Without diminishing either the importance of, or the suffering in, the other wars of the war-riven seventeenth century, it can plausibly be said that the Anglo-Dutch Wars were second only to the Thirty Years War in real significance for subsequent history. The two maritime nations were increasing their overseas trade and dominions, and were in serious competition therefore. Hypothetical speculation about what character the world might have had after the seventeenth century if the Dutch had won decisively, or if the House of Orange had not provided a King of England in William III, can take any number of shapes: but the fact is that the series of wars, if not all the battles fought in them, eventually benefited the English side of the argument, with what followed being – as they say – history.
The first Anglo-Dutch War of 1652–4 was not desired by either side, and given the similarity between the two countries should not have occurred at all. Both had relatively new governments – that of De Witt in the United Provinces and Cromwell in England – both were Protestant, both were Republican, both were on their guard against the dynasties they had overthrown, both were supported by merchants and traders eager to expand overseas and thus to profit from the fading influence of Portugal and Spain. Indeed, Cromwell was keen not merely to form an alliance with the Dutch, but even contemplated seeking a union of the two countries.
His somewhat idealistic aspirations on the political and foreign relations front did not accord with the pragmatism of the commercial interest in the Rump Parliament, which succeeded in getting a Navigation Act passed, designed to stop the Dutch trading with English colonies. The Act, which provided that only English ships could carry goods imported into England from abroad, was the manifestation of something that proved much more enduring and formidable than the Cromwellian interregnum itself, namely, the determination of English businessmen to get and keep as much world trade for themselves as they could. They were conscious of the success of the Dutch in exploiting Portuguese weakness in the East Indies, where the Dutch now controlled the lucrative spice trade. Dutch shipbuilding was also a major factor, producing good vessels cheaply and supporting the rapid growth of Dutch seaborne commerce everywhere from the Baltic to the Far East.
Charles I had attempted the perilous task in 1631 of making a secret treaty with Spain intended to limit Dutch sea-power, even as England was supposed to be on the Protestant side of the war. The chief reason that England did too little at first in contesting the rise of Dutch maritime influence was the Civil War; distracted, impoverished and weakened by that conflict, England was for a time not in a good enough position at sea to keep pace with Dutch advances.
Dutch reaction to the Navigation Act of 1652 was exacerbated by other irritations. These included Cromwell’s requirement that a levy be paid for herring caught within thirty miles (fifty kilometres) of England’s shores, and the demand that shipping in the Channel must salute English warships. The immediate trigger for fighting was an order by the commander of the Dutch war fleet, Martin Tromp, to refuse to salute the English navy. The response of the commander of the English navy, Robert Blake, was to open fire on the Dutch fleet. Over the next few months a series of battles followed, the first two of which were won by Blake, the third by Tromp. In the following year, 1653, the Dutch fared worse. At the Battle of Portland – sometimes called the Three Days’ Battle – Tromp lost twelve warships and fifty merchantmen. Admiral Blake was wounded in the action, which gave him time while recuperating to meditate on the encounters with the Dutch and to write his celebrated Fighting Instructions, a major advance in the science of naval warfare. At the Battle of the Gabbard in June 1653 the commander of the English ships, George Monk, put the Instructions into practice, and achieved a decisive victory; at the following Battle of Scheveningen the English crushed the Dutch fleet. Tromp died in that battle.
The war ended with England having destroyed much of the Dutch navy and holding a thousand Dutch merchantmen captive.
The second Anglo-Dutch War began much further from either country’s home shores. Dutch slavers were undercutting the price of English-shipped slaves from West Africa, so a squadron of English warships attacked and captured two West African ports used by the Dutch. That happened in 1663; the following year the English captured New Amsterdam on the east coast of America and renamed it New York. This second incident precipitated a full naval war which lasted until 1667. In 1665 the Duke of York (later James II) led a naval force to victory over the Dutch off Lowestoft in the North Sea. In return the Dutch engaged the English fleet in the grim Four Days’ Battle which, though it ended in far greater losses for the English – including capture by the Dutch of the great ship Prince Royal – was claimed by the English as a victory because the Dutch fleet withdrew first. The English achieved a number of further victories, including the Sack of Terschelling, but when Charles II was obliged to cut back on naval expenditure because of his poor management of his country’s economy – which had been further hit by the outbreak of plague in 1665 and the Fire of London in 1666 – the Dutch took their chances. In an audacious attack they sailed up the Thames into the Medway and destroyed the English fleet at anchor there, towing away England’s two most prized ships, the Unity and the Royal Charles.
