The junction of the allied fleets was followed, on 28th May, by the fierce and sanguinary battle of Solebay. The victory was indecisive, but the advantage lay rather with the Dutch. De Ruyter withdrew to his own coast, and the English were too much crippled to follow.[893] No other great sea-fight took place in 1672, but in September Sir Edward Spragge employed his squadron against the Dutch fishermen. Just before the declaration of war the States-General laid an embargo on their fishing vessels; but they removed it in September,[894] and towards the end of the month it was reported that a hundred Dutch busses, convoyed by twenty frigates, were fishing off the Norfolk coast. On the 22nd Spragge’s squadron, showing no colours, appeared off Yarmouth, and greatly frightened the English herring fishermen, who thought the Dutch fleet was upon them. By noon on the 24th he had captured eleven Dutch doggers and 117 prisoners; two of the doggers had licenses from the English Government, and were released later. By the end of the month the prizes numbered about thirty doggers, one buss, and a privateer, with over 300 prisoners,—not a very large haul,—while about 200 others had been chased home, and many nets, which the fishermen had cut and left in the water, were destroyed. Spragge having thus, as he reported, “cleared these seas of fishermen except our own,” returned to the Thames.[895]
While the Dutch maintained the contest at sea with honour and success, they were overwhelmed on land. A great French army, under Turenne, Condé, and other celebrated generals of the age, poured into the Provinces. Town after town, fortress after fortress, surrendered to the invaders, and the Prince of Orange, with the remnant of his small army, retired into Holland. It seemed inevitable that the Republic, contending with the two most powerful states in Europe and bereft of allies,—for Sweden as well as England had been detached from the triple league,—would soon be subjugated. The States-General, in despair, sued for peace. Two ambassadors were sent to Louis and two to Charles. Louis offered them impossible terms, and allowed ten days for acceptance or rejection. Charles refused to see them at all, but sent them to Hampton Court along with Boreel, who had not yet left England; and there they remained for some weeks carrying on a sort of backstairs negotiation. Then the king, fearing they might intrigue with his own subjects, who were in sympathy with them, dismissed them early in August. But becoming apprehensive at the unexpected rapidity of the French conquests, he despatched the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Arlington, and soon also Viscount Halifax, to negotiate anew with Louis, and to inform him of the overtures for peace from the States-General. On their way they passed through Holland, where they had several interviews with the Dutch Government and the Prince of Orange. After renewing the league with Louis at Utrecht, and agreeing that neither king should conclude peace except with the consent of the other, the conditions on which Charles was willing to make peace were formulated. The States were asked to undertake, on demand, to banish perpetually any person guilty of treason against the king, or of writing seditious libels; to pay £1,000,000 sterling towards the cost of the war; to invest the Prince of Orange with the sovereignty of the United Provinces, or at least to confer upon him the highest offices; and to surrender as security to the king Walcheren, the city and castle of Sluys, as well as the isles of Cadsand, Goeree, and Voorne. With regard to the sovereignty of the sea, they were to yield the honour of the flag without the least reserve or hesitation, so that whole fleets were to lower their top-sails and strike their flags to a single English ship carrying the king’s flag, in any part of the British sea up to the coasts of the United Provinces. The States-General were, moreover, to agree to pay to the King of England, for ever, the sum of £10,000 a-year for permission which the king would grant them to fish for herrings on the coasts of England, Scotland, and Ireland.[896]
The demands of Louis were even more oppressive to the Dutch, and threatened them in what they held most dear—their religious liberty, for the sake of which they had formerly fought so long and so heroically against the tyranny of Spain.
In this crisis of their history despair and fury seized upon the people. The Ministers were blamed for the misfortunes of the country; a popular tumult burst forth in favour of the Prince of Orange; and John de Witt, the clear-eyed statesman who had so long held the helm and steered the Republic through so many dangers and difficulties, was foully murdered in circumstances of great brutality—a fate which his brother shared. The young Prince infused his own invincible spirit into the people. The terms of peace were rejected, and a supreme effort was made to save the country by the method which had been adopted against Alva and Requesens just a century before: the dykes were opened and the land laid under water, causing the enemy to retreat. The steadfast courage of the Prince of Orange and the growing alarm at the designs of France at last brought allies to the States. Spain and both branches of the house of Austria espoused their cause, and German troops came marching to the Rhine.
