and other domestic inconveniencies, had hindered him from coming to London”; and then, the general company having been dismissed, and only Lord President Lawrence, Lord Strickland, and Thurloe, remaining in the room, there was some talk on business.  Various matters were mentioned, but only generally, Nieuport not thinking it fit to trouble his Highness with “a large discourse,” and his Highness indeed intimating that he did not find himself well enough to talk much.  But all was very amicable, and at the end of the interview Cromwell, saying he hoped to be in London next week, insisted on conducting the Ambassador to the door of the antechamber, leaving Lawrence, Strickland, and Thurloe, to do the rest by attending him through the galleries back to the coaches.  On that same day there had been a Council-meeting at Hampton Court, the last at which Cromwell was present.  Possibly Dutch business was discussed there, and also at the next meeting of Council, which was at Whitehall on the 3rd of August, and without Cromwell.  On the 5th, at all events, when the Council again met at Hampton Court, Cromwell not present, there was, as we have seen (ante, p. 355), a minute on Dutch business of a very ominous character.  Cromwell’s heart was now with the magnanimous Swede rather than with the merchandizing Dutch; and, in all probability, had he lived longer, Ambassador Nieuport would have had to send home news that might not have been pleasant to their High Mightinesses.  But the next day (August 6) Lady Claypole was dead; and from that day, through the remaining four weeks of Cromwell’s life, the concerns of the foreign world grew dimmer and dimmer in his regards.  Perhaps to the last moment of his consciousness what did most interest him in that foreign world was the great new commotion round the Baltic in which his Swedish brother was the central figure, and in which both the Dutch and the Brandenburg Elector were playing anti-Swedish parts, the Elector avowedly, the Dutch more warily, “The King of Sweden hath again invaded the Dane, and very probably hath Copenhagen by this time,” wrote Thurloe from Whitehall to Henry Cromwell at two o’clock in the morning of August 27.  Cromwell, therefore, had learnt that fact before his death, and it must have mingled with his thoughts in his dying hours.  In these very hours, we find, not only was Ambassador Nieuport close at hand again, for Dutch negotiations in which the fact would naturally be of high moment, but Herr.  Schlezer also, the London agent of the Brandenburg Elector, was at the doors of the Council office, with express letters from the Elector, which he was anxious to deliver to Thurloe himself, in case even at such a time some answer might be elicited.  Thurloe choosing to be inaccessible, he had left the letters with Mr. Marvell.  Thus, twice in the last weeks of Oliver’s Protectorate we have a distinct sight of Marvell in his capacity of substitute for Milton.  He barges down the Thames very early on a Sunday morning to salute an Ambassador in the name of the Protector and bring him up to town in a proper manner; and he receives in the Whitehall office a troublesome diplomatic agent, who has come with important despatches.[1]