of State, he might have thought that this amicable language hardly answered to the facts. Cromwell's earliest move in his new line was to despatch Blake with one strong fleet to the Mediterranean (October), and Penn and Venables (December 1654) with another to the West Indies. In each case the instructions were not less explicit against French ships than Spanish. Blake alarmed France and Spain, menaced the Pope, and attacked the Barbary pirates. The expedition against Saint Domingo was a failure it was ill-found, ill-conceived, and ill-led. Before returning in disgrace, the commanders, hoping to retrieve their name, acquired the prize of Jamaica. These proceedings brought the Protector directly within the sphere of the great European conflict of the age, and drew England into the heart of the new distribution of power in Europe that marked the middle epoch of the seventeenth century. From the Elizabethan times conflict on the high seas had ranked as general reprisal and did not constitute a state of war, nor did it necessarily now. The status of possessions over sea was still unfixed.1 Cromwell, however, had no right to be surprised when Philip chose to regard aggression in the Indies as justifying declaration of war in Europe. A further inconvenient consequence was that Spain now began warmly to espouse the cause of the exiled line, and in the spring of 1656, Philip IV. formally bound himself to definite measures for the transport of a royalist force from Flanders to aid in an English restoration.

The power of Spain had begun to shrink with the abdication of Charles V. (1556). Before the middle of the seventeenth century Portugal had broken off; revolt had shaken her hold in Italy; Catalonia was in standing insurrection; the United Provinces had finally achieved their independence; by the barbarous expulsion of Moors and Jews she

1 Corbett's Spanish War, 1585–87, viii.-ix.—Navy Records Society, 1898.

ENGLAND, SPAIN, AND FRANCE 405

lost three millions of the best of her industrial population; her maritime supremacy was at an end. Philip IV., the Spanish sovereign from a little time before the accession of Charles I. in England to a little time after the restoration of Charles II., was called, by flatterers, the Great. "Like a ditch,' said Spanish humour-" the more you dig away from it, the greater the ditch." The treaty of Westphalia (1648), the fruit of the toil, the foresight, and the genius of Richelieu, though others gathered it, weakened the power of the Germanic branch of the House of Hapsburg, and Mazarin, the second of the two famous cardinals who for forty years governed France, was now in the crisis of his struggle with the Spanish branch. In this long struggle between two states, each torn by intestine dissension as well as by an external enemy, the power of England was recognised as a decisive factor after the rise of the republic; and before Cromwell assumed the government, Spain had hastened to recognise the new Commonwealth. Cromwell, as we have seen, long hesitated between Spain and France. Traditional policy pointed to France, for though she was predominantly catholic, yet ever since the days of Francis I., the greatest of her statesmen, including Henry IV. and Richelieu, had favoured the German princes and the protestant powers, from no special care for the reformed faith, but because the protestant powers were the adversaries of the emperor, the head of the catholic party in Europe.

Mazarin endeavoured to gain Cromwell, from the moment of his triumphant return from Worcester. It is the mark of genius to be able to satisfy new demands as they arise, and to play new parts with skill. Expecting to deal with a rough soldier whom fortune and his sword had brought to the front, Mazarin found instead of this a diplomatist as wary, as supple, as tenacious, as dexterous, as capable of

