[Footnote 1:  Godwin, IV, 214-217 and 298-300; Guizot, II. 231-234; Thomason copy of the Declaration against Spain, dated Nov. 9, 1655; Council Order Books, Oct. 2, 1655; Article on Lockhart in Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary of Scotsmen; Carlyle, III. 309-310.]

It was just about this time of change and extension in the foreign relations of the Commonwealth that the people of England and Wales became aware that they were, and had been for some time, under an entirely new system of home-government, called Government by Major-Generals.

The difficulties of the home-government of the Protectorate were great and peculiar.  The power of the Lord-Protector and his Council to pass ordinances had been called in question.  Judges and lawyers were not only pretty unanimous in the opinion that resistance to payment of imposts not enacted by Parliamentary authority might be made good at law, and that the Ordinance for Chancery Reform was also legally invalid; they doubted even whether, in strict law, there could be proceedings for the preservation of the public peace, by courts and magistrates, under any Council ordinance about crimes and treasons.  All this Cromwell had been meditating.  How was revenue to be raised?  How were Royalist and Anabaptist plottings to be suppressed?  How were police regulations about public manners and morals to be enforced?  How was the will of the Central Government at Whitehall, in any matter whatsoever, to be transmitted to any spot in the community and made really operative?  Meditating these questions, Cromwell, as he expressed it afterwards, “did find out a little poor invention”:  “I say,” he repeated, “there was a little thing invented."[1] The little invention consisted in a formal identification of the Protector’s Chief Magistracy with his Headship of the Army.  He had resolved to map out England and Wales into districts, and to plant in each district a trusty officer, with the title of Major-General, who should be nominally in command of the militia of that district, but should be really also the executive there for the Central Government in all things.  A beginning had been made in the business as early as May 1655, when Desborough was appointed Major-General of the Militia in the six southwestern counties; and the districts had been all marked out and the Major-Generals chosen in August.  But there had been very great secrecy about the scheme; and not till the 31st of October was there official announcement of the new organization.  Only about mid-winter, 1655-6, did people fully realise what it meant.  The Major-Generalcies then stood thus:—­

[Footnote 1:  Speech V. (Carlyle, III. 176).]

Person.  District.

1.  MAJOR-GENERAL PHILIP SKIPPON. London.

2.  MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN BARKSTEAD. Westminster and Middlesex.

3.  MAJOR-GENERAL THOMAS KELSEY. Kent and Surrey.