The great interests of the nation at that time may be taken as the landed, the mercantile, and the clerical; and the republic at starting might reckon on hostility from each of them. With the landed interest it dealt at once too severely to have its friendship, and too lightly to crush it. If it had adopted a sweeping measure of confiscation, as other revolutionary governments have done, and as it did itself in Ireland, it might have settled the soldiers on the confiscated lands, thus easing itself of their too obtrusive support, while it established a permanent interest in its favour over the whole country. As it was, the land was only confiscated in a few special cases, when it was given to the various grandees of the parliament, in reward of services, and in return for money spent on the public behalf. The ordinary gentry who had been in arms for the king, ‘delinquents,’ as they were called, were allowed to retain their estates on payment by way of composition of some part of the income. They thus retained their old means of influence, along with a memory of a grievance to intensify their natural royalism. Nor was the trouble got over once for all at the foundation of the commonwealth. The composition paid on the estates was one of the chief sources of revenue, and when, through a Dutch war or the like, the republic was short of money, delinquents were hunted out who had hitherto escaped. Thus the sore was kept running, and if the humbled gentry, like {331} colonel Poyer of Pembroke, were ‘sober and penitent in the morning,’ they were also like him often ‘drunk and full of plots in the afternoon.’ Their meetings for horse-races and cock-fighting were reckoned nurseries of disaffection, and the best security against them was that secrets sworn to over the bottle were not generally well kept.