The letter is dated, he says, from Cassel, Jan.

8, 1655-6.] Although making no great pretensions to learning himself, Cromwell seems to have taken especial pleasure in that part of his powers and privileges which gave him an influence on the literature and education of the country.

Here, in fact, he but carried out in a special department that general notion of the Civil Magistrate's powers and duties which had led him to declare himself so strongly for the preservation and extension of an Established Church.

The more thorough-going champions of Voluntaryism in that day, Anabaptists and others, had begun, as we have seen, to agitate not only for the abolition of a national Church or State-paid clergy of any kind, but also for the abolition of the Universities, the public schools, and all endowments for science or learning.

But, if Cromwell had so signally disowned and condemned the system of sheer Voluntaryism in Religion, it was not to be expected that the more peculiar and exceptional Voluntaryism which challenged even State Endowments for education should find any countenance from _his_ Protectorate.
Nor did it.
The two English Universities had been sufficiently Puritanized long before Cromwell's accession to the supreme power--Cambridge in 1644-5, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Manchester (III.
92-6), and Oxford in 1647-8, under the Chancellorship of the Earl of Pembroke (IV.