England had at last got a constitution which was no production of a military coterie. Protector and Parliament were at last at one. Unfortunately, those who had welcomed this fair concord took little account of the forces which were likely to govern events in the not far distant future--the force of the army, whose handiwork had been set at nought--the force of the Parliamentary tradition strengthened by the work of the Long Parliament--and, above all, the force of discontent with the shifting sands on which the new Government was built, a discontent which might easily show itself in a national call for the restoration of the Stuart King--not because his person was loved, but because he would bring with him what appeared to be the strong basis of old use and wont. Oliver was not wholly absorbed in constitutional struggles or in foreign conflicts. In administration his Government stands supreme above all which had preceded it, because no other ruler united so wide a tolerance of divergencies of opinion with so keen an eye for individual merit. He could gather round him the enthusiastic Milton to pen those dignified State Papers in which he announced his resolutions to the Powers of Europe; Andrew Marvell, the most transparently honest of men, who, with all his admiration for Oliver, had mingled in the verses written by him as a panegyric on his patron those lines recording Charles's dignified appearance on the scaffold, which will be remembered when all his other writings in prose or verse are forgotten. In Oliver's Council sat Bulstrode Whitelocke, the somewhat stolid lawyer, who, too cautious to give a precedent approval to Oliver's revolutionary acts, was always ready to accept the situation created by them, and yet sufficiently inspired by professional feeling to resign his post as Commissioner of the Great Seal rather than accept the Protector's reforms in the Court of Chancery. There too sat Nathaniel Fiennes, the second son of Lord Saye and Sele, not indeed a statesman with broad views, but ready at any moment to pen State papers in defence of a Government which had rescued him from the neglect into which he had fallen--probably undeservedly--in consequence of his hasty surrender of Bristol in the Civil War. Amongst Oliver's diplomatists were Morland and Lockhart. Amongst his admirals, the honoured Blake and the ever-faithful Montague. Amongst those who at one time or another were his chaplains were Owen, the ecclesiastical statesman, and Howe, whose exemplary piety led him to doubt whether the Protector's household was sufficiently religious, and whose broad-minded charity prepared him to abandon the Church of the Restoration, not because it was un-Puritan, but because it was exclusive.