Early in March 1656 a proclamation was issued by the Privy Council declaring all Spanish monies, merchandise, and shipping to be lawful prize. The ink of this document was scarcely dry—indeed it had not been formally published—when, on the denunciation of an informer, the house of Don Antonio Rodrigues Robles, a wealthy Spanish merchant and Marrano of Duke’s Place, City, was entered by bailiffs armed with a Privy Council warrant instructing them to “seize, secure, and keep under safe custody all the goods and papers therein found.” On the same day the Commissioners of Customs, acting under a similar warrant, took possession of two ships in the Thames, the Two Brothers and the Tobias, which were believed to be Robles’s property.[[137]] On the face of it, this action seemed to have no connection with the Jewish question. The fact that the information on which the warrants were based was presented to the Council by so staunch a friend of the Jews as Thurloe suffices to show that its Jewish bearing was at first quite unsuspected. It was apparently the private enterprise of a perfidious scrivener named Francis Knevett, who, after obtaining the confidence of several members of the Marrano community in his professional capacity, had discovered that under the new proclamation he might betray them with advantage to himself.[[138]] This seems also to have been the view of Robles, for in a petition he immediately addressed to the Protector he disputed the validity of the seizures on the purely legal ground that he was a Portuguese and not a Spaniard, and that his rights as a Merchant Stranger, which were consequently unaffected by the war with Spain, had been unjustly invaded.[[139]] On this point the Council, to whom the petition was referred, ordered an inquiry, and one of its members, Colonel Jones, was deputed to take evidence.
Meanwhile some suspicion that the case was aimed at the newly acquired privileges of the Marranos seems to have got abroad. Many of the Jews in London were of Spanish birth, and others, though natives of Portugal, were probably endenizened Spaniards, since in their guise of Nuevos Cristianos they had held high office under the King of Spain.[[140]] It was clear, then, that if the case against Robles was established other prosecutions would follow, and in that way the small Jewish community would be broken up. The danger was all the greater since the protection and privileges so recently acquired by the Jews had only been granted verbally, and might easily be repudiated if public opinion proved too strong for the Protector. There was, however, no immediate reason why the leading Marranos, who had hitherto been in negotiation with Cromwell, should take up Robles’s cudgels, for he belonged to a party in the Synagogue which had imbibed strong Royalist sympathies in Holland and France, and which, consequently, had kept itself aloof from Menasseh’s Readmission campaign. They accordingly confined themselves to the presentation of a petition to the Protector, in which they asked that the “favours and protection” accorded to them, including the right of worship, might be confirmed in writing. At the same time they prayed for a license to acquire ground for a Jewish cemetery. This document was signed by Menasseh ben Israel, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, and five other Marranos, but Robles was not among its signatories.[[141]]
Cromwell at once referred this petition to the Council, but the Lord President, apparently recognising that the Jewish question was coming up in a new form, held it back until the Robles case had been dealt with.[[142]] The fact that Robles was a Jew had, indeed, already been ascertained, and the belief that the prosecution was aimed at all his co-religionists was gaining ground owing to a new outburst of activity on the part of the anti-Semites. The anxiety of the Marranos at the shelving of their petition became accentuated by this agitation, and especially by the doubts which it seemed to be producing in the minds of some of their best friends. The wavering feeling in high places was made disagreeably manifest to them by a letter addressed to Menasseh ben Israel by John Sadler, in which that friend of the Jews pointed out that the charges of ritual murder and quasi idolatry preferred by Prynne and Ross were being widely discussed, and that a public answer to them was urgently necessary.[[143]] Before Menasseh’s reply was written Colonel Jones presented an interim report to the Council, from which it appeared inter alia that Knevett had filed a further information denouncing other Marranos as Spanish subjects.[[144]]
