Meanwhile the members of the Rump, still the nominal rulers of England, finding opportunity for profit in the sale of royalist lands and in the administration of finance, had exasperated Cromwell by their maladministration and neglect of the public welfare. The life of the Rump was temporarily prolonged, however, by the popularity of its legislation against the Dutch, at this time the rivals of England on the seas and in the colonies. In 1651 the Rump passed the first Navigation Act, forbidding the importation of goods from Asia, Africa, or America, except in English or colonial ships, and providing that commodities of European production should be imported only in vessels of England or of the producing country. The framers of the Navigation Act intended thereby to exclude Dutch vessels from trading between England and other lands. The next year a commercial and naval war (1652-1654) broke out between England and Holland, leading to no decisive result, but, on the whole, increasing the prestige of the English navy. With renewed confidence the Rump contemplated perpetuating its narrow oligarchy, but Cromwell's patience was exhausted, and in 1653 he turned Parliament out of doors, declaring, "Your hour is come, the Lord hath done with you!" Cromwell remained as military and religious dictator. [Sidenote: Oliver Cromwell] Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) is the most interesting figure in seventeenth-century England. Belonging by birth to the class of country gentlemen, his first appearance in public life was in the Parliament of 1628 as a pleader for the liberty of Puritan preaching. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, Cromwell, now forty-one years of age, assumed a conspicuous place. His clothes were cheap and homely, "his countenance swollen and reddish, his voice sharp and untuneable," nevertheless his fervid eloquence and energy soon made him "very much hearkened unto." From the Civil War, as we know, Cromwell emerged as an unequaled military leader, the idol of his soldiers, fearing God but not man. His frequent use of Biblical phrases in ordinary conversation and his manifest confidence that he was performing God's work flowed from an intense religious zeal. He belonged, properly speaking, to the Independents, who believed that each local congregation of Christians should be practically free, excepting that "prelacy" (_i.e._, the episcopal form of church government) and "popery" (_i.e._, Roman Catholic Christianity) were not to be tolerated. In private life Cromwell was fond of "honest sport," of music and art. It is said that his gayety when he had "drunken a cup of wine too much" and his taste in statuary shocked his more austere fellow-Puritans. In public life he was a man of great forcefulness, occasionally giving way to violent temper; he was a statesman of signal ability, aiming to secure good government and economic prosperity for England and religious freedom for Protestant Dissenters. [Sidenote: Radical Experiments under Cromwell]