large views, as incapable of dejection, as he was all these things himself. The rude vigour of the English demands and the Lord Protector's haughty pretensions never irritated Mazarin, of whom it has been aptly said (Mignet) that his ambition raised him above self-love, and that he was so scientifically cool that even adversaries never appeared to him in the light of enemies to be hated, but only as obstacles to be moved or turned. It was at one time even conjectured, idly enough, that Mazarin designed to marry one of his nieces to the second son of Oliver. For years the match went on between the puritan chief who held the English to be the chosen people, and the Italian cardinal who declared that though his language was not French, his heart was. Mazarin's diplomacy followed the vicissitudes of Cromwell's political fortune, and the pursuit of an alliance waxed hotter or cooler, as the Protector seemed likely to consolidate his power or to let it slip. Still both of them were at bottom men of direct common sense, and their friendship stood on nearly as good a basis for six or seven years, as that which for twenty years of the next century supported the more fruitful friendship between Sir Robert Walpole and Cardinal Fleury. A French writer, eminent alike as historian and actor in state affairs, says of these negotiations that it is the supreme art of great statesmen to treat business simply and with frankness, when they know that they have to deal with rivals who will not let themselves be either duped or frightened (Guizot). The comment is just. Cromwell was harder and less pliant, and had nothing of the caress under which an Italian often hides both sense and firmness. But each was alive to the difficulties of the other, and neither of them expected short cuts or a straight road. Mazarin had very early penetrated Cromwell's idea of making himself the guardian both of the Huguenots in France, and of the protestant

CHAP. VIII THE PIEDMONTESE MASSACRE 407

interest throughout Europe. In the spring of 1655 the massacre of the protestants in the Piedmontese valleys stirred a wave of passion in England that still vibrates in Milton's sonnet, and that by Cromwell's impressive energy was felt in Europe. At no other time in his history did the flame in his own breast burn with an intenser glow. The incident both roused his deepest feelings and was a practical occasion for realising his policy of a confederation of protestant powers, with England at the head of them and France acting in concert. To be indifferent to such doings, he said, is a great sin, and a deeper sin still is it to be blind to them from policy or ambition. He associated his own personality with the case, in a tone of almost jealous directness that struck a new note. No English ruler has ever shown a nobler figure than Cromwell in the case of the Vaudois, and he had all the highest impulses of the nation with him. He said to the French ambassador that the woes of the poor Piedmontese went as close to his heart as if they were his own nearest kin; and he gave personal proof of the sincerity of his concern by a munificent contribution to the fund for the relief of the martyred population. Never was the great conception of a powerful state having duties along with interests more magnanimously realised. It was his diplomatic pressure upon France that secured redress, though Mazarin, not without craft, kept for himself a foremost place.

Now was the time when the Council of State directed their secretary to buy a new atlas for their use, and to keep the globe always standing in the council chamber. The Venetian representative in London in 1655 declares that the court of the Protector was the most brilliant and most regarded in all Europe: six kings had sent ambassadors and solicited his friendship. The glory of all this in the eyes of Cromwell, like its interest in history, is the height that was thus reached among the ruling and

established forces of Europe by protestantism. The influence of France, says Ranke, had rescued protestantism from destruction; it was through Cromwell that protestantism took up an independent position among the powers of the world. A position so dazzling was a marvellous achievement of force and purpose, if only the foundation had been sounder and held better promise of duration.

The war with Spain in which England was now involved by her aggression in the West Indies, roused little enthusiasm in the nation. The parliament did not disapprove the war, but showed no readiness to vote the money. The Spanish trade in wine, oil, sugar, fruit, cochineal, silver, was more important to English commerce than the trade with France. It is worthy of remark that the Long Parliament had directed its resentment and ambition against the Dutch, and displayed no ill-will to Spain; and much the same is true of the Little Parliament and even of Cromwell himself in early stages. The association of France in the mind of England with Mary Stuart, with the queen of Charles I., and with distant centuries of bygone war, was some set-off to the odium that surrounded the Holy Office, the sombre engine of religious cruelty in the Peninsula; and the Spanish Armada was balanced in popular imagination by the Bartholomew Massacre in France, of which Burleigh said that it was the most horrible crime since the Crucifixion. No question of public opinion and no difficulties at the exchequer prevented the vigorous prosecution of the war. Blake, though himself a republican, served the Protector with the same patriotic energy and resource that he had given to the Commonwealth until, after the most renowned of all his victories, and worn out by years of service, the hero died on reaching Plymouth Sound (1657).

By October of 1655 Mazarin had brought Cromwell so far as to sign the treaty of Westminster, but