Mayor Dethicke, Aldermen Pack and Tichbourne, &c.) There were four meetings of this Conference at Whitehall in December, Cromwell himself taking part.  “I never heard a man speak so well,” says an auditor of his speech at one of the meetings.  On the whole, however, the Conference could not agree with his Highness.  Some of the city-men objected, on commercial grounds, to the admission of the Jews; and the clergy were against it almost to a man, partly on the authority of Scripture texts, partly from fear of the effects of the importation into London of the new sect of Judaism.  The Conference was discontinued; and, though the good Rabbi lingered on in London till April 1656, nothing could be done.  Prejudice in the religious world was too strong.  Nevertheless the Protector found means of giving effect to his own views.  Not only did he mark his respect for Manasseh Ben Israel by a pension of L100 a year, to be paid him in Amsterdam; he admitted so many Jews, one by one, by private dispensation, that there was soon a little colony of them in London, with a synagogue to suit, and a piece of ground at Stepney leased for a cemetery.  In effect, the readmission of the Jews into England dates from Cromwell’s Protectorate.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Merc.  Pol. Nov. 1-8, 1655; Council Order Book, Nov. 13; Godwin, IV. 243-251; Carlyle, III. 136, note.  Prynne opposed the Readmission of the Jews in a pamphlet, in two parts, called A Short Demurrer to the Jews’ long discontinued Remitter (March 1656); and Durie published, in the form of a letter to Hartlib, A Case of Conscience:  whether it be lawful to admit Jews into a Christian Commonwealth (June 27, 1656).  I have not seen Durie’s letter; but Mr. Crossley (Worthington’s Diary, I. 83, note) reports it as moderately favourable to the Jewish claim.  The letter is dated, he says, from Cassel, Jan. 8, 1655-6.]

Although making no great pretensions to learning himself, Cromwell seems to have taken especial pleasure in that part of his powers and privileges which gave him an influence on the literature and education of the country.  Here, in fact, he but carried out in a special department that general notion of the Civil Magistrate’s powers and duties which had led him to declare himself so strongly for the preservation and extension of an Established Church.  The more thorough-going champions of Voluntaryism in that day, Anabaptists and others, had begun, as we have seen, to agitate not only for the abolition of a national Church or State-paid clergy of any kind, but also for the abolition of the Universities, the public schools, and all endowments for science or learning.  But, if Cromwell had so signally disowned and condemned the system of sheer Voluntaryism in Religion, it was not to be expected that the more peculiar and exceptional Voluntaryism which challenged even State Endowments for education should find any countenance from his Protectorate.  Nor did it.