were permanently in favour of England, which lay athwart the tracks of Dutch commerce. But to this there was an exception in the Baltic trade. There the Dutch secured the advantage and in January 1653 signed a treaty with Denmark whereby the latter Power undertook to exclude the English from the Sound and from the supplies of naval stores to which it formed the only access. This difficulty caused the Commonwealth not only to seek friendship with Sweden but also to stimulate the production of naval stores in New England and other suitable colonies, a policy which led to a system of bounties and other special aids enduring into the nineteenth century. These measures never completely solved the problem, and until wood gave place to iron, and sail to steam, the Baltic remained a prime anxiety with English foreign ministers.

During the war Cromwell expelled the Long Parliament and with the aid of the army leaders established himself as Protector. At once the alternative policy, from which Puritan thought had momentarily swung away, came again to the fore; and the Protector determined to end the Dutch War as soon as possible on the ground that it constituted a betrayal of religion. Haggling over terms delayed the end for a year (until April 1654), for the English knew quite well that their enemies needed peace, and were determined to make them pay for it. At length a treaty was signed providing for a defensive alliance, the continuance of the salute in British waters, the exclusion of the Stuarts from the United Provinces, the maintenance of the Navigation Acts, and moderate compensation for past injuries suffered by the London East India Company. The peace reflected the fact that the Dutch had been beaten but not routed, and it was disappointing to Cromwell in that it contained no promise of the aggressive Protestant coalition which appealed so strongly to his imagination. Its most valuable concomitant was an agreement with Denmark (September 1654) abolishing the privileged Dutch position in the Baltic and providing that English shipping should pay no higher dues in the Sound than the shipping of any other non-Baltic nation. The Dutch War had embarrassed the finances of the English Government, but had inflicted less economic loss upon the country than might have been expected from the severity of the fighting. It had not wholly decided the question of ultimate maritime supremacy, for Cromwell desired to utilise Dutch sea power rather than to extirpate it. A proposal drawn up with his approval during the negotiations reveals his own ideal of an oceanic policy. It embodies the scheme of the Protestant League against the Catholic Powers, a league to be supported by the joint fleets of England and the Netherlands, monopolising the colonies and oceanic trade of the world. The Dutch were to buy out the English East India Company and to enjoy the whole commerce of the Indian Ocean. The two Powers were to conquer all the shores of America and West Africa, the slaving posts of the latter being divided, and all

ENGLAND AND SPANISH AMERICA

225 America except Brazil falling to England. So might Antichrist be chained with golden fetters of his own forging, in the manner dreamed of by the Elizabethans. The plan was idealistic, but it rested on brute force, and the force would inevitably have been diverted to baser ends; for Cromwell was too old and too much hampered to have remained long enough in control. Perhaps he was himself conscious that it was all a dream, for he did not persist, and the war ended in the prosaic manner already described.1

If an Anglo-Dutch partition of oceanic wealth was impracticable, Cromwell was nevertheless determined to advance the Protestant interest in Europe and to use for that purpose the land and sea power which had fallen into his hands. This gives a unity to his foreign and imperial policies, and causes the latter to assume some elements of a permanent nature. It has been held that Cromwell carved his way to power on domestic issues and then mishandled international questions of whose bearings he was ignorant. In the oceanic sphere this is unjust. His mind was steeped in the Elizabethan tradition, and he had a long practical acquaintance with colonial affairs. In European politics, it may be admitted, his views were out of date, for he still thought in terms of the religious conflict which had really ceased to be the mainspring of men's actions, and failed to realise that the Counter-Reformation had spent its force whilst the nationalist ambitions of France were to dominate the future. In reality the oceanic factor redeemed his policy from futility, for here he was in accord with a permanent English instinct, rooted in the past and reaching forward into the times to come. An enumeration of a succession of British adventures will illustrate the continuity. The Elizabethan raids in the Caribbean; the establishment, in the period 1604-42, of colonies in that area and near its entrance and its exit, of Guiana posts, of half-a-dozen island settlements, of Virginia and Bermuda; the discussion in the same period of plans for an English West India Company; Cromwell's "Western Design"; the Darien Scheme; the South Sea Company and its Asiento concession; the War of Jenkins's Ear-these are all links in a chain, successive aspects of an abiding ambition to divert to British coffers the wealth of Spanish America. Cromwell could not know the future, but he knew the past and based his actions on that knowledge. He had been a close associate of Pym and the Earl of Warwick and other Puritan leaders, who had formed the Providence Company in 1630, and in colonising that island had thrust an English wedge deep into the Spanish monopoly of the western Caribbean. Again, under Warwick he had been a member of the parliamentary commission for Plantations formed in 1643. Warwick had tried hard to hold the English Caribbean islands to their allegiance, had patronised privateers who preyed upon the Spanish colonial trade, and had sent out pioneers to 1 For the Dutch and Danish negotiations see Gardiner, vol. II, chaps. xxx, xxxi.

