ders under the command of Turenne. Their valour and
discipline were shown by the part they took in the capture of Mardyke in
the summer of that year; and still more in the June of 1658 by the
victory of the Dunes, a victory which forced the Flemish towns to open
their gates to the French, and gave Dunkirk to Cromwell.

[Sidenote: Cromwell's theory.]

Never had the fame of an English, ruler stood higher; but in the midst
of his glory the hand of death was falling on the Protector. He had long
been weary of his task. "God knows," he had burst out to the Parliament
a year before, "God knows I would have been glad to have lived under my
woodside, and to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have
undertaken this government." Amidst the glory of his aims, Cromwell's
heart was heavy with this sense of failure. Whatever dreams of personal
ambition had mingled with his aim, his aim had in the main been a high
and unselfish one; in the course that seems to modern eyes so strange
and complex he had seen the leading of a divine hand that drew him from
the sheepfolds to mould England into a people of God. What convinced him
that the nation was called by a divine calling was the wonder which men
felt at every step in its advance. The England which he saw around him
was not an England which Pym or Hampden had foreseen, which Vane in his
wildest dreams had imagined, or for which the boldest among the soldiers
of the New Model had fought. Step by step the nation had been drawn to
changes from which it shrank, to principles which it held in horror.
When the struggle began the temper of the men who waged it was a
strictly conservative temper; they held themselves to be withstanding
the revolutionary changes of the king, to be vindicating the existing
constitution both of Church and State. But the strife had hardly opened
when they were drawn by very need to a revolutionary platform. What men
found themselves fighting for at Edgehill and Marston Moor was the
substitution of government by the will of the nation for government by
the will of the king, and a setting aside of the religious compromise
embodied in the Church of the Tudors for a Church which was the mere
embodiment of the Puritan section of the people at large. Defeat drove
England to the New Model; and again it found itself drawn to a new
advance. No sooner was the sword in the hand of the "Godly," than the
conception of religious purity widened into that of religious liber