The work appears to have pleased his employers, for immediately after its publication Stubbe began the composition of another on the same lines—to vindicate the “honour” of his Majesty and the kingdom. In this he wished very much to deal with the lampoons and “scandalous pictures” circulated in Holland, “thereby to raise a due passion and resentment in the English,” especially one which represented the English ambassadors at Breda kneeling in supplication to their High Mightinesses the States-General; and Sir Joseph Williamson, who was then in Holland with Buckingham and Arlington, was asked to bring over specimens of these. He told Williamson that in his new work, which he proposed to entitle “An Apology for the King’s Majesty’s Declaration, By an Old Commonwealth Man,” he would represent to the English people his Majesty’s “generous concern for his subjects’ welfare and trade,” and his admirable prudence in the noble conduct of affairs; he would excuse his stop of the Exchequer and the Declaration of Indulgence, and descant upon the growth of the Dutch by contumelies to the king and nation. Stubbe was also anxious to obtain, besides the pictures and medals, a manuscript book which he had seen, containing an account of the transactions between the Dutch and the Commonwealth. This was in the possession of Thurloe, who had been Secretary under Cromwell, and he refused to produce it, until a warrant issued by Lord Clifford compelled him to give it up.[905]
The second work was published in 1673, and Stubbe did all that he promised to do, copiously illustrating it with figures of the objectionable medals and pictures, and greatly abusing the Dutch.[906]
But all such efforts to stir up animosity against the Dutch and to convince the public and Parliament of the justness of the war completely failed, and Charles was forced to enter into negotiations for peace. Immediately after the battle of the Texel, in August 1673, a congress of the Powers which had assembled at Cologne began its deliberations to arrange terms of peace, under the mediation of Sweden. The English plenipotentiaries were Sir Leoline Jenkins and Sir Joseph Williamson, and the instructions given to them by Charles included the following:—“The principal points we shall insist upon,” said the king, “beyond the particular ones relating to general amity, commerce, &c., are these following: First, To have the honour for the future paid to the flagg of England, which hath been practised and acknowledged by them in all former times. Secondly, A million of pounds sterling to reimburse us in some part the expenses we have been at in making the war. Thirdly, Ten thousand pounds per annum as an honorary acknowledgment for the great benefit that Republic reaps for the fishing on our coasts, and two thousand pounds more for the like liberty they enjoy upon the coast of our kingdom of Scotland.”[907]
The terms of peace now offered, it will be observed, were much less exacting than those demanded in the previous year, and the request for an express acknowledgment of the king’s sovereignty of the sea was dropped. The Dutch plenipotentiaries at the outset of the proceedings said little difficulty would be raised about the question of the flag, but they demurred to the demand to pay tribute for liberty of fishing.[908] This thorny subject was threshed out on either side with all the old arguments which were used in the times of James and Cromwell. The Dutch pled possession, prescription, treaties; the English replied that the treaties had expired in subsequent wars, and were abrogated by the separation of the Provinces from the House of Burgundy, with whom the treaties were made. A new point was raised to show that no right could now be claimed under the Burgundy treaties. If they were still in force, why had the citizens of Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands, subjects of the King of Spain, who was the successor and descendant of the Dukes of Burgundy, and the very people in whose favour the Magnus Intercursus was made, petitioned the King of England as lately as 1666 for a license to fish in the British seas, a privilege which had been granted to them?[909] To this the Dutch replied that the right to the fishery did not spring from the treaty of 1495, which had been made merely to avoid contests that previously occurred. As the result of conferences with the Dutch representatives, the Swedish mediators informed Jenkins and Williamson that the States-General would not consent to an annual payment for the right of fishery, but they suggested, as the Prince of Orange had done once before, that the matter might be compromised by the payment of a lump sum. Charles declined this proposal, but he reduced the amount of the yearly payment he asked by half—to £5000 for the English fishery and £1000 for the Scottish. The conference was at the same time informed that it was then, and always would be, the “passion” both of king and subject in England to assert and preserve the great royalty of the fishery.
Since the Dutch would not agree to the payment of an annual tribute for the liberty to fish, and Charles would not agree to a lump sum, the mediator suggested that the Dutch might be asked for a small yearly payment for the privilege of drying their nets on shore. This ingenious device roused the suspicions of the English delegates, who feared the tabling of a clause which would represent the tribute as for the use of the land and not for the liberty of fishing. Charles agreed with them in refusing the compromise, telling them that the article about the fishing was “to be barely and solely for the liberty of fishing on his Majesty’s coasts,” and was not to be mixed up with any question of drying nets. They were also told to make it clear that his license was to be a “successive permission” only, from his Majesty to the Dutch, for liberty to fish, and to take care, not to part wholly with his right in the fishery to them. By an arrangement of this nature Charles and his successors would have been free to follow the example of the kings of Denmark in dealing with the dues at the Sound—that is, in gradually raising the amount.[910]
Passing from this subject to the question of the flag, it was soon apparent that the Dutch had been too sanguine in thinking there would be little difficulty in dealing with it. The mediators, in drawing up a protocol of the English demands, had modified the article put in concerning the flag. The English had confined themselves to the bare words “the right of the flag” (“le droit du pavillon”), to which the Swedes added, “in the manner your Excellencies (the Dutch ambassadors) projected.” The Dutch, in short, had expanded the meaning of the nineteenth article of the treaty of Breda so as to omit the troublesome and objectionable words “the British seas,” their proposed article being “that ships of the United Provinces meeting British ships at sea should lower the top-sail and the flag, in such manner as the same had ever been previously observed.” Jenkins and Williamson strongly opposed the omission of the phrase “the British seas.” They declared that the King of England had a special right and immemorial prerogative in those particular seas, but if he grasped at the same honour in all places, not only the Dutch but all the world besides would have reason to dispute it with him. They said further that the king wished that yachts, by name, and all vessels whatsoever in his service and carrying his colours, flag, or jack, should have the same honour paid to them. They also objected to the clause “in such manner as,” &c., as being vague and open to misunderstanding, and insisted that it should be set down clearly what the Dutch were to do and how they were to do it in the future. They wished, in short, to bind the Dutch by an express stipulation to the view that the meaning of the clause in the previous treaties was that whole fleets should strike to any single vessel in the king’s service in the British seas, while leaving “the British seas” undetermined; and they tabled an article to that effect. Both the Dutch and the mediators objected to this clause as asserting positively that to have been the custom in former times, and saying that to admit it would be to condemn themselves in what they had done in regard to the Merlin. They were quite willing, they said, to do the thing for the future, but it was unreasonable to ask them to avow so openly that they had been in the wrong in not doing it hitherto. To this the English replied that it was most certainly and notoriously an ancient right of the crown of England, of which they had proofs in all ages, and that to omit the words would be to accept of the ceremony as a courtesy and not as a right.
