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 things were only thin disguises for the rule of the Sword and the Army. He was much pressed to take the title of King and to restore the old Constitution, but from this he shrank. Except to Papists and to the beaten Church of England he was not intolerant; he believed in letting men's consciences be free, and he strove to make people righteous and God-fearing. All that, however, was a dismal failure; it only disgusted all moderate people with the whole Puritan creed.

Yet, in Olivers five years of rule, he accomplished what the Stuarts had not done in forty-five. Not only had he subdued Scotland and Ireland, but he even made them send thirty members apiece to a sort of united Parliament in England. And far more than this; he made the name of England once more dreaded and honoured abroad as it had not been since the death of Elizabeth. He wrung from the Dutch a heavy payment for some wrongs they had done our traders in the Far East; he won for us a share in that Far-Eastern trade. He fell upon the Spaniards in the true style of Drake and Raleigh; he took their great plate fleet; he tore Jamaica from them; he sent his ‘Ironsides’ to France to aid France against Spain; they were the first great English army seen abroad since the fifteenth century, and where they fought they swept all before them. He took up the great cause of Protestantism all over Europe. When he died in 1658 England was again the first naval power and almost the first military power in the world.

But when his son Richard (‘Lazy Dick’ or ‘Tumbledown Dick’, as people called him) succeeded him as Protector, the whole unnatural arrangement crumbled away at once because it did not suit the spirit of the