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in which the Dutch might hope to restore the Stuart monarchy and draw their profit from the spoils of the Atlantic. To one element in the Commonwealth such a contest seemed inevitable and not unwelcome. But on both sides there was another element. The rich province of Holland was republican in feeling and not eager to further the ambitions of the stadholder, and some of the magnates of Amsterdam worked quietly to avert war; they were profiting well by the existing state of affairs in which they were free to trade with the English colonies, and they did not realise how soon the Commonwealth meant to curtail their opportunities. In England also there was an influence for peace. To the ardent Puritans of the army, men who had no personal interest in overseas trade, war with the most Protestant nation of the continent was abhorrent. They wished rather to promote a great anti-Catholic league. To these idealists, Cromwell among them, it seemed feasible to effect a close alliance with the Dutch and to settle the oceanic differences by some delimitation of spheres of influence. The sudden death of William II in October 1650 clarified the situation. The Dutch Netherlands became fully republican and ceased to be bellicose, and the English peace party were able to despatch a mission to the Hague to negotiate an alliance.

The mission was from the outset a failure. Its leaders, Oliver St John and Walter Strickland, were annoyed by the insults of exiled Royalists who mobbed them at the Hague, and they soon made up their minds that they could effect no useful treaty with the Dutch. The English demands were in the first place for a defensive military alliance and the expulsion of the Royalists. If they could obtain these, the ambassadors were further charged to propose some form of political union between the two republics. The latter project never came under discussion, for the Dutch rejected the former as onesided: England, with the Battle of Worcester yet unfought, would claim the immediate assistance of an ally, whilst the Netherlands were in no danger of attack from any quarter. Moreover, there were no disaffected Dutchmen to be turned out of England in recompense for the expulsion of the English Royalists from Holland. The Dutch therefore countered with proposals of their own for the regulation in their favour of fishing rights in the North Sea, of the maritime law of contraband, and of colonial trade. On the latter subject, in particular, their suggestions were as inadmissible as those of the English, for they proposed a mutual freedom of trade in the American and West Indian settlements. With their own poor colonies but huge mercantile marine, they stood to gain all and give nothing in trade with the rich colonies of England and in competition with her much less advanced mercantile organisation. By midsummer of 1651 the negotiations had reached a deadlock.1

In England, suddenly awakened to the mercantile possibilities For the negotiations in detail, see Gardiner, 1, 322-9.

THE FIRST DUTCH WAR

223 of the East and the West, there were only two courses that could be pursued towards the Dutch: alliance and a division of the mercantile arenas, or war for supremacy in all of them. The religious interest had prompted the policy of alliance, now discredited; the mundane interest was thus free to force a contest. The Navigation Act of October 1651, passed a month after the pacification of the British Isles by the victory of Worcester, marks the predominance of the new attitude. It is to be regarded, however, less as a declaration of war than as a measure for strengthening the Navy for a contest considered on other grounds to be inevitable. The Dutch certainly did not take it as a cause of mortal quarrel. They had coolly infringed many an English trading regulation in the past and counted on doing so again, and they held, in common with most modern economists, that to English trade the Act would be rather damaging than the reverse.1 They were at this time curiously blind to the naval menace which had so suddenly arisen on the western side of the North Sea, and they felt few qualms about the security of their world-wide commerce; for them English sea power was the sea power of the Stuarts, well-nigh as contemptible as that of Spain or Portugal. Thus they moved without foresight into a war whose immediate causes were disputes capable of settlement by negotiation-the law of contraband, and the English claim to the salute by foreign ships in the narrow seas. The contraband question arose out of Anglo-French hostilities. English cruisers were retaliating for the depredations of the French privateers; French merchants were shipping their goods for safety in Dutch bottoms; and the English courts were condemning such cargoes as lawful prize. Goodwill, which could have adjusted the matter, was smothered by mutual contempt and aggressiveness, and when, in May 1652, a commerce-protecting squadron under Van Tromp encountered a squadron under Blake, the salute was refused, blood was shed, and the Dutch War began.

