other as friends usually do; and, when the Protector put on his hat, the Ambassador put on his as soon as the other.  After a little pause, the Ambassador put off his hat, and began to speak, and then put it on again; and, whensoever in his speech he named the King his master, or Sweden, or the Protector, or England, he moved his hat:  especially if he mentioned anything of God, or the good of Christendom, he put off his hat very low; and the Protector still answered him in the like postures of civility.”  The speech, which was in Swedish, but immediately translated into Latin by the Ambassador’s secretary, was to the effect that the King of Sweden desired to propound to His Highness some matters for additional treaty.  Cromwell’s reply, delivered in English, which the Ambassador understood, was to the effect that he was very willing to enter into “a nearer and more strict alliance” with the King of Sweden and would nominate some persons to hear Count Bundt’s proposals.—­All this had been in the last days of July 1655; but, though there had been subsequent audiences of the Ambassador, and banquets given to him and the other chief Swedes by the Protector himself at Hampton Court, August had passed, and September, and October, and November, and still the actual Treaty had been avoided.  Other things engrossed the Protector—­the Treaty with France, the West-India Expedition, the beginning of the War with Spain, &c.  But in Count Bundt there had been sent to Cromwell perhaps the most high-tempered ambassador he had ever seen.  Immediately after the first audience, Dorset House, in Fleet Street, taken and furnished at the Ambassador’s own expense, had become the head-quarters of the Embassy; and here, as month after month had passed without approach to real business, his impatience had flashed into fierceness.  It broke out in his talk to Whitlocke, who took every opportunity of being with him, the rather because other “grandees” held aloof.  “No Commissioners being yet come to the Swedish Ambassador,” writes Whitlocke, under date Dec. 1655, “he grew into some high expressions of his sense of the neglect to his master by this delay; which I did endeavour to excuse, and acquainted the Protector with it, who thereupon promised to have it mended.”  In truth, the warlike Swedish King had become by this time a man whose embassy compelled attention. “Letters of the success of the Swedes in Poland and Lithuania,” “Letters of the Swedes’ victory against the Muscovites,” “The Swedes had good success in Poland and Moscovia,” “An Agreement made between the King of Sweden and the Elector of Brandenburg:” such had been pieces of foreign news recently coming in.  Accordingly, in January 1655-6, Whitlocke, Fiennes, Strickland, and Sir Gilbert Pickering, had been empowered, on the Protector’s part, to treat with Count Bundt, and the Treaty had begun.—­There were preliminary difficulties, however.  Cromwell wanted a Treaty that should include the Dutch and the King of Denmark, and be, in fact, a League of