petitions with significant graciousness. They were at once sent to the
Council, with an endorsement, stating that “His Highnes is pleased in an
especiall manner to recommend these two annexed papers to the speedy
consideracion of the Councell, that the Peticion may receive all due
satisfacion and withall convenient speed.” It is impossible not to be
struck by the pressing nature of this recommendation, when it is
considered that the chief petition dealt with a very large and important
political question, and that its signatory was a man wholly unknown in
England. Cromwell’s action can only be explained by the theory that he
was, as I have suggested, the instigator of the whole movement. Whether
the Council were aware of this or not is impossible to say. They had as
yet no decided opinions on the subject, but they saw that it was a large
and difficult question, that its bearings were imperfectly known, and
that its decision, either one way or the other, involved a very serious
responsibility at a time when the religious element wielded so much
power in the country, and withal so capriciously. At the personal
instigation of the Protector, however, they consented to appoint a
committee to consider the petitions. A month later, taking advantage of
a meeting at which Cromwell was not present, the committee verbally
reported, and the Council resolved, that it “saw no excuse to make any
order.”[57]
That Cromwell was disappointed by this result he speedily made clear. In
regard to the Resettlement petition, he did not care to take the
responsibility of giving a decision; but on the other petition he took
immediate steps to afford satisfaction to Dormido, in spite of the
refusal of the Council to have anything to do with it. He addressed an
autograph letter to the King of Portugal, asking him as a personal
favour to restore Dormido’s property, or to make him full compensation
for his losses.[58] Seeing that Dormido was an alien, and had absolutely
no claim on the British Government, this personal intervention by
Cromwell on his behalf affords a further strong presumption of his
privity to the Jewish mission. It is also not a little significant that
a few months later the Protector granted a patent of denization to
Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, the chief of the little Marrano community in
London, and his two sons.[59]
The question was, however, not allowed to rest here. Cromwell wanted an
authoritative decision, which would enable him to do more than merely
protect individual Jews, and it was clear that this could not be
obtained unless a more important person than Dormido were induced to
take the matter in hand. The question had to be raised to a higher
level, and for this purpose it was necessary that it should make some
noise in the country. Only one European Jew had sufficient influence in
England to stimulate the popular imagination, and to justify the
Government in taking serious steps for the solution of the question.
That man was the author of the “Hope of Israel.” In May 1655 it was
decided to send Samuel ben Israel back to Amsterdam to lay the case
before his father, and persuade him to come to London.[60] There is no
mystery as to who suggested this step. Menasseh in his diplomatic way
merely tells us he was informed that his “coming over would not be
altogether unwelcome to His Highness the Lord Protector.”[61] There is,
however, a letter extant from John Sadler to Richard Cromwell, written
shortly after Oliver’s death, in which it is definitely stated that
Menasseh was invited “by some letters of your late royall father.”[62]
Sadler no doubt spoke from personal knowledge, for in 1654 he was acting
as private secretary to the Protector, and the endorsement on Dormido’s
petitions recommending them to the Council bears his signature.[63]
Under these circumstances we can well understand that Menasseh was
induced, as he says, to “conceive great hopes,” and that he resolved to
undertake the journey. In October he arrived in London with the MS. of
his famous “Humble Addresses” in his pocket.
During the five months that Menasseh was preparing for his journey,
Cromwell was not idle. Colonial questions were occupying his mind very
largely, and on these questions he was in the habit of receiving advice
from one at least of the London Marranos, Simon de Caceres, a relative
of Spinoza, and an eminent merchant who had large interests in the West
Indies, and had enjoyed the special favour of the King of Denmark and
the Queen of Sweden.[64] It was no doubt at the instigation of De
Caceres that in April 1655 Cromwell sent a Jewish physician, Abraham de
Mercado, with his son Raphael to Barbados.[65] Later in the year he was
deep in consultation with De Caceres in regard to the defences of the
newly acquired island of Jamaica, and a plan for the conquest of
Chili.[66] The most important result of these confabulations was a
scheme for colonising Surinam (which since 1650 had been a British
colony) with the Jewish fugitives from Brazil, who had been obliged to
leave Pernambuco and Recife through the Portuguese reoccupation of those
towns. The idea was, no doubt, suggested by Dormido, himself one of the
victims of the Portuguese conquest. In order to attract the Jews, they
were granted a charter in which full liberty of conscience was secured
to them, together with civil rights, a large measure of communal
autonomy, and important land grants.[67]
Thus a beginning was made in the solution of the Jewish question by
their admission as citizens to one of the colonial dependencies of Great
Britain. This was the first important step achieved by Cromwell, and it
illustrates at once his deep interest in the Jewish question, and the
practical considerations which actuated him in seeking its solution.
