Cromwell's commissioners for preserving the peace of the Commonwealth are the invisible men of Interregnum politics. They were the special agents appointed by the Lord Protector to assist the Major-Generals during their brief rule between 1655 and 1656. Yet while much has been written about their military superiors, an almost complete veil of anonymity surrounds these officials. Virtually the only modern historian to be impressed by the commissioners and their work is Stephen Roberts in his fine study of Devon during the period 1646—70; for him they possessed ‘the ultimate bureaucratic virtue': ‘thoroughness’.

Manifestly it is high time Cromwell's commissioners were rescued from oblivion and in this essay an in-depth case study will be made of his appointees in Staffordshire, focusing on certain key issues. Were they a set of colourless nonentities? Is it fair to characterise them, as Ronald Hutton has done, as ‘usurpers within the social as well as the political (and often the religious) order'? And what of Ivan Roots' assertion that the Major- Generals and their helpmates ‘were a heterogenous lot' especially in terms of their ‘age, education, experience and so on'? Hopefully our investigation will answer these questions and in the process throw new light on the character of local government personnel during what David Underdown has described as the revolutionary phase of the Protectorate when direct military rule temporarily superseded traditional methods of 'settlement’.

In the ‘cantonisation' of the nation in October 1655, Staffordshire was associated with Cheshire and Lancashire and placed under the authority of Major-General Charles Worsley, an uncompromising zealot determined in his own words ‘to strike while the iron is hott' and to be ‘a terror to the bad’.