where your Grace shall remain. Attach to the number of twenty or thirty of the rankest knaves of the shire. Let six be hanged of the ripest of them, the rest remain in prison. And thus, sir, make a progress this hot weather, till you have perused all those shires that have offended. Your Grace may say you shall lose the hearts of the people; of the good people you shall not—of the ill it maketh no matter.'[1]
When the Protector received this letter, the danger was so imminent that he was obliged to send orders to Staines to break the bridge over the Thames, for fear of an attack on London.[2] Yet in the crisis of the peril, he sent out another of his unlucky enclosure commissions, with circulars, insisting that every gentleman on his own estate should 'reform himself before proceeding to the redress of others;' and throw down his hedges and embankments. 'Put the rebellion down first,' was the advice of Paget, and let the enclosers smart for it afterwards. But the Protector could not draw his sword against men whose cause he considered partially just. The Commons were driven to madness by the tyranny of the gentlemen and the Lords—was he to arm the oppressors with authority to destroy men for crimes they were themselves responsible?
July.At length, however, the religious element in the insurrection became, in the counties west of London, more and more preponderating. Somerset's
