THE PROBLEM

Amidst the vast body of scholarly writing that has been published on seventeenth-century Britain in general, and on the revolutionary events of the 1640s and 1650s in particular, the period of the Cromwellian Protectorate from December 1653 to May 1659 remains relatively neglected. Several recent writers on Cromwell and the Interregnum have remarked on the lack of a detailed book-length study of the politics of the Protectorate, and specifically of the Protectorate Parliaments. Ivan Roots, for example, has observed that although ‘biographies of Cromwell abound … There is surprisingly little detailed work on the central government and politics of the Protectorate and less still specifically on the Protectorate Parliaments.’ Similarly, Barry Coward has commented that ‘there is no full published account of parliamentary politics during the Protectorate’, while Peter Gaunt has written that ‘the three Protectorate Parliaments … have attracted no … thorough investigation and remain sadly understudied. Moreover, most of the rather meagre attention has tended to focus on the second Protectorate Parliament, to the further neglect of the other two.’ A symposium on the Protectorate held in January 2004 at the History of Parliament Trust in London revealed both the limitations of the historiography to date and the remarkable potential for further research on this period. At present, there is no detailed monograph, focused on parliamentary history, that spans the period between the end of 1653 (when the studies by Blair Worden and Austin Woolrych end) and the autumn of 1658 (when that by Ronald Hutton begins).