CONY'S OPPOSITION AT LAW: DEFERENCE OF FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS: BLAKE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: MASSACRE OF THE PIEDMONTESE PROTESTANTS: DETAILS OF THE STORY AND OF CROMWELL'S PROCEEDINGS IN CONSEQUENCE: PENN IN THE SPANISH WEST INDIES: HIS REPULSE FROM HISPANIOLA AND LANDING IN JAMAICA: DECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN AND ALLIANCE WITH FRANCE: SCHEME OF THE GOVERNMENT OF ENGLAND BY MAJOR-GENERALS: LIST OF THEM AND SUMMARY OF THEIR POLICE-SYSTEM: DECIMATION TAX ON THE ROYALISTS, AND OTHER MEASURES _IN TERROREM_: CONSOLIDATION OF THE LONDON NEWSPAPER PRESS: PROCEEDINGS OF THE COMMISSION OF EJECTORS AND OF THE COMMISSION OF TRIERS: VIEW OF CROMWELL'S ESTABLISHED CHURCH OF ENGLAND, WITH ENUMERATION OF ITS VARIOUS COMPONENTS: EXTENT OF TOLERATION OUTSIDE THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH: THE PROTECTOR'S TREATMENT OF THE ROMAN CATHOLICS, THE EPISCOPALIANS, THE ANTI-TRINITARIANS, THE QUAKERS, AND THE JEWS: STATE OF THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS UNDER THE PROTECTORATE: CROMWELL'S PATRONAGE OF LEARNING: LIST OF ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS ALIVE IN 1656, AND ACCOUNT OF THEIR DIVERSE RELATIONS TO CROMWELL: POETICAL PANEGYRICS ON HIM AND HIS PROTECTORATE .-- NEW ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF SCOTLAND: LORD BROGHILL'S PRESIDENCY THERE FOR CROMWELL: GENERAL STATE OF THE COUNTRY: CONTINUED STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE RESOLUTIONERS AND THE PROTESTERS FOR KIRK-SUPREMACY: INDEPENDENCY AND QUAKERISM IN SCOTLAND: MORE EXTREME ANOMALIES THERE: STORY OF "JOCK OF BROAD SCOTLAND": BRISK INTERCOURSE BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND LONDON: MISSION OF MR.

JAMES SHARP .-- IRELAND FROM 1654 TO 1656 .-- GLIMPSE OF THE COLONIES.
This long stretch of twenty months was to be another period of the government of the Commonwealth by the Lord Protector and the Council of State on their own responsibility and without a Parliament.

In the circumstances in which the late Parliament had left them, without supplies and without a single concluded and authoritative enactment, they could only fall back on the original Instrument of the Protectorate, amending its defects by their own ingenuity as exigencies occurred, with a suggestion now and then snatched, for the sake of quasi-Parliamentary countenance, from the wreck of the late Constitutional Bill.

Hence a character of "arbitrariness" in Cromwell's government throughout this period greater perhaps than in any other of his whole Protectorate.

For that, however, he was prepared.