The Parliament ventured to oppose him: he dissolved the Parliament. With indifference to the form of all government recognised in England, he chose eleven of his generals to act as his ministers. The Army, with Cromwell as its head, was for the time the governing body. He was greatly hated, and still more greatly feared. Plots were formed against his life; but none were successful. He died peacefully in 1658 and his portentous figure goes out of the story.
Like nearly every dictator, he left no under-study able to play his part. His son Richard, with little of his father's hardness, was put, reluctantly, into his place. He retired at the first opportunity. Within little more than a year of the great Protector's death the Army weakened, and the Parliament, which he had overridden by that Army's aid, regained its power. The Stuart who was king by hereditary right was recalled. The tremendous episode of the Commonwealth was, to outward seeming, almost as if it had not happened.
Meanwhile, that is, in 1659, France and Spain had for the moment made terms of peace, of which one article was that Louis XIV. should marry a Bavarian princess, and another that France should take over from Spain certain frontier fortresses and also a part of the Spanish Netherlands.
That peace was maintained for some seven years, during which Spain was much occupied by recurring wars with Portugal, Portugal having thrown off the Spanish sovereignty in 1640.
But a new king came to the throne of Spain, and Louis put forward further claims in the Netherlands. Louis, at the moment, was in alliance with Holland against England in the war which had been provoked by the Navigation Act.
A peace was now formally made by the English Government with Holland, which was quickly followed by an alliance between the two countries so lately at war. Yet, while this alliance was thus sealed by the Government, Charles, King of England, on his own account, and in return for sums of money advanced to him by Louis, made a secret treaty of alliance with the French. Four years later, England and France, as allies, declared war upon Holland. A separate peace was made between England and Holland two years later again; but between France and Holland the war continued for another four years. A temporary peace was then agreed to, but yet again Louis, by further claims, provoked the war anew; and it was while this war was in progress that William of Holland became King of England, in succession to James II., last of the Stuarts.
This conjunction naturally brought England and Holland into a really active alliance, and so threw England into war with France. It was a war which at first went badly for the allies, both on sea and land, and England was menaced with invasion by the French—a menace dispelled by the great English naval victory of La Hogue in 1692.
The Peace of Ryswick
On land also the Dutch gained some successes, and in 1697 a general peace, to which Spain was one of the signatories, was made at Ryswick. By a former treaty, some ten years earlier, Spain had given up, as we have seen, part of her Netherlands possessions. That treaty had been broken, as usual, by the aggressive policy of the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV. But by the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Spain recovered a portion of the Netherlands territory that had been taken from her during the latter course of the war. Nevertheless, only a year later—as we are able to state now, though probably nothing was known of it at the time—a secret pact was made between England, France, and Holland for dividing up the Spanish dominions.
The whole story is one of false dealing between nations and of alliances so quickly shifting as to be bewildering, and so guileful as to be offensive to all faith in human nature. But the very idea that there could be good faith between nations, or any other guide for their conduct than the selfish interest of each, never seems to have entered into the minds of the statesmen of that day. They may have been men of honour in their personal dealings, but in their international dealings such terms as honour and honesty were empty words, conveying no meaning.