Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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their neighbours to decimation and refused to take part. Many victims of the

levy appealed against it to Cromwell and the council, who were quite gener-

ous in granting exemptions—to the dismay of the major-generals, at least

seven of whom protested. They needed the money, for although four of them,

in areas where royalists were thickest on the ground, collected a surplus, most

found themselves short. Their own salaries and those of their militia ofﬁcers

fell heavily into arrears, and their troopers’ retainers went unpaid.

It might be thought otiose to explain any further why their regime was very

widely disliked, but in fact the major-generals were by no means universally

unpopular. Several were struck by the enthusiasm with which they were

greeted in their regions, especially by the more active commissioners. There

really was a ‘godly interest’ in the country, and though it was in most parts a

minority one Cromwell’s eagerness to see the work of reformation go for-

ward was more widely shared than is sometimes allowed. But among their so

varied duties, this was the sphere in which their success was most limited. In

some regions they did stir the local magistrates into greater activity, especially

in administering poor relief and regulating alehouses. But though they closed

some hundreds of the latter, tens of thousands survived them, and those they

suppressed showed a strong tendency to spring up again. As for moral

offences, in Middlesex under Major-General Barkstead there were three

times more prosecutions in 1656 than in 1652, and he had some success in

banning race-meetings and enforcing sabbath observance. But he was not

typical; most major-generals seem to have found it as hard to keep the people

chaste as to keep them sober. Some ﬁlled the local prisons with rogues and

vagabonds, but most of the vagrant fraternity seem to have just moved on to

where the heat was lower. In many areas the major-generals’ efforts towards

reformation were frustrated by the hostility of anti-puritan, anti-military JPs,

but again there were wide differences in their relations with the established

magistracy. It depended as much on their personalities as on the predispos-

ition of their territories. Boteler in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and

Huntingdonshire, and Worsley in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Staffordshire

both aroused animosity by the unyielding and abrasive manner in which they

went about their business, whereas Whalley, sandwiched between them in

Leicestershire and Warwickshire, achieved real progress through courtesy

and considerateness. He gave much time to such practical matters as relieving

poverty, checking enclosures that involved depopulation, regulating markets

by standardizing weights and measures, and punishing cheating and over-

charging. More controversial were the major-generals’ efforts to purge the

municipal corporations of obstructive or ungodly members, because their

legal right to do so was very dubious. On the other hand their relations with

the assize judges were generally good, and several rode the circuits with them.

Few of them acted solely as enforcers of the interests of central government

628 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

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upon the reluctant localities; quite often they spoke up for their territories

against its demands. They were not always well supported by Cromwell and

the council, partly because the latter was so heavily stretched by other

demands on its time. As Anthony Fletcher has said, ‘Far too much was ex-

pected of men who were bound to be treated with the cynical mixture of wary

deference and quiet obstructionism reserved for government inspectors’.

They inherited some of the opprobrium that had attached to the old county

committees of the 1640s, and as with those bodies their unpopularity was

exacerbated by snobbery. Of the sixteen men who acted as major-generals, or

as their deputies where the titular major-generals were on duty elsewhere,

only three were fully on the social level of the county elite, six were lesser

gentry, and seven ranked still lower in the scale. Most were also considerably

younger than most of the JPs whom they tried to spur into action, for only

four of the sixteen were over forty.

In their primary role of stamping out conspiracy they succeeded tri-

umphantly, for their control over royalists’ movements and the bonds they

took of them, distasteful though we may ﬁnd such measures, were almost

totally effective. There were one or two more assassination plots, but they

were quickly discovered or betrayed; most royalists felt an honourable dislike

for such methods. There were no further plans for a general rising until 1658,

when they fell apart even more ineptly than in 1655. Long before then, Thur-

loe and his agents had such a grip on security that they no longer needed the

major-generals’ special militia. The Knot retreated into inactivity, and from

November 1656 onward, if not before, one of its members, Sir Richard

Wyllis, regularly divulged many of its secrets to Thurloe. If the major-

generals failed to facilitate any considerable reduction in the regular army,

that was not their fault. Cromwell was pursuing an adventurous foreign pol-

icy which necessitated a reserve of land forces, and anyhow the total of land

forces afoot in England and Wales in October 1655—about 11,700 ofﬁcers

and men

—was modest enough by contemporary European standards.

