We need not pause to relate how he showed this: for one example, by treating with the King of Portugal, who was stigmatised at Madrid as an usurper, and by the simultaneous execution, for murder, of Don Pantaleon de Sã, the brother of the ambassador from Portugal. M. Guizot's very interesting narrative is full of similar and striking proof, the greater part of it quite new. France and Spain outdo each other in obsequious homage before Cromwell's intractable energy. We see each bidding higher and higher against the other for his active friendship, and Cardeñas at last eagerly offering him a subvention of not less than six hundred thousand dollars a year, "without having in London or in Flanders," wrote Mazarin to Bordeaux, "the first sou to give him if he "took them at their word. He would promise with the same facility a million, indeed two, to get a pledge from "him, since assuredly it would not cost them more to "hold and execute one promise than the other." Mazarin, a better diplomatist, enriches his promises with a flowing courtesy; sends with them his wine, his tapestry, and his Barbary horses; and concedes, on the part of the young king, a rank only less than royal. Even the Prince of Condé hastens to become acceptable to the rough English soldier, and declares his belief that the people of the three kingdoms must be now at the summit of their happiness at seeing their goods and lives confided to so great a 66 man. "Cromwell received all these advances with the same show of good will not that he saw them all with equal eye, or that he drifted indifferent or uncertain among allies so opposite. Unlike the Long Parliament, he inclined much more towards France than towards Spain; with a superior sagacity he had perceived that Spain was thenceforward an apathetic power, able to effect but little, and in spite of its favourable demonstrations, more hostile than any other to Protestant England, for it was more exclusively than any other given up to the maxims and influences of the Roman Church. And at the same time that there was little to expect from Spain, she offered to the maritime ambition of England, by her vast possessions in the new world, rich and easy prey." Accordingly, there soon followed, we need hardly remind the reader, the well-known swoop upon the King of Spain's West Indian possessions. The better half of the design failed, indeed, when the attack upon St. Domingo failed; but the seizure of Jamaica was an unquestionable prize, which Cromwell's wisdom turned at once to a noble account. The historian describes all these incidents and their consequences in a way that shows ever characteristically the personal predominance of the Protector. Up to within a few days of the declaration of war against Spain, hope has continued with Cardeñas. To even the hour of the treaty of alliance with France, fear has not quitted Mazarin. And by a free use of the very words of the men who wrote freshly and on the instant out of the midst of their diplomacy, the foreign policy of the Protectorate is thus with vivid truth and a rare freshness reproduced by M. Guizot. We may compare the mighty tread of Cromwell with the pirouettes of the statesmen opposed to him, and get no mean perception of the true hero of the day. Of the conditions of the treaty at last concluded with France, it is not necessary that we should speak; but the jealous rigour with which Cromwell insisted on the substitution of Rex Gallorum for Rex Galliæ, is a pregnant indication of the attitude now assumed by him to the most powerful of foreign States. Never, certainly, had our English name been carried so high. "He is the greatest "and happiest prince in Europe," exclaimed young Louis Quatorze. Bound in fast treaties with all the Protestant States, allied to the most potent of Catholic Sovereigns, Montecuculi deprecating his wrath on one side as agent for the house of Austria, and on the other the Marquis of Leyden on behalf of the King of Spain, he received, besides the foreign ministers who habitually resided at his court, ambassadors extraordinary from Sweden, Poland, Germany, and Italy, who came solemnly to present to him the overtures or homage of their masters. Pictures and medals, some nobly commemorative of his exploits, others coarsely satirical of his adversaries, were displayed in almost every town of the continent, celebrating his illustrious deeds, and humbling before them the old princes and kings. Well might one of the most considerable of the foreign agents write over to Thurloe from Brussels that "the Lord Protector's government makes England "more formidable and considerable to all nations than "it has ever been in my day." Nor is less justice rendered by M. Guizot to what he believes to have been another of the titles of that government to esteem; and of Cromwell's patronage of literature and learned men, he speaks with due respect. Though he holds that his mind was neither