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.