Once embarked, however, Colbert manifested his spleen in his plans to overthrow the would-be tyrants of the seas. Sweden and Denmark, he urged, should be stirred up against that ferocious nation. The danger that the House of Orange might be restored and might then prove subservient to England should perhaps be countered by lending Turenne to the Dutch as their stadholder. The Mediterranean and the Baltic might be closed against the English if France were prepared to endure the loss of trade and the danger to her islands off the American coast.1 The war pursued its chequered course without decisive result or great change in the relative power of England, France and Holland on either side of the seas. Until the Dutch raided the Medway, the great strokes failed. Counting on the King of Denmark, the English hoped to seize stupendous riches from the enemy merchant fleets at Bergen, but "against... the opposition of Heaven, Dane and Dutch" they could accomplish nothing.2 The Dutch largely avenged their early losses, and by robbing their merchantmen procured the necessary sailors, but the English replied with such a muster "that the Dutch...thought that every oak in England was grown into a ship since last battle". The treaties concluded at Breda in 1667, after the manifold reverses of the English, registered concessions which could hardly have been avoided. Pulo Run, disputed for nearly half a century, was an unhealthy outpost in a region where the Dutch had proved their superiority. The principle of the mutual retention of conquests cost us Surinam (now a genuine Dutch colony), worth less than New Amsterdam, which we retained. To relax the Navigation Act so as to allow Dutch ships to transport Rhenish goods to England was elementary statesmanship. As between French and English, restitution was the basis of the peace. Criticism was provoked by the return to the French, after thirteen years' possession, of Nova Scotia (Acadia) "which hath a river three hundred miles up the country, with copper mines more than Swedeland, and Newcastle coals, the only place in America that hath coals that we know of". The recovery of Antigua, Montserrat, and our former half of St Christopher none the less far outweighed this loss according to the common scale of values of the time. To a seafaring northern nation, a sugar island was worth more than a continent in the frigid zone. Although its terms were unimportant, the peace marked a momentous change in the relationship between the three chief Powers which made it. The English were relieved of their most exaggerated fears of invasion. Charles, freed by the fall of Clarendon, could now for his own ends consort with Louis XIV, while his subjects followed 1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, VI, 245 seqq. 2 Sandwich, Apology (Colenbrander, 1, 257). 3 Colenbrander, 1, 417. Sir George Downing, cit. Pepys, Diary, 8 September 1667. GROWTH OF DANGER FROM FRANCE 315 their Protestant instinct to prefer the Dutch. The French were set free to throw their strength into the War of Devolution, an attempt to fortify their eastern frontiers at the expense of Spain, and to advance the claim of their Queen to be heiress of the Spanish Empire. The Dutch, menaced not remotely by this French advance, were powerfully impelled towards an understanding with their recent foe. A lasting entente, however, was unattainable so long as they continued to threaten English trade and to exclude the King's relations from their natural place within the State. After the Peace of Breda, the monopoly question and the Orange question were for a moment obscured by the threatening progress of the King of France. Turenne's swift conquests in Flanders and Hainault alarmed both sea powers, while the loss of Franche-Comté roused the Emperor as well as Spain. Reviving as it seemed a national and Protestant policy, the league between Dutch and English in their Triple Alliance with Sweden delighted Londoners and to all appearances immediately achieved its end (January 1668). At Aix-laChapelle Louis limited his conquests to a dozen strong places on the border of the Spanish Netherlands, and in 1668 he found it less difficult than in later years to persuade Europe of his moderation. In the four critical years which followed (1668–72), France enjoyed the advantages which flowed from her long entente with England and from her longer championship of the liberties of Europe against the Habsburgs. The menace to Spain incarnate in Louis XIV drove Spain, indeed, into a closer association with England which had important results beyond the seas. In 1670 the voluminous agreement for peace, commerce and alliance concluded at Madrid three years before was supplemented by "a treaty for the composing of differences, restraining of depredations, and establishing of peace in America". Tacitly abandoning her claim to monopoly, Spain conceded to the English the right to keep and enjoy for ever all that they possessed in the New World. While sailing to or trading in each other's ports in America remained forbidden, either King might suffer it by licence, and for a generation Spain found it profitable to tolerate much English trade.1 În contrast with the Latin Powers, the Dutch, on the other hand, suffered the consequences of their behaviour, which convinced their new allies that they designed a total monopoly of oceanic trade. Sir Josiah Child enumerates no less than fifteen trades lost by England, and these mainly to the Dutch. These include the Russia trade, where the Dutch ships are now twenty-two to one, the Greenland trade, where the Dutch and Hamburgers are perhaps five hundred to one, and such important trades as those to China and Japan, to the East Indies for nutmegs, cloves and mace, to Surinam, and in great part the Plate trade from Cadiz and the trade in Spanish 1 Coxe, W., Memoirs of...Sir Robert Walpole, 1, 557-60. wools from Bilbao. Even "that vast and notorious trade of fishing for white herrings upon our own coast" and "the trades of Scotland and Ireland, two of our own kingdoms, the Dutch have bereaved us of and in effect wholly engrossed to themselves". Were they freed from their French fears, he concludes, they might be to the English as severe taskmasters as the Athenians to the lesser trading-cities of Greece.1 The Africa and East India Companies furnished an unfailing supply of local quarrels. "For all this noise", said Clifford at the rejoicings for the Triple Alliance, "we must have another war with the Dutch." Next year the rumour ran that the most prudent English statesmen had urged waiting only until France and Spain were by the ears.3 "If we must fall out with the Dutch", wrote the architect of the Triple Alliance, "we can never do it in more nor in better company; for I know not whether we are more dissatisfied with them at this time than France and Spain and Sweden and the Bishops of Cologne and Münster... Sweden for refusing to secure any part of their subsidies, and Spain for pressing them to secure the whole by a hypothèque of the upper quarter of Gelderland. "4 From the standpoint of national necessity, however, the grievances of all other Powers against the republic were as transient and unimportant as those of France were the reverse. Even England might accept Temple's verdict that, drunk or sober, the Dutch showed zeal for her alliance, and that they had no real design to exclude her from the India trade.5 But to Louis and to Colbert it had become clear that Messieurs les Marchands blocked both the lines upon which France might endeavour to advance. The keys to the treasure-houses of the Indies, no less than the key to Brussels, lay in Amsterdam. Hence while Colbert waged a tariff war and created a mighty navy, Louis taxed all the resources of diplomacy to isolate the obstructive Power. By what base means he succeeded in winning the King of England is well known. The secret Treaty of Dover, which promised Zealand to this country, involved English policy in treachery only paralleled by that which followed the fall of Marlborough. Arlington was compelled to refuse the accession of the Emperor to the Triple Alliance, to sacrifice the Duke of Lorraine to France, to inflict cruel wounds on the faithful Temple and to betray Buckingham, his fellow-servant. The regular and the subterranean diplomacy of France were reinforced by the clumsy but significant arguments of Colbert. The English, he declared for Charles's ear, ought not to be allied with a Government of 1 A new discourse of trade (2nd edn. London, 1694), Preface. 2 Cooke, G. W. (ed.), The life of the first Earl of Shaftesbury by Mr B. Martyn and Dr Kippis, p. 360. 3 Pepys, Diary, 20 March 1669. 4 Temple, Letters, p. 179. 5 Ibid. p. 184. Barbour, V., Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, pp. 171 seqq. 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, 11, 153. 2 Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 11, 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. 3 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. 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, II, ii, 557. • Ibid. m, ii, 79. |