The Sovereignty of the Sea / An Historical Account of the Claims of England to the Dominion of the British Seas, and of the Evolution of the Territorial Waters

by Thomas Wemyss Fulton

Fig. 13.—The “Sovereign of the Seas.” After Vandevelde.

The king’s dominion on the sea was rapidly waning. Fielding’s ignoble mission was the last attempt that fate permitted Charles to make in actively asserting it. The shadow of the coming revolution was already upon him. The trial of Hampden for refusing to pay the ship-money focussed the attention of England, and it was followed by complaints of other grievances arising from the personal government of the king. The popular tumult in Edinburgh in the summer about the new Liturgy had as a sequence the National Covenant and insurrection. Charles found another use for his fleet than the enforcement of his sovereignty of the sea in the expedition to Scotland to subdue his rebellious subjects; and the British seas, even the King’s Chambers, were soon again the scenes of flagrant acts in violation of his authority. By a strange irony it was at this time that the king’s “Great Ship,” the famous Sovereign of the Seas, whose praises were sung by Thomas Heywood, the dramatist, was launched at Woolwich. Its construction had been under consideration for several years; it was begun in January 1636 and launched early in October 1637. Charles took a keen personal interest in his great ship, and supervised its details. He selected a scutcheon and motto to be engraved on each of its 102 brass guns—the rose and crown, sceptre and trident, and anchor and cable, with the inscription, Carolus Edgari sceptrum stabilivit aquarum—Charles established the dominion of Edgar over the seas; and on the “beak-head” sat the effigy of King Edgar, trampling on seven kings.[586] As its name implied, it was meant to be a symbol as well as an instrument of the king’s sovereignty of the seas; and it was symbolical of it in a sense undreamt of by Charles. It was costly, highly decorated and begilt, but useless until it was cut down and made serviceable under the Commonwealth. He inserted it in the list of ships to serve in the fleet that assembled in the Downs in 1638, but it was not ready to join.

This fleet consisted of twenty-four king’s ships and seven merchant vessels, and, owing to the illness of the Earl of Northumberland, it was placed under the command of Sir John Pennington.[587] It did still less than the fleet of the previous year. Two ships were sent to the westwards on an alarm that “Turkish” pirates were in the Channel; it convoyed two vessels laden with gunpowder into Dunkirk, notwithstanding the blockade by the Dutch, and returned to the Downs; and two ships were despatched to the north to intercept supplies of arms and munitions of war from Rotterdam and Bremen to the Scots. There was not even the “one turn in an honourable procession” to the westwards as in the previous year, and the fleet rode idly at its anchorage.

The question of the “homage of the flag” had by this time also fallen somewhat into the background. In the two preceding years it had been enforced with much zeal. In 1636, when Northumberland’s fleet was among the herring-busses, Captain Carteret, in the Happy Entrance, forced a Spanish fleet of twenty-six sail to strike to him off Calais, though they tried their best to avoid it. A Dunkirker was also made to strike and “lie by the lee” off Nieuport by Captain Slingsby. But the French still refused to lower their flag when on the other side of the Narrow Sea. Sir Henry Mervin, on meeting two French men-of-war off Gravelines with their colours in the main-top, fired some twenty shots at them without causing them to strike. In the Mediterranean the French retaliated. An English vessel on the coast of Barbary was forced to lower its flag to French ships of war, and because the captain refused to go on board them when requested, the ship was attacked and captured. In the following year Captain Straddling of the Dreadnought used drastic measures against some Hollander merchant-ships. Falling in with four of them off the Lizard, homeward bound from Brazil, with their flags abroad, he commanded them to strike. One refused till many shots were fired, excusing himself afterwards by saying he thought the English ships were Dunkirkers. Straddling took him into custody, and lodged him in Plymouth fort “to answer his insolence and contempt of his Majesty’s regality in these seas,” and he remained a prisoner there for a fortnight before he was released by order of the Admiralty.[588] But in 1638 there were few incidents of this kind, probably because of the fleet lying at anchor so long, though it may be supposed that the general condition of public affairs did not whet the zeal of the naval officers.

It was not long before advantage was taken abroad of Charles’s troubles in Scotland. In the early part of 1638 Pennington reported that there were many Hollander, French, and Dunkirk ships at sea, and that they were pillaging English vessels;[589] but the king was unable to protect even the herring-busses of the Fishery Society that he had taken under his peculiar care. The Dunkirkers, emboldened by immunity, took four of them in 1639, and then daringly anchored in the Downs. The Dutch men-of-war became bold, and then insolent. They began by protecting a Calais vessel that had rifled an English ship, their Admiral refusing to surrender her. Soon their fleets visited the English coasts in menacing strength, and although they “performed their duty” in the matter of the flag, they insisted on their right to stop and search English vessels, even in the King’s Chambers. “The Hollanders’ ships,” wrote Northumberland’s secretary to Pennington in June 1639, “begin to be very bold in our seas, and lie about Portland with fifty sail, examining and searching all English ships and others which pass by them, so that in effect they command where the King challenges sovereignty.” The English merchants, he said, made great complaint that their trade was likely to be destroyed; they were “much perplexed, and called to mind tonnage and poundage, for which his Majesty was pleased to promise thirty sail of his ships to secure trade in the Narrow Sea.”[590]

