ages acquired, however real, would be less striking to the
multitude, whom it was his interest to allure. The royal family,
so closely connected with the French monarch, might receive great
assistance from that neighboring kingdom; and an army of French
Protestants landed in England would be able, he dreaded, to unite the
most opposite factions against the present usurpation.[*]

These motives of policy were probably seconded by his bigoted
prejudices; as no human mind ever contained so strange a mixture of
sagacity and absurdity as that of this extraordinary personage. The
Swedish alliance, though much contrary to the interests of England, he
had contracted merely from his zeal for Protestantism;[**] and Sweden
being closely connected with France, he could not hope to maintain that
confederacy, in which he so much prided himself, should a rupture ensue
between England and this latter kingdom.[***]

* See the account of the negotiations with France and Spain
by Thurloe, vol. i. p. 759.

** He proposed to Sweden a general league and confederacy of
all the Protestants. Whitlocke, p. 620. Thurloe, vol. vii.
p. 1. In order to judge of the maxims by which he conducted
his foreign politics see, further, Thurloe, vol. iv. p. 295,
343, 443; vol. vii. p. 174.

*** Thurloe, vol. i. p. 759.

The Hugonots, he expected, would meet with better treatment while he
engaged in a close union with their sovereign.[*] And as the Spaniards
were much more Papists than the French, were much more exposed to the
old Puritanical hatred,[**] and had even erected the bloody tribunal of
the inquisition, whose rigors they had refused to mitigate on Cromwell's
solicitation,[***] he hoped that a holy and meritorious war with such
idolaters could not fail of protection from Heaven.[****] A preacher,
likewise, inspired as was supposed by a prophetic spirit, bid him "go
and prosper;" calling him "a stone cut out of the mountains without
hands, that would break the pride of the Spaniard, crush Antichrist, and
make way for the purity of the gospel over the whole world."[v]

* Thurloe, vol. i. p. 759.

** Thurloe, vol. i. p. 759.

*** Thurloe, vol. i. p. 759. Don Alonzo said, that the
Indian trade and the inquisition were his master's two eyes,
and the protector insisted upon the putting out both of them
at once.

**** Carrington, p. 191.

v Bates.

Actuated equ