FIRST PARLIAMENT OF PROTECTORATE 175
tuted a parliament that was to meet only occasionally and
whose sessions might be short. The new features were: the lord
protector, whose power was circumscribed by the necessity of
securing the consent of parliament or, when it was not sitting,
of the council; and the council, which was no longer nominated
by parliament—its first fifteen members were named in the
Instrument. Except for its partial control of the purse, which
could be exercised only once in three years, parliament could
not prescribe to the executive. There were thus three authorities
established, with no provision for their co-ordination, and no
machinery was established for amending the Instrument if it
should be found defective.
The results of the elections to the new parliament were not
very promising from Cromwell's1 point of view. The Irish and
Scottish representatives formed a solid bloc of officers or their
dependants, but their adherence to the protectorate was offset
by the return of prominent republicans and by the election of
numerous presbyterians of moderate views—the £200 qualifica-
tion for county voters, instead of the former 40-shilling freehold,
probably helped them by restricting the franchise to the
wealthy. The protector seems to have realized the need for
conciliation, for his opening speech called for a policy of 'heal-
ing and settling' and denounced the levellers in language likely
to appeal to the representatives of the upper classes before him.
He accused the levellers of seeking to destroy the classes into
which society was divided: noblemen, gentlemen, and yeomen,
a distinction worthy to be preserved. They wanted, he said,
to reduce all to an equality which would give the tenant as
liberal a fortune as the landlord. He then was equally vehe-
ment in castigating those guilty of excesses in religion—their
blasphemies and wantonness, their desire to destroy the estab-
lished church as anti-christian by abolishing tithes, and their
constant itch to overturn everything. The protectorate had
been established at a time of great danger and suffering. There
were wars with Portugal, Holland, and France, and the trade
of the nation was ruined and the manufacture of cloth was at
a standstill for want of a market. For all these ills a remedy
had to be supplied by the present government, which in addi-
tion had this further claim to their support: that it had been
1 Usage prescribes that Cromwell be called by his surname, although as pro-
tector he signed himself Oliver P.