It was now no longer possible to ignore the existence of an anti-Jewish conspiracy. The first action of the Jews was to hurry forward the publication of Menasseh’s reply to Prynne and Ross. This took the form of the famous Vindiciæ Judæorum—the third tract printed in the present volume. It was described merely as “A Letter in Answer to certain Questions propounded by a Noble and Learned Gentleman touching the reproaches cast on the Nation of the Jewes.” The date of its appearance, however, fixes its relation to the Robles crisis, for it was published ten days after Colonel Jones’s report, while the seriousness of that crisis is strikingly illustrated by the urgent and earnest tone of the pamphlet. Menasseh evidently felt that not only his own grandiose idea of a new asylum for Israel was at stake, but that even the small progress that had been achieved towards that end was threatened by a more rigid exclusion of the Hebrew nation. He threw his whole soul into this fresh vindication of his people and their claims. Nothing, indeed, that had come from his facile pen had been more dignified, more impressive, more convincing. The vanity, the superficiality, the pretentious mysticism of his former works had gone. He was no longer playing a part even to himself. He was merely the champion of his people in a moment of their sore trial, writing from a heart whose every throb was for their welfare and their honour. The simple eloquence of this essay, its naïve garrulousness, the glimpses it yields of a pious, gentle, self-denying character, made it one of the most effective vindications of the Jews ever written. The best tribute to its value is afforded by the fact that it has since been frequently reprinted in all parts of Europe when the calumnies it denounced have been revived.
The Vindiciæ Judæorum was a fitting prelude to the dénouement that followed. With this certificate in their hands the Marranos felt that they might risk claiming their legal rights as Jews, and thus at once repudiate their Spanish nationality and challenge a settlement of their status in the country. The decision was a bold one, but there was shrewd method in its apparent rashness. If the Marranos were technically Spanish subjects, they were in reality testimonies to the intolerance of Spain which made that country, in Cromwell’s words, “the natural, the providential enemy of England,”[[145]] and which was one of the grounds of the war. Like the Protestant traders whose liberty of conscience had been trampled on in Spain they also had been persecuted, though in a worse form. They were fugitives from the Inquisition, and consequently had a peculiar claim on the indulgence and consistency of the English people, who at that moment were filled with righteous horror at the religious policy of the “Popish enemy.”
In pursuance of this idea Robles now addressed a fresh petition to the Protector, which reached the Council of State on the 15th April,[[146]] five days after the publication of the Vindiciæ. In this document the purely legal question of nationality was dropped, and Robles confined himself to reciting how he and his kindred had been persecuted by the Inquisition in Portugal and Spain, how his father had died under torture, how his mother had been crippled for life, and other members of his family burnt or sent to the galleys because they were Jews. He related that he had sought refuge in England, “intending therein to shelter himselfe from those tiranicall Proceedings and injoy those Beneffitts and Kindnesse which this Com̄onwth ever aforded to aflicted strangers.” He appealed to Cromwell’s notorious sympathy for “afflicted ones,” and especially “owr nation the Jews,” and skilfully suggested that a continuance of his prosecution would be tantamount to the introduction of the Inquisition into England. A week later affidavits confirming the statements in this petition were signed by all the leading Marranos and handed to Colonel Jones.[[147]] Thus the Crypto-Jews threw off their disguise. In the investigations which followed, the existence of over twenty Jewish families in London was revealed, and it was given in evidence that many of them had resided for years in the country.
