Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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Roman Catholics were formally denied the right to practise their religion.
They were commanded to surrender all arms and ammunition in their pos-
session, and to pledge themselves not to correspond with the king or his
agents. But the protestant clergy complained that so long as papists gave
bonds for their good behaviour the government was not concerned to inter-
pose further in suppressing their exercise of their religion, which suggests that
a de facto tolerance of discreet catholic worship prevailed where it posed no
political threat. From March 1656, however, catholic priests were declared
subject to the death penalty if found on Scottish soil, though this may have
been a reaction to Charles II’s imminent treaty with Spain rather than the
inauguration of a more rigorous policy.
The year of Broghill’s presidency in Scotland witnessed something of a
turning-point in the affairs of his native Ireland, though the problems of gov-
erning the two countries, and England’s approach to them, were very differ-
ent. The vast majority of Scots were fellow-protestants, and most of them had
been the English parliament’s allies in the first Civil War. Despite all that had
happened between 1648 and 1654, the Protectorate’s policy was to win back
the friendship of the Scottish people and to involve them as far as was safe in
the administration of their country. By contrast, not only were the over-
whelming majority of the native Irish Roman Catholics, and tarred in English
eyes (however unjustly) with the brush of the 1641 massacres, but a substan-
tial proportion of protestants, whether Old English or more recent settlers,
had been royalists. In their sympathies many still were. The situation was
complicated by the large number of Presbyterian Scots settled in Ulster, who
associated the Protectorate and its agents with Independency, sectarianism,
and the toleration of heresy.
When Cromwell became Protector Irish government was still officially in
the hands of four commissioners appointed by the Rump, though the repub-
lican Rumper John Weaver had already resigned, and Ludlow was so openly
opposed to the new regime that he tried to prevent it from being proclaimed
in Dublin. A heavy responsibility lay upon Fleetwood, who had been made
commander-in-chief in 1652. That was just after he had married Ireton’s
widow, and so became Cromwell’s son-in-law. Cromwell had a great affec-
tion for him, and for some time to come he let it get the better of his general-
ly shrewd judgement of character. Fleetwood was a brave soldier and a
devout and upright man, but he had neither the flair nor the intelligence for a
major political role, and he was apt to be putty in the hands of men who spoke
the canting language of the saints. He regarded the bulk of the Irish people as
past saving, and he saw it as his function simply to keep a conquered country
quiet, rather than to cultivate the co-operation of those inhabitants who
might be prepared to give it. Consequently he had no compunction about
exercising military rule, and few qualms about his army’s unpopularity, even
668 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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among the best disposed of Irishmen. His personal loyalty to Cromwell was
beyond question, strained though it became when he thought that his father-
in-law was about to become king, but that of some of his officers was more
doubtful. There had been more disquiet among them over Cromwell’s eleva-
tion as Protector than in the army in England, probably because Ireland had
come to be seen as a suitable posting for officers whose republican or sectar-
ian leanings made them look likely to rock the boat in the home forces. A sig-
nificant proportion of them were Baptists, and radical Baptists made an
extraordinary number of conversions in the army of Ireland during the
1650s. One can understand why. Among fairly simple men who felt isolated
in an alien environment, amidst what they saw as a hostile, barbarous, and
antichristian (i.e. papist) population, the thunderous certainties of a funda-
mentalist faith gave them comfort and knit them closer together. The gospel
preached by Baptist firebrands in Cromwellian Ireland was very different
from the gentle religion of the heart that we know in modern Britain, or from
that of such moderate contemporary Baptist leaders as Jessey and Kiffin.
Fleetwood remained an Independent, but he made no attempt to stem the mili-
tant Baptist tide; indeed conversion was said to open the path to promotion.
William Allen, the former agitator and now Adjutant-General in Ireland, was
one such convert; he and his fellow-Baptists Quartermaster-General Vernon
and Colonel Axtell led the faction whose fidelity to the Protectorate was most
in doubt. It was reported in 1655 that the military governors of five Irish
towns were Baptists, and that some had used their resources to import Bap-
tist preachers from England. This heavy Baptist bias, with its disturbing polit-
ical overtones, made the army doubly unpopular with the older protestant
interest that had adhered to the Church of Ireland, and with the Presbyterian
Scots settled in Ulster.
