According to another letter, personal allusions to Cromwell even yet more violent occurred in the discourses of these misguided men. Powell and Feake called him "the dissemblingist perjured villain in the world," and desired any friends of his, who might be present, to go and report this to him, adding, that the Protector's reign would be short, and "that he should be served worse than that great tyrant the last Lord Protector was, he being altogether as bad, if not worse than he."[64] [Sidenote: _Feake and Powell._] These fanatics threw themselves with earnestness into the Dutch war. That conflict, looking at the political and religious character of the combatants, strikes us as very strange, both parties being republicans, and both being defenders of religious liberty: but it had arisen from commercial and maritime rivalries, into which additional bitterness had been shed by the natural sympathies of the Prince of Orange with the Stuart family. A confederation of the two commonwealths, for the promotion of civil freedom and the interests of Protestantism throughout Europe, formed an English dream at the end of the civil wars; and what had at first been contemplated as a subject for peaceful negotiation was afterwards absurdly sought to be accomplished by naval battles. The republican zeal and Protestant fervour of Feake and his friends enlisted them on the side of a thorough union between the two states, and they stipulated for it as an indispensable condition of peace. That England should persevere till Holland could be yoked to her in humble submission for the attainment of these civil and religious ends, constituted a staple theme in the harangues at Blackfriars. Conciliation and compromise were condemned. The preachers denounced in the wildest way the statesman-like views of Cromwell, who felt anxious to put an end to the deadly struggle of two countries, between which policy as well as justice dictated alliance with mutual independence. His opponents did all they could to stir up the people of England against the Netherlanders, and one of the Dutch deputies, who went to hear them, wrote home, declaring that their sermons were "most horrid trumpets of fire, murder, and flame."[65] Millenarianism thus became mixed up with political schemes; and these Commonwealth visionaries believed that God had given Holland to the English as a "landing place of the saints, whence they should proceed to pluck the whore of Babylon from her chair, and to establish the kingdom of Christ on the Continent."[66]