naturally elegant nor richly cultivated, he can yet see that his free and liberal genius understood thoroughly the wants of the human intellect. And while M. Guizot's experience has taught him, clearly enough, that absolute power, on emerging from great social disturbances, takes its chief delight and achieves its completest triumphs in the promotion of material prosperity, still, in regard to Cromwell, he frankly admits that few despots have so carefully confined themselves within the limits of practical necessity, and allowed the human mind such a wide range of freedom. He sees in him the practical saviour of the two old Universities, and the founder of the University of Durham. He is glad to record that he offered Hobbes the post of a secretary in his household, that he continued the employment of Milton, and that he took no offence at either Selden or Casaubon, when the one declined his pension, and the other his invitation to write a history of the civil wars. He dwells with pleasure on his kindness to the learned Usher, on his desire to stand well with Cudworth and with Taylor, on his frank patronage of all the lettered Puritans, and on the facts that Waller had a place in his court (we have evidence, since M. Guizot wrote, that he put no mean value on the poet's famous panegyric'), that Butler was permitted to meditate Hudibras in the house of one of his officers, and that Davenant obtained his permission to open a private theatre for performance of his comedies. He might have added that the Lord Protector had himself a taste for innocent and cheerful recreation; that he had no objection to play at Crambo, or even occasionally smoke a pipe with my Lord Commissioner Whitelocke, who also has left us a pleasant anecdote contrasting his laughter and gaiety to the soldiers with the greater impatience and reserve of Ireton; and that, in the correspondence of one of the Dutch ambassadors, there is a picture of his courteous habits on state occasions, and of the dignified and graceful conduct of his household, which far exceeds, in sober grandeur and worth, any other court circular of that age. "The music played all the "while we were at dinner," says Herr Jongestall," and after, the Lord Protector had us into another room, 66 1 A brief but remarkable letter was brought to light the other day in which Cromwell, writing from Whitehall in 1655, tells Waller that he has no guilt upon him unless it be "to be "revenged for your soe willinglye 66 mistakinge mee in your verses ;" and talks of putting Waller to redeem him from himself, as he had already from the world. The great Protector was not insensible to those noble and ever memorable lines. Waller had known well how to make his Panegyric most pleasing to his great kinsman's "But for the World's Protector shall "You strike with one hand, but you "where the Lady Protectress and others came to us, and we had also music and voices." 66 To these graces of his private life, and to his domestic love and tenderness, which even his worst enemies have admitted, M. Guizot is of course not slow to pay tribute; but on one point he has suffered himself to be strangely misled. He gravely mentions Cromwell's infidelity to his wife, as if it were an admitted fact, and not a mere royalist slander; and he seems to think that some complaints of her own remain in proof of a well-founded jealousy. Jealousy there may be, in the solitary letter of this excellent woman which has descended to us; but it is the jealousy only of a gentle and sensitive nature, shrinking from the least ruffle or breath of doubt that can come between itself and the beloved. "My dearest," she writes, "I wonder you should blame me for writing no "oftener, when I have sent three for one: I cannot but "think they are miscarried. Truly, if I know my own "heart, I should as soon neglect myself as to omit the "least thought towards you, when in doing it I must do "it to myself. But when I do write, my dear, I seldom "have any satisfactory answer, which makes me think my writing is slighted; as well it may; but I cannot but 66 think your love covers my weakness and infirmities. "Truly my life is but half a life in your absence." That is not the writing of a woman jealous of anything but the share of her husband's time and care which public affairs steal from her. Most touching, too, is a letter of his own of nearly the same date, written to her from the very midst of the toils and perils of Dunbar; in which he tells her that truly, if he does not love her too well, he thinks he errs not on the other hand much, and assures her that she is dearer to him than any creature. Let M. Guizot be well assured that he has here fallen into error. Of another error into which he has fallen, also connected with the domesticities of Cromwell, we have now, in conclusion, to speak in somewhat more detail. It touches an interesting point in Cromwell's history, and we are happy |