What Cromwell and his Puritans did was amazing. He had Ireland in rebellion on his hands. He put down that rising with an iron severity. Rulers of England before him had established those colonies of Scottish and other immigrants which are the source of the present division of Ireland into the Free State in the south and the Northern Ireland which is still directly under the English Government. Cromwell's plan to break up the centres of rebellion was to shift sections of the Irish people themselves out of their homes and plant them down in other parts of the same country. It was a policy that left a hatred of English rule which still lives in the hearts of the descendants of the people so mistreated. But for the moment it brought a forced peace. Also on his hands was a Scottish rising, of the Church party which was opposed equally to English Puritans and to Scottish Covenanters. That too he dealt with masterfully and severely. He was a virtual dictator. The Parliament ventured to oppose him: he dissolved the Parliament. With indifference to the form of all government recognised in England, he chose eleven of his generals to act as his ministers. The {92} Army, with Cromwell as its head, was for the time the governing body. He was greatly hated, and still more greatly feared. Plots were formed against his life; but none were successful. He died peacefully in 1658 and his portentous figure goes out of the story. Like nearly every dictator, he left no under-study able to play his part. His son Richard, with little of his father's hardness, was put, reluctantly, into his place. He retired at the first opportunity. Within little more than a year of the great Protector's death the Army weakened, and the Parliament, which he had overridden by that Army's aid, regained its power. The Stuart who was king by hereditary right was recalled. The tremendous episode of the Commonwealth was, to outward seeming, almost as if it had not happened. Meanwhile, that is, in 1659, France and Spain had for the moment made terms of peace, of which one article was that Louis XIV. should marry a Bavarian princess, and another that France should take over from Spain certain frontier fortresses and also a part of the Spanish Netherlands. That peace was maintained for some seven years, during which Spain was much occupied by recurring wars with Portugal, Portugal having thrown off the Spanish sovereignty in 1640. But a new king came to the throne of Spain, and Louis put forward further claims in the Netherlands. Louis, at the moment, was in alliance with Holland against England in the war which had been provoked by the Navigation Act.