While these hostilities were occurring on the European side of the Atlantic, the celebrated buccaneer Henry Morgan was enjoying himself in the Caribbean. His adventures continued after the war ended, laying him open to charges of piracy, which resulted in a spell in prison when he was remanded back to England in chains. But when the third Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1672 he was given a knighthood and sent back to the Caribbean as Governor of Jamaica. His story exemplifies the continuation of the often semi-private, semi-autonomous nature of the seventeenth-century conflicts that were officially regarded as wars between states.
It is well to remember that these tussles between the English and Dutch had much independent background to them. For Anglophone readers the often murderous and introverted obsessions of the people in the British isles are familiar; yet by regicide and civil war they had brought the future forward at a faster pace than anywhere else in the world at that point. With hindsight it is clear that the new political thinking in England – discussed later in these pages – and its contest between people and monarchy had laid the foundation for what happened in the great revolutions of the eighteenth century and their own sequels.
But the Dutch too had a strenuous and formative legacy; they had endured eighty years of war with Spain to secure their full independence, and their navigators and merchants had been determinedly successful in making their nation prosperous. Wealth flowed like a river from the seas into the canals of its cities; the expression ‘the Dutch Golden Age’ scarcely does justice to this period in their history. The ebullience of its art is well known; less well known is the fact that it was the southern Netherlands of Brabant and Flanders, for long more urbanised and industrialised than the United Provinces when these latter broke away, that had been the rich part in the late sixteenth century, having led Europe economically – mainly because of its textile industry – since late medieval times. But the industry of the northern provinces in fishing, agriculture and shipping provided the basis for expansion into a great maritime trading empire in the seventeenth century, so when the United Provinces unilaterally split from Spain, the exodus of Protestants from the southern Netherlands to the northern maritime provinces provided an impetus of experience and enterprise that spurred yet further the northern provinces’ energies.
The shipping trade of the northern provinces had carried salt, cloth, brick and tiles, and brought slaughtered meats from Denmark and timber and grain from the Baltic, grain transportation being the major source of the United Provinces’ revenue in their early years. The Dutch fishermen in the North Sea caught over 30,000 metric tons of herring a year, outpacing Scottish fishing by a substantial margin. Protestant weavers who fled to the northern provinces after the split between north and south in the 1580s soon made Leiden one of the premier industrial cities of Europe.
But once the expansion of maritime trade and colonisations began, the Dutch Golden Age truly flowered. From sugar to spices the Dutch were in control of lucrative commodities; their principal markets in the Baltic – the Hanseatic cities, conduits to and from the interior of Europe – absorbed a large part of what they brought back from around the world. Until shortly beforehand the spice trade had relied on the laborious overland routes of the Middle East, but European navigation by the three sailing nations – Portugal, the Netherlands and England – had circumvented Arabia and the Ottomans, and the Netherlands were at the outset the most successful and vigorous of the three.
Travellers and exiles in the Dutch Republic, as it became, were impressed by the order, cleanliness, comfort and tolerance of its people and cities. Apart from the unpleasant matter of the Gomarists and Arminians in the early decades of the century, the northern Netherlands was an oasis of internal peace in those troubled times. But its success prompted both rivalry – as with the English – and covetousness – as with the French, whose Louis XIV doubtless often reflected on what a milch cow the Netherlands would be as part of a larger continental empire.
