impression upon me, and does oblige me to serve your Eminency upon all occasions, so as I shall be happy to find out. So I trust that very honourable person Monsieur Burdoe [Bordeaux] will therein be helpful to

"Your Eminencie's

"Thrice humble Servant,

"O. CROMWELL."

The historian calls this a rare excess of affected humility; but after all what is there more, in the counterfeit humility, than such a reply to a compliment as every gentleman in England makes every week in some form to somebody. "You do me too much honour. There is nothing that I would not do to serve you, Sir. "Good morning."

There is never in truth any affected humility, but rather a contempt very thinly covered, if not openly avowed, on the part of Cromwell to Mazarin; nor does this find anywhere more characteristic expression than in the evidence M. Guizot incidentally gives us of the sort of gifts they interchanged. While Mazarin sent over regal presents of tapestry, wine, and Barbary horses, Cromwell, familiarly and half contemptuously confident that he had to do with a man more avaricious than vain, would return such compliments by forwarding so many cases of pure Cornwall tin. As to their public intercourse throughout, the historian sees that it was but a constant interchange of concessions and resistances, services and refusals, in which they ran little risk of quarrelling, for the simple reason that they mutually understood each other, and did not require from one another anything that could not be denied without doing greater injury than the grant would do service; but it was after all a kind of equality in which the personal predominance undoubtedly remained with Cromwell. It is he whom it is manifestly impossible, throughout, either to intimidate or deceive; and though it was no small art on Mazarin's side, as soon as he saw this, to affect to meet his adversary with the same simple frankness, there can hardly be a question which plays the

greater figure, he who possessed the art, or he who always reduced its possessor to the necessity of practising it.

Of Cromwell's first effort after the dissolution of the Long Parliament to govern with the help of the men who had been parties to that act of violence, the result, according to M. Guizot's view, was to show him that reforming sectaries and innovators, though useful instruments of destruction, are destructive to the very power they establish; and that the classes among whom conservative interests prevail are the only natural and permanent allies of authority. Yet he had no choice but to renew his efforts in the same direction, with what help such experience could give; for the French historian has satisfied himself that his honest desire was so far, by any possible means, to place himself in subordination to English law, as to obtain cooperation from a fairly-chosen Parliament that should consent honestly to assist him in establishing a Cromwell dynasty of kings, and in restoring, with the monarchy, the ancient form of lords and commons. But still his attempts were unavailing. He could not restore what he had so helped to destroy. Amid the ruins which his hands had made, he was doomed to see the vanity of those rash hopes, and to learn that no government is, or can be, the work of man's will alone. In the endeavour to obtain such a Parliament as the old usages of England sanctioned, he raised up more than one semi-constitutional assembly; but merely to destroy it when it disappointed him, and with it, as he well knew, his only safe means of taxing the people he would govern. The money needful for State purposes thus failing him, he was at last driven to the expedient pronounced by M. Guizot to be the political act which caused his ruin-the establishment of Major-Generals to levy tithes on the revenues of the royalists. By this unjustifiable act, M. Guizot declares that he detached his glory from the cause of order and peace, in the name of which he had begun to found his throne, and plunged his power down among the depths of revolutionary violence. "He invoked," says the consti

tutional historian, "necessity; and without doubt thought himself reduced to that: if he was right, it was one of "those necessities inflicted by God's justice, which reveal "the innate vice of a Government, and become the sen"tence of its condemnation."