The major-generals do not deserve the kind of anathema that they com-

monly received from historians steeped in the prevailing liberalism of late

Victorian and Edwardian times, or from those writing under the shadow of

the military dictatorships of the mid-twentieth century. Yet they have to be

reckoned one of the mistakes of Cromwell’s rule, not only because of the

unpopularity that they brought upon it but because they were given an impos-

sibly wide range of duties and responsibilities, too little support in carrying

them out, and too little time—effectively less than a year—in which to fulﬁl

them. Much of the bad press that they received stems ultimately from

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 629

Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (New Haven and London, 1986), p. 60.

H. M. Reece, ‘The military presence in England 1649–1660’ (unpublished Oxford D.Phil.

thesis, 1982), p. 287.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 629

royalist sources, understandably enough, and from anti-Cromwellian repub-

licans. Clarendon and Ludlow, who both branded them as ‘bashaws’,

the

very type of oriental tyranny, exaggerated grossly, but it was never a good

idea to commit to the same inexperienced soldierly hands the security of the

government against conspiracy, the general invigoration of civil administra-

tion, and the promotion of a godly reformation. From Cromwell’s point of

view the worst damage that he did was to his own cherished aim of ‘healing

and settling’. He had set out as Protector with the laudable intentions of

bridging over the rifts opened up by the wars, eliminating arbitrariness from

civil government and putting the military origins of his power behind him. He

let himself be deﬂected too far by the persistence of royalist plotting and by

his disappointment with his ﬁrst parliament, but it is curious that it took him

so long to see how far he was compromising his own ideals.

It is not difﬁcult to see why domestic business did not always get the attention

it needed, because while the government was dealing with Penruddock’s ris-

ing and its aftermath it was being faced with decisions of huge consequence in

its relations with France and Spain. Both powers, it will be remembered, had

been seeking England’s friendship, and now that her civil wars were over and

her great ﬂeet free from its struggle with the Dutch, neither could afford to

provoke her to war. Cromwell exploited this situation, sometimes coolly,

sometimes rashly, but because English shipping had suffered so many losses

at French hands during the years of undeclared war at sea, he at ﬁrst displayed

more hostility towards France than towards Spain. Back in February 1654,

while still at war with the Dutch, he had sent Major Robert Sedgwick to organ-

ize an attack by the colonists of New England on what is now New York, but

was then New Amsterdam. When his peace with the United Provinces ruled

that out, Sedgwick, boldly stretching a clause in his commission that empow-

ered him to seize French ships, attacked and captured three forts in the French

colony of Acadia, which then included the coasts of modern New Brunswick

and Maine as well as Nova Scotia. This was disputed territory between

France and the New Englanders, who were delighted by Sedgwick’s ven-

ture—the more so when Cromwell showed no signs of yielding to French

pressure to restore the forts and the lands they protected.

Blake’s ﬂeet, which had sailed for the Mediterranean in October 1654,

became an even greater source of friction. France was planning to invade

Naples, the capital of the Spanish kingdom that embraced all southern Italy

and Sicily, and the design involved the conjunction of two French ﬂeets, one

630 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, VI, 17 (Book XV, § 25); Memoirs of Edmund Lud-

low, I, 405–6. Blair Worden, however, has pointed out to me that this passage in Ludlow may be

an editorial interpolation; see his introduction to E. Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower

1660–1662 (Camden series, Royal Historical Society, 1978).

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 630

based in Brest, the other, under the Duke of Guise, in Toulon. Blake’s orders

have not survived, but they were probably to frustrate the invasion by all pos-

sible means. Cromwell requested and obtained the King of Spain’s permission

for Blake to have the use of Spanish ports in the Mediterranean, and his mere

presence caused Guise to call the whole scheme off. It also secured the restor-

ation of English merchant ships captured by the French. It caused widespread

alarm all around the Mediterranean shores; the pope feared that Blake

intended to attack the papal states, and some wealthy Roman citizens sought

safety in rural retreats. But Blake’s next mission was against the Barbary cor-

sairs operating under the protection of the Dey of Tunis, and on 4 April he

brought off an unprecedented feat by sailing into Porto Farino harbour and

attacking nine warships that lay under the protection of a powerful fort

and other shore batteries. His ship’s guns silenced the shore-based artillery,

and all the Dey’s men-of-war were burnt. Consequently he met with a very

different reaction from the Dey of Algiers when he anchored off the port later

in the month. He was most courteously received, and he rapidly negotiated

the release of the English captives who were toiling as slaves under Algerian

masters.

