“a poor prince, and yet a man in his person as gallant and as good, as any that these late ages have brought forth.”... “A man that hath adventured his all against the Popish interest in Poland, and made his acquisitions still good for the Protestant religion. He is now reduced into a corner, and what adds to the grief of all is that men of our religion forget this, and seek his ruin.”

He declared that the success of the coalition threatened the commerce and the maritime power of England. “If they can shut us out of the Baltic Sea, and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade? Where are your materials to preserve your shipping?” Every sailor knew what exclusion from the Baltic meant for England.

The Protector’s conclusion was that England must intervene to prevent the King of Sweden from being crushed, and be ready to back him, not only with its fleet, but by landing a force on the continent. “You have accounted yourselves happy,” said he, “in being environed with a great ditch from all the world besides. Truly, you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot, and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma.”

The crisis passed away as rapidly as it had risen, and Gustavus rescued himself without English aid. A winter march over the frozen Belt and the siege of Copenhagen brought Denmark to its knees. In February, 1658, Cromwell’s ambassador mediated a peace between the rival powers at Roeschild. But the peace was of short duration. In August, 1658, a month before Cromwell died, the war broke out again, and once more Holland and Brandenburg came to the help of the Danes. The general Protestant league was impossible, because each Protestant power preferred to pursue its private aims and defend its private interests. Ambition and national traditions made Denmark and Sweden irreconcilable foes. Brandenburg was more anxious to secure its own independence than to propagate the faith. The Dutch sought first the interests of their commerce, and preferred, as Oliver complained, “gain to godliness.”

In Cromwell’s England there were some who, like Morland, held it the greatest glory of the Protector that he had ever identified the interests of England with the interests of European Protestantism. But the merchants of London complained that they were ruined by the cessation of their Spanish trade, and the war with Spain had lost him the hearts of the City. To the commercial classes, and to many republican statesmen, Holland, not Spain, seemed the natural enemy of England, and bitter attacks on the late Protector’s policy were heard in the Parliament of 1659. Yet the great position in Europe which Cromwell’s energy had gained for England impressed the imagination of contemporaries. “He once more joined us to the continent,” sang Marvell, in his lines on Cromwell’s death, while Sprat depicted him as waking the British lion from its slumbers, and Dryden as teaching it to roar. Contemporary historians struck the same note. “Cromwell’s greatness at home,” admitted Clarendon, “was a mere shadow of his greatness abroad.” Burnet recorded with approval Cromwell’s traditional boast, that he would make the name of Englishman as great as ever that of Roman had been. Still more glorious appeared the policy of the usurper in comparison with that of Charles II. “It is strange,” noted Pepys, in 1667, “how everybody do nowadays reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what brave things he did, and made all the neighbour princes fear him.”

Then came a change. For a hundred years it was the fashion to say that Cromwell by allying himself with France against Spain destroyed the balance of power in Europe, and produced that preponderance of France against which Europe struggled so long. People forgot that the overgrowth of French power was due to the complicity of Charles II., even more than to Oliver’s co-operation, and that, with Oliver as his ally, Louis XIV. would neither have attempted the partition of Holland, nor revoked the Edict of Nantes. With modern historians, it is a commonplace to observe that Cromwell’s foreign policy was an anachronism, that the era of religious wars ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, and that material and political motives alone determined thenceforth the relations of European powers. There is much truth in the criticism, but in the years which immediately followed that treaty, religious disputes entered so largely into political quarrels that it was not easy for contemporaries to perceive what is obvious enough to posterity. Least of all was such clearness of vision possible to the Puritan statesman, in whose mind the interest of religion took precedence of all other interests, and to the soldier who regarded war as the instrument with which the God of battles worked out His purpose on earth.

Cromwell’s foreign policy was in part a failure, but only in part. He promoted the material welfare of his country, and saved her from foreign interference in her domestic affairs. Where he sought purely national interests he succeeded, but it was impossible for him not to look beyond England. “God’s interest in the world,” he said, “is more extensive than all the people of these three nations.” At another time he told his Council: “God has brought us hither to consider the work we may do in the world as well as at home.” Others shared these views, and there were many Puritans who, like Cromwell, held that nations had duties as well as interests. The duty of a free Commonwealth, wrote Harrington, was to relieve oppressed peoples, and to spread liberty and true religion in other lands. “She is not made for herself only,” but should be “a minister of God upon the earth, to the intent that the whole world may be governed with righteousness.” This was the dream that Cromwell sought to realise through his great Protestant league. Looked at from one point of view, he seemed as practical as a commercial traveller; from another, a Puritan Don Quixote.

CHAPTER XIX
CROMWELL’S COLONIAL POLICY

Cromwell was the first English ruler who systematically employed the power of the government to increase and extend the colonial possessions of England. His colonial policy was not a subordinate part of his foreign policy, but an independent scheme of action, based on definite principles and persistently pursued. As we have seen, it was his extra-European policy which ultimately determined his part in the great European struggle of his days.