WITH FRANCE: 
SCHEME OF THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND BY MAJOR-GENERALS:  LIST OF THEM
AND SUMMARY OF THEIR POLICE-SYSTEM:  DECIMATION TAX ON THE ROYALISTS,
AND OTHER MEASURES IN TERROREM:  CONSOLIDATION OF THE LONDON
NEWSPAPER PRESS:  PROCEEDINGS OF THE COMMISSION OF EJECTORS AND OF THE
COMMISSION OF TRIERS:  VIEW OF CROMWELL’S ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF
ENGLAND, WITH ENUMERATION OF ITS VARIOUS COMPONENTS:  EXTENT OF
TOLERATION OUTSIDE THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH:  THE PROTECTOR’S TREATMENT
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLICS, THE EPISCOPALIANS, THE ANTI-TRINITARIANS, THE
QUAKERS, AND THE JEWS:  STATE OF THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS
UNDER THE PROTECTORATE:  CROMWELL’S PATRONAGE OF LEARNING:  LIST OF
ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS ALIVE IN 1656, AND ACCOUNT OF THEIR DIVERSE
RELATIONS TO CROMWELL:  POETICAL PANEGYRICS ON HIM AND HIS
PROTECTORATE.—­NEW ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND:  LORD
BROGHILL’S PRESIDENCY THERE FOR CROMWELL:  GENERAL STATE OF THE
COUNTRY:  CONTINUED STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE RESOLUTIONERS AND THE
PROTESTERS FOR KIRK-SUPREMACY:  INDEPENDENCY AND QUAKERISM IN
SCOTLAND:  MORE EXTREME ANOMALIES THERE:  STORY OF “JOCK OF BROAD
SCOTLAND”:  BRISK INTERCOURSE BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND LONDON:  MISSION OF
MR. JAMES SHARP.—­IRELAND FROM 1654 TO 1656.—­GLIMPSE OF THE
COLONIES.

This long stretch of twenty months was to be another period of the government of the Commonwealth by the Lord Protector and the Council of State on their own responsibility and without a Parliament.  In the circumstances in which the late Parliament had left them, without supplies and without a single concluded and authoritative enactment, they could only fall back on the original Instrument of the Protectorate, amending its defects by their own ingenuity as exigencies occurred, with a suggestion now and then snatched, for the sake of quasi-Parliamentary countenance, from the wreck of the late Constitutional Bill.  Hence a character of “arbitrariness” in Cromwell’s government throughout this period greater perhaps than in any other of his whole Protectorate.  For that, however, he was prepared.  At the first meeting of the Council after the Dissolution of Parliament (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 1654-5) there were present, I find, His Highness himself, and thirteen out of the eighteen Councillors, viz.:  Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Viscount Lisle, Lambert, Desborough, Fiennes, Montague, Sydenham, Strickland, Sir Charles Wolseley, Skippon, Jones, and Rous; and it was then “ordered by his Highness and the Council that Friday next be set apart for their seeking of God, and that Mr. Lockyer, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Denn, and Mr. Sterry, be desired then to give their assistance.”  In entering on the new period of their Government, the Protector and the Council thought a day of special prayer very fitting.[1]