g, some time longer, that numerous standing army, which was so
much complained of.[**]

* Thurloe, vol. i. p. 182.

** We are told, in the Life of Sir Harry Vane, that that
famous republican opposed the Dutch war, and that it was the
military gentlemen chiefly who supported that measure.

On the other hand, some, who dreaded the increasing power of Cromwell,
expected that the great expense of naval armaments would prove a motive
for diminishing the military establishment. To divert the attention of
the public from domestic quarrels towards foreign transactions, seemed,
in the present disposition of men's minds, to be good policy. The
superior power of the English commonwealth, together with its advantages
of situation, promised success; and the parliamentary leaders hoped
to gain many rich prizes from the Dutch, to distress and sink their
flourishing commerce, and by victories to throw a lustre on their own
establishment, which was so new and unpopular. All these views,
enforced by the violent spirit of St. John, who had great influence over
Crom-well, determined the parliament to change the purposed alliance
into a furious war against the United Provinces.

To cover these hostile intentions, the parliament, under pretence of
providing for the interests of commerce, embraced such measures as they
knew would give disgust to the states. They framed the famous act of
navigation; which prohibited all nations from importing into England in
their bottoms any commodity which was not the growth and manufacture
of their own country. By this law, though the terms in which it was
conceived were general, the Dutch were principally affected; because
their country produces few commodities, and they subsist chiefly by
being the general carriers and factors of Europe. Letters of reprisal
were granted to several merchants, who complained of injuries which,
they pretended, they had received from the states; and above eighty
Dutch ships fell into their hands, and were made prizes. The cruelties
committed on the English at Amboyna, which were certainly enormous, but
which seemed to be buried in oblivion by a thirty years' silence, were
again made the ground of complaint. And the allowing the murderers of
Dorislaus to escape, and the conniving at the insults to which St. John
had been exposed, were represented as symptoms of an unfriendly, if not
a hostile disposition in the states.

The states, alarmed at all these