Such was the provocation that Cromwell offered to France that Mazarin

gave some passive support to the royalist conspirators in the early part of

1655. Yet it was with Spain that Cromwell went to war in the following Octo-

ber, and with France that he signed a treaty of peace and commerce in the

same month. This was to ripen in time into a full offensive alliance. The story

of his breach with Spain goes back to the spring of 1654, when he was in a

rather bellicose and overconﬁdent mood after concluding his successful peace

with the Dutch. Both Cardenas and Bordeaux, ambassadors respectively of

Spain and France, believed he was seriously seeking an alliance against the

other’s country, but for both the terms that he demanded were impossibly

high. The price that he asked of Spain for going to war with France was free

trade with the Spanish colonies, the right of protestant Englishmen in Spain

to worship freely in private premises, the cession of Dunkirk as an earnest for

the eventual handing over to England of Calais if the war went successfully,

and a subsidy of £300,000 a year while it lasted. No wonder Cardenas sent to

Brussels for authority before agreeing to such terms, but in May 1655 he

thought he had Cromwell’s assurance that he would declare war on France.

Cromwell, however, was setting his mind, if he had not set it already, on

acquiring by conquest one of Spain’s most valuable colonies, Hispaniola. He

seems to have thought that he could attack Spanish possessions on the other

side of the world without engaging in war with Spain herself, but he was not

afraid to face war if it should come. Such an unprovoked attack was by no

means an unprecedented idea, for Warwick, Eliot, and Pym among others had

urged it in the parliaments of the 1620s. Like them, Cromwell believed that if

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 631

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it succeeded it would quite soon pay for itself, and more. The project aroused

keen debate in July in the Council of State, and thanks to jottings taken by

Edward Montagu we have a rare glimpse of how it went. Fascinatingly, it

shows how forcefully Cromwell’s views could be opposed in council, in this

case by Lambert in particular. Against the enterprise, he argued its cost and

uncertainty, the heavy casualties to be expected, and the unlikelihood that it

would advance the protestant cause. He gave higher priority to tasks and

challenges nearer home, including the settlement of Ireland. He had a power-

ful case. But Cromwell was convinced that providence was leading them to

the Western Design, as it came to be called. He contended that it would cost

little more than laying up the ships engaged in it, and that it would give

employment to a considerable part of the army.

Later, in justifying the con-

sequent war to parliament, he invoked the example of ‘Queen Elizabeth of

famous memory’, and maintained that the Spaniard was England’s ‘natural

enemy’, by reason of ‘that antipathy that is in him providentially’.

So it was

that prejudice, providentialism, and nostalgia for a half-mythical Elizabethan

golden age impelled him towards the most ill-considered military decision of

his career.

The leadership of the expedition was divided, with William Penn, General

at Sea, in command of 38 ships, and Colonel Robert Venables at the head of

a land force of nominally 3,000 infantry and 100 cavalry, to be reinforced by

recruitment from Barbados. Relations between the two men were deplorable;

Penn, who was suspicious and irascible by nature, not only treated Venables

with contempt but allowed his subordinates to do so. But the responsibility

for the Western Design’s failure lay at least as much with the government that

planned it as with the commanders who led it. The military force was too

small for a start, and instead of being composed of entire regiments whose

ofﬁcers and men knew and trusted each other, it was made up of small drafts

from many units scattered up and down the country. Their colonels, given

carte blanche to name whom they chose, naturally rid themselves only of the

men they were glad to lose, and their numbers had to be made up from the

scourings of the streets. Venables pleaded and protested in vain. He had to

sail with only 2,500 men, and his recruits in Barbados were nearly all

untrained, poor-spirited, and ill-disciplined servants, since the colonists saw

the expedition as a disruption of their trade and gave it a cold welcome. The

soldiers’ low morale was further depressed by nasty victuals and inadequate

stores. Much the best of Venables’ troops consisted of a regiment of about

1,200 seamen drawn from the ﬂeet; they brought his total force to just over

9,000 men.