CHBEI

15

colonise Tobago and Trinidad in 1638-47. Warwick and William Jessop, the secretary of the defunct Providence Company, had borne a leading part in organising the expedition which recovered Barbados in 1651-2, whilst Cromwell had been a member of the Committee of Trade and Plantations sitting at that time. And now, at the beginning of the Protectorate, Warwick, still the friend of the Protector, was resigning the lead into his hands. These were the bases of the "Western Design". The whole policy of the Protectorate was to weaken Spain, the Catholic Power, and to divert her colonial wealth to Protestant uses. On the European side it was but slaying the slain, but on the oceanic, if for Catholic we read Bourbon, and for Protestant, British, the doctrine was that preached by the elder Pitt in 1739.

Cromwell saw the goal when he became Protector, but he had to do more than close the Dutch War in order to clear the way. His relations with Spain were complicated by those with France, for the two Powers were still engaged in the struggle which for the rest of Europe had ended in 1648. At the beginning of the Commonwealth, France had shown violent hostility towards the Puritans, whilst Spain, hating them fully as much, had yet offered them the hand of friendship. The stadholder's ambitions were directed as much against Spain as against England, and France and Portugal were obvious allies ready to cooperate with him. Spain therefore recognised the Commonwealth in 1650 and facilitated Blake's blockade of Lisbon by allowing him to base his fleet on Spanish ports; at the same time her anti-Puritan feeling showed itself in the shielding of the royalist murderers of Ascham, the Commonwealth envoy at Madrid.. The death of the stadholder in the autumn of 1650 relieved Spanish anxieties for a time, yet it left the alliance of England still worth courting, for England could intervene with decisive effect in the Franco-Spanish struggle in Flanders. Many Puritans were on religious grounds more bitter against France than against Spain, for the former was thought to be persecuting her Huguenots whilst the latter had now no Protestant subjects to oppress. As the French depredations upon English commerce continued, it was an open question in the first two years of the Protectorate whether the anti-Catholic onslaught of England should be directed against Spain or France. Cromwell kept them both in uncertainty. Perhaps if Spain would have granted liberty of worship to Englishmen and free navigation in the West-"the two eyes" of Philip IV-the Protector would have forborne to revive the Elizabethan policy to which his own mind leaned. Meanwhile both Spaniards and French had been given cause to ponder the uses of England's sea power, for in September 1652 Blake had destroyed a

1 See Newton, A. P., Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, especially the final chapter. This seems to modify some of the views expressed in F. Strong's "Causes of Cromwell's West Indian Expedition", American Hist. Review, IV, 228–45.