These tactics produced dismay in the ranks of the anti-Semites. Knevett made a last despairing effort to construct a fresh case against the Jews by trying to bribe Robles’s servants to assist him in framing a new information. In this he failed.[[148]] The case was now quickly disposed of. On April 25th the Council of State, still anxious to avoid responsibility for a decision, sent all the papers to the Admiralty Commissioners, with a request for a prompt report. On May 11th the Commissioners summoned the witnesses before them, but extracted little else from them than that Robles was believed to be Portuguese, and that they were all victims of the Inquisition. On May 14th the Commissioners reported that they were unable to give a definite opinion on the question of nationality. Two days later the Council screwed up their courage to a decision, and, without giving any reasons, ordered all the warrants to be discharged, and reinstated Robles in the possession of his goods, premises, and ships.[[149]]
The Jewish battle was won, and nothing now remained but to secure the fruits of victory in an inexpugnable form. What followed is, in detail, a matter of conjecture, but the broad lines of the settlement we know from the petition of the Corporation of the City of London, already quoted. Rights of “cohabitation and trade in these dominions” were formally accorded to the Jews in writing.[[150]] That this happened before the end of 1656 we may gather from a statement of Cromwell’s intimate friend, Samuel Richardson, who, in his “Plain Dealing,” published in that year, says of the Protector, “He hath owned the poor despised people of God, and advanced many of them to a better way and means of living.”[[151]] The first steps were probably taken on the 26th June, when the longdeferred petition of the Marranos for a license to acquire a burial-ground and for a confirmation in writing of their rights of residence and worship came up for consideration.[[152]] The Council, still reluctant to engage their responsibility, made no entry of the discussion in their Order Book, and it was probably arranged that Cromwell should personally confirm the Jewish right of residence, subject to an understanding that the spirit of the recommendations presented to the Council after the Whitehall Conferences should be observed. The right to acquire a cemetery was certainly granted. Cromwell probably further engaged himself to instruct the London city authorities to place no impediments in the way of the Jews trading on an equality with other citizens.[[153]] On their side, the Marranos must have agreed not to assist in an indiscriminate immigration of their co-religionists, not to obtrude their worship and ceremonies on the public, not to engage in religious controversy, and not to make converts.[[154]] The restriction with regard to worshipping in private houses was also probably revised, and the maintenance of a synagogue, subject to the other conditions, sanctioned.[[155]] In February 1657 Antonio de Carvajal and another leading Marrano, Simon de Caceres, signed the lease for a Jewish cemetery in Mile End.[[156]] Shortly afterwards another result of the settlement was made public. Solomon Dormido, a son of David Abarbanel Dormido and nephew of Menasseh ben Israel, was admitted to the Royal Exchange as a duly licensed broker of the City of London, the authorities waiving in his favour the Christological oath essential to the induction of all brokers.[[157]] As wholesale trading in the City was transacted exclusively through brokers, the admission of a Jew to that limited fraternity is a substantial proof of the acquisition of untrammelled trading rights by the new community.
The victory, it will be observed, secured to the local Marranos all they required, and in a measure realised the aims of Cromwell’s own policy. To Menasseh ben Israel, however, it was no victory: it was a compromise of a purely selfish nature, which left his idea of a proclamation of a free asylum to the persecuted and scattered remnants of Israel as remote as ever. We may be certain that he did not hide his grief or his indignation. There is indeed abundant reason for believing that he quarrelled over it with the new Jewish community. His hopes of returning to his old position in Amsterdam were shattered, for the Dutch Jews, who had always shared the Stuart sympathies of their Christian compatriots, had formally abandoned him when they found they had nothing to gain from his mission, and had opened negotiations on their own behalf with the exiled king at Bruges.[[158]] He might, perhaps, have secured his future by becoming Rabbi of the London community had he been content to abide by the terms of the new settlement. This, however, he sturdily refused, and although he was deserted by all his friends, and his monetary resources were exhausted, he continued from his lodging in the Strand to urge on Cromwell the issue of the proclamation on which he had set his heart.
That he must have quarrelled with the London Marranos immediately after the settlement is shown by a letter he addressed to Cromwell towards the end of 1656, in which he asked for pecuniary help, and stated that he (the Protector) was “the alone succourer of my life in this land of strangers.”[[159]] Cromwell responded with a gift of £25, and in the following March granted him a pension of £100 a year, dating from February, and payable quarterly.[[160]] Unfortunately this pension was never paid, and Menasseh became overwhelmed with cares.[[161]] Nevertheless, for six months longer he doggedly pursued his mission. In September 1657 his only surviving son, Samuel ben Israel, who had remained with him in England, died.[[162]] Then his spirit broke. Begging a few pounds from the Protector[[163]] he turned his steps homewards, carrying with him the corpse of his son.