632 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Clarke Papers, III, 207–8; also in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III,

377–8.

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 261–2.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 632

The attempt on Hispaniola began on 14 April 1655, and it was a pre-

dictable disaster. To reach their objective, San Domingo, most of the troops

had a thirty-ﬁve mile march in torrid heat, on reduced rations, and dreadful-

ly short of water. Dysentery struck down more and more of them, including

Venables himself. When they ﬁnally came before the walls of the city they

were in such wretched shape that he had to order a temporary retreat, and

though he organized a second attempt on it his soldiers, the naval regiment

excepted, were so demoralized by small-scale Spanish guerrilla attacks that he

was forced to call it off. He re-embarked what was left of his men on 4 May,

and Penn transported them to Jamaica, which had at most 500 troops to

defend it. The island surrendered on the 17th, and its 1,500 or so Spanish

settlers were all forced to leave. In English eyes Jamaica was no compensa-

tion for Hispaniola, which was nearly seven times as large and had far

more colonists. Penn thought so little about a possible Spanish counter-

attack that he sailed for home in June with all his larger warships. Venables,

who was now very ill, followed soon after, leaving the very capable

Colonel Richard Fortescue in command of the garrison. Fortescue was

one of the few who had any idea of the prosperous future that lay ahead

for Jamaica, which he considered a better site for British colonization

than Hispaniola. Sadly, he died only three months after taking up his

command.

Penn and Venables, on returning home, were summoned before the coun-

cil, and after a lashing from Cromwell’s tongue for deserting their posts both

were committed to the Tower. Penn had the less to complain of, since by

bringing most of his ships back without orders he had passed up a chance of

capturing the Spanish silver ﬂeet, though he had known it was in Havana, and

vulnerable. Venables was harshly treated, for he sought his ofﬁcers’ consent

before leaving his post, and he would probably have died if he had stayed at

it. Neither commander was released until he abjectly acknowledged his guilt

and surrendered his commission, which both did before the end of October.

Penn deserved his disgrace more than Cromwell knew, for he had offered his

services to the king in 1654, and on retiring to his estates in Munster after

making his submission he resumed his correspondence with the exiled court.

Venables was to be Monck’s choice as governor of Chester shortly before the

Restoration. It would be unjust to regard Penn and Venables simply as

Cromwell’s scapegoats, for both had failed to some extent to measure up to

their responsibilities, and he did not place all the blame on them. He was

deeply troubled by the expedition’s failure to achieve its ﬁrst objective, and he

searched his own heart for reasons why the Lord had frowned upon his

attempt at what he saw as ‘promoting the glory of God, and enlarging the

bounds of Christ’s kingdom’. He wrote to Fortescue: ‘We have cause to be

humbled by the reproof God gave us at San Domingo, upon the account of

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 633

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our sins, as well as others’’.

He might have beaten his breast less for his own

and others’ sins and more for inadequate planning, under-provision of troops,

poor commissariat, and gross ignorance of the needs of soldiers campaigning

in the tropics. Gardiner hit the nail on the head when he commented: ‘Oliver,

as ever, trusted in God. For once in his life he had forgotten to keep his

powder dry’.

Bordeaux naturally hoped that Cromwell’s aggression in the Caribbean

would propel him into the treaty with France that Mazarin had long been

seeking. So it might have done, if the attack on Hispaniola had not coincided

with an act of violence in some Alpine valleys in the duchy of Savoy that exer-

cised Cromwell very powerfully. Savoy was then a virtual dependency of

France, and its young duke’s mother, the Duchess Christina, who had until

lately been regent and still held the reins, was a sister of Henrietta Maria. The

valleys of the Pellice and the Chisone were inhabited by a peasant community

called the Vaudois or Waldenses, who had been unorthodox in their religion

since the twelfth century and had converted to Calvinism in the sixteenth. In

1561 they had won toleration within strict geographical bounds, but they had

subsequently expanded well beyond them; indeed by 1650 eleven of their

‘temples’ were in forbidden territory. In January 1655 an order from the

duke, instigated by his mother, commanded them under pain of death to quit

all areas outside the 1561 limits, unless they engaged themselves within three

days to convert to catholicism or sell their property to catholics. The valleys

to which they were required to withdraw were snowbound for much of the

year and would have yielded their present numbers no adequate living, but

when they petitioned against the decree Christina had the Marquis of Pianez-

za sent against them with a military force that included some French troops.