But the ally on which the Dutch most relied was the Parliament of England. It had now been prorogued for nearly two years, and Charles was at last forced to summon it by his need of money to carry on the war. When it met, the members were told by the king that he had been forced into a war which was just and necessary both for the honour and the interest of the nation, and he referred them to his declaration, in which the reasons were given. He also defended the Declaration of Indulgence to dissenters, which had been designed to favour the Roman Catholics, and about which the country was greatly agitated. The Earl of Shaftesbury, as Chancellor, enlarged on the same themes. Against the Dutch he levelled such charges as were contained in the declaration of war. They had broken treaties about the East Indies and Surinam, “and at last,” he exclaimed, “they came to that height of insolence, as to deny the honour and right of the flag, though an undoubted jewel of this crown, never to be parted with; and by them particularly owned in the late treaty of Breda and never contested in any age.” He accused them of disputing the king’s title to it in all the Courts of Christendom, and of having made great offers to the King of France if he would stand by them against England. They were branded as the common enemy to all monarchies, and especially to that of England, “their only competitor for trade and power at sea,” who alone stood in their way to a universal empire as great as Rome. They had, he said, slighted all negotiations and refused all cessation of hostilities; and the king, he claimed, in entering on the war had only carried out the maxims of the Parliament which had advised the last war, and had then judged it necessary to extirpate the Dutch, laying it down as an eternal maxim, “delenda est Carthago, that government is to be brought down.” The Parliament was then asked to vote further supplies.
At first, while avoiding the least approbation of the war, Parliament passed a resolution that they would grant eighteen months’ assessments, at the rate of £70,000 a-month, for the king’s “extraordinary occasions”; but this was designed merely to allow them time to deal with the Declaration of Indulgence before Charles could afford to dismiss them. The contest with the king on this question ended in victory for the Parliament, which then passed the Test Act, disqualifying Catholics for all offices under the crown. The king was still resolved to pursue the war. The money voted by Parliament served to equip a fleet; and as the Duke of York was made ineligible owing to the Test Act, Prince Rupert took his place as admiral. In May 1673 the combined naval forces of France and England sought out De Ruyter on his own coast, and three battles were fought in the summer,—on 28th May, 4th June, and 11th August,—both sides claiming victory; but the Dutch prevented the projected landing of English troops, and compelled the allies to retire to their own coasts.[897]
By this time, however, the king saw he could not with safety continue to carry on the war much longer. Spain, which had already declared war against France, threatened to do the same against England unless peace was made, and this would destroy the lucrative English trade with that country. The war was intensely unpopular in England, and the seamen fought without heart. The timid conduct of the French squadrons in the various battles excited deep and widespread resentment. It was on all sides rumoured that Charles had sold his country in order to carry out the selfish designs of Louis. The subsidies, moreover, were soon exhausted, and it would be necessary to ask Parliament again for more money. It was clear that the appeal which Charles had made to the spirit or vanity of the nation with respect to the honour of the flag and the sovereignty of the sea had thoroughly failed, although inspired and mercenary pens did what they could to arouse enthusiasm. These efforts were indeed a measure of the unpopularity of the third Dutch war. Before it broke out certain authors had handled the theme. The learned Prynne, who lost his ears for opposing Charles I., became a subservient supporter of his son; and, as Keeper of the Records in the Tower, he published an erudite, but confused, book in which the absolute right of the King of England to the dominion of the surrounding seas was maintained.[898] In a very different kind of book, one Captain John Smith repeated current arguments and misstatements on the same topic, especially with reference to the fisheries, for he had been one of the agents of the Fishery Society of Charles I. He makes a statement that must have caused the king, if he saw it, some surprise at his modesty in asking only £10,000 or £12,000 from the Dutch. He had heard, he says, that the “composition” of the Hollanders for leave to fish on our coasts was an annual rent of £100,000 and £100,000 “in hand”; and as none of it had been paid into the Exchequer, he computed the arrears then to be over £2,500,000, a sum which, he very truly remarked,—and it is the sole truth in the statement,—“would come very happily for the present occasions of his Majesty.” Like many others before him and after him, he advocated the building of a fleet of busses and the prohibition of the Hollanders from fishing in the British seas.[899] Still other writers laid stress on the close connection between the sovereignty of the sea and trade, commerce, and navigation;[900] and after the war broke out more pointed attacks were made against the Dutch. They were accused of invading our fisheries without license from the king, refusing to strike sail, disputing our dominion of the seas, and by artifice supplanting us in trade and commerce.[901]
