youngest
of his chaplains. For the veteran free-lance and Arminian John
Goodwin, a keen critic now of Cromwell's Commission of Triers and of
other parts of his Church-policy, his liking must have been less; but
Goodwin's merits were fairly appreciated, and he had at least perfect
liberty to conduct his congregation as he pleased and to publish his
pamphlets. So, on the other hand, eminent Presbyterian divines like
Calamy, accommodated amply in Cromwell's Established Church, had all
freedom and respect.--As to his dealings with non-clerical men of
letters friendly to his government, we know a good deal already.
Milton, of whose relations to the Protectorate we shall have to speak
more at large, was his Latin Secretary; Needham was his journalist;
Marvell was in his private employment and was looking for something
more public. Still younger men were growing up, in the Universities
or just out of them, regarding the Protectorate as now the settled
order of things, in which they must pass their future lives.
Cudworth, recently promoted from the mastership of Clare College,
Cambridge, to that of Milton's old College of Christ's, had been
asked by the Protector to recommend to him any very promising young
Cambridge men he might discover;[2] and, doubtless, there had been a
similar request to Owen of Oxford. Dryden, still at Cambridge, though
now twenty-five years of age, and already, by his father's death, a
small Northamptonshire squire of L40 a year, was looking forward, we
shall find, as his family connexions with the Parliamentarians and
the Commonwealth made natural, to a life in London under the great
Protector's shadow.

[Footnote 1: Orme's Life of Owen (1820), p. 113.]

[Footnote 2: Life of Cudworth, as cited by Godwin, IV. 596.]

All that could be expected by divines and scholars ranking in our
second category, i.e. as subjects of the Protectorate by mere
compulsion, and known to be strongly disaffected to it, was
protection and safety on condition of remaining quiet. This they did
receive. For a month or two, indeed, after the terrible ordinance of
Nov. 24, 1655, threatening the expulsion of the ejected Anglican
clergy from the family-chaplaincies, schoolmasterships, and
tutorships, in which so many of them had found refuge, and forbidding
them to preach anywhere or use the Book of Common Prayer, there had
been a flutter of consternation among the poor dispersed clerics.
That Ordinance, however, as we saw, had m