ar time to terrify them into submission and prevent farther
plottings. At all events, it was announced in the Ordinance itself
that there would be great delicacy in the application of it, so as to
favour such of the ejected as deserved tender treatment; and, in
fact, it was never applied or executed at all. No one was prosecuted
under it; and, though it was not recalled, it was understood that it
was suspended by the pleasure of his Highness, and that chaplains,
teachers, and preachers, of the Episcopal persuasion, might go on as
before, and reckon on all the toleration accorded to other
Dissenters. On this footing they did go on, ex-Bishops and future
Bishops among them, with increasing security; and gradually the
notion got abroad that the Protector began to have even a kindly
feeling for the "good old Church." Many Royalist authorities concur
to that effect. "The Protector," says one, "indulged the use of the
Common-Prayer in families and in private conventicles; and, though
the condition of the Church of England was but melancholy, yet it
cannot be denied that they had a great deal more favour and
indulgence than under the Parliament." Burnet, on the authority of
Dr. Wilkins, afterwards Bishop Wilkins, who was the second husband of
Cromwell's youngest sister, adds a more startling statement. "Dr.
Wilkins told me," says Burnet, "he (Cromwell) often said to him
(Wilkins) no temporal government could have a sure support without a
national church that adhered to it, and he thought England was
capable of no constitution but Episcopacy; to which he told me he did
not doubt but Cromwell would have turned." Wilkins probably liked to
think this after he himself had turned; but it is hardly credible in
the form in which Burnet has expressed it. Yet Cromwell, in that
temper of conservatism, or desire of a settled order in all things,
which more and more grew upon him after he had assumed the
Protectorate, had undoubtedly the old Episcopalian clergy in view as
a body to be conciliated, and employed as a counterpoise to the
Anabaptists. He cannot but have been aware, too, of the spontaneous
movements in some of the quasi-Presbyterian Associations of the
clergy for a reunion as far as possible with the more moderate
Episcopalians, as distinct from the High-Church Prelatists or
Laudians. Among others, Baxter was extremely zealous for such a
project; and his accounts of his correspondence about it with
ex-Bishop Brownrigg in 1655,