In 1652 our country began to reap the fruits of the costly efforts it
had made to obtain good government. A central authority was at last
established, stronger than any which had existed since Elisabeth,
and one which extended over Scotland and Ireland, no less than over
England. The ecclesiastical and dynastic aims of the Stuart monarchy
had been replaced by a national policy, in which the interests of
the people of Great Britain sprang to the first place. The immediate
consequence of this union of vigour and patriotism, in the government,
was the self-assertion of England as a commercial, and therefore as a
naval power. This awakened spirit of conscious strength meant war with
the Dutch, who while England was pursuing ecclesiastical ends, had
possessed themselves of the trade of the world. War accordingly broke
out early in 1652. Even before it came to real fighting, the war of
pamphlets had recommenced. The prohibition of Salmasius' _Defensio
regia_ annulled itself as a matter of course, and Salmasius was free
to prepare a second _Defensio_ in answer to Milton. For the most
vulnerable point of the new English Commonwealth, was through the
odium excited on the continent against regicide. And the quarter
from which the monarchical pamphlets were hurled against the English
republic, was the press of the republic of the United Provinces,
the country which had set the first example of successful rebellion
against its lawful prince.

Before Salmasius' reply was ready, there was launched from the Hague,
in March, 1652, a virulent royalist piece in Latin, under the title of
_Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum_ (Cry of the King's blood to Heaven
against the English parricides). Its 160 pages contained the
usual royalist invective in a rather common style of hyperbolical
declamation, such as that "in comparison of the execution of Charles