Though he had justified Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump and had become openly an Oliverian at the beginning of the Protectorate, he had never ceased to regard with admiration and affection such of the old Republicans as Vane, Bradshaw, and Overton.

It had probably all along been a question with him whether the blame of their disablement under the Protectorate lay more with themselves or with Oliver.

Then, as we have abundantly seen, there is reason for believing that before the end of the Protectorate his own Oliverianism or Cromwellianism had become weaker than at first.

The Miltonic reserves, as we have called them, with which he had given his adhesion to the Protectorate even at first, had taken stronger and stronger development in his mind; and, whatever he found to admire in Cromwell's Government all in all, the whole course of that Government in Church matters had been a disappointment.

Milton wanted to see Church and State entirely separated; Cromwell had mixed them, intertwined them, more than ever.
Milton wanted to see the utter abolition in England of anything that could be called a clergy; Cromwell had made it one of the chief objects of his rule to maintain a clergy and extend it massively.
Whether this policy might not yet be reversed had been one of Milton's first questions with himself after Cromwell's death; and his _Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes_, addressed to Richard's Parliament, had been a challenge to that Parliament not to shrink from the great attempt.