open eye on the beneficed clergy, criticising their doctrines, and calling for the ejection of those of whose teaching they disapproved. During the first six or nine months of 1656, when these men ruled supreme, the anti-Puritan fervour which was before long to lay low both the Protectorate and the Commonwealth, ceased to be the special note of particular classes and rooted itself in general society, far outside the circle of ordinary royalism.

Of all this Oliver had no perception. He was clearing the way for the people of God, and he had no regrets. It was more to the purpose that the system, politically unsound, was also unsound financially. The decimation of the Royalists failed to supply funds sufficient to pay the expenses of the Major-Generals.

T was all the worse for Oliver from the financial
point of view, that he was now pursuing a foreign
policy which-whatever opinion we may have of it
on other grounds-at least increased the burdens
of the nation to a point at which Englishmen began
to grow restive.
Even before the signature of

the Dutch peace in the spring of 1654, Oliver had cast about in his mind for a foreign policy, and it was only on rare occasions that he appears to have contemplated the possibility of keeping peace with all nations unless it was absolutely necessary to engage in war in defence of the honour or interests of the country. He