ABSTRACT
In December 1653 Oliver Cromwell was installed as the Lord Protector of ‘the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the dominions thereunto belonging’.1 He ruled the Commonwealth through one Parliament, he presided over a single Council of State which supervised the work of regional commissioners in Scotland and Ireland, and he appointed English judges to preside over the courts of the formerly independent kingdoms of the archipelago. The constitution also established a principle of religious liberty within the Commonwealth for all Protestants who ‘professed faith in God by Jesus Christ…so as they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others’. Although the constitution of December 1653-the Instrument of Government-spoke of the several nations of the Commonwealth, it did not make any distinction between the constituent states or dominions. From 1653 to 1660 there was thus a single polity in the Atlantic archipelago such as was not dreamed of earlier in the early modern period, nor attempted even in the nineteenth century within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. How had this come about?