From this time to the end, M. Guizot is of opinion that Cromwell was thoroughly conscious of the weakness with which he was smitten by his own deed, and that it was upon feeling in all directions for support he at last perceived his surest prop to be the advocacy of liberty of conscience. Of the formal discussion which he afterwards raised with his friendly Parliament on the question of his assuming royal state, the historian speaks as of a comedy performed for the instruction of the nation. It was designed to make men familiar with the topic, and to scatter abroad a variety of arguments in its favour; but the interference of the army brought the comedy to an unwelcome end. Cromwell resigned the name of king; and with it, the historian appears to think, any power of retaining much longer the kingly authority. He had arrived at the slippery height on which to stand still was impossible, and there was no alternative but to mount higher or to fall. Even his great heart failed him. He now saw, that, die when he might, he must be content to leave behind him for his successors the two enemies he had most ardently combated, anarchy and the Stuarts; and M. Guizot's comments leave it to be inferred as his opinion, that had he long survived the discomfiture which embittered his last months, even his political position might have been seriously endangered. He died, however, in the fullness of his power, though sorrowful. "Sorrowful not only because he must die, but also, and above all, because he must die without having "attained his true and final purpose."

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But that his, nevertheless, was the strong resolve which exclusively upheld the State as long as life remained to him, M. Guizot shows nowhere so emphatically as in the description of the Protectorate of his son. The weak purpose of Richard being substituted for his father's iron

will, every party again became loud in the assertion of his own particular theory; "accomplices became rivals ;" and soon, in the stormy sea of faction, the good ship of the Republic drifted an utter wreck. Then were seen, according to the historian, the faults both of the pure republicans and of the adherents of Cromwell revenging themselves upon their authors. For what more easy than the way at last appeared to be, to a firm establishment of Richard Cromwell's government? Whatever his infirmities of character, he was disliked by none. M. Guizot quotes golden opinions expressed of him by all sorts of people, and points out that the whole private interest of the members of his first Parliament lay in the assurance of his power, and with that also of their own prosperity. He describes the Government as having no design and no desire of tyranny; Richard himself as naturally moderate, patient, equitable; and his counsellors, like himself, as demanding nothing better than to govern in concert with the Parliament, and according to the laws. What, then, so natural or so reasonable, as for all men who had not vowed their hearts to the old royal line or to the pure republic, to accommodate themselves to the régime established, and to live, by common consent, tranquil and safe under the new Protector? But it was not to be. Though their empire had vanished, their obstinacy remained unenlightened and unsubdued. Detested as oppressors, and decried as visionaries, they retorted by accusing their country of ingratitude, and battled vainly against the successive defeats which they knew not that the hand of God was inflicting. But though they could not build they could destroy, and so the second Protectorate passed away.

Yet let us not leave the reader under any doubt whether a fuil or a stinted measure of justice is done by the historian to what was really successful as well as great in the policy of the first Protectorate. It is on every account our interest to give M. Guizot further hearing as to this, since it enables us to give also further indication of the

very valuable original illustrations contributed by his book to our English annals.

M. Guizot describes the foreign policy of Cromwell as based on two fixed ideas,-peace with the United Provinces and the alliance of the Protestant States. These were in his eyes the two vital conditions of the security and greatness of his country in Europe, of his own security and his own greatness in Europe and in his country. With the United Provinces peace was at once made, Whitelocke was sent upon his embassy to Sweden, a special treaty of commerce was negotiated with the King of Denmark, and Cromwell found himself on terms of friendship with all Protestant States of Europe. In France it was said, continues M. Guizot, that he even meditated, in the interests of Protestantism, a more vast and difficult design.

"The Protector proposes to himself,' wrote to the Cardinal Mazarin one of his confidential agents, to cause the assembly of 6 a council of all the Protestant communions, to re-unite them in " one body for the common confession of one and the same faith.' Some particular facts indicate that he was, indeed, preoccupied with this idea. He was one of those persons of powerful and fertile genius in whom great designs and great temptations are born by crowds; but he applied promptly his firm good sense to his finest dreams, and never pursued farther those which did not endure that trial.

"He assumed towards the Catholic powers an attitude of complete and frigid independence, without prejudice or ill-will, but without forwardness, showing himself disposed to peace, but always leaving to be seen a glimpse of war, and carrying a rough pride into the care of the interests of his country or of his own greatness."1