second speech. There were wars with Portugal and Holland, and open hostility with France and Denmark. The nation was fast sinking beneath the burden of taxation and the cessation of trade. In spite of the pressure of those who urged that perseverance in the war would bring Holland to complete submission, Cromwell signed on 5 April 1654 a peace with the States-General which provided security for English commerce and satisfaction for the losses of English merchants in the east. The Dutch conceded the supremacy of the English flag, and submitted to the Navigation Act. By a private engagement with the province of Holland, the permanent exclusion of the princes of the house of Orange from authority was secured, and the English republic was thus freed from the danger of royalist attacks from that quarter. A few days later a commercial treaty with Sweden was concluded, which included also a prohibition of protection and favour to the enemies of either that might be developed into a political alliance. By the ambassador Cromwell sent to Christina a portrait of himself with dedicatory verses by Marvell, and Whitelocke found the queen full of admiration for the Protector, rating him greater than Condé, and comparing him to her own ancestor, Gustavus Vasa (Whitelocke, Embassy to Sweden, i. 247, 285; Marvell, Poems, ed. Grosart, p. 416). A treaty with Denmark, opening the Sound to the English on the same terms as the Dutch, end indemnifying their merchants for their losses during the late war, was the natural corollary of the treaty with the United Provinces (14 Sept. 1654).
Lastly, the long disputes with Portugal were closed by a treaty which not only extended the large trading privileges enjoyed by the English in Portugal, but secured special advantages to English shipping, and the free exercise of their religion to English merchants (10 March 1653; Schäfer, Geschichte von Portugal, iv. 571 All four of these treaties were distinguished by the care exhibited in them for the interests of English commerce. But Cromwell valued the three with the protestant states still more, as stepping-stones to the great league of all protestant states which he hoped to see formed. In his negotiations with the Dutch envoys he had brought the scheme prominently forward. At the meeting of his first parliament he had dwelt on the security these treaties afforded to the protestant interest in Europe. ‘I wish,’ he added, ‘that it may be written on our hearts to be zealous for that interest’ (Geddes, John de Witt, pp. 338, 362; Carlyle, Speech ii.)
The fulfilment of these hopes, the success of Cromwell’s foreign policy, and the permanence of his domestic reforms, all alike depended on the acceptance of his government by the nation. It was necessary that a parliament should confirm the authority which the army had conferred upon Cromwell, and it was doubtful whether any parliament would accept the limitations of its sovereignty which the council of officers had devised. The first parliament elected according to the ‘instrument of government’ met in September 1654. From the beginning of its debates that assembly, inspired by the old leaders of the Long parliament, refused to admit the validity of a constitutional settlement imposed by the army. It was willing to accept the government of a single person, but insisted on the subordination of that person to parliament. ‘The government,’ ran the formula of the opposition, ‘shall be in the parliament of the people of England, and a single person qualified with such instructions as the parliament shall think fit’ (Burton, Diary, i. xxv). The co-ordinate and independent power attributed to the protector by the ‘instrument of government’ was thus denied, and Cromwell thought necessary to intervene to protect his own authority and the authority of the constitution itself. He granted their claim to revise the constitution, but only with respect to non-essentials. ‘Circumstantials’ they might alter, ‘fundamentals’ they must accept. Those fundamentals he summed up in four points: government by a single person and parliament, the division of the power of the sword between a single person and parliament, the limitation of the duration of parliaments, and liberty of conscience. Finally, he announced his resolution to maintain the existing settlement against all opposition. ‘The wilful throwing away of this government, so owned by God, so approved by men . . . I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave and buried with infamy than I can give my consent unto’ (Carlyle, Speech iii., 12 Sept. 1654). Ninety members were excluded from the house for refusing to sign an engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth and the Lord Protector, and not to alter the government as settled in a single person and a parliament. But those who remained did not consider that their acceptance of this principle bound them to accept the rest of the constitution. They proceeded to revise one after another all the articles of the ‘instrument of government,’ and trenched on more than one of the provisions which Cromwell had defined as Fundamentals. They restricted the Protector's