Certain outstanding circumstances of the war can alone be noticed here. The Dutch statesmen had neglected their fleet, and still more its administration, so that their capable admirals were hampered by lack of means. English trade was small compared with Dutch, and the English warships could devote most of their energy to commerce destruction, taking about 1500 prizes in the course of the two years' struggle. These injuries were proportionately the more damaging to the Dutch, since foreign trade was a necessity of their national life, whilst for England it was a source of wealth, but not yet of bare livelihood. But in one respect the great Dutch trade proved a fighting asset, for it ensured a plentiful supply of seamen, whilst the English fleets were often undermanned. This fact made a lasting impression on English statesmen and confirmed them in the policy of the Navigation Acts. Geographical conditions, as has often been pointed out,

1 See Clark, G. N., in History, vII, 282-6.

were permanently in favour of England, which lay athwart the tracks of Dutch commerce. But to this there was an exception in the Baltic trade. There the Dutch secured the advantage and in January 1653 signed a treaty with Denmark whereby the latter Power undertook to exclude the English from the Sound and from the supplies of naval stores to which it formed the only access. This difficulty caused the Commonwealth not only to seek friendship with Sweden but also to stimulate the production of naval stores in New England and other suitable colonies, a policy which led to a system of bounties and other special aids enduring into the nineteenth century. These measures never completely solved the problem, and until wood gave place to iron, and sail to steam, the Baltic remained a prime anxiety with English foreign ministers.

During the war Cromwell expelled the Long Parliament and with the aid of the army leaders established himself as Protector. At once the alternative policy, from which Puritan thought had momentarily swung away, came again to the fore; and the Protector determined to end the Dutch War as soon as possible on the ground that it constituted a betrayal of religion. Haggling over terms delayed the end for a year (until April 1654), for the English knew quite well that their enemies needed peace, and were determined to make them pay for it. At length a treaty was signed providing for a defensive alliance, the continuance of the salute in British waters, the exclusion of the Stuarts from the United Provinces, the maintenance of the Navigation Acts, and moderate compensation for past injuries suffered by the London East India Company. The peace reflected the fact that the Dutch had been beaten but not routed, and it was disappointing to Cromwell in that it contained no promise of the aggressive Protestant coalition which appealed so strongly to his imagination. Its most valuable concomitant was an agreement with Denmark (September 1654) abolishing the privileged Dutch position in the Baltic and providing that English shipping should pay no higher dues in the Sound than the shipping of any other non-Baltic nation. The Dutch War had embarrassed the finances of the English Government, but had inflicted less economic loss upon the country than might have been expected from the severity of the fighting. It had not wholly decided the question of ultimate maritime supremacy, for Cromwell desired to utilise Dutch sea power rather than to extirpate it. A proposal drawn up with his approval during the negotiations reveals his own ideal of an oceanic policy. It embodies the scheme of the Protestant League against the Catholic Powers, a league to be supported by the joint fleets of England and the Netherlands, monopolising the colonies and oceanic trade of the world. The Dutch were to buy out the English East India Company and to enjoy the whole commerce of the Indian Ocean. The two Powers were to conquer all the shores of America and West Africa, the slaving posts of the latter being divided, and all

ENGLAND AND SPANISH AMERICA

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America except Brazil falling to England. So might Antichrist be chained with golden fetters of his own forging, in the manner dreamed of by the Elizabethans. The plan was idealistic, but it rested on brute force, and the force would inevitably have been diverted to baser ends; for Cromwell was too old and too much hampered to have remained long enough in control. Perhaps he was himself conscious that it was all a dream, for he did not persist, and the war ended in the prosaic manner already described.1

If an Anglo-Dutch partition of oceanic wealth was impracticable, Cromwell was nevertheless determined to advance the Protestant interest in Europe and to use for that purpose the land and sea power which had fallen into his hands. This gives a unity to his foreign and imperial policies, and causes the latter to assume some elements of a permanent nature. It has been held that Cromwell carved his way to power on domestic issues and then mishandled international questions of whose bearings he was ignorant. In the oceanic sphere this is unjust. His mind was steeped in the Elizabethan tradition, and he had a long practical acquaintance with colonial affairs. In European politics, it may be admitted, his views were out of date, for he still thought in terms of the religious conflict which had really ceased to be the mainspring of men's actions, and failed to realise that the Counter-Reformation had spent its force whilst the nationalist ambitions of France were to dominate the future. In reality the oceanic factor redeemed his policy from futility, for here he was in accord with a permanent English instinct, rooted in the past and reaching forward into the times to come. An enumeration of a succession of British adventures will illustrate the continuity. The Elizabethan raids in the Caribbean; the establishment, in the period 1604-42, of colonies in that area and near its entrance and its exit, of Guiana posts, of half-a-dozen island settlements, of Virginia and Bermuda; the discussion in the same period of plans for an English West India Company; Cromwell's "Western Design"; the Darien Scheme; the South Sea Company and its Asiento concession; the War of Jenkins's Ear-these are all links in a chain, successive aspects of an abiding ambition to divert to British coffers the wealth of Spanish America. Cromwell could not know the future, but he knew the past and based his actions on that knowledge. He had been a close associate of Pym and the Earl of Warwick and other Puritan leaders, who had formed the Providence Company in 1630, and in colonising that island had thrust an English wedge deep into the Spanish monopoly of the western Caribbean. Again, under Warwick he had been a member of the parliamentary commission for Plantations formed in 1643. Warwick had tried hard to hold the English Caribbean islands to their allegiance, had patronised privateers who preyed upon the Spanish colonial trade, and had sent out pioneers to 1 For the Dutch and Danish negotiations see Gardiner, vol. I, chaps. xxx, xxxi.

CHBE I

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colonise Tobago and Trinidad in 1638-47. Warwick and William Jessop, the secretary of the defunct Providence Company, had borne a leading part in organising the expedition which recovered Barbados in 1651-2, whilst Cromwell had been a member of the Committee of Trade and Plantations sitting at that time. And now, at the beginning of the Protectorate, Warwick, still the friend of the Protector, was resigning the lead into his hands. These were the bases of the "Western Design". The whole policy of the Protectorate was to weaken Spain, the Catholic Power, and to divert her colonial wealth to Protestant uses. On the European side it was but slaying the slain, but on the oceanic, if for Catholic we read Bourbon, and for Protestant, British, the doctrine was that preached by the elder Pitt in 1739.

Cromwell saw the goal when he became Protector, but he had to do more than close the Dutch War in order to clear the way. His relations with Spain were complicated by those with France, for the two Powers were still engaged in the struggle which for the rest of Europe had ended in 1648. At the beginning of the Commonwealth, France had shown violent hostility towards the Puritans, whilst Spain, hating them fully as much, had yet offered them the hand of friendship. The stadholder's ambitions were directed as much against Spain as against England, and France and Portugal were obvious allies ready to cooperate with him. Spain therefore recognised the Commonwealth in 1650 and facilitated Blake's blockade of Lisbon by allowing him to base his fleet on Spanish ports; at the same time her anti-Puritan feeling showed itself in the shielding of the royalist murderers of Ascham, the Commonwealth envoy at Madrid. The death of the stadholder in the autumn of 1650 relieved Spanish anxieties for a time, yet it left the alliance of England still worth courting, for England could intervene with decisive effect in the Franco-Spanish struggle in Flanders. Many Puritans were on religious grounds more bitter against France than against Spain, for the former was thought to be persecuting her Huguenots whilst the latter had now no Protestant subjects to oppress. As the French depredations upon English commerce continued, it was an open question in the first two years of the Protectorate whether the anti-Catholic onslaught of England should be directed against Spain or France. Cromwell kept them both in uncertainty. Perhaps if Spain would have granted liberty of worship to Englishmen and free navigation in the West-"the two eyes" of Philip IV-the Protector would have forborne to revive the Elizabethan policy to which his own mind leaned. Meanwhile both Spaniards and French had been given cause to ponder the uses of England's sea power, for in September 1652 Blake had destroyed a

1 See Newton, A. P., Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, especially the final chapter. This seems to modify some of the views expressed in F. Strong's "Causes of Cromwell's West Indian Expedition", American Hist. Review, IV, 228-45.

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