IV. THE APPEAL TO THE NATION
On his arrival in London, Menasseh, with his retinue of three
Rabbis,[68] was lodged with much ceremony in one of the houses opposite
the New Exchange, in the then fashionable Strand, the Piccadilly of its
day. These houses were frequented by distinguished strangers who desired
to be near the centre of official life at Whitehall, and the fact that
Menasseh with his slender purse took up his abode in one of them,
instead of seeking hospitality with his brother-in-law or his Marrano
co-religionists in the city, shows at once the importance with which his
mission was invested.[69] He was the guest of the Protector, bidden to
London to discuss high affairs of state, and as such it was obviously
inadmissible that he should be hidden away in some obscure address in an
East-End Alsatia.
His first task after he had settled down in his “study” in the Strand
was to print his “Humble Addresses,” in which he appealed to the
Protector and the Commonwealth to readmit the Jews, and stated the
grounds of his petition. This tract was written and translated into
English long before he left Amsterdam. It had probably been prepared
three years before, when he first received his passes for England. That
it was in existence at a time when his final mission was uncontemplated
is proved by its mention in a list of his works he sent to Felgenhauer
in February 1655 (N.S.).[70] The title is there given as _De Fidelitate
et Utilitate Judaicæ Gentis_, and it is described as _Libellus
Anglicus_. This was nine months before he arrived in London, and three
and a half months before his brother-in-law sent for him. My impression
is that the tract was prepared at the time of the St. John mission in
1651, and that Menasseh had drafted it in accordance with the advice of
Thurloe, who had pointed out that the faithfulness and profitableness of
the Jewish people were likely to weigh more with Cromwell than the
relation of their dispersion to the Messianic Age.
At any rate, the style and matter of the pamphlet are in welcome
contrast to the fantastical theories of the “Hope of Israel,” resembling
more the matter-of-fact petition of Dormido. The Danielic prophecy is,
it is true, still asserted, but only as an aside, the case for the
Readmission being argued almost exclusively on grounds of political
expediency. Incidentally certain floating calumnies against the
Jews—such as their alleged usury, the slaying of infants for the
Passover, and their conversion of Christians—are discussed and refuted.
