Cromwell's letters to these officers that autumn inform us that there were twenty-eight men-of-war on that station, and people from Barbadoes, from New England, and from England and Scotland, were being sent to occupy and settle the island. A thousand Irish girls were sent out. Cromwell pointed out to the Commissioners how advantageously the island lay for keeping in check the Spanish Main, and the trade with Peru and Carthagena. His comprehensive glance was alive to all the advantages of the conquest, and his resolution engaged to make the most of it. Whatever is the value of Jamaica now, we owe it to him. He believed that he was not only serving the nation but religion by humbling Spain. He wrote to the Commissioners, "The Lord Himself hath a controversy with your enemies, even with that Roman Babylon of which the Spaniard is the great underpropper. In that respect we fought the Lord's battles, and in that respect the Scriptures are most plain." Spain, of course, proclaimed war against England, to her further loss, and the glory of Cromwell and his invincible Puritan admiral, Blake. Penn and Venables resigned their commissions, and were set at liberty. On October 24th, the day after the Spanish ambassador quitted London, Cromwell signed the treaty of peace with France, by which Condé and the French malcontents were to be excluded from the British dominions, and Charles Stuart, his brother the Duke of York, Ormond, Hyde, and fifteen others of the prince's adherents, were to be excluded from France. Cromwell opened the year 1656 amid a multitude of plots and discontents. The enemies of the Republic--Royalists, Anabaptists, Levellers--were all busy in one quarter or another. Cleveland, the poet, who had been taken prisoner nine years before by David Leslie, at Newcastle, and expected to be hanged for his tirades against the Scots, but had been dismissed by Leslie with the contemptuous words, "Let the poor knave go and sell his ballads," was now seized by Colonel Haynes for seditious writings at Norwich; but Cromwell also dismissed him with like indifference.