32 RELIGION, COLONISING AND TRADE 
all means to hold fast to Jamaica, and the taking and 
holding fast of Jamaica made history. Both the policy 
and the conduct of the operations against Spain lent 
themselves to plentiful criticism. In ¢ A Discourse of 
Trade,” published in London in 1670, the author, 
Roger Coke, grandson of Lotd Justice Coke, wrote of 
Cromwell’s break with Spain in 1654, after the Dutch 
had made peace with her in 1648, and of the consequent 
loss of British trade in the Spanish West Indies, as, © a 
folly never to be forgiven in his politics, nor the losses 
this nation sustained thereby ever again to be repaired.’ 
That the difficulties of the enterprise had been under- 
estimated ; that the forces employed were a disorderly 
medley, ill assorted and inadequately equipped ; that 
the colonies, or the employing classes in the colonies, 
were but ill content to have their manhood and their 
labour supply drawn off for the planting of an island 
which might be—to Barbados at any rate—an unwel- 
come rival; that Cromwell’s wholesale deportations 
savoured of barbarism; all this must be admitted. 
Yet was he, in Professor Egerton’s words, ¢ a great 
Imperial ruler, pethaps the only Englishman who has 
ever understood in its full sense the word Empire.’ ? 
Minded to oust the Dutch from New Netherlands, 
if peace had not come too soon for that purpose ; 
taking and keeping while he lived the French forts in 
Acadia ; writing to Blake and Montague as to whether 
an attack on the Spanish Fleet at Cadiz or on Cadiz 
itself was feasible, or whether any other place be 
* A Discourse of Trade, Preface, p. Bs. 
A Skort History of British Colonial Policy (1908), second edition, 
3. 64.