Under the two first Stuart Kings of England there were quarrels with the Dutch that nearly led to war. The Dutch colonists and traders in the Far Eastern seas had used high-handed measures to prevent English competition. Nearer home there were disputes as to the right claimed by the King's ships to make any foreign ship lower her flag and salute the English ensign. But it was not till the days of the Commonwealth that the first war broke out. It was a conflict between two republics. Its immediate cause was Cromwell's Navigation Act, which deprived the Dutch of a considerable part of their carrying trade. The first fight took place before the formal declaration of war, and was the result of a Dutch captain refusing the customary salute to a Commonwealth ship.
In this, as in the later conflicts with Holland, while England was still able to live on its own products, the Dutch were in the position in which we are now, for the command of the sea was vital to their daily life. Their whole wealth depended on their great fishing fleets in the North Sea; their Indiamen which brought the produce of the East to Northern Europe through the Straits of Dover; and the carrying trade, in which they were the carriers of the goods of all Central Europe, which the Rhine and their canals brought into their ports. The mere prolongation of a naval war meant endless loss to the merchants and shipowners of Holland.
The development of ocean-borne commerce had led to great improvements in shipbuilding in the three-quarters of a century since the days of the Armada, and the fleets that met in the Channel and the North Sea during Cromwell's Dutch war were far more powerful than those of Medina-Sidonia and Howard. The nucleus of the English fleet had been formed by the permanent establishment created by Charles I, but the ships for which he had levied the "Ship Money" were used against him in the Civil War, for the seafaring population and the people of the ports mostly sided with the Parliament. The operations against Rupert in the Mediterranean, the war with the Algerines, and the expeditions to the West Indies had helped to form for the Commonwealth a body of experienced officers and seamen, and in Blake, Cromwell had at least one admiral of the first rank. The fleets on both sides sometimes numbered as many as a hundred sail. The guns mounted in broadside tiers had come to be recognized as the weapons that must decide a sea-fight, and in this first Dutch war we see on both sides attempts to use tactical formations that would give the best scope to gun power.
Though a battle was always likely to develop into an irregular mêlée, in which the boldest exchanged broadsides and the shirkers hung back, there were attempts to fight in regular lines, the ships giving each other mutual support. Want of traditional experience, marked differences in the speed and manœuvring power of ships, and the rudimentary character of the signalling, made it difficult to keep the line, but it was early recognized as an ideal to be aimed at.
The old oar-driven galleys, with their heavy batteries in the bows and all the guns pointing ahead, went into battle, as at Lepanto, in line abreast. The broadside battleship would thus have her guns pointed at her consorts. The line abreast was used only to bear down on the enemy. The fighting formation was the line ahead. This was adopted at first as a fleet running down from windward closed upon its enemy. Unless they were actually running away, the other side would be sailing in line ahead with the wind abeam. It was soon realized that in this formation an admiral had his fleet under better control, and gradually the normal formation for fleets became line ahead, and hostile fleets either fought running on parallel courses on the same tack, or passed and repassed each other on opposite tacks. But this was the result of a long evolution, and the typically formal battles fought out by rule in the "close-hauled line ahead" belong to the eighteenth century.
The first Dutch war ended with Blake's victory off the Kentish Knock. The second war, in the days of Charles II, is best remembered in England in connection with a national disgrace, the Dutch raid on Chatham and the blockade of the Thames. This disaster was the result of a piece of almost incomprehensible folly on the part of the King and his advisers. But it came shortly after a great naval victory, the story of which is by most forgotten. It is worth telling again, if only to show that the disaster in the Thames was not the fault of the British navy, and that even under Charles II there were glorious days for our fleet. It is also interesting as a typical naval battle of the seventeenth century.
the "sovereign of the seas," launched 1637. a typical warship of the 17th century
After the painting by Vandervelde
Hostilities began in 1664 without a formal declaration of war, the conflict opening with aggressions and reprisals in the colonial sphere of action. English fleets seized Dutch trading ships on the African coast and Dutch islands in the West Indies. In North America the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, at the mouth of the Hudson, was occupied, annexed, and renamed New York in honour of His Highness the Duke of York, the brother of the King. England drifted into the war as the result of conflicts in the colonies, and was in a state of dangerous unreadiness for the struggle on the sea. "God knows how little fit we are for it," wrote Pepys, who as Secretary of the Navy knew the whole position. There was the utmost difficulty in obtaining men for the ships that were being got ready for sea. The pressgangs brought in poor creatures whom the captains described as a useless rabble. There were hundreds of desertions. Happily the Dutch preparations were also backward, and England had thus some breathing time.