[Footnote 1:  Baillie, Letters to Spang, in 1655 and 1656, as already cited, with III. 568-573 for Instructions to Sharp and Propositions of the Protesters; Life of Robert Blair, 325-329.]

No one was more anxious for the success of Mr. Sharp’s mission than the good Baillie of Glasgow University, now in his fifty-fifth year, a widower for three years, but about to marry again, and known as one of the stoutest Resolutioners and Anti-Protesters since that controversy had begun.  He had had his discomforts and losses in the University under the new Principalship of Mr. Patrick Gillespie; but had been busy with his lectures and books, and the correspondence of which he was so fond.  Among his letters of 1654-5, besides those to Spang, are two hearty ones to his old friend Lauderdale in his London captivity, one or two to London Presbyterian ministers, and an interesting one to Thomas Fuller, regretting that they had not been sooner acquainted, and saying he had “fallen in love” with Fuller’s books and was longing for his Church History.  This was not the only sign of Baillie’s mellower temper by this time towards the Anglicans.  He was inquiring much about Brian Walton, whose name had not been so much as heard of when Baillie was in London, and whose Polyglott seemed now to him the book of the age.  Baxter, on the other hand, was an Ishmaelite, a man to be put down.  All these matters, however, had been absorbed at length in Baillie’s interest in Mr. Sharp’s mission.  He was to write to his old London friends, Rous, Calamy, and Ashe, urging them to help Mr. Sharp to the utmost, and he was to correspond with Sharp himself.  “I pray God help you and guide you; you had need of a long spoon [in supping with a certain personage]:  trust no words nor faces, for all men are liars,” is the memorable ending of the first letter that Sharp in London was to receive from Baillie.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Baillie, III. 234-335; with Mr. Laing’s Life of Baillie.]

IRELAND.

There had been little of novelty in Ireland for some time after the proclamation of the Protectorate (Vol.  IV. p. 551).  Fleetwood, with the full title of “Lord Deputy” since Sept. 1654, had conducted the Government, as well as he could, with a Council of assessors, consisting, after that date, of Miles Corbet, Robert Goodwin, Colonel Matthew Tomlinson, and Colonel Robert Hammond.  This last, so brought into the Protector’s service after long retirement, died at Dublin in July 1655.  Ludlow still kept aloof, disowning the Protectorate, though remaining in Ireland with his old military commission.  Left very much to themselves, Fleetwood and his Council had carried out, as far as possible, the Acts for the Settlement of the country passed or proposed by the Rump in 1652, but not pushing too severely the great business which the Rump had schemed out, of a general and gradual cooping up of the Roman Catholics