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 290 APPENDIX I the mid-ocean it resolved to fortify St. Helena, as a half-way house for the Indian fleets. In the Far East it projected a place of strength at Pularoon, and ap- plied to Richard Cromwell for letters to the emperors of China and Japan. From the charter of 1657 the Company drew a new life, whose pulsations reached its farthest factories in Asia. Against European aggres- sors it boldly claimed the aid of the Commonwealth. More than once it invoked Cromwell's intervention against Holland; and the Company's last transaction with the Protector was still another petition against the Dutch. Three weeks later the strong ruler was dead, and about to be laid with royal pomp in West- minster Abbey. After the Restoration men dug up his body from its sepulchre among kings, hung it on a gallows, and shovelled the headless trunk into a felon's grave. But though they might tear out his laws from the statute- book and hide away his charters, there was one part of his life's work which they could not destroy. He found the English in the East struggling, humiliated, in despair. He left them with their future assured. He was the first ruler of England who realized that the India trade was no private preserve of the sov- ereign and his nominees, but a concern of the nation, to be maintained by national diplomacy and defended by the national arms. His union of conflicting Anglo- Indian interests in 1657 anticipated the great Parlia- mentary fusion of those interests fifty years later. Under his charter the East India Company transformed