In regard to the conversion of Christians, Menasseh had completely
changed his attitude since writing the “Hope of Israel,” for in that
work he had boasted of the conversions made by the Jews in Spain.[71]
The prudent restraints Menasseh had imposed upon himself in the
composition of this pamphlet are the more marked, since we know that he
had in no way modified his original views as expounded in the “Hope of
Israel.” This is shown by a letter he wrote to Felgenhauer early in the
year, thanking him for dedicating to him the _Bonum Nuncium Israeli_,
one of the maddest rhapsodies ever written.[72] In this letter he
reiterated all his former views, with the exception of his belief in the
imminence of the Millennium. Nor had he adopted any idea of compromising
the question of the Readmission to meet the prejudices or fears of the
various political and religious factions in England. His demand was for
absolute freedom of ingress and settlement for all Jews and the
unfettered exercise of their religion, “whiles we expect with you the
Hope of Israel to be revealed.” The necessity of such a privilege had
been the more impressed upon him by the renewal of the persecutions of
his co-religionists in Poland, which had sent a great wave of destitute
Jews westward. It was primarily for them and for the Marranos of Spain
and Portugal that he hoped to find an unrestricted asylum in
England.[73]
Until the publication of the “Humble Addresses,” there are but scanty
clues in the printed literature of the time to the frame of mind in
which Menasseh’s mission found the English public. It would seem, from
the silence of the printing-presses, that the nearer the people
approached the Readmission question as a problem of practical politics,
the less enthusiastic they became for its solution. This is not
difficult to understand. The secular Tolerationists were unable to make
headway against the dangers of unlimited sectarianism, to which their
doctrines seemed calculated to open the door. Of their chief exponents,
Roger Williams was in America, John Sadler was muzzled by the
responsibilities of office, and Hugh Peters was without an influential
following. Moreover, the prosecutions of James Naylor and Biddle were
then prominently before the public as a lesson that Toleration had yet
to triumph within the Christian pale. The Conversionists and
Millenarians, who formed the great majority of the Judeophils, and who
included all Menasseh’s own friends except Sadler, attached no
importance to the terms on which the Jews might be admitted, and were
quite willing to acquiesce in legislative restrictions provided only
they were admitted. The Economists and Political Opportunists,
represented by Cromwell, Thurloe, Blake, and Monk,[74] did not dare to
confess their true motives, since their worldly aims would on the one
hand have been condemned by all the religious partisans of the
Readmission, and on the other, would have alarmed the merchants of
London, who had no desire for the commercial competition of a privileged
colony of Hebrew traders.
This discouraging state of affairs was aggravated by foreign and
Royalist intrigues. From the moment Menasseh’s mission was thought of,
the Embassies in London and the Royalist agents set to work to defeat
it. The Embassies, especially that of Holland, opposed it on its true
grounds, as a development of the policy of the Navigation Act.[75] The
Royalists were anxious to defeat it because, as Whitelock says, “it was
a business of much importance to the Commonwealth, and the Protector was
earnestly set upon it.”[76] Moreover, they had hoped to attract the Jews
to their own cause, and they had been encouraged in this hope by the
substantial assistance already rendered to them by wealthy Hebrews, like
the Da Costas and Coronels.[77] An intercepted letter from Sir Edward
Nicholas, Secretary to the exiled King, shows that the highest Royalist
circles took a profound interest in the Jewish question, and made it
their business to be well informed as to its progress. Nicholas, indeed,
seems to have known all about the negotiations which preceded Menasseh’s
journey to England.[78]
As soon as Menasseh reached London, he found himself the object of a
host of calumnious legends, clearly designed by the Royalists and
foreign agents to disturb the public mind. The story that the Jews had
offered to buy St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bodleian Library, which had
been circulated unheeded in 1649, was revived.[79] One of Menasseh’s
retinue was accused of wishing to identify Cromwell as the Jewish
Messiah, and it was circumstantially stated that he had investigated the
Protector’s pedigree in order to prove his Davidic descent.[80] It was
declared that Cromwell harboured a design to hand over to the Jews the
farming of the customs.[81] At the same time their character was painted
in the darkest colours.[82] One of the most insidious forms that this
campaign took was an attempt to show that the hope of converting the
Jews, by which the larger number of the friends of the Readmission were
actuated, was illusory, and that so far from becoming Christians, the
Jews would “stone Christ to death.” For this purpose the pen of a
converted Jew, named Paul Isaiah, who had served as a trooper in
Rupert’s Horse, was requisitioned.[83] It was a hazardous experiment to
employ Isaiah, for he might easily have been hailed by the
Conversionists as a proof of the convertibility of the Jews. It was,
however, notorious that he had learnt the ethics of the wilder Cavalier
swashbucklers only too well,[84] and he was consequently regarded rather
as an “awful example” of the sort of Jew who might be expected to listen
to the Gospel than as an encouragement to hope for the salvation of the
whole people.
