=3. What People said.=――When Edward Nicholas presented that brave, bold brief of his on behalf of proscribed and unpopular clients, the whispers had been many that he held it by the grace, or even, said some, at the secret instigation of Cromwell, but when Manasseh arrived in London, the marked favour with which the Protector received his Jewish petitioner set the wildest rumours in circulation. Cromwell was declared to be of Jewish descent, and it was further alleged that his Jewish kinsfolk beyond the seas had recognised in him their Messiah. St. Paul’s Cathedral, on the same authority, was to be converted into a synagogue, and an actual sum was named as the price the Jews had offered for it. These absurd tales were actually believed in by many ignorant people, for those most incapable of faith are often the most credulous of folly. The solution of Cromwell’s favourable reception of the Jews was simple enough. Those who went so far to seek for reasons could have found them close at hand. But there are people, says Carlyle, who ‘can look into the great soul of a man, radiant with the splendours of very heaven, and see nothing there but the shadow of their own mean darkness.’[50] In Cromwell’s support of Jewish claims the ‘great soul’ was only consistent with itself. The character of Cromwell in all things was an index to his conduct in this one thing. Liberty of conscience, religions rights secured to all men, was the Puritan battle cry. The principle had been fought for at Naseby, it would be upheld at Whitehall, and, though Cromwell could not know it, it would never more be abandoned by the England which he, in his stern rectitude, lifted out of the meretricious mists of greatness, into the ‘fine air, the pale severity of light’――a national ideal of goodness.