Burnet’s account is that the whole country partook of this growing prosperity, which he attributes to the excellent police of the English, the trading they introduced, and the money they put in circulation.  “A man may ride over all Scotland with a switch in his hand and a hundred pounds in his pocket, which he could not have done these five hundred years,” was Mr. Samuel Desborough’s summary account afterwards of the state of the country which he had helped to administer under the Protectorate; and Cromwell’s own reference to the subject is even more interesting and precise.  Acknowledging that the Scots had suffered much, and were in fact “a very ruined nation,” yet what had befallen them had introduced, he hinted, a very desirable change in the constitution of Scottish society.  It had enfranchised and encouraged the middle and lower classes.  “The meaner sort in Scotland,” he said, “love us well, and are likely to come into as thriving a condition as when they were under their own great lords, who made them work for their living no better than the peasants of France;” and “The middle sort of people,” he added, “do grow up there into such a substance as makes their lives comfortable, if not better than they were before.”  Of course, in neither of these classes, any more than from among the dispossessed nobles and lairds, can the sentiment of Scottish nationality and the pain of its abolition have been extinct.  Yet one notices, towards the end of 1656, a soothing even in that respect.  The Scots, all but universally, by that time, had acquired the habit of speaking deferentially of “His Highness” or “His Highness the Lord Protector”; correspondence with Charles II. had entirely ceased; the Edinburgh barristers had returned to the bar; and the Scottish clergy, pretty generally, left off praying for Charles publicly.  Lord Broghill’s admirable management had helped much to this reconciliation.  “If men of my Lord Broghill’s parts and temper be long among us,” wrote Baillie, “they will make the present Government more beloved than some men wish.  From our public praying for the King Broghill’s courtesies, more than his threats, brought off our leading men.”  Baillie himself had yielded that point at last.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Baillie, III. 236-321 (including letters to Spang, July 19, 1654, Dec. 31, 1655, and Sept. 1, 1656); Burnet (ed. 1823), I. 104-105; Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland, II. 249; Carlyle, III. 342-3 (Cromwell’s Speech XVII.).]

Raging yet among the Scottish clergy, and dividing the Scottish community so far as the clergy had influence, was the controversy between the Resolutioners and the Remonstrants or Protesters (Vol.  IV. pp. 201-214, 281-284, 288-289, and 361).  By a law of political life, every community, at every time, must have some polarizing controversy; and this was Scotland’s through the whole period of her absorption in the English Commonwealth and Protectorate.  The Protesters were the Whigs, and