None of those works was of much account, and the Ministry felt the need of obtaining the services of an able writer to stimulate ill-feeling against the Dutch, and in particular to answer a well-reasoned pamphlet which the Dutch had widely circulated in refutation of the reasons for the war given in the king’s declaration. The States-General did not reply to that document, but Wicquefort did so in the pamphlet referred to, which was entitled “Considerations on the Present State of the United Netherlands.” The tone of his reply was extremely temperate. The writer insisted on the difference between the striking of the flag and the sovereignty of the sea; the former was merely a ceremony of respect which all republics paid to monarchies, and not in the least a sign of subjection or an acknowledgment of sovereignty, and as such it had been regulated in the treaty of Breda. The States had always resisted the claim that a whole fleet of theirs should strike to a single English ship. In 1654 Cromwell had abandoned a similar claim on their objecting; and as the article in the treaty of Breda was the same as the one agreed to in 1654, it was unjust to construe it now in the sense of the article which Cromwell had withdrawn. On that ground alone, therefore, it could not be maintained that Van Ghent and the whole Dutch fleet were bound to strike to the king’s yacht. Moreover, the article applied only to the British seas, and the writer argued that that meant the Channel and not the North Sea, citing the seventh article of the treaty of Breda as to the cessation of hostilities. Since the Dutch fleet were lying at anchor off their own coast when the king’s yacht passed, they were not obliged to strike, because they were in the North Sea, and not in the British seas at all. The conclusion was drawn, and as we have seen justly, that the king had sent his yacht for the deliberate purpose of getting a ground of quarrel. As for the sovereignty of the sea, the States attributed to God alone such dominion as the king usurped to himself. They therefore refused Downing’s demands, which had been put forward to give the king a pretext for war. To admit them would ruin the United Provinces, which lived by commerce and the liberty of the sea. As for the fisheries, they had never asked for permission to fish from the King of England; and though in 1636 licenses were forced upon some of their defenceless fishermen by English men-of-war, that was an act of violence from which no right or title could be derived, and the attempt was relinquished at the demand of the States-General, and had not been repeated.
The cogent arguments of the Dutch writer were well fitted to confirm the general opinion in England as to the cause of the war, and the Court promptly secured the services of Henry Stubbe, a clever, versatile, and prolific writer, to refute them. His answer to Wicquefort was considered by the private committee on 15th May 1672,[902] and it was published anonymously in the following month.[903] The spirit in which Stubbe entered into his task is revealed in a letter he wrote to Secretary Williamson. “The rule I go by,” he said, “is this: that no nation is more zealous for their honour than the English; that if they are put into a great passion they forget their particular interests and animosities.”[904] He therefore tried as much as he could to inflame the public mind.
The Justification, though rabid in tone, is in many respects an able book. It differs from many of the controversial works of the day in that the author, however oblique may be his inferences from them, does not, so far as we have observed, pervert and misquote the documents he cites. It is unnecessary to particularise his arguments on the sovereignty of the sea. They were drawn mainly from Selden, Welwood, and other authors, and partly from certain State Papers which the Ministry placed at his disposal. The striking of the flag by foreigners was, of course, declared to be a regality, and “paramount to all treaties”; it was a “fundamental of the crown and dignity of the King of England.” The attack on the Smyrna fleet, which Wicquefort denounced and made the most of, was justified by their refusal to strike their flags, the instructions issued to the admirals of England for four hundred years compelling them to seize all ships which refused. The universal dominion which the king possessed over the British seas was thus formulated: (1) the regality of fishing for pearl, coral, amber (!), &c., and the “direction and disposal” of all fishes “as they shall seem to deserve the regards of the public”—a somewhat cryptic claim; (2) the prescribing of the laws of navigation to foreigners as well as to the king’s own subjects; (3) the power of imposing customs and taxes upon those navigating or fishing in them; (4) jurisdiction in regard to maritime delinquencies; (5) the duty of foreign ships to strike their flags and lower their top-sails to the king’s “floating castles,” the ships of war, by which “submission they are put in remembrance that they have come into a territory wherein they are to own a sovereign power and jurisdiction, and receive protection from it.” It was admitted that the sea was free for commerce and innocent passage; but both might be refused if there was suspicion of danger, and that the imposition of tribute for fishing, convoy, or the maintenance of lights and beacons did not infringe the liberty of commerce.