Cromwell never doubted Fleetwood’s personal loyalty, but he became suf-
ficiently concerned about the temper of his subordinates to send his son
Henry over in March 1654 to investigate. Henry was only just twenty-six, but
he knew something of Ireland, having served there as a colonel of horse in
1649–51 and fought alongside Broghill. Reporting on his return home, he
was reassuring about the reliability of the officers in general, but he recom-
mended that Ludlow should be stripped of his commissions—something that
Fleetwood should have done immediately when Ludlow refused orders to
proclaim the Protectorate. Henry found Fleetwood himself over-partial
towards his Baptist and other sectarian officers, and hinted that it might be
better to call him home. Fleetwood was perturbed by Henry’s mission, for it
set rumours flying that the younger man was being lined up to supplant him.
He communicated his fears to Cromwell, who replied in June that the idea of
putting Henry in his place had never entered his heart. Indeed Fleetwood was
raised in August to the office of Lord Deputy, and furnished with a council of
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six to assist him in the government of Ireland. Not long afterwards the Coun-
cil of State recommended that Henry be made acting commander of the forces
of Ireland with the rank of major-general. He was formally commissioned
and added to the Irish council in December, but he did not return to Ireland
until July 1655.
These were not good decisions. It made little sense to advance Fleetwood,
whose only talents were military, to a virtually vice-regal post at the head of
the civil government, and to saddle Henry, who had real political ability but
little standing in the army, with the responsibilities of commander-in-chief,
over the heads of colonels all older than himself. The result was to leave Irish
government from the council downward riven by faction for as long as the
Protectorate lasted. Furthermore there were just not enough councillors to
carry out the work in hand, partly because three of them doubled as judges
and could only attend to their heavy political duties when the courts were not
sitting. It was a perennial problem to find really able Englishmen who were
willing to serve in Ireland, whether as judges or administrators, and it was
compounded because those who did so were most inadequately supported
from Westminster—and not only in the matter of finance. Time and again,
when they appealed for measures or orders to underpin their efforts, they
were ignored or kept waiting for months. No parliament ever got around to
passing an act of union, though a bill for that purpose did receive two read-
ings in December 1656. The constitutional basis of much of Irish government
was therefore always more uncertain than that of Scotland. This was partly
because Cromwell and his council had too much on their hands, what with
suppressing conspiracies, managing the major-generals (who had also felt
under-supported), pursuing the long negotiation over the Petition and
Advice, and conducting the war with Spain. But another reason was that par-
liament, when it was sitting, and to a lesser extent the council, evinced less
concern and sympathy towards Ireland’s problems than Scotland’s. To most
MPs Ireland was something of a bore, if it did not inspire positive hostility.
Cromwell himself might have given his son stronger support. He was com-
mendably anxious not to incur the charge of advancing his own kin, and
Henry, besides being very young to carry high responsibilities, was not with-
out his faults: he was not strong on tact, his temper had a short fuse, and his
correspondence with Thurloe suggests a streak of paranoia in his attitude
towards his opponents. But he had a broader vision of Ireland’s needs and
England’s interests in the country than anyone else in high authority there,
and it would have been better if the home government had heeded him more
and the army party less. His relations with the latter were made more difficult
because his arrival coincided with the first considerable disbandments, to
which Fleetwood was openly opposed. It also coincided with the revival of
the four courts of justice in Dublin which parallelled those at Westminster,
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Upper Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, and Chancery; but they were
wretchedly understaffed, and they remained so. They also shared the defi-
ciencies of their Westminster counterparts, especially in their profusion of
archaic technicalities and their separation of common law from equity. The
army party saw their revival as a betrayal of the cause of radical law reform,
but for most property-owners in Ireland it was a step in the right direction;
unreformed courts were a great deal better than none. At the same time there
was a marked revival of the JPs’ authority in the localities, and with it the ter-
mination of the summary judicial powers that army officers had been exer-
cising since the reconquest. There were of course many officers in the
commission of the peace, but the benches also included a proportion of older
protestant settlers, and Henry used his authority to add to their number wher-
ever possible. All in all his arrival in 1655 marked a turning-point in Irish
administration, tilting the balance from a military to a civilian predominance,
though the process was gradual and never fully achieved.
