This incident filled the English both at Leghorn and Porto Longone with high gratification, but it was the beginning of new sorrows. The Grand Duke at first laughed at the trick, but the outcries of the Dutch forced him to take a more serious view of the outrage. An act of hasty ill-temper on the part of Captain Appleton gave him an excuse for putting the English captain into prison at Pisa. Later on, he handed him over to Badiley at Porto Longone. The English endeavoured to propitiate the Italian prince by the sentence of a court-martial which removed Appleton from his command. His offence had been that he took a runaway prisoner out of the hands of the duke's sentry on the Mole. But although the Grand Duke professed himself satisfied, and even asked that Appleton might be restored to his command, he was plainly annoyed with the English, and probably very tired of the trouble they were causing him. The urgent appeals of Longland and Badiley for reinforcements from England could not be answered at the very height of the great war. The Grand Duke may perhaps have thought that it was better to make friends of the Dutch. He began to press either for the surrender of the Phenix by the English, or for their departure from his port. At last, in March 1653, Badiley decided to wait no longer. Indeed the Grand Duke was showing a temper which made decisive action necessary. Badiley therefore sent orders to Appleton to get ready the two men-of-war, and the four merchant ships, lying within the Mole, to meet him. The Dutch had raised the blockade of Porto Longone, and were concentrated outside Leghorn. The plan of the English commander was that he should appear off the port, and that so soon as he was known to be in the neighbourhood, Captain Appleton was to take the opportunity to slip out by night. Badiley, in the course of a controversy which arose between the two, asserted that he gave strict orders to the effect that the ships within the Mole were not to come out by day unless they saw him engaged with the Dutch. He complained that the sloth of Appleton and his captains spoiled this plan. They did not make the necessary exertions to come out of cover by night. Then their rashness completed what their idleness had begun. They came out in broad daylight, when it was impossible to slip past the Dutch unseen. These two errors were, according to Badiley, the cause of the disaster which ensued. As the English ships came out with a leading wind, they had the Dutch between them and the English ships which had come over from Porto Longone. It was the manifest interest of the enemy to attack the English in detail. Badiley being at the greater distance and to leeward, they naturally attacked Appleton. If they had followed the reverse course, they would have presented the English with an opportunity of concentrating upon them, since Appleton would have had nothing to do but to run down from windward to the assistance of his colleague. The two men-of-war and four armed merchant ships which had come out from Leghorn were easily overpowered by the Dutch. Badiley says he was unable to render Appleton any effectual assistance, and the Council of State seems to have thought that he was telling the truth. The Leopard made a stout fight, but the other ships did not offer a prolonged resistance.
After the capture of the ships at Leghorn, there was nothing to detain Badiley on the coast of Northern Italy, and he therefore betook himself first to Naples, and then to the Straits. He would, if he had had his own choice, have remained abroad to cruise, but his men were by this time sick of the service, and were clamouring to return home. He appears to have been afflicted by some very disorderly fellows in his ships' companies. It was in vain that Captain Badiley appealed to their patriotism, and threatened them with the terrors of No. 11 in the Parliament's recently issued Articles of War. They answered persuasions and threats alike with cries of "Home, home!" At last he sailed, and reached England unopposed. The riotous character of his men was not improved by the time they returned to Chatham. Their violence made the duty of paying them off very irksome to Mr. Commissioner Pett, but he had his revenge; for no sooner were they paid off on their return from the Straits than they were pressed again, and sent off to serve their country in the great decisive battles of the war in June and July.
Diplomatic difficulties arose between the Government of England and the Grand Duke of Tuscany in consequence of this episode of the war, but before this there had been a violent pamphlet controversy between the parties concerned. It was one of the earliest, though not the first, of the series of naval quarrels. Appleton, considering he had been left in the lurch by Badiley, openly accused his commander of treachery and cowardice, in a pamphlet dedicated to Cromwell and supported by the testimony of his captains. Badiley replied by a counter-pamphlet, retorting the charges of treachery and cowardice on Appleton, and adorning his defence of himself by charges of incapacity, impiety, and immorality against his critics. Both parties were very angry, very hot, and very abusive. They present the reader with the spectacle of heated seafaring men wrangling in an abusive manner, with much clumsy irony. On the whole, it does appear that if Appleton had been more alert and intelligent, he might have given more effectual help to Badiley. So Cromwell apparently thought, for Appleton was not employed again. Yet both were so furious, loud-mouthed, and brutal, that it is impossible to accept either as a wholly trustworthy witness.
CHAPTER IX
THE PROTECTORATE
Authorities.—Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Cromwell will of course be consulted for this period. Clarendon's intellectual greatness and his insight enable him to interpret the spirit of events even when he is wrong in his facts. Cromwell's instructions to Penn and Venables, the letters of all the officers concerned, and the journals of the proceedings in San Domingo, have been collected in the second volume of the Life of Penn. Blake's operations in the Mediterranean and the ocean are to be made out from the papers in Thurloe, his own letters, and the narratives of the capture of the Plate Ships and the battle at Santa Cruz, published by order of Cromwell's Parliament.
The Government of Oliver Cromwell was that of a usurper and, in the strict sense of the word, a tyrant. He did not indeed use his power with wilful cruelty, but by the very nature of the case he ruled by the sword, and not by law. Still, usurper and tyrant as he was, his aim was not the indulgence of any mere passion of his own. He was not only the greatest man of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, but he was thoroughly English in his wishes, his aims, and even prejudices. The desire to give the nation, in return for the subversion of its regular Government, a compensation which would take the form of an extension of its national grandeur and the promotion of its interests, had possibly something to do in framing his foreign policy. Yet there was a wide difference between the course he followed and that which commended itself, first to the Jacobins, and then to Napoleon. He did not plunge England into a succession of wars in pursuit of glory and an unattainable universal dominion, in order to divert it from discontent with his own rule. He aimed at the things which the great majority of Englishmen, whether Royalist or Puritan, knew to be consistent with the true interests of England, and could approve. These were three. In the first place, he undertook to teach foreign nations once more that they must respect England—a lesson they had too much forgotten during the weak rule of the Stuarts and the confusion of the Civil War. The old rhyme has it, that
"Though his government did a tyrant's resemble,
He made England great and her enemies tremble."