The publication of the “Humble Addresses” only aggravated these popular
misgivings. While the clerical and commercial Anti-Semites disputed all
the propositions of Menasseh’s pamphlet, the visionaries and friends of
Israel strongly resented the “sinfulness” of its insistence on the
profitableness of the Jews. The bias of public feeling, as revealed by
the tracts to which the “Humble Addresses” gave rise, was distinctly
less favourable than in 1649, and was overwhelmingly hostile to an
unreserved acquiescence in the terms of the Jewish petition. In 1649 an
honest attempt to understand Judaism was made, as we may see by the
publication of Chilmead’s translation of Leo de Modena’s _Historia dei
riti ebraici_. There is no trace of an appeal to this or any similarly
authoritative work in 1655–56, except in a stray passage of an isolated
protest against the calumnies heaped on the Jews.[85] On the contrary,
the efforts of the new students of Judaism, like Alexander Ross, were
devoted to proving that the Jews had nothing in common with Christians,
and that their religion “is not founded on Moses and the Law, but on
idle and foolish traditions of the Rabbins”—that it was, in fact, a sort
of Paganism.[86] The historical attacks on the Jews were the most
powerful that had yet been made, while the replies to them were few and
by obscure writers.[87] What is most significant, however, is that the
chief friends of the Jews—the men who had encouraged Menasseh six years
before—were now either silent or openly in favour of restrictions which
would have rendered the Readmission a barren privilege. Sadler did not
reiterate the Judeophil teachings of his “Rights of the Kingdom”; there
was no echo of Hugh Peters’s “Good Work for a Good Magistrate,” with its
uncompromising demand for liberty of conscience; and the pseudonymous
author of “An Apology for the Honourable Nation of Jews,” which had so
strongly impressed the public in 1648, was dumb. John Dury, who had
practically started the first agitation in favour of the Jews, was now
studying Jewish disabilities at Cassel, with a view to their
introduction into England;[88] and Henry Jessey, the author of “The
Glory of Judah and Israel,” to the testimonies of which Menasseh
confidently appealed in the closing paragraph of his “Humble Addresses,”
had been won over to the necessity of restrictions.[89] Not a single
influential voice was raised in England in support of Menasseh’s
proposals, either on the ground of love for the Jews or religious
liberty. The temper of the unlettered people, especially the mercantile
classes, is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that only a few months
before a Jewish beggar had been mobbed in the city, owing to the
inflammatory conduct of a merchant, who had followed the poor stranger
about the Poultry shouting, “Give him nothing; he is a cursed Jew.”[90]
Undeterred by the inhospitable attitude of the public, Menasseh formally
opened his negotiations with the Government of the Commonwealth. His
first step was to pay a visit to Whitehall, and present copies of his
“Humble Addresses” to the Council of State. He was unfortunate in the
day he selected for this visit, for it happened to be one of the rare
occasions when Cromwell was not present at the Council’s deliberations.
The result was that, as on the similar occasion of the consideration of
the report on Dormido’s petition, the Council felt itself free to take
no action. It contented itself with instructing its clerk, Mr. Jessop,
“to go forth and receive the said books,” and then proceeded with other
business.[91]
That the Council had no desire to assume the responsibility of deciding
the thorny Jewish question soon became manifest. A fortnight after
Menasseh’s abortive visit to Whitehall, Cromwell brought down to the
Council a petition which had been handed to him by the Jewish Rabbi, in
which were set forth categorically the several “graces and favours” by
which it was proposed that the Readmission of the Jews should be
effected.[92] The Protector evidently felt none of the misgivings of his
advisers. It is probable, indeed, that in his masterful way he
misunderstood the trend of public feeling. He had convinced himself
that, as an act of policy, some concession to the Jews was desirable.
His strong instinct for religious liberty inclined him favourably to the
more academic aspects of the question, and his profound sympathy with
persecuted peoples had been stirred by the accounts Menasseh had
personally given him of the dire straits of the Jews in Poland, Sweden,
and the Holy Land, and of the cruelties inflicted on them in Spain and
Portugal.[93] Moreover, his patriotism revolted at the idea that
Protestant England should be _particeps criminis_ in a policy of
oppression which was so peculiarly identified with Papistical error.