Henry’s position, both as councillor and acting military commander, was
almost impossible while Fleetwood remained in Ireland as Lord Deputy, and
his father knew it. Oliver did not actually recall his son-in-law, but he wrote
suggesting that he might return home ‘if you have a mind’,
2
and Fleetwood
did so in September 1655. Many of his supporters remained in places of
power and influence, however, and for a considerable period the council was
split three a side between his faction and Henry’s. Deplorably, Cromwell did
not bestow the title and authority of Lord Deputy on his son until Fleet-
wood’s commission expired in 1657, and even then he took nearly seven
weeks to make up his mind to do so. This sent the wrong signals to the older-
established protestant interest in Ireland, with whom Henry was trying so
hard to establish a rapport. It also hampered his efforts to make ends meet
financially.
One thing that the Irish situation had in common with the Scottish was that
neither country could pay for the cost of governing and policing it, and that
in both the occupying army was far and away the heaviest item of expenditure.
It was estimated that in December 1654 England had 23,115 officers and men
in Ireland, at a cost of nearly £500,000 a year. By July 1657 they had been
reduced to slightly over 16,000, and by the end of the Protectorate to less than
12,000, but in 1658 their annual upkeep was still reckoned at £336,000, and
their pay was nine months in arrears. Henry made himself further unpopular
with the army by proposing that to reduce it further part of its duties should
be taken over by an unpaid, locally based militia, but the scheme was not
adopted. With the civil administration costing a modest £46,000 a year in
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 671
2
Quoted in T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ire-
land, 1649–1660 (Oxford, 2nd ed. 2000), p. 20. In these pages I have drawn heavily on Dr
Barnard’s authoritative study.
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1658, there was no chance of balancing overall expenditure with revenue,
and in that year the deficit was reckoned to be running at £96,000. The result-
ant financial burden was keenly resented in England. The sources of revenue
were similar to those in Scotland: land owned by the state or forfeited to it by
the rebels, customs and excise, and the monthly assessment. The loss of
records makes it impossible to calculate the yield from land, though it was felt
to be very disappointing. But customs and excise, which had brought in
around £35,000 a year in the early 1650s, had improved to nearly £50,000 by
1657, and were put out to farm in 1658 for £70,000. That target proved too
high, but the rising yield suggests a considerable recovery in trade and living
standards, as well as more efficient collection. Soon after Henry’s arrival in
Ireland, many heavy restraints on her trade were lifted. The bans on the
export of cattle, beef, pork, hides, tallow, and butter were removed. Cattle
and sheep farming flourished, clothmaking throve in a modest way (thanks
partly to the needs of the English soldiery), linen manufacture was encour-
aged, and grain exports to England rose strikingly. Irish merchants, however,
still had to pay customs duty on exports to England, including wool, and they
were not allowed free trade with the American colonies, as the Scots were.
Ireland’s commercial interests remained firmly subordinated to those of Eng-
land, as they had been under Strafford, and would be again, even more rigor-
ously, after the Restoration. In this respect Cromwellian government was
running to form. One obstacle to the revival of trade, especially foreign trade,
that government should have addressed but did not was the wretchedly
debased state of the Irish coinage.
As in Scotland, the monthly assessment was the most unpopular tax
because it was appropriated to the upkeep of the occupying army, but it was
hated even more in Ireland because it was fixed so high. The target was
£12,000 in 1656, £13,000 in 1657, and would have been raised to £14,000
for 1658 if the Irish MPs at Westminster, with Henry’s full support, had not
got it reduced to £9,000. Some English members were so outraged that they
moved that the representatives of Ireland should be sent to the Tower. But the
latter, and Henry, were fully justified, because the assessment had been
unfairly apportioned as well as set too high, and punitive taxation was deter-
ring new settlers as well as retarding economic recovery.
The greatest economic injustice, and the heaviest blow to recovery, had
been perpetrated by the Long Parliament long before Cromwell became Pro-
tector, when it decided not only to exclude Roman Catholics from municipal
government and trading guilds but to expel them from all walled towns.
