[Footnote 1:  Studied from scattered documents in Thurloe and from those of Milton’s State-Letters for Cromwell that appertain to Sweden and Denmark and the missions of 1657, with help from a very luminous passage in Baillie’s Letters (III. 370-371), and with facts and dates from the excellent abridged History forming the Supplement to the Rationarium Temporum of the Jesuit Petavius (edit. 1745, I. 562-564), and from Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great, I. 222-223.]

At home meanwhile things went on smoothly.  Cromwell had by this time brought his Established Church into a condition highly satisfactory to himself.  The machinery of the Ejectors and the Triers was still in full operation; and, on reports from the Trustees for the Maintenance of Ministers, his Highness and the Council still had the pleasure, from time to time, of ordering new augmentations of clerical stipends.  The Voluntaryism which still existed in wide diffusion through the English mind had become comparatively silent; and indeed open reviling of the Established Church had been made punishable by Article X. of the Petition and Advice.  Perhaps the plainest speaker now against the principle of an Established Church, or at least against the constitution of the present one, was the veteran John Goodwin of Coleman Street. “The Triers (or Tormentors) tried and cast by the Laws of God and Men” was the title of a pamphlet of Goodwin’s, which had been out since May 1657, assailing the Commission of Triers.  Goodwin was too eminent a Commonwealth’s man, and too fair a controversialist, to be treated as a mere reviler; and it was left to the Protector’s journalist, Marchamont Needham, to reply through the press. “The Great Accuser cast down, or a Public Trial of Mr. John Goodwin of Coleman Street, London, at the Bar of Religion and Right Reason,” was a pamphlet by Needham, published July 31.  It was dedicated “To His Most Serene Highness, Oliver, Lord Protector,” &c., in such terms as these:—­“Sir, It is a custom in all countries, when any man hath taken a strange creature, immediately to present it to the Prince:  whereupon I, having taken one of the strangest that (I think) any part of your Highness’s dominions hath these many years produced, do, with all submissiveness, make bold to present him, bound hand and foot with his own cords (as I ought to bring him), to your Highness.  He need not be sent to the Tower for his mischievousness:  there is no danger in him now, nor like to be henceforth, as I have handled him.”  In a prefixed Epistle to the Reader there is a good deal of scurrility against Goodwin.  He is described as “worse than a common nuisance.”  He is taxed also with inconsistency, inasmuch as he had been one of those who, in Feb. 1651-2, had signed the famous Proposals of Certain Ministers to the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel, in which the principle of an Established Church had been assumed and asserted (ante, IV. 392).