When the news reached Cromwell, which it did Aug.

13, 1657, it affected him profoundly.

He had previously been remonstrating, as we have seen, both with the Danes and the Dutch, by letters of Milton's composition (ante pp.

272-3 and 290), trying to avert such an unseemly Protestant intervention in arrest of the Swedish King's career.

And now, having his two envoys, MEADOWS and JEPHSON, ready for the emergency, he despatched them at once to the scene of that new Swedish-Danish war in which what had hitherto been the Swedish-Polish war was to be at once engulphed.