Many of the less wealthy just moved out into the suburbs, and some simply
evaded the ban, but most of the substantial catholic merchants left the coun-
try and settled abroad; St Malo was their favourite refuge. They took with
them their ships, their stocks, and their expertise, causing a serious shortage
672 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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of Irish-based shipping to carry Irish trade, and much urban decay, especially
in Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Waterford. The Commonwealth’s attempts
to induce well-to-do protestants to settle in these and other towns met with a
mediocre response, though Martin Noell, a rich revenue farmer who shared
the office of Postmaster-General with Thurloe, did have some success in
establishing an English merchant community in Wexford.
3
Henry Cromwell
played a strong part in aiding the revival of borough corporations, to which
Fleetwood and the army party had been thoroughly hostile. Only Dublin,
Belfast, and two other towns had with difficulty hung on to their charters dur-
ing the period of reconquest, but from 1656 onward charters were granted or
restored to Cork, Waterford, Limerick, Kilkenny, Derry, Wexford, New
Ross, Cashel, and other places. Since catholics were debarred, and members
of the corporations were probably named in the charters (which do not sur-
vive), this was only a limited step towards urban self-government; the mayors
of Galway and Limerick, for instance, were army officers or ex-officers. But it
was another step in the right direction, and another success for Henry and his
friends over the military faction.
The two parties were no less divided over religious policy. The army inter-
est looked little further than providing for the religious needs of the occupy-
ing forces and such new settlers as came in under their auspices. Ideally, they
would have liked to convert all protestants in Ireland to their own Indepen-
dent or Baptist faiths, though they were welcoming towards Quakers, who
made many converts in the army, especially in Munster. They were unsym-
pathetic towards the Church of Ireland, with its episcopal structure and
Anglican liturgy, and the antagonism between them and the Presbyterians of
Ulster was mutual. Henry by contrast, as part of his policy of building bridges
between the Protectorate and the older-established protestant interest, culti-
vated the clergy of the Church of Ireland. Thereby he laid himself open to
criticism, because of that church’s links with the proscribed Church of
England and royalism, but given his assumption that the regime that he
served had a long-term future in Ireland it was a risk worth taking. He also
sought good relations with the Ulster Presbyterians, since they were
obviously there to stay, though not to the extent of encouraging their
ambition to impose their own brand of theocracy on the rest of the country.
The difficulty of revivifying some kind of ecumenical national protestant
church, which was Henry’s aim, lay not only in the existing Church of Ire-
land’s commitment to episcopacy and its dubious political affiliations, but in
its generally run-down state. This was evident even before the 1640s, but still
more so after 1649. Very many of its livings were so poor that incumbents
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 673
3
Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, pp. 56–7; life of Noell by G. E. Aylmer in The Dictionary of
National Biography: Missing Persons (Oxford, 1993), pp. 497–8.
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could only keep alive by taking more than one, and many of its churches were
already dilapidated before the fighting of the 1640s wrought further damage.
The Rump abolished episcopacy and banned the Book of Common Prayer,
but set up no other church polity or form of worship to replace them in Ire-
land; such matters were deferred to the act of union that was never passed.
After the reconquest, however, the English government began appointing
salaried preachers in Ireland, at first primarily for the benefit of its own garr-
isons and administrators, but increasingly from 1655 for that of the protest-
ant community in Ireland as a whole. Between 1651 and 1659, 376 state-
salaried ministers were appointed, most of them after Henry’s arrival in the
country. At least 67 of them had held benefices in the Church of Ireland; an
equal number were Presbyterians, and nearly all the rest were Independents.
4
They included a few Baptists, but the stricter members of that sect refused the
state’s stipend on principle, and some who took it lost their appointments
under Henry—not because of their religious beliefs but because of their polit-
ical partisanship. Henry’s checks on the Baptist ascendancy in parts of
the army, and his promotion of a broad religious front that would embrace
the old as well as the new settler interest, led four of the five leading Baptists
in the army, Adjutant-General Allen, Quartermaster-General Vernon, and
Colonels Axtell and Barrow, to resign their commissions in November 1656.
The fifth, Colonel Hewson, a particular opponent of Henry, had recently left
Ireland to take command of a new regiment in England and a seat in the Other
House. His Irish regiment remained nominally his, but he did not return.
5
Henry at first regarded the Quakers as a seriously subversive influence in the
army, where they made many converts, for Quakers were not yet committed
as a body to pacifism. The Irish council ordered the arrest of all Quakers late
in 1655, and some officers were cashiered. But Henry soon came to realize
that most of the Friends in Ireland posed no threat, and the number of them
held in prison fell rapidly from seventy-seven in 1655 to one in 1659.
