ABSTRACT
Hezekiah Haynes, as a Major-General, had to manage the 1656 elections in East Anglia for Cromwell’s second Protectorate Parliament. Cromwell, under financial pressure, persuasion from ‘civilian Cromwellians’ and his own conservative political instincts as an ‘ideological schizophrenic’, remained wedded to the idea of settlement through as traditional a parliament as possible. Haynes, being in the provinces, was aware of the underlying discontent of the conservative political nation and the apparent actions of his own brother in 1648 would have reinforced this. Haynes believed that the government of Colchester, which he regarded ‘looking ill upon us, and incredulous of any trouble, if some special regard be not had to it, will certainly run malignant’. The situation for the godly deteriorated when municipal elections in September 1655 returned a conservative as the mayor of Colchester and Haynes related his concerns to Thurloe in November from Cambridge.
