there till the 21st, having audiences with his Highness, delivering to him letters from Louis and the Cardinal, and entertained by him with all possible magnificence.  While they were there, a special envoy joined them, announcing the capture of Dunkirk; and so the joy was complete.  There was nothing the French King would not do to show his regard for the great Protector; and, but for his Majesty’s illness at that moment from small-pox, the Cardinal himself would have come over instead of sending his nephew.  And why should there not be a renewal of the Treaty after the expiry of the present term, to secure another year or two of that co-operation of the English Army and Fleet with Turenne which had led already to such excellent results?  What if Ostend, as well as Dunkirk and Mardike, were to be made over to the Protector?  These were suggestions for the future, and meanwhile new successes were added to the capture of Dunkirk.  Town after town in Flanders, including Gravelines at last, yielded to Turenne, or other generals, and received French garrisons, and through the summer autumn the Spaniards were so beset in Flanders that an expedition thence for the invasion of England in the interest of Charles Stuart, or in any other interest, was no longer even a possibility.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Godwin, IV. 544-551; where, however, the digest of facts does not seem accurate in every point.  Compare Thurloe, VII. 173-177 and-192-3, and Merc.  Pol. June 10-17 and June 17-24, 1658 (as quoted in Cromwelliana, 172-173), and Guizot, II 380-388.]

While thus turning to account the alliance with the only Catholic power with which there could be safe dealing, the Protector clung firmly to his idea of a League among the Protestant Powers themselves.  If Burnet’s information is correct, it was about this time that he contemplated the institution in London of “a Council for the Protestant Religion in opposition to the Congregation De Propaganda Fide at Rome.”  It was to sit at Chelsea College:  there were to be seven Councillors, with a large yearly fund at their disposal; the world was to be mapped out into four great regions; and for each region there was to be a Secretary at L500 a year, maintaining a correspondence with that region, ascertaining the state of Religion in it, and any exigency requiring interference.  That remained only a project; but meanwhile there was the agency of Jephson with the King of Sweden, of Meadows with the King of Denmark, of Downing with the United Provinces, and of other Envoys here and there, all working for peace among the Protestant States and joint action against the common enemy.  In the Council Order Books for May 1658 one comes also upon new considerations of the old subject of the Protestants of the Piedmontese valleys, with a fresh remittance of L3000 for their relief, and an advance at the same time of L500 out of the Piedmontese Fund for the kindred purpose of relieving twenty distressed Bohemian families.