The truth was that English ships had been engaged in transporting Spanish troops and bullion to Dunkirk, and that the Dutch were merely exercising their rights as belligerents. Their action was nevertheless a plain flouting of the high pretensions of the king, and it was the more disagreeable because Charles had now again veered round to the side of Spain. He was much moved at the “insolencies” of the Hollanders, which “concerned his honour” and “put his sovereignty in hazard”; and the Earl of Northumberland, who had been created Lord High Admiral in the preceding year, also expressed himself as much afflicted that such affronts were put on the nation in his time. It was, said Windebank, a very high disorder that any of the king’s neighbours should presume to lie with a fleet in his Majesty’s Channel, near his ports, and where he justly claimed sovereignty, and arrest and search English ships, taking out of them “such persons, being passengers, as they please”; “especially”—and this no doubt was a potent reason of the king’s displeasure—“since the merchants and others took occasion by such pretences of interruption of their trade to make difficulty to pay their ship-money, which his Majesty is resolved to maintain.” The king therefore commanded Pennington to put a stop to these affronts and to preserve the sovereignty of the narrow seas, so “that trade may be free and open, as well to his Majesty’s subjects as to others in league and amity with his Majesty, and that peace be kept and the merchants secured according to his Majesty’s proclamations and declarations published heretofore to that effect.”[591]

It was one thing to indite imperious commands in London as to the necessity of maintaining the king’s sovereignty of the seas; it was quite another thing to carry them out in the Channel in the presence of a powerful Dutch fleet under the new Admiral, Maarten Harpentz Tromp. Pennington, conscious of his impotency, tried at first to justify, or at least to extenuate, the action of the Dutch men-of-war. They only took out of the English ships the Spanish soldiers, he said, who were being carried to Flanders; they were most civil and courteous while doing so; in reality, it was the English captains who had committed the greater insolency. At all events, before attempting any reparation, it would be only prudent to have an overmastering force, lest greater loss and dishonour should happen, because, he said, the Dutch were in great strength, and it was reported that the French fleet was about to put to sea. Pennington was nevertheless ordered to prevent the affronts as best he could. He then said he would do his best; but he had only four ships available, and he asked for express orders how far he should proceed if he were resisted with overmastering strength.[592]

But the question of the right of search was for the moment relegated to diplomatic channels, and before anything could be done, either by peaceful agreement or by Pennington’s ships, another event put an end to it, and dissipated the king’s dreams of the dominion of the seas. The battle of the Downs was fought between the Dutch and the Spaniards on 11th October 1639, in spite of Charles’s express prohibition, and in spite of his helpless fleet. So glaring a violation of one of the King’s Chambers within three years of the appearance of Selden’s Mare Clausum—an injury which he was as unable to prevent as to redress—proclaimed to Europe that he was no longer sovereign over the sea that was incontestably his own.

At the end of August a large Spanish fleet, consisting of some thirty great galleons and thirty-six transports with troops for Flanders, set sail from Corunna. On 6th September it was attacked in the Channel by a Dutch squadron of seventeen ships, and a running fight was kept up, the Spaniards passing eastwards off the English coast. Tromp, engaged in blockading Dunkirk, heard the cannonading, and on the 8th he joined the Dutch squadron with fifteen sail, when a fierce battle took place in the Straits of Dover.[593] The Spanish Admiral, Don Antonio de Oquendo, having expended all his powder, took refuge with his shattered galleons in the Downs on 9th September, whither Tromp followed him. Great anxiety was felt in London, first of all lest the powerful foreign fleets should refuse to strike to the small English squadron under Sir John Pennington, and then lest they should begin hostilities in the King’s Chamber. On the former point doubts were soon set at rest. Tromp at once took in his flag in the presence of the English ships, a “civility” with which Charles was pleased. So also did the proud Spaniard, but only after preliminary refusal and demur; and Pennington’s insistence that the standard of Spain should be lowered was made a subject of complaint at Madrid.[594] Anxiety on the second point was protracted, and it was not diminished by the reports that were received that the French fleet was coming to reinforce their allies the Dutch. Pennington, in the most emphatic manner, had forbidden hostilities within the King’s Chambers, and he assigned the northern part of the anchorage to the Spaniards and the southern part to the Dutch. For several weeks the belligerent squadrons remained in the Downs facing one another. The Spanish Admiral, a few days after his arrival, succeeded under cover of night in despatching to Dunkirk some of his smaller vessels laden with soldiers. Tromp and Oquendo appealed to Charles through their respective ambassadors, “and then ensued an auction, the strangest in the annals of diplomacy, in which Charles’s protection was offered as a prize to the highest bidder.”[595] On the one hand, he demanded £150,000 from Spain, and better treatment in the business of the Palatinate, as the price of securing the safety of the Spanish fleet.[596] On the other hand, he declared himself ready to abandon the Spaniards to Tromp, if France would come under a binding promise to place Charles Louis at the head of the army which had been commanded by Bernard of Weimar—as a means, of course, to recover the Palatinate.[597]