On the positive side of religious policy, Henry worked to restore tithes as
part at least of the clergy’s maintenance, subject to the proviso that no incum-
bent should receive less than £80 a year. In April 1656 he instituted a com-
mittee of eleven members, including four ministers, who were to consult with
two councillors and recommend the best method of adjudging fit candidates
for livings and removing unworthy ministers. They seem to have taken over
the job themselves, though Munster kept its own commission for the appro-
bation of ministers, and in Ulster the presbyteries were allowed to retain their
role therein. Lay patrons recovered their rights of presentation from 1655
674 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
4
Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, p. 166; Patrick J. Corish in New History of Ireland, III,
377–9.
5
DNB, sub Hewson, Henry; Firth and Rait, Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army, II,
409–11.
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 674
onward, subject to their nominees satisfying the committee for approbation.
In 1657 a general inquisition was instituted into the value of all benefices, the
names of incumbents, patrons, and impropriators, and the physical contribu-
tion of churches. The commissioners’ main task was to recommend changes
in parish boundaries that would bring livings up to the £80 minimum. The
result of these various measures was to improve the income of the parish
clergy substantially, reduce the charge of the state-salaried preachers upon the
exchequer, and increase the overall number of active pastors. Even so, Henry
admitted in 1658 that little more than a third of the country was adequately
supplied with ministers; but there were large tracts of it in which protestant
worshippers were very thin on the ground and his reckoning probably did not
include the episcopalian chaplains who were kept at their own expense by
some protestant magnates like the Earl of Cork, as well as by several town
corporations and Dublin guilds. It can hardly be doubted that such chaplains
practised the Anglican rites behind closed doors, and that Henry, like his
father except in times of crisis, looked the other way. As in the economic and
judicial spheres, he made large progress in his four years towards a state of
affairs in which the whole protestant community could live together in har-
mony, and by the end of his time his standing was high throughout it, except
among the dwindling and now harmless band of Baptist and other fanatics.
Where his regime failed, and was bound to fail, was in its avowed objective
of evangelizing the catholic Irish. There were one or two tentatives in that
direction, but the scarcity of able and willing Irish-speaking preachers, the
inadequate financial resources, and the low priority of the enterprise com-
bined to doom them. There were some conversions, but they were mostly of
the kind that had produced church papists in Elizabethan England: outward
only, and motivated by a desire to protect property and escape penalties. But
at least the Protectorate was not a time of active religious persecution. It
would have been if Cromwell’s second parliament had had its way, for it
passed an Act against Popish Recusants which it expressly extended to Ire-
land. It required all suspected catholics in both countries to take an oath
whereby they not only abjured the pope’s spiritual jurisdiction and power to
depose, but denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and affirmed ‘that the
church of Rome is not a true church’.
6
Irishmen who took it were further
required to bring up their children to speak only English and conform to the
English catechism. Henry deplored this oath of abjuration, which naturally
caused great consternation among Irish catholics, but having failed to prevent
its extension to Ireland he seems to have made no attempt to impose it. Nor
was there any drive to compel catholics to attend the services and receive the
sacraments of a church that their consciences rejected, as there had been in
The Protectorate in Scotland, Ireland, and Europe 675
6
Firth, Last Years, II, 147–8.
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Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Priests were officially proscribed; from
January 1653 the policy was to banish them on pain of the penalties for high
treason if they returned, and perhaps a thousand or more went into exile. But
a considerable number returned and led an underground existence among the
catholic population, despite a price of £5 on their heads. Those that were
caught were commonly transported to the West Indies, but they were not in
Henry’s time subjected to a traitor’s death. The number of Irish martyrs sub-
sequently recommended to Rome for beatification comes to 119, including
22 laymen, for the years 1649–53, and of these 84 suffered in 1651–2; but the
toll fell to 2 in 1654 and 3 in 1655, the year of Henry’s arrival. There were
none thereafter. Tragic though it was that the great majority of the Irish
people could not practise their religion openly, Henry was moving in the
direction of de facto toleration of discreet catholic worship, and the penal
laws throughout the Cromwellian Protectorate were less harsh than they
were to be under William III and after.