CROMWELL AND MAZARIN

227 French squadron bearing aid to Dunkirk, and so had enabled a Spanish army to capture that fortress.

With the Dutch War concluded, the Protector had to make up his mind. For him, with his military record and his sense of a mission, there could be no standing still. Holding himself accountable for the use of the power which had been placed in his hands, he conceived that he must employ it for the advancement of England and of the Protestant interest, which in his eyes were identical. The only doubt was of the direction in which to strike. War against either France or Spain could be made to yield a Flemish conquest upon which to base an intervention in the affairs of Europe at large. War with France had also the attraction of enabling him to assist the Huguenots. But his secret agents soon convinced him that there was little basis for such an aim. The Fronde was not, as he had been tempted to believe, a war of religion, and there was hardly anything in common between English Puritanism and the opponents of Cardinal Mazarin. On the other hand, the actions of Spain in the West, viewed through English eyes, called out for vengeance. The conquest in time of peace of Tortuga (1635) and of the Puritan colony of Providence (1641) seemed unprovoked aggressions to one who honestly could not comprehend that Spain had regarded their establishment as an aggression. Several minor transactions had a similar bearing; and Philip IV would not hear of liberty of worship for Englishmen in his ports. So, after some months of negotiation with either Power, Cromwell decided in the autumn of 1654, not for regular war with Spain, but for a great reprisal raid in the Caribbean, the seizure of some important colony which, if the thing promised well, might grow into a conquest of Spanish America. The opening stage, he calculated, need not commit him to war in Europe, where he might still for some time postpone his choice of a foe. Mazarin had already swallowed the intervention at Dunkirk which had lost him that stronghold, and when in October 1654 news came that an English force had captured the French forts in Acadia, Cromwell declined to restore them and incurred no declaration of war from the cardinal. It seemed reasonable, therefore, that he should expect Spain to put up with similar treatment; but in that, as the event was to show, he miscalculated.

Thus the "Western Design" went forward, a feint in the major game of European diplomacy, but one planned to yield in itself solid results across the ocean. The plans were faulty, for Cromwell listened to advisers who were too optimistic, and he badly under-estimated the difficulty of the task. He was probably influenced by the statements of Thomas Gage, the author of The English American, a book which had a great vogue at the time.1 In it the writer described, from personal observation, the feebleness and moral corruption of the 1 See Gage, T., The English American or a New Survey of the West Indies, ed. A. P. Newton, Introduction.

Spanish colonial population, the rottenness of their defences, and the discontent of the natives under their sway. Gage was right so far as he went, but he did not tell the whole truth. For experience had already shown that the true defence of the Spanish colonies against English aggression lay not in men and guns, but in climate and pestilence. Of Cromwell's error it may be said that, believing the Spanish Empire to be a sham, "a Colossus stuffed with clouts", he sent out a sham expedition to conquer it.

He had no desire to lose in the West Indies the men who supported his authority at home. He planned therefore that the troops sent from England should number only 3000, and that their force should be doubled by recruits picked up in Barbados and the Leeward Islands. Actually the English part of the force did not exceed 2500 men, and those of poor quality. Few were trained soldiers, and the majority were civilians hastily impressed. This so-called army was hurriedly embarked at the close of 1654 without having once mustered in its entirety. As Gardiner has remarked, “It had not been by gathering a mob and styling it an army that Oliver had beaten down his enemies at Marston Moor and Naseby". The explanation lies in his under-estimate of the difficulty of the service and in the prevailing theory of emigration, which held that it was unwise to settle good men out of England. For in Cromwell's mind the conquest was to be merely incidental to the exploitation of the territories acquired, and the troops were to settle down in them as the first colonists. The warships were much better manned, and it was their seamen who did most of the real work that was accomplished. By the end of March 1655 the expedition had visited Barbados and the Leeward Islands and had enlisted about 3000 colonists, men who were even more dissolute and ineffective than those who had come from England.

The Protector's orders to Robert Venables and William Penn, respectively the land and sea commanders, were vague. They might begin by taking Porto Rico or Hispaniola and thence extend the movement to the other Spanish islands, or they might disembark on the Spanish Main and capture Cartagena and the adjoining coasts, or they might occupy an island and then try for Cartagena. He left it all to them and their fellow-commissioners to decide on the spot: "The design in general is to gain an interest in that part of the West Indies in the possession of the Spaniard, for the effecting whereof we shall not tie you up to a method by any particular instructions".1 The orders were such as Cromwell himself would have preferred to receive, but they threw too much upon the shoulders of Venables, whose character was rather that of a subordinate than of a leader.

It is unnecessary to enter into the details of what followed. The story of the landing in Hispaniola and the disgrace at San Domingo is well known. By the beginning of May all was over in that quarter.

1 Brit. Mus., Add. MSS, 11410, f. 41, printed in full in Watts, A. P., Histoire des colonies anglaises aux Antilles, 1649-1660, pp. 466-9.