Inevitably there was resistance, and the result (in April) was the so-called

Vaudois massacre. Its scale cannot be precisely established, but the victims

certainly ran into hundreds, and the slaughtered included women and chil-

dren. Even more villagers were terrorized into renouncing their religion. A

Huguenot captain, who resigned his commission rather than participate in

such atrocities, testiﬁes to the burning of houses and people, the killings in

cold blood, and the extreme cruelty of the Piedmontese soldiery; he alleged

that Pianezza, in his presence, ordered the killing of all prisoners, though it

seems that some were taken.

On hearing of these events in May, Cromwell sent formal letters to the

Duke of Savoy, expressing his outrage, to the King of France, urging his inter-

vention, and to the rulers of Sweden, Denmark, the United Provinces, and

Transylvania, inviting them to join him in securing redress for this dreadful

634 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 858, 891, quoted in Barry Coward,

Oliver Cromwell (1991), pp. 133–5, in an admirable discussion.

Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, III, 371.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 634

wrong. Milton, as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, worked these missives into

diplomatic Latin, and his own sonnet on the massacre, ‘Avenge O Lord thy

slaughtered saints’, shows that his heart was in the job. Mazarin was angry at

this ill-timed setback to the treaty he was seeking, for it was intimated to him

that it would not proceed unless France at least disowned the Duke of Savoy’s

action. In the name of the seventeen-year-old Louis XIV Cromwell was

assured that French troops had been used without his knowledge and for ends

that he disapproved. The Duchess Christina, Louis’s aunt, proved more recal-

citrant, but under French pressure her son assured Cromwell that upon his

intercession he would pardon his rebellious subjects. Cromwell duly inter-

ceded, and by the resultant treaty of Pignerol (or Pinerolo) in August the

Vaudois had their freedom of worship conﬁrmed within their territory, which

was formally extended to include some but not all of the lower ground into

which they had expanded since 1561. Neither they nor Cromwell were fully

satisﬁed, but the treaty went ahead and was signed in October. It spelt out the

terms of a ﬁrm peace and freedom of trade between England and France, and

included a secret article whereby Charles II, his brother James, and seventeen

other leading royalists were excluded from French territory. Since James

Duke of York was then Lieutenant-General in the army of Marshal Turenne,

this was a major concession.

The treaty did not provide for the offensive alliance that Mazarin hoped

for, since England and Spain were not yet formally at war. But the govern-

ment in Madrid was predictably unwilling to stomach the recent attacks on

its colonies; it called Cardenas home, and in mid-September laid an embargo

on all English goods and ships throughout Spanish territories and waters. In

London the council was much divided as to whether to break openly with

Spain, but Cromwell carried the majority in favour of war, which he justiﬁed

in a very long and jingoistic manifesto.

This was published on 26 October,

two days after he signed the treaty with France. It was only a matter of time

before that matured into a full offensive alliance, and Cromwell’s appoint-

ment of Sir William Lockhart as England’s formal ambassador to the French

court was a step towards it. The 35-year-old Lockhart was another former

royalist to receive Cromwell’s trust in a position of high responsibility; he had

proved his worth in the council of his native Scotland. He did not leave for

Paris until April 1656, probably because Mazarin was due to receive an envoy

from Madrid, sent to explore possible terms of peace. But peace with Spain

was not yet on Mazarin’s agenda.

Sweden was another power that courted England’s alliance, with a view to

both military and naval aid. The young King Charles X was much more bel-

licose than Queen Christina and Oxenstjerna had been. He had overcome an

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 635

Printed in Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, III, 878–94.