The best testimony to the fairness and good intentions of Henry’s treat-
ment of the Irish, given the circumstances, came from the royalists Ormond
and Clarendon after the Restoration. The great transplantation of catholic
landlords to Connaught was none of his doing; it was largely implemented
before he came over. He was a benign Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin,
which had almost ceased to take in students before he presided over its
revival. He resurrected a dormant proposal of the Rump to found a second
college in Dublin, which was well on the way to establishment when the
troubles of 1659–60 overtook it. Archbishop Ussher, whom he admired, died
in 1656, leaving a magnificent library, which was threatened with sale and
dispersal. Henry ensured that it was bought for the new college at the con-
siderable cost of £22,000, a significant part of which was raised from contri-
butions by officers of the army in Ireland.
As if the Petition and Advice and the problems of Scotland and Ireland were
not enough to keep Cromwell and the council busy, they had on their hands
a war with Spain, a threat of renewed war with the Dutch, a northern war in
and around the Baltic which came close to involving Britain, and in 1658 a
joint campaign with France by land and sea, resulting in the acquisition of
Dunkirk.
The Spanish war was relatively uneventful in 1656. Spain lacked the
resources for any serious attempt to recapture Jamaica, so although a
squadron was kept in the Caribbean under young Captain Christopher
Myngs (he was only thirty when first appointed), such action as there was
took place in Spanish rather than colonial waters. Late in March 1656 a fleet
of thirty-seven ships set sail for the Spanish coast under the joint command of
Blake and Edward Montagu, who had recently been appointed General at
676 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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Sea. The command was shared at Blake’s request, no doubt because of his
failing health; it had never been robust since his wound. Montagu was
Cromwell’s choice, and a bold one, for he too was only thirty and he had never
been to sea. But he had fought at Marston Moor as a colonel of foot before he
was nineteen, and he had impressed Oliver in a number of employments since
then. The main aim of the expedition was to capture the Plate fleet and gener-
ally prey on Spanish shipping, though the two commanders were authorized
to attack Spanish territory if they saw a good opportunity. They reconnoitred
Cadiz and Gibraltar, but wisely decided that to take and hold either was
beyond their resources. The Spanish home fleet would not come out and chal-
lenge them, and they found few prizes because Spain had few merchant ships
of her own at sea. But Portugal’s Brazil fleet was then nearing home, and by
threatening it they forced King John to ratify the treaty on which he had been
stalling since 1654. They next made a foray into the Mediterranean, leaving
Vice-Admiral Stayner with a squadron before Cadiz. Their aim was to extir-
pate the corsairs of Tripoli, but it was frustrated by a devastating storm which
scattered Blake’s contingent. Nevertheless five frigates made a spectacular
raid on Malaga, burning nine ships and raking the town with fire. The success
of the year, however, fell to Stayner, when he had been driven from Cadiz by
a gale, and on 8 September caught the Plate fleet running for home without a
convoy. The seven great galleons mistook his six small ships for fishing ves-
sels, and were taken wholly by surprise when they opened fire. Stayner cap-
tured two and sank two more without loss to himself. The amount of captured
treasure that reached England proved much less than expected, as mentioned
earlier, but the loss to Spain was great, and the rather scrappy operations of
1656 certainly succeeded in crippling Spanish commerce.
Montagu sailed home with part of the fleet late in October, but Blake kept
up the blockade of Cadiz all through the winter, which was an unprecedent-
ed feat. There was considerable alarm when the Dutch admiral de Ruyter
appeared off Cadiz late in January 1657, for it was rumoured that he had
been sent to join the Spaniards in fighting Blake. But though de Ruyter had
secret orders to resist any attempt by English warships to search the mer-
chantmen that he was convoying, his primary targets were the French privat-
eers and Barbary corsairs that had been plundering Dutch merchant shipping.
Neither the Dutch nor the English government wanted war, and Cromwell
and de Witt between them made sure that the danger passed.
By February Blake’s ships were mostly in poor shape through having been
so long at sea, and his crews were on short rations in both food and drink.
Blake himself was in wretched health. When news came that another Plate
fleet had been sighted heading for the Canaries he felt bound to resist his cap-
tains’ eagerness to take a squadron and cut it off, for he judged his fleet to be
in too weak a state to be divided. But late in March the victualling ships from
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