It seems at first sight strange that the Independents should have been "gay," and, even with a reserve, frolicsome, for they were originally the soldiers of Cromwell's "New Model," "honest and religious men." But Wood describes them as he knew them many years after Naseby and Marston Moor, when their character had changed with changing circumstances. Triumphant success seldom improves the morale of any party. Oxford proved a Capua to the Independents who lived in it after the strain of war was over: the very principle of Independency, liberty of opinion and action given to every Christian congregation, came to be applied to the life of the individual: freedom to reject any doctrine or practice which you do not like naturally ends in much gaiety and frolicsomeness, especially if your lines are cast in pleasant places: it becomes difficult not to slide into practical Antinomianism. What a place to live in for eleven years! yet Wilkins did so with success and general applause. He was inclined by temperament to the freedom of mellowed Independency rather than to the stiffness of the Presbyterians, who more successfully than their rivals resisted the enervating influences of life in Oxford. Circumstances as well as inclination led him to become an Independent: his marriage with Cromwell's sister, and the appointment to be one of the Commissioners to execute the office of Chancellor, perhaps also his appointment to the Wardenship, all tended to draw him to the side of Ireton and the Protector. Of the latter he saw much, and was consulted by him on academical and ecclesiastical affairs. Lord Morley[2] records "a story told by Bishop Wilkins, who was the husband of Cromwell's youngest sister Robina, that the Protector often said to him that no temporal government could have a sure support without a national church that adhered to it, and that he thought England was capable of no constitution but Episcopacy." Lord Morley thinks that "the second imputation must be apocryphal." That is by no means clear: Cromwell may have said what Wilkins probably did not invent, meaning that he thought Episcopacy good enough for England, for Englishmen were incapable of any better constitution; or he may have modified his judgment of Episcopacy,--who knows all that Cromwell came to think in his latter days, a time when most men revise their opinions? He may have felt the disenchantment which awaits success.