wasted on the expenses of the household. The confiscated church lands, intended to have been sold for public purposes, had been made away with, and the exchequer had been supplied by loans at interest of thirteen and fourteen per cent., and by a steadily maintained drain upon the currency. In return for the outlay, the Protector had to show Scotland utterly lost, the Imperial alliance trifled away, the people at home mutinous, a rebellion extinguished by foreign mercenaries in which ten thousand lives had been lost, the French conquests held by Henry VIII. as a guarantee for a repudiated debt on the point of being wrested from his hands, and of the two million crowns due for them, but a small fraction likely now to be forthcoming; finally, formal war, with its coming obligations and uncertainties.
The blame was not wholly his. The Protector's power was probably less than it seemed to be, and the ill-will and perhaps the rival schemes of others may have thwarted projects in themselves feasible. Yet it may be doubted whether, if he had been wholly free to pursue his own way, his blunders would not have been even more considerable; and by contemporary statesmen delicate allowances were not likely to be made for a ruler who had grasped at an authority which had not been intended for him, and had obtained it under conditions which he had violated. His intentions had been good, but there were so many of them, that he was betrayed by their very number. He was popular with the multitude, for he was the defender of the poor against the rich; but the magnificent weakness of his
