with which he had to struggle
were, of course, very great. On the other hand, he seems to have been
deficient both in strength of character and in military capacity; and
his ill-health made still more difficult a task for which he was
fundamentally incompetent. The comparative failure of this, Cromwell's
pet enterprise, was a bitter blow to the Protector. For a whole day he
shut himself up in his room, brooding over the disaster for which he,
more than any other, was responsible. He had aimed not merely to plant
one more colony in America, but to make himself master of such parts of
the West Indian islands and Spanish Main as would enable him to dominate
the route of the Spanish-American treasure fleets. To this end Jamaica
contributed few advantages beyond those possessed by Barbadoes and St.
Kitts, and it was too early for him to realize that island for island
Jamaica was much more suitable than Hispaniola as the seat of an English
colony.[121]

Religious and economic motives form the key to Cromwell's foreign
policy, and it is difficult to discover which, the religious or the
economic, was uppermost in his mind when he planned this expedition. He
inherited from the Puritans of Elizabeth's time the traditional
religious hatred of Spain as the bulwark of Rome, and in his mind as in
theirs the overthrow of the Spaniards in the West Indies was a blow at
antichrist and an extension of the true religion. The religious ends of
the expedition were fully impressed upon Venables and his successors in
Jamaica.[122] Second only, however, to Oliver's desire to protect "the
people of God," was his ambition to extend England's empire beyond the
seas. He desired the unquestioned supremacy of England over the other
nations of Europe, and that supremacy, as he probably foresaw, was to be
commercial and colonial. Since the discovery of America the world's
commerce had enormously increased, and its control brought with it
national power. America had become the treasure-house of Europe. If
England was to be set at the head of the world's commerce and
navigation, she must break through Spain's monopoly of the Indies and
gain a control in Spanish America. San Domingo was to be but a
preliminary step, after which the rest of the Spanish dominions in the
New World would be gradually absorbed.[123]

The immediate excuse for the attack on Hispaniola and Jamaica was the
Spaniards' practice of seizing English ships and ill-treating English
cr