SUBMISSION OF THE COLONIES 219 represented. The Act of 1650, with its assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament, and Willoughby's declaration, based on the established constitutional rights of Englishmen, illustrate the dilemma of the old colonial Empire. But it is characteristic of the political methods of the race that this dilemma, although never escaped, never became troublesome except when complicated with a dispute over material interests. That dispute, in the present instance, related to trade, and the Barbadians concluded their manifesto by placing on record their gratitude to the Dutch for commercial benefits received at Dutch hands.1 Without this, it is doubtful whether Willoughby would have obtained much support; for the royalist faction, although energetic, was small, and there was among the planters hardly one genuine adherent of the proprietary claims which he represented. Ayscue, on arriving at Barbados, found its military strength considerable. The coastline offered few landing places, and Willoughby had under arms seven or eight times as many men as the admiral could hope to disembark. A pause of three months ensued, during which the pressure of blockade did its work. At the outset Ayscue seized a number of Dutch merchantmen whom he found trading in contravention of the Act of 1650. As time went on, the planters saw themselves faced with ruin, and the moderates among them, with motives rather economic than political, at length compelled Willoughby to yield. The articles of surrender, signed on 11 January 1652, provided that the island should receive a governor appointed from home, but that there should be no taxation save that imposed by the Assembly, and that trade with friendly nations should be free. The sense of the latter phrase was left undefined, and was in practice interpreted as subject to the Acts of 1650 and 1651. Free trade with foreigners, therefore, meant trade conducted solely in English ships. The colonists afterwards protested, but there can be little doubt that they had understood the condition; it had been vital to them to get rid of the existing blockade, even at the expense of agreeing to a future restriction which might not be seriously enforced. Willoughby and other extremists were banished, the proprietary rights were annulled, and Barbados was left under the governorship of Daniel Searle, one of Ayscue's fellow-commissioners. Bermuda had abandoned the revolt on hearing that the expedition was at sea, and Antigua's submission quickly followed that of Barbados. A small squadron with a separate body of commissioners entered Chesapeake Bay in March 1652. Berkeley and the ultraRoyalists of Virginia made a show of resistance, but the public opinion of the colony was against them, and articles were signed without hostilities. They included the same clauses on freedom of trade and taxation as the Barbados agreement, and Richard Bennett, one of 1 See Schomburgk, Sir R., History of Barbados; Davis, N. D., Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados; and Harlow, V. T., Hist. of Barbados, 1625–85, chap. ii. the parliamentary commissioners, became governor. But the Interregnum statesmen showed little interest in the internal affairs of Virginia when once she had acknowledged their authority, and Bennett's successors until the Restoration were elected by the Assembly. No objection was raised even to Berkeley's residence in the colony, and he remained as a private individual until he resumed office under Charles II. A single warship ensured the submission of Maryland, which also was left thereafter very much to its own devices. The Chesapeake Plantations, penetrated in all directions by navigable creeks, offered conditions the exact opposite to those presented by the convex coastline of Barbados. A few cruisers could paralyse resistance, and there was no point in imposing harsh terms upon colonists who admitted its futility. The subjugation of the colonies provided the first example since their foundation of the employment of the Navy as a link of empire. It may be regarded as an important branch of the new imperial policy which was taking shape and which was to be developed after the Restoration. On the other policies laid down in the Act of 1650, it may be said that, having established in theory the principle of parliamentary supremacy, the Commonwealth made little attemptnone, indeed, outside Bermuda and the Caribbean islands-to interfere in practice with local autonomy; that it did partially annul the chartered rights conferred by the Stuart prerogative, abolishing completely those of Carlisle and Willoughby, suspending those of Lord Baltimore, and reconstructing the Bermuda Company, but leaving untouched the privileges of Massachusetts; and that it made serious but incomplete attempts to put in practice those clauses of the Navigation Acts that affected colonial trade. The efficacy of those attempts is a debated question which is probably incapable of settlement. All that can be said is that there was some enforcement and some evasion of the monopoly granted to English shipping.1 The chief imperial interest of the Commonwealth is in the framing of a domestic policy for the Empire; the interest of the Protectorate lies in the relations of the Empire towards foreign Powers. Here also some principles emerge which can be traced as of more or less continuous application, helping to elucidate some of the transactions of the eighteenth century. Between the domestic and foreign policies, Anglo-Dutch relations form a connecting link, since the Dutch, although foreigners, had entrenched themselves so deeply within the boundaries of the Empire as almost to share the interests of its subjects. The Dutch have often been thought of as one of the great colonising nations of the world, but the truth is that they were not pre-eminent as colonists, nor even as rulers of native dependencies, save for one purpose, that of trade. Trade was the means and the end of Dutch greatness, and Dutchmen overseas lacked both the religious fervour 1 Beer, pp. 391-9. THE DUTCH IN THE ATLANTIC 221 which palliated the gold lust of the Spanish pioneers, and the capacity for establishing new polities of the parent type which rooted the English at so many points in the West in the space of a single generation. As against these deficiencies, the Dutch had an unsurpassed faculty for recognising and seizing the strategic positions of world trade, for exploiting the services of native races, and for developing those business methods which enabled them to enter into the fruits of the colonial enterprise of others. The history of the Atlantic area in the seventeenth century justifies these remarks. The Dutch colonies in it were few and feeble: the progress of New Amsterdam, with its 7000 inhabitants after fifty years of effort, cannot compare with that of New England; in the West Indies the Dutch produced no such lusty communities as Barbados and St Christopher; and in Brazil they failed to establish a colony by conquest, although sea power and initial success gave them every advantage. But they did succeed in planting an excellent system of trading posts. In that capacity New Amsterdam was a success, attracting to itself the produce of its populous English neighbours; so also were St Martin and St Eustatius, adjoining the English and French Antilles, and Curaçoa, giving facilities for an illicit trade on the Spanish Main. In the mouths of several Guiana rivers the Dutch built fortified factories where they collected valuable wares from the natives. And in West Africa they ousted both Portuguese and English from the best slaving stations, capturing Elmina in 1637 after Portugal had held it for close on two centuries. The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, presided over these activities. Like most chartered companies it failed as a patron of colonies, but it did succeed in its maritime operations against Spain and Portugal and went far towards realising the policy of monopolising the trade of the Atlantic whilst leaving others to colonise its shores. Enough has already been said to show that the Commonwealth's determination to be master of its own colonies and of their trade contained the seeds of a quarrel with the Dutch; and on more general grounds there was the certainty of rivalry if the maritime advance of England should fulfil the promise of its promoters. The mercantilist habit of mind, which regarded commerce as a kind of warfare, was bound to accentuate this tendency. Politics moved in the same direction. The stadholder, William II, succeeding to his office just as the treaties of 1647-8 brought the Thirty Years' War, and with it the Dutch-Spanish contest, to a close, was known to be dissatisfied with the peace. He wished to join France in still further humiliating Spain; both he and the French court had personal reasons for seeking to avenge Charles I; and France was already virtually at war with England upon the sea. These circumstances, coupled with the Portuguese patronage of Prince Rupert in the early part of 1650, seemed to indicate a coalition of three Powers against England and Spain, 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 1 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. |