Thus impressed, he cared little for the outcries of the pamphleteers or
the nervous scruples of his councillors, and he set himself to force on
a prompt solution. At his instance a motion was made “That the Jews
deserving it may be admitted into this nation to trade and traffic and
dwell amongst us as Providence shall give occasion,”[94] and this,
together with the petition of Menasseh and his “Humble Addresses,” was
at once referred to a Committee. At the same time it was made clear to
that body that the Protector expected an early report.[95]
So much is evident from the fact that the Committee met the same
afternoon and reported the next morning. Its task was not an easy one.
The feeling of the Council was by no means hostile to the Jews, but it
had no enthusiasm for their cause, and it probably felt that an
extension of official toleration beyond the limits of Christianity was a
hazardous experiment. On the other hand, it was no longer possible for
it to express this feeling in the same unceremonious fashion as had been
done in the case of Dormido. The Jewish question had become the question
of the day owing to Menasseh’s visit. Public feeling had been deeply
stirred by it, and Cromwell had placed it in the forefront of his
personal solicitude. Some action was necessary. The Committee seems to
have discreetly resolved that the wisest course to pursue was one which
would absolve it of responsibility, and leave Cromwell and the outside
public to fight it out between them. Accordingly it reported that it
felt itself incompetent to offer any advice to the Council, and it
suggested that the views of the nation should be ascertained by the
summoning of a Conference of representative Englishmen who might assist
it in framing a report.
This resolution was duly reported to the Council on the following day,
when Cromwell was again present. How little the Protector estimated the
difficulties in his path is shown by the fact that the Committee’s
recommendation was at once acted upon. John Lisle, Sir Charles Wolseley,
and Sir Gilbert Pickering, three members of the Committee notoriously
devoted to Cromwell, were instructed to meet the Lord President the same
afternoon, and draw up a list of the personages to be summoned to the
proposed Conference.[96] The list was duly presented to the Council on
the following morning, and, under the vigilant eye of the Protector,
approved. At the same time the terms of a circular convening the
Conference were agreed upon, and the 4th December was fixed for the
meeting.[97]
Nothing is more significant than the rapidity with which these steps
were taken. On Tuesday the 13th November Menasseh’s petition was sprung
on the reluctant Council. On the following Thursday summonses to a
National Conference were being sent out from Whitehall, the Council
having meanwhile held three meetings, at all of which the Jewish
question was discussed, and a Committee specially charged with the
question having held two further meetings. In all this we may clearly
trace the personal insistence of the Protector.
Bruited abroad through the congregations of the divines and the
constituents of the politicians and merchants to whom the summonses to
the Conference had been addressed, the question of the Readmission of
the Jews now came to the forefront of national politics. Amid
considerable popular excitement, the Conference met in the Council
Chamber at Whitehall[98] on the first Tuesday in December.
It was a notable gathering—one of the most notable in the whole history
of the Commonwealth. The statesmen present were the most eminent on the
active list of the moment. There was Henry Lawrence, the Lord President,
with four of his civilian colleagues on the Council, Sir Gilbert
Pickering, Sir Charles Wolseley, Lisle the regicide, and Francis Rous.
Close by was Walter Strickland, the diplomatist, who had represented the
Commonwealth at the Hague, and had shared with Oliver St. John the
honours and mortifications of the famous mission of 1651. In the same
inner circle were John Lambert, “the army’s darling,” and one of the
most brilliant of Cromwell’s veterans, and William Sydenham, one of the
founders of the Protectorate. The law was represented by Sir John
Glynne, Chief Justice of the Upper Bench, and William Steele, Chief
Baron of the Exchequer. Lord Chief Justice St. John had also been
invited, but he astutely stayed away. Those who knew St. John must have
regarded his absence as ominous. On behalf of the mercantile community
there appeared Alderman Dethick, the Lord Mayor of London, Alderman
Cressett of the Charterhouse, Alderman Riccards, and Sheriff Thompson.
These men were official nonentities, for the real representatives of
Commerce were Sir Christopher Pack, the late Lord Mayor and the leading
mercantile authority in the country, William Kiffen, the wealthy
merchant-parson, and the regicide Owen Rowe, now deputy-governor of the
Bermuda Company.