252 APPENDIX I that his biographers have found no leisure for his deal- ings with the East India Company. Yet the manuscript records attest how decisive those dealings were. The East India trade ceases to be a pawn sacrificed to kings and queens in the game of royal marriages. It begins to stand out as a national interest, to be maintained by European treaties and enforced by a European war. In 1640, when the gov- ernor of the Company had rebuked " the generality " for their slack subscriptions notwithstanding the king's promises, they replied, according to the Ms. Court Book: " Until they shall see something acted by the King and State, men will not be persuaded to under- write a new stock.' ' They were now to come under a ruler chary of promise, but in action intrepid. Cromwell found the Dutch triumphant in Europe and Asia, our Indian relations with the Portuguese still left to the haphazard of local conventions on the Bom- bay coast, and Amboyna unavenged. He enforced from Portugal an open trade for the English in the East; from Holland he wrung the long-denied redress for the torture and judicial slaughter of Englishmen in 1623, together with the restoration of the island then seized by the Dutch. Chief of all, he definitely imposed on the Company the principle of a permanent joint stock, on which it continued until its trade was thrown open in the nineteenth century. Under Cromwell's charter of 1657 was raised the first subscription destined not to be dissolved, but to grow into the permanent capital of the East India Company. The corporation passed,
