The Idea of a Protestant Foreign Policy

Abstract

IN ENGLISH HISTORIOGRAPHY “the idea of a Protestant foreign policy” may be referred to the concept of Oliver Cromwell’s diplomacy as being inspired more by religious than by commercial or geopolitical considerations. As such it implies condemnation. With the eccentric exception of Carlyle, historians writing since the middle part of the nineteenth century have called Cromwell’s foreign policy Protestant principally as an aid to pointing out, and explaining, its deficiencies. This interpretation has had for its theme that Cromwell’s view of the European situation was anachronistically orientated toward that of Elizabeth’s day, or at least of the Thirty Years’ War, when religious antipathies were more relevant to national interests. In consequence the words “Elizabethan” and “anachronistic” have been used here as virtual synonyms for “Protestant.” Gardiner made the identification explicitly: “His mind still worked on the lines of the Elizabethan period, when the championship of Protestantism was imposed on Englishmen by interest as well as by duty.”¹ The idea is that Cromwell, pursuing this “chimera,”² was led to neglect real problems, such as the trade rivalry of the Dutch and the danger of French domination of the Continent, for involvement in a Spanish war destructive of English commerce, and an alliance with France detrimental to the balance of power.