Had he not for six years been a most conspicuous Cromwellian?
Had he not justified again and again in print Cromwell's _coup d'etat_ of 1653, by which the Rump had been turned out of power, and which the now Restored Rumpers, and especially such of their leaders as Vane, Scott, Hasilrig, and Bradshaw, were bound to remember as Cromwell's unpardonable sin, and the woeful beginning of an illegitimate interregnum?
He had justified it, hardly anonymously, in his Letter to a Gentleman in the Country, published in May 1653, only a fortnight after the fact (Vol.IV.pp.

519-523).

He had justified it a year later in his _Defensio Secunda_ of 1654, published some months after the Protectorate had actually begun.

In that famous pamphlet, he had, amid much else to the same effect, made special reference to Cromwell's Dissolution of the Rump in these words addressed to Cromwell himself: "When you saw delays being contrived, and every one more intent on his private interests than on the public good, and the people complaining of being cheated of their hopes and circumvented by the power of a few, you did what they themselves had so often declined to do when asked, and put an end to their Government" (Vol.IV.p.

604).