It had been to the Protesters that Cromwell had turned with greatest liking and hope, both on political grounds and from spiritual sympathy, when he was fighting in Scotland; and, since the beginning of his Protectorate, _they_ had been most in favour.
Early in 1654 three of their number, Mr.Patrick Gillespie, Mr.John Livingston, and Mr.John Menzies, had been summoned to London to advise the Protector; they had been there two or three months; and the effects of their advice had been visible in an ordinance about vacant Kirk-livings very favourable to the Protesters, and generally in a continued inclination towards the Protesters in the proceedings of the English Government in Scotland.

The ministers and others ejected by Cromwell's visitors had been mostly of the Resolutioner species; and one of Baillie's complaints is that Protesters, whether fit or not, were put into vacant livings by the English, and that only Scotsmen of that colour were conjoined with the English in the executive and the judicatories.

Till 1656 all this had been very natural.

The dregs of Stuartism, and consequent antipathy to the Protectorate, had persisted till then most visibly among the Resolutioners.[1] [Footnote 1: Baillie, _ut supra_; Life of Robert Blair, 313 _et seq._; Wodrow's Introduction to his _History_ (1721); Beattie's _Church of Scotland during the Commonwealth_ (1842), Chap.

III.] Though the Protesters were originally what we have called super-ultra-Presbyterians, it was not surprising that some of them had moved into Independency.