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 635

initial inclination to give aid to the English king when he came to appreciate

how useful a pact with Cromwell could be in pursuing his overriding ambi-

tion, which was to make the Baltic a Swedish lake by extending his hold over

its southern and Norwegian shores. When he sent Peter Coyet to England as

his envoy in March 1655, Cromwell gave him the warmest of welcomes.

Oliver had hero-worshipped Charles X’s uncle Gustavus Adolphus, and

would have liked few things better than to make Sweden the cornerstone of

his dreamed-of general protestant league, since the Dutch had proved so

regrettably disposed to put commerce before religion. But Cromwell wanted

the United Provinces included in any treaty that he negotiated, and Dutch and

Swedish objectives were deeply opposed. The Dutch could not tolerate any

stranglehold over the Baltic that threatened their vital source of timber and

naval stores, as well as one of their major trading areas, and Britain’s com-

mercial interests required the maintenance of the hard-won Anglo-Dutch

peace. The situation was further complicated when Charles X asserted a spe-

cious claim to the throne of Poland and declared war on that country in June

1655. All through the second half of the year he pursued an astonishing career

of conquest; ﬁrst Warsaw, then Cracow, next Thorn and Elbing fell to him,

until by December Danzig was the one major Polish city still holding out

against him. For Cromwell to have committed English warships to ﬁghting

Dutch ones in the Baltic, and English land forces to campaigns in Poland and

northern Germany, which is what Charles X proposed, would have been

madness. Nevertheless Charles’s overtures, made through his ambassador

Count Bonde, gave rise to keen and frequent debate in the council of state,

where Whitelocke’s pro-Swedish sympathies were balanced by the pro-Dutch

stance of Lawrence, Pickering, and Strickland. So while Cromwell kept on

cordial terms with Bonde, he parried his requests to raise troops in England,

and kept up talks with the Dutchman Nieupoort. The negotiations continued,

but no positive alliance resulted from them. Eventually, in July 1656, a satis-

factory commercial treaty was concluded with Sweden, conﬁrming English

merchantmen’s rights to trade in the Baltic on equal terms with those of other

nations, and securing that the tolls levied in the Polish and Prussian ports now

under Swedish control should remain no higher than they had been in 1650.

This time the Swedish king did gain permission to raise 2,000 men in Eng-

land, besides 1,000 in Scotland, who had been agreed upon earlier.

By now England was carrying more weight in European politics than she

had done for half a century. Cromwell was learning his way through its tor-

tuous paths. He had still been trailing clouds of Elizabethan glory when he

launched the Western Design, but its ill success taught him greater realism—

greater respect, too, for the interests of English merchants. It was natural that

an East Anglian puritan whose adult life had coincided with the Thirty Years

War should be intensely concerned for the protestant cause in Europe and the

636 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658

ch20-22.y8 27/9/02 12:02 PM Page 636

world at large, but by 1656 he had been forced to realize that his dream of a

general league of protestant powers was likely to remain a dream. He was lis-

tening more to those of his councillors whose knowledge of European affairs

was fuller than his own, and his conduct of foreign policy became more prag-

matic over the years. This appraisal would have raised eyebrows two or three

generations ago, when historians were still repeating the charge, ﬁrst levelled

quite soon after his death, that he acted against England’s long-term interests

by aligning her with the rising power of France, who was to be her national

enemy through most of the long eighteenth century and beyond. But the

Fronde was scarcely over when he ﬁrst took up the reins, and no one could

foresee during Mazarin’s troubled years how far and how fast French power

and aggression would advance under the mature Louis XIV, or how Spain’s

decline would accelerate during the miserable reign of Philip IV’s successor.

Cromwell had to care for his own security, and his slowly and cautiously

negotiated alliance with France yielded substantial dividends. If he had cast

his lot with Spain, France might seriously have supported the cause of Charles II,

Louis XIV’s ﬁrst cousin. Admittedly his war with Spain enabled Charles to

sign a treaty with Philip IV, but that king was too heavily stretched to give him

any help, and Cromwell knew it. Charles in Bruges, where he took up resi-

dence, was less of a menace than he would have been on French or Dutch soil,

from which Cromwell’s diplomacy had excluded him. If Oliver had lived just

a little longer, Britain would doubtless have been included in the Treaty of the

Pyrenees.

Cavaliers in Arms, Swordsmen in the Saddle 637

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