and enlarged edition of 1659) among the Thomason Pamphlets, with the date “June 1657” marked on it:  Wood’s Ath.  IV. 624-5; Godwin, IV. 388-390 (where the pamphlet is assumed to have been out “early in May"); Carlyle, III, 67.  After the Restoration, Sexby being then dead, the pamphlet was claimed by another.—­An answer to Killing no Murder, under the title Killing is Murder, appeared Sept. 21, 1657.  It was by a Michael Hawke, of the Middle Temple.]

People were still talking of Killing no Murder when the First Protectorate came to a close.  We have now only to take account of the circumstances of that event, and of the differences there were to be, constitutionally, between the First Protectorate and the Second.

On the 25th of June, 1657, all the details of the Humble Additional and Explanatory Petition and Advice having been at length settled by the House, that supplement to the original Petition and Advice was also ready for his Highness’s assent.  The two documents together, to be known comprehensively as The Petition and Advice, were to supersede the more military Instrument, called The Government of the Commonwealth, to which Cromwell had sworn in Dec. 1653, at his first installation, and were to be the charter of his new and constitutionalized Protectorate.  The Articles of this new Constitution were seventeen in all, and deserve some attention:—­Article I., as we know, confirmed Cromwell’s Protectorship and empowered him to choose his successor.—­Article II. provided for the calling of Parliaments of Two Houses once in three years at furthest.—­Article III. stipulated for all Parliamentary privileges and the non-exclusion of any of the duly elected members except by judgment of the House of which they might be members.—­Article IV., which was much the longest, determined the classes of persons who should be disqualified from being elected or voting in elections. Universally, all Roman Catholics were to be excluded, and all who had abetted the Irish