Protestants? Who is there that holdeth up his head to oppose this danger? A poor prince; indeed poor; but a man in his person as gallant, and truly I think I may say, as good as any these last ages have brought forth; and a man that hath adventured his all against the Popish interest in Poland, and made his acquisition still good for the Protestant religion. He is now reduced into a corner; and what addeth to the grief of all-more grievous than all that hath been spoken of before I wish it may not be too truly said—is, that men of our religion forget this and seek his ruin." The cause of Charles X. had become very dear to Oliver, and ought, he imagined, to be very dear to the English people. The 'Popish plot' against the Swedish king loomed largely in his eyes. "It is a design," he continued, "against your very being; this artifice, and this complex design against the Protestant interest-wherein so many Protestants are not so right as were to be wished! If they can shut us out of the Baltic Sea," with Oliver the consideration of material prosperity was never far distant from his spiritual enthusiasm—“and make themselves masters of that, where is your trade? Where are your materials to preserve your shipping? Where will you be able to challenge any right by sea, or justify yourselves against a foreign invasion on your own soil? Think upon it; this is the design! I believe if I believe if you will go and ask the poor mariner in his red cap and coat, as he passeth

from ship to ship, you will hardly find in any ship but they will tell you this is designed against you. So obvious is it, by this and other things, that you are the object; and, in my conscience, I know not for what else, but because of the purity of the profession amongst you, who have not yet made it your trade to prefer your profit before your godliness, but reckon godliness the greater gain."

It was Oliver's head-not his heart-that was at fault. But a few days after these words were spoken, Charles X. was tramping with his army over the ice of the two Belts, in that marvellous march which landed him in Zealand, and compelled Frederick III. to sign the Treaty of Roeskilde which abandoned to Sweden the Danish possessions to the east of the Sound. What then were Oliver's Ambassadors doing when that treaty was negotiating? They were but arguing as any Dutchman or Brandenburger might have argued, on behalf of the material interests of their own country. They favoured Charles's wish to annex the Danish provinces beyond the Sound, because it would leave the passage into the Baltic under the control of two Powers instead of one. They opposed his wish to annex more than two provinces of Norway, in order that the monopoly of the timber trade might not fall into his hands. Of the Protestant alliance not a word was spoken.

For all that, the Protestant alliance had not passed

out of Oliver's mind. Now that Denmark was crushed, Charles professed himself to be quite ready to attack Leopold of Austria, if only he were allowed to crush Brandenburg first; and in May an English Ambassador was sent to Berlin to plead with the Elector of Brandenburg to join England and Sweden against Leopold, to whose support Frederick William was looking against an unprovoked attack from Charles. Happily for England, Frederick William refused to countenance this insane proposal, and in August Charles renewed the war against Denmark, with a fixed determination to bring the whole of the Scandinavian territory under his own sway, before he involved himself in those further complications in Germany, in which Oliver, supported by Mazarin, was anxious to involve him. "France,” said the King of Sweden, "wants to limit me and to prescribe the course I am to take, and England attempts to do the same, but I will put myself in a position to be independent of their orders." His Ministers spoke even more openly of their future plans. When Denmark and Norway had been annexed, and the Baltic brought under the undisputed control of Sweden, Courland and West Prussia must inevitably pass into their master's hands. Then with an army of 40,000 men, supported by a navy of 100 ships, the Swedish army would march through Germany into Italy, visit the Pope, and plunder Rome. "Their first thought

is pillage," added the French Ambassador who reported these vapourings perhaps not without exaggeration. Charles X. was a great soldier, but he was by no means the oppressed saint of Oliver's imagination.

There can be little doubt that the maintenance of a war in the heart of Germany, even with a Swedish ally, would have been far beyond Oliver's means. The occupation of the Flemish ports had taxed his resources to the uttermost. In the speech in which he had sung the high praises of the Swedish king, he had been obliged to plead the necessities of the army as a ground for his demand for fresh supplies. The pay of the army was far in arrear, and it was on the army that he depended to keep down hostile parties at home and to stave off a Royalist attack from abroad. Nor was that army needed for purposes of mere defence. Picturing to himself the majority of the Continental nations as actuated by a wild desire to assail England, he inferred that attack was the best defence. "You have counted yourselves happy," he said to Parliament, "in being environed with a great ditch from all the world beside. Truly you will not be able to keep your ditch, nor your shipping, unless you turn your ships and shipping into troops of horse and companies of foot; and fight to defend yourselves on terra firma.”

This then was what Oliver's much-lauded foreign

policy had come to more regiments, and even higher taxation than what the vast majority of Englishmen believed to be far too high already. A great Continental war, with all its risks and burdens, was dangled before the eyes of a Parliament to which such an outlook had no attractions. That Parliament was no longer the body which had voted the new constitution. Not only were there now two Houses, but the composition of the older House had been significantly altered. The most determined supporters of the Protectorate had been withdrawn to occupy the benches of the new House, whilst the clause of The Humble Petition and Advice, which prohibited the Protector from ever again excluding members duly elected from what had now become the House of Commons, opened its doors to his most determined enemies. The men who now found their way to their seats, such as Hazlerigg and Scot, were opposed heart and soul to the whole system of the Protectorate, and longed for the re-establishment of Parliamentary supremacy. Such men were the more dangerous because they were sufficiently versed in Parliamentary tactics to know the advantage of a rallying cry which would bring the lukewarm to their side. The powers and attributes of the other House were ill-defined in the constitutional document to which it owed its birth, and it was easy to gain adherents by urging that it was not entitled either to the name or the privileges of the