=4. Negotiations begun for the Return of the Jews to England.=――The Amsterdam Rabbi wanted to insure for the Jews another such welcome as Holland had given to them. He wanted to find for the proscribed and exiled race a home as free citizens among a free people. His relations with Grotius and with Vossius made his thoughts turn, in the first place, to Sweden, with whose queen, Christina, he had had, too, some literary correspondence. But before the Swedish project came to any practical issue, the course of events happily made him direct his energies towards England, where the struggle for a nation’s ‘rights’ had but lately been won at the cost of a king’s life. In 1649 Charles I. had expiated his hateful, harmful weakness on the scaffold, and though John Hampden’s brave voice, which had aroused the English conscience like a trumpet call, was, since June 1643, stilled in death, his cousin, Oliver Cromwell, was at the helm, and sternly and uncompromisingly directing it to good ends. The first demand of the victorious army of Independents, who had fought not for place, but for principle, was liberty of conscience, and equality before the law for all religious denominations. In this new attitude of Puritan England, and in the earnest character of its new and uncrowned ruler, Manasseh ben Israel saw and seized his opportunity. In the year 1650 he forwarded to Cromwell his ‘Hope of Israel,’ and, by the help of influential friends, he caused petitions for the re-admission of Jews to England, with rights secured to them of worship, of commerce, and of burial, to be laid before the Long and the Rump Parliaments. He busied himself also in the composition of a pamphlet, called _Vindiciæ Judæorum_ (Defence of the Jews), which proved, on its completion, the most powerful and the least pedantic of his writings. It was not, however, finished when, in 1655, the way having been now, as he considered, sufficiently prepared by correspondence, he resolved on trying the effect of personal intercession with the Protector. To quote his own subsequent and simple words on the subject, ‘I could not be quiet in my mind until I had made my humble addresses to the Lord Protector, whom God preserve. And finding that my coming over would not be altogether unwelcome to him, with those great hopes which I conceived, I joyfully took leave of my house, my friends, my kindred, all my advantages there, and the country wherein I have lived all my lifetime under the benign protection and favour of the lords, the States-General, and magistrates of Amsterdam. In fine, I say, I parted from them all, and took my voyage to England.’ CHAPTER XXXIII.[48] THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND.