ANTI-DUTCH DESIGNS 317 merchants like the Dutch, a Government which was all for commerce and one whose flourishing condition could only too easily display the difference between a republic and a monarchy in that regard, while the French alliance would have the opposite effect. He derided English jealousy of the French power by sea, declaring that the Dutch alone had dared to equal that of England in the late war, and that as their commerce increased so would their sea power in proportion.1 These arguments, historically interesting as they may be, were unnecessary to convince the King and powerless to convince the people. The Dutch were soon to utter a more cogent appeal when they declared that three years after their downfall England's turn would come.2 In 1672, however, royal policy prevailed in England as in France. "Surely", wrote Evelyn when the piratical war broke out, "this was a quarrel slenderly grounded and not becoming Christian neighbours." Among the factors which determined Charles's declaration of war, the hope of seizing Dutch ships, Dutch colonies and Dutch commerce occupied a leading place. The attempt on the Smyrna fleet failed, and Southwold Bay was indecisive, but for a time in 1672 it seemed as though the forces which Louis had marshalled could do with the republic as they pleased. The small merchant State, whose great men were at variance, was overwhelmed by Turenne and Condé, supported by England, Sweden, Münster and Cologne. Colbert, who had in all good faith directed the bishops to invite "Heaven's blessings upon an enterprise so just and lawful as this", was called upon to formulate terms of peace which should satisfy the needs of Louis' commerce. His reply illuminates both the political and the commercial theory of the age. The simplest plan, he pointed out, would be to annex both the Dutch and their commerce to France. Failing this, their commerce with France itself might be taxed and that with the northern nations so hampered as to favour French competition. Their transactions at the bar of Cadiz he regarded as immune from interference, but their ships could be kept out of the Mediterranean, and ten to twelve million livres of trade with the Levant might thus be wrested from them. Half that sum or more, the price of negroes and gold dust and other goods exported from Africa to America, might be secured by taking Curaçoa, Tobago, St Eustatius and a fort on the Guinea Coast. The great trade with the Indies, no less considerable than that with the Levant, could be halved by taking one of the Moluccas and a "place" or two upon the coast of Malabar. All this would flood France with bullion and thereby swell the revenues of the King. As posterity can never forget, this programme of spoliation was frustrated by de Ruyter, whose strategy foiled the French and English 1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, vi, 268. 3 Diary, 12 March 1672. ¿ Colenbrander, Bescheiden, II, 153. 2 Colenbrander, Bescheiden, II, 165. fleets,1 and by William of Orange, who proved himself a worthy member of "the noblest succession of heroes that we find in any history". He was aided by the natural reaction of Europe against the monarch who could contrive such a war and the minister who could wish to end it on such rapacious terms. William never gave greater proof than in 1672-4 of a self-control in which his partisans had shown themselves lamentably lacking. He refused alike to make himself king, to purchase a fatal peace, and to embarrass his future by a perhaps unprofitable English marriage. Having given the Dutch a rallying-point and a policy, he first secured the help of his kinsman the Great Elector, and afterwards that of Denmark, the Emperor and Spain. His own advent to power had removed the English King's chief grievance. Early in 1674, the deeper instincts of England prevailing over jealousies of trade, she relapsed into a neutrality more and more menacing to France. Although the French neglected nothing that could keep her neutral, the inevitable consequence of her defection was that as between the belligerents the Dutch became superior at sea. Colbert trembled for the coasts both of France and of America, though in fact his newly created fleet proved by no means negligible in warfare, and the French developed and profited by a taste for privateering. Among the first effects of the struggle upon colonial and commercial competition was the interruption of the French efforts to build up their Canadian dominion. In a year in which the King had to maintain 200,000 soldiers and a numerous fleet, he could send the colony only a consignment of sixty girls.3 If, in 1678, England had declared war, his plan was to suspend all commerce, and make every available merchantman a privateer. The treaties of Nymegen, like the war which they concluded, were overwhelmingly continental in character. Restoring Holland, and marking another stage in the long retreat of Spain, they brought Louis as a European monarch to the height of his power. If, however, contemporaries thought it no hyperbole to speak of his ambition of a fifth universal monarchy, this must be ascribed in part to the promise of the fleet, which could be brought by following Colbert's methods to a strength of some eight hundred vessels with as many men as might be needed. The French even boasted that de Ruyter had been vanquished by Duquesne, and in a few years Spain, Genoa and Algiers were all made to feel the growing reality of their naval power. On the other hand, a war which had added Franche-Comté and many northern towns to France, and which had enabled Louis to throw his aegis magnificently over Sweden, owed its brilliance and its success not to the sea but to the land. It had confirmed in the 1 Custance, Admiral Sir R., A study of War, pp. 30-42. 2 Burnet, p. 703. 3 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, m, ii, 557. ▲ Ibid. m, ii, 79. FRENCH AGGRESSION AND WARS ON LAND 319 autocrat of France that prejudice against naval warfare which showed itself in his omission to fulfil his many promises to honour the new naval arsenals with a visit.1 Not until 1680 was he astonished at Dunkirk, as Bismarck in his old age at Hamburg.2 Louvois, rather than Colbert, stood first in Louis' favour, and aggression on the eastern frontier rather than overseas occupied the royal mind. That France, which had defied Europe in a war of aggression, continued her encroachments in time of peace, lent additional weight to the third great consequence of the war, the rise of William of Orange. The Protestant prince, scion of a great German house, who had saved Holland, who protected the neighbouring provinces of Spain, and whose marriage with Mary of York (1677) gave him great significance in England, seemed to be marked out more clearly year by year as the predestined champion of Europe against France. William's attitude towards colonies and commerce was therefore a historical factor of high importance. It may be safely said that while no Dutch statesman could ignore the ocean, and least of all he who had advocated a national flight to the East Indies to escape from servitude to France, William was throughout his life compelled to think first in terms of Europe. His personal preference, like that of Louis, was for the land, and he lacked interest in other continents. Thus the loss of the directing mind of Colbert on the one side was not accentuated by the gain upon the other of a statesman with great designs of empire. The Dutch people continued to follow those instincts and appetites which had made their overseas position, but they were denied the interference of their only statesman who was strong enough to interfere. The expansion of England under the later Stuarts likewise owed little to political direction. Charles II, it is true, took an interest in such matters; James was a gold hunter and a keen seaman; Clarendon understood the importance of Plantations; Shaftesbury wrote ably on colonial questions; and the Committee of Trade was not always, as the Dutch ambassador sneered, composed of men wholly ignorant of it. But if it cannot be maintained that, from 1664 to 1678, England was steered by a man or body aiming steadily at power overseas, still less can this be said of the tumultuous and tragic years which culminated in the Revolution. Of them in general the words were true which Burnet applied to the passive acceptance of the bombardment of Genoa in 1684: "We were now pursuing other designs, from which it was resolved that nothing from beyond sea should divert us". England had profited by four years of neutrality and French favour to acquire a great carrying-trade, but Parliament 1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, VII, p. xlvii. 2 Lavisse, Histoire de France, vII, ii, 263; Bülow, Prince von, Imperial Germany, p. 127. 3 Evelyn, Diary, 5 February 1657. Burnet, p. 384. forced the abandonment of Tangier, while James did not hesitate to trample on prosperous Virginia. Between the Peace of Nymegen and the outbreak of a general European war in 1689, therefore, commercial and colonial rivalry played a secondary part as compared with the constitutional convulsions of England and the assertion of autocracy by France. While Charles was struggling with the Protestant extremists about Exclusion, Louis was annexing one German city after another in what is known as the "war in peace". His capture of Luxemburg, for example, though primarily defensive, was esteemed to make the French masters of all the Netherlands, to give them entrance into Germany, and to open the way to universal monarchy.1 Yet England did not move, and in 1684 the Emperor sanctioned for twenty years many of the so-called réunions. Not until the oppression of the Huguenots and of the Piedmontese Protestants had seemed to denote "an universal design to destroy all that would not go to mass throughout Europe", did the English, the Dutch and other Protestant peoples feel that a new effort must be made. The brutal treatment of Genoa and the brutal treatment of the Pope helped to unite Powers of both religions in William's League of Augsburg (1686). The English Revolution and Louis' attempt to restore the Catholic James II by force expanded this league into the Grand Alliance, which from 1689 to 1697 arrayed Europe with unprecedented unanimity in the defence of her liberties against aggressive France. 2 The menace to Europe was the greater in that France could now employ for aggression the strength which she owed to Colbert. Colbert himself had died in 1683, after witnessing the failure of many of his schemes and the loss of his prime influence with the King. Neither his own dejection at the last nor the manifest error of some of his ideas should disguise the importance of his contribution to colonial and commercial France. His improvement of communications, establishment of free ports and reduction of the rate of interest at home qualified his country to compete with foreign producers. No less important was the improved status which he gained for French merchants, thus opening their calling to men of gentle birth. His fleet could not but make a powerful bid for supremacy at sea and might well become irresistible. With its support, the imposing empire of France beyond the seas and the considerable machinery of companies devised for its exploitation must play a great part in history. In France, moreover, where either the people needed the initiative of the Crown or were prevented by its obtrusive activity from developing initiative of their own, Colbert's stream of decrees and subsidies had produced an appreciable harvest. "Venetian glass, Brussels lace, the stocking industry, fine cloth of Louviers, of Sédan, of Abbeville, common cloth of Elbeuf, Caudebec hats, Tours 1 Evelyn, Diary, 26 May 1684. 2 Ibid. 5 May 1686. STRUGGLE BETWEEN FRANCE AND EUROPE 321 and Lyons silks, tapestry of la Savonnerie, of Beauvais, of Aubusson, the perfecting of clock-making, the cultivation of madder, various products of iron, of steel, of leather, of clay"-all these owed their development to him.1 The war (1688-97), whose beginning was marked by a short-lived French ascendancy at sea, produced many colonial and commercial fluctuations and disasters, while in India English progress was crowned by the foundation of the station which soon became Calcutta. In America, King William's war compelled the several colonies to take counsel together for defence against the French. At home, the new pre-eminence of Parliament within the constitution found expression in the formation and pervasive activity of a Board of Trade. Captures and conquests were made by both sides on and beyond the seas, yet on the whole both the war and the peace were conspicuous for the unqualified predominance of Europe. The keynote of the Treaty of Ryswick indeed was mutual restitution. The chief colonial nations, the French on one side and the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English on the other, settled their differences without the exchange of territories overseas. French rule was recognised in Nova Scotia, and France recovered Pondicherry from the Dutch. Almost a decade of war, none the less, had developed British sea power, which rested on a commercial marine, and British colonies, which represented a genuine migration, in contrast with their respective French competitors, which depended upon the authority and the initiative of the Crown. Seven years had passed since the death of Colbert's son, as brilliant as his father had been obscure, the Seignelay who had developed the maritime ambitions carefully inculcated from his birth. His country had again won laurels upon the land, while the attendant exhaustion and expense rendered her incapable of reverting immediately to Colbert's policy overseas. Louis, indeed, might hope that the approaching dissolution of the Spanish empire would compensate France for every sacrifice, but the studied moderation of his peace terms could no longer regain him the reputation forfeited in 1672 and in the 'eighties. He must enter the competition handicapped by the settled distrust of Europe and by the firm establishment in England of a Protestant dynasty represented by his lifelong foe. The truce between France and Europe concluded in 1697 lasted in fact for little less than four years. These were of necessity filled with negotiations and preparations for disposing of the Spanish empire. When Mexico and Peru were at stake, it was idle to expect statesmen to absorb themselves in St Christopher or Curaçoa, while even from the trader's point of view, Spain or Naples might well surpass any conceivable gain outside of Europe. A further key to the history is 1 Chéruel, A., De l'administration de Louis XIV (1661–1672) d'après les mémoires inédits d'Ormesson, p. 94.. 2 Cf. Corbett, J. S., England in the Mediterranean, 1603-1713, II, 188, etc. CHBEI 21 |