At this stage, however, the king sent them a new article about the flag, defining in part the limits within which the Dutch were to be asked to strike, and these were from Cape Finisterre to the North Cape in Norway. These surprising boundaries had been suggested a year or two before as the limits of the British seas by the Masters of the Trinity House ([p. 478]), and no doubt Charles meant them to be so considered. They were derived primarily from Selden’s Mare Clausum, and the southern limit, Cape Finisterre, had been for some time incorporated in the Admiralty instructions.[911] The Dutch were thus to be asked to strike to English ships along almost the whole extent of the western coasts of Europe, a distance exceeding two thousand miles.
The English plenipotentiaries did not like this article. They informed Lord Arlington that when they were preparing the one they had already submitted, they had wished there had been means to ascertain the bounds of our seas as well as there was for clearing up the point regarding whole fleets striking to a single ship; but they had concluded that the king and the Lords of the Committee (for foreign affairs) looked upon it as a thing so invidious and difficult as not to be attempted at that juncture. They explained that they would receive no assistance from the French ambassador or the mediators, all of whom, they clearly perceived, had difficulty in containing themselves from disputing the right of striking at all. As long as they confined the claim to the British seas they were not afraid of opposition, since they had overwhelming evidence as to the usage. But if they insisted on the limits of Cape Finisterre and the North Cape, and supported their contention with arguments from geography or tradition, or if they were asked to produce proofs or instances as to “the matter of fact” near those limits, they foresaw that objections would be raised which they were not sufficiently instructed to answer. No doubt, they continued, it might be advantageous to fix some limits in order to lessen the chance of disputes, but even if mathematical lines could be laid down and agreed upon, it would not remove all ground of quarrel. Besides, to fix definite bounds would place upon themselves a burden which properly lay upon their adversaries; for when the king’s right of the flag was established as incontrovertible within the British seas, if any one who was called upon to strike declared he was not in the British seas, he would have to prove it. This long disquisition failed to convince the king. He insisted that the previous article, in which the term “British seas” alone occurred, should be withdrawn and the new article with the specified limits substituted.[912]
The influence of certain important changes in political affairs which had taken place since the congress met now made itself strongly felt at the deliberations. The position and the prospects of the United Provinces had greatly improved. The States-General had succeeded in entering into alliances with the Emperor, the King of Spain, and the Dukes of Brandenburg and Lunenburg. In the field the movements of the Prince of Orange and his allies caused Louis to abandon his conquests with even greater rapidity than he had made them. The English Parliament, too, from which the Dutch had reason to hope for much, was about to assemble. It was thus natural that the Dutch ambassadors and the representatives of their allies at the congress should take a higher tone in dealing with the peace proposals. Some of the conditions which had been put forward by France and England were now declared to mean “utter ruin” to the Dutch, or their “eternal servitude”; and among them was the demand of Charles for a payment for liberty of fishing, which it was asserted would make them tributary to England. The English plenipotentiaries employed all the arguments they could discover in Selden’s Mare Clausum and other similar works, and in the volume of State Papers with which they were provided, to convince the congress that fisheries might be “appropriated” on the high seas as well as in rivers and lakes, and that the King of England had the exclusive right to the fisheries off his own coasts. They cited the example of Genoa with the tunny fishery, the treaties between England and Denmark concerning the fisheries on the Norwegian coast and at Iceland, the licenses of the kings of Denmark, the English licenses to French fishermen and the grant to Bruges, the Act of Richard II., and the licenses forced by the Earl of Northumberland on the Hollander busses in 1636. They even displayed the original documents showing King James’s expostulations with the Dutch in 1618, and the charter granted to Bruges. It was all in vain. The times had changed. The Dutch ambassadors could now afford to pass the matter off with a raillery. They told Jenkins and Williamson that they “would bait the herrings, as men do carps, to come and feed upon their coasts, and then they would be in possession of a liberty to fish”; adding that they would then allow the English to fish upon the Dutch coast without fear of molestation. More seriously, they said that since no similar stipulation had been allowed in any previous treaty, the States-General trusted to the goodness of the king to pass over the article on that occasion; and Beverning, who was one of the Dutch representatives, recalled how he had discussed the whole matter with Cromwell in 1653, who had withdrawn the claim to the fishery.
No one, neither the mediators nor even the French, the allies of Charles, gave the English ambassadors any encouragement to insist on the fishery article; and finally De Groot informed them, in language more forcible than elegant, that his countrymen would rather “burst” than submit to any acknowledgment in that matter, and that he believed the States would sooner forbid their subjects to fish at all than to ask leave to do so of the crown of England.