During the greater part of 1654 Oliver had been hesitating whether to ally himself with Spain or with France. For some time he inclined to the side of Spain. His religious sympathies were touched by the sufferings of the French Huguenots. The succour which he proposed to convey to them would have brought him into direct alliance with Spain, and it was only the revelation of Spanish financial and military weakness which turned him aside from his project. Then came a suggestion long weighed and finally taken up, for carrying on war against the Spanish West Indies. It would be hard to deny that, even in modern eyes, a _casus belli_, apart from all ideal schemes of weakening the Government which sheltered the Inquisition, was to be found--not in the refusal of the Spanish authorities to allow English ships to trade in the Spanish islands, but in the deliberate seizure of English ships and the enslavement of English crews guilty of no other crime than that of being bound for Barbados or for some other English colony. The strangest part of the matter is that Oliver closed his eyes to the natural consequence of an attack upon a Spanish colony. He fancied that it would be still possible to carry out the Elizabethan plan of keeping peace in Europe and making war in the Indies. He was probably strengthened in this opinion by the fact that, almost from the first days of the Commonwealth, a war of reprisals had been going on at sea with France without disturbing the nominally amicable relations between the two countries. Why should he not take a West Indian Island as a reprisal for the seizure of English ships, and peace be maintained with Spain as if nothing had happened?