The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector. The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical of the Puritan spirit--absolutely convinced of the justice of his cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies--a very terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the weak Stuart kings. So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the two great features in our story during that half-century. The other principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour. England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place between English and French over the French settlements in the St. Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {87} [Illustration: GENERAL WOLFE'S STATUE AT QUEBEC, CANADA.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {88} Quebec had been founded as early as 1608. It was not until 1641 that the foundations were laid of Montreal. But in the meantime Prince Edward's Island, Nova Scotia, and several of the West Indian islands had been occupied by English colonists. Portugal during most of this half-century was under the Spanish king. She regained her complete independence, under a king of her own, in 1640. But by that time she had lost her empire in the East. Spain, sailing west from the New World, had arrived at the Philippine Islands, which Portugal had reached going east. Thus neither had transgressed the famous Bull. And yet East and West did meet in those islands. Drake, moreover, in his famous circumnavigation of the world, had come to the neighbouring Spice Islands, going west.