Not without deliberation, therefore, had he given up the first form of the Commonwealth, consisting in a single supreme House of Parliament and an annual Council of State chosen by the same, and accepted the later or Protectoral form, with Cromwell for its head, a permanent Council of State round Cromwell, and Parliaments on occasion.

But, underneath this general adhesion to the Protectorate, there had been even then certain Miltonic reserves, and especially the reserve of a protest against the continuance of a State Church.
Now, had Milton been in a condition to act the part of a practical statesman through Oliver's Protectorate, might not some extraordinary development have been given to those reserves?
With his boundless courage and the non-conforming habits of his genius, would he ever have been the Parliamentary servant of a Government from which he differed at all,--from which he differed so vitally on the question of Church Establishment?
Probably in nothing else had Cromwell wholly disappointed him.

Through the Protectorate there had been all the toleration of religious differences that could be desired, or what shortcoming there had been had hardly been by Cromwell's own fault; the other interferences with liberty had hardly perhaps, in Milton's estimation, gone beyond the necessities of police; and in Cromwell's foreign policy, with its magnificent championship of Protestantism abroad, what man in England was more ardently at one with him than the draftsman of his great foreign despatches?
At the time of the proposal of Cromwell's Kingship, and generally at the time of the transition out of his first Protectorate into his second, with the resuscitation then of so many aristocratic forms and the attempt to reinstitute a house of peers, there may have been, as we have already hinted, an uprising in Milton's mind of democratic objections, and the effect may have been that Milton before the end of Oliver's Protectorate was less of an Oliverian than he had been at the beginning.

Still, precluded from any active concern in those constitutional changes, he may have reconciled himself to them easily enough, and also to the transmission of the Protectorship from Oliver to Richard.

The one insuperable stumbling-block, I believe, had been and was Cromwell's Established Church.