[552] Roe to Elizabeth, 19th Aug., 20th Sept. Ibid., cccxxx. 50; cccxxxii. 1.
[553] Northumberland to the Admiralty and to Secretary Coke, Sept. 16. State Papers, Dom., cccxxxi. 55, 56.
[554] State Papers, Dom., cccxxxii. 39.
[555] Northumberland’s Journal, Ibid., cccxliii. 72; Northumberland to Nicholas, 6th October 1636. Ibid., cccxxxiii. 26. Dutch accounts vary somewhat from that given by the Earl of Northumberland. According to them, seven English men-of-war fell in with a hundred busses convoyed by five States’ warships, and the busses paid the tax and took the licenses. But when thirteen Dutch men-of-war, convoying a great herring fleet, arrived on the scene and put themselves in a position for battle, the English ships did not interfere any further and soon sheered off.
[556] An Accompt of the Convoy money, as it was delivered unto me by the Captaines emploied in that Service, vizt.: Captain Carteret, £657, Captaine Lindsey, £200, Captain Slingsby, £42, Captain Johnson, £20, Mr Skinner, £80.
[557] An Account of the Acknowledgment Money taken of the Holland Fishermen. The partiality for English gold is shown by the fact that £119, 13s. of the total was thus paid.
[558] The Dutch themselves appear to have acknowledged a payment of 20,000 florins (Muller, Mare Clausum, 274). Rapin (Hist. d’Angleterre, vii. 455) and Wagenaar (Vaderlandsche Historie, xi. 260) placed it at 30,000 florins; Larrey (Hist. d’Angleterre, d’Ecosse et d’Irlande, iv. 126) states that the Dutch concluded a treaty with Charles by which they agreed to pay him “dix mille ecus par an,” which is equivalent to the same thing; Hume (Hist. of England, ch. lii. an. 1636) says: “The Dutch were content to pay £30,000 for a license during this year.” The error is found in the earlier English historical writers. Rushworth (Collections, V. ii. 322) also states the sum as £30,000, and adds that the Dutch were willing to pay a yearly tribute for a like liberty in future. Frankland (Annals of King James and King Charles the First, 477 (1681)) says that Northumberland with his “sixty gallant ships” “commanded the Dutch busses to cease fishing until they had obtained permission from the King, which they seeming not willing and ready to do, he fired amongst them, sunk some and seized others, until they were forced to fly into his Majesty’s harbours, and desired the Lord Admiral to mediate to his Majesty for his leave for this summer, and they would pay unto his Majesty’s treasury therefor the sum of £30,000, which they did accordingly, and professed their readiness to become suppliants to his Majesty for a grant, under the condition of a yearly payment therefor for the future.” This writer seems to have confused Northumberland’s operations with those of Blake’s fleet in 1652 ([see p. 406]) or with the onslaught of the Dunkirkers in 1635. Kennet (A Complete Hist. of England, iii. 85 (1719)) repeats the mistake and puts the sum at £30,000, and so with almost all the historians, as well as the naval writers. Thus, Burchett (A Complete Hist. of the Most Remarkable Transactions at Sea, 379 (1720)) and Lediard (The Naval History of England, 526 (1735)) give the statement of Frankland; Entick (A New Naval History, 438 (1757)) drops one of the ciphers and makes the sum £3000, but otherwise retains the false account. Admiral Colomb, in his recent excellent work on Naval Warfare ([p. 33]), no doubt founding on these naval authors, also refers to the “non-payment of the £30,000 annually, which had been fixed by Charles as license dues.” The writers of minor books embellished the error. In a mendacious treatise published in 1664 (The Dutch drawn to the Life, 146) it is said that Northumberland “scoured the seas of the Dutch busses, seizing some, sinking others, and enforcing the rest to flee; so reducing all to the precarious condition of entreating the favour of fishing by the King’s commission, which he was the readier to indulge them, because he looked upon them as the most likely instruments for his nephew’s restauration to the Palatinate.” John Smith, writing in 1670 (England’s Improvement Reviv’d, 257), said that “the composition of the Hollanders (for liberty to fish) was an annual rent of £100,000, and £100,000 in hand; and never having been paid or brought into the Exchequer, as I could hear of, there is an arrearages of above £2,500,000; an acceptable sum,” he adds, “and which would come very happily for the present occasions of his Majesty”—Charles II. would have been very glad of much less; he quite failed to induce the Dutch to pay him £12,000 a-year for a like liberty. Evelyn in 1674 (Navigation and Commerce) put the “arrears” at over half a million sterling, and he said that in 1636 the Hollanders paid £1500, 15s. 2d. for licenses; but this was only, as he explained later, “the sophism of a mercenary pen,” since he slumped the convoy and the “acknowledgment” money together (having had access to Northumberland’s Journal), and eight years later he wrote to Pepys his remarkable letter of recantation, in which he stated, “Nor did I find that any rent (whereoff in my 108 page I calculate the arrears) for permission to fish was ever fixed by both parties” (Diary and Correspondence, iii.)
The writers on international law have copied the erroneous statements from the historians and from one another. Wharton (Hist. of the Law of Nations, 154) says, “The exclusive rights to the fisheries within these seas (the Four Seas) and near the coasts of the British Islands had been occasionally acknowledged by the Dutch in the form of annual payments and taking out licenses to fish; and was again suspended by treaties between the sovereigns of England and the Princes of the House of Burgundy.” This statement, which outrages chronology as well as fact, is repeated (without acknowledgment) by Phillimore (Commentaries upon International Law, I., Part ii., c. vi. s. clxxxiv.), and by Travers Twiss (The Law of Nations in Time of Peace, 254), Hall (Treatise on International Law, 145), and others. Hall quotes Hume’s statement that the Dutch had to pay £30,000 for leave to remain, and a more recent author supposes that the great fishing of the Dutch on our coasts originated in the reign of Elizabeth, and that, growing strong, they refused to pay the “duties levied without question for generations within the British Seas” (Walker, A History of the Law of Nations, i. 167). As has been shown in the text, the Dutch herring-boats resisted the payment of the “acknowledgment” money as far as they could; the States-General equipped a fleet to prevent by force their molestation by the English men-of-war, and they dismissed their Admiral because he failed in 1636 to protect them.
[559] Aitzema, op. cit., ii. 408. “Op de bewaringhe ende bescherminghe van de groote ende kleyne Visscherij deser Landen tegen de Spaansche ende allen anderen die hun souden willen beschadigen,” August 5/15, 1636.
[560] State Papers, Dom., cccxxxiii. 13.