Somewhat for the reason just mentioned, the third Anglo-Dutch War was not of a piece with the first two. France was at war with the Dutch, and Charles II saw a chance; an alliance between England and France against the Netherlands, and English naval support for a French invasion, was intended to dent the Dutch commercial threat in the wider world. But the Dutch had a superb naval commander in Michiel de Ruyter and a canny military tactician in William of Orange, against whom the combined efforts of the two powerful states proved unavailing. It was in this war that the Dutch famously flooded the polders around Amsterdam to halt a French invasion; it was in this war too that the Dutch entered an alliance with their old enemies the Spanish, because the Spanish were at odds with the French: ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ indeed.
Anti-war sentiment in England was strong, however, because there were suspicions that Charles II was using the war as a stalking-horse for Roman Catholicism to get back into England. The futility and stalemate of the war gave anti-war advocates an upper hand. The Treaty of Westminster in 1674 marked the end of hostilities. It included among its terms the requirement that the Dutch Republic pay England an indemnity, and that William of Orange marry Mary, Charles II’s daughter (and William’s cousin; he was Charles II’s nephew). Fourteen years later William of Orange was King of England, having fought against his other cousin, Mary’s brother, the man who became James II and whose vacant throne William took. While James was Duke of York he was an effective naval commander, and had led English ships to several victories over the Dutch. That is why New York, captured from the Dutch in 1664, was named after him.
It has been astutely pointed out that historians of England are prone to neglect the Anglo-Dutch Wars, relegating them to a position of relative insignificance in the march of English and then British naval power in the centuries after the seventeenth century.1 But the fact that their overall outcome was to establish England as the dominant commercial global power has a meaning that cannot be ignored. These wars were fought in the interests of a class of men in England who had risen to influence in the Civil War – middle-class commercially minded men, the men (I am using the male term advisedly) whose triumph was completed by the constitutional settlement of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in the 1680s when Parliament, their instrument, became supreme. The model of that Parliament, the political principles which justified its nature and powers (see the discussion of Locke in Chapter 19 below), and the central importance to civic life of the interests of the commercial middle classes, were exported to a world-wide empire policed by naval supremacy, an empire that was the chief world power for a large part of the next three centuries. The acorn from which this oak grew was the capturing of an unrivalled position at sea. In the Dutch Golden Age the fleets and seamanship of the Dutch were as good as and (from the English point of view) at times – and too often – better than those of the English. But the outcome of these wars, though it was not the result of obliterating naval victories as such, was to allow British sea-power to surpass all contenders.
In the nineteenth century the British navy and the Pax Britannica it imposed was predicated on the concept of the ‘two-power standard’, which is the measure of how great British maritime supremacy had become. The two-power standard embodied the idea that the British navy had to be big enough and powerful enough to beat not just the next most powerful navy in the world, but the next two most powerful navies in the world combined. The rise to this pre-eminence, the ability to project force anywhere in the world at will, is explicitly attributed by maritime historian Glen O’Hara to the Anglo-Dutch Wars. His discussion ‘traces the rise of [English then British] naval dominance to the mid-seventeenth century, a time of ideological and economic disputation with the Dutch Republic that ended in three wars and that helped put England on the road to maritime supremacy’.2
This is why in every continent today there are institutions, political practices, attitudes to the administration of law, education systems, even games and sports such as cricket and rugby, which are the residues and deposits of what, quite literally in British ships, was carried from the small islands off the west coast of Europe to large parts of the rest of the world from the seventeenth century onwards. This is not a chest-beating remark, though there are British historians (and politicians) today who cannot forget the greatness – nor remember the bad aspects of it too! – that British naval supremacy and determined commercialism together achieved. It is just a statement of fact. And it is a fact that is one of the legacies of the seventeenth century, and specifically of this series of naval wars that were relatively minor in themselves but had a huge consequence.
Taken together, then, the Thirty Years War and the Anglo-Dutch naval wars, chief among all the conflicts of the century, have a role in the epoch under consideration that equals that of the intellectual advances happening at the same time. The wars and the ideas connect in many ways, directly and otherwise. One of the direct ways is that the wars permanently freed large parts of Europe from the attempted hegemony over thought and enquiry of the Roman Catholic Church. Another direct link is the interplay of science and technology in the development of weapons, and of the effect of war on economies; see the final sections of Chapter 18 below. Another unexpected, indirect but important link is the topic of the next chapter.