IV) The Anglo-Dutch Affair
(1650-1702)
King William III
Many princes are destined to become kings before they are born, few actually obtain the title before birth. Such is the case with King William III, though he was not called that until after his official coronation fifteen years later. Throughout his life, William III would be the Dutch monarch most closely tied with England. Two wars would be waged against their neighbors across the North Sea (though Princess Christina was regent through the first war), followed by an alliance through marriage, ending with William III landing in England and installing his English wife as Queen.
By the age of fifteen, Princess Christina died, leaving young William an orphan. Much debate raged within the Staaten-General as what to do next. Was William too young to take the throne? There was some discussion as to appointing a regent until William proved himself capable of taking the crown. That begged the question who would decide when he was worthy? None of the Second Chamber were for keeping William from his rightful throne. A few in the First mused over being regent themselves, and perhaps king.
In the end, it was William’s other holding, the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway that decided the issue. Nobility ranging from Kopenhagen to Oslo to Bergen refused to accept any Netherlander the Staaten-General appointed as their regent. William would be their king. Before the Danes could crown him, the Dutch coronation went forward in Liege, and William III was crowned king of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the King of Denmark-Norway. His first act as King would be to wage was against the English and Scottish in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
Portuguese Restoration
In the second year of William II’s reign, Portugal declared independence from Spain. For eighty years, both Portugal and Spain shared the same king, and following their defeat during the Forty Years War, Spain pressed for full political union. Without its vast colonial holding or wealth in the spice trade, Portugal was powerless before annexation. It was not until the end of the Thirty Years War, and another resounding defeat for Spain did the Portuguese make their move. As soon as the war ended, Portuguese nobles placed Joao IV on the throne in Lisbon.
Portugal was not looking just to regain its status in the brotherhood of nations, but to reclaim its once glorious empire as well. Even if they defeated the Spanish, Portugal was still no match for the Dutch Navy. In decades past, Portugal held an alliance with England, and upon reclaiming its throne, it reactivated that alliance. It was Portugal’s hope that the English Navy could defeat the Dutch, and allow them to regain at the very least, Brazil.
Joao IV did declare war on the United Provinces, though the English held back for the moment. England had its own problems at the moment, and by 1649, a change in government was at hand. Charles I was recently executed, and Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth’ was on the rise. The Commonwealth had no use for Iberian problems. After all, why should English blood be spilt for a bunch of Catholics. Puritan England would just as soon add rich Brazil to its own domain.
Portugal’s ambition was not to be. By 1653, Spain all but crushed the rebellion, forcing Joao IV into exile, and eliminated many of the Portuguese nobles who sought to break from Spain. Ironically, by then England and the United Provinces were already at war with each other, alliance or not. Never again would the Portuguese flag wave above the Iberian peninsula. Many Portuguese fled across the ocean, escaping Spanish retribution, to the only part of the world were their language was spoken among freemen; Dutch Brazil.
Act of Navigation
By the middle of the Seventeenth Century, the United Provinces possessed the largest trading fleet in Europe, which more vessels than most other nations combined. Their maritime based economy gave them a dominate position in Europe. France could invade, but the United Province could close borders, seal trade and strangulate the economy of any nation that may wish to make her an enemy. They profited greatly from the spice trade, and in the colonies taken from Portugal. More over, because of civil war in England, the Dutch were gaining significant influence over England’s own colonies in North America.
With Oliver Cromwell and his Commonwealth victorious, England’s Royal Navy was a force on the rise. During the English Civil War, the United Provinces supported Charles I and the Royalist, and were subsequently outraged by the Commonwealth’s act of regicide upon Charles’s execution. Therefore, Cromwell considered the Dutch an enemy. More precisely, considered William II an enemy.
Upon William’s death, relations changed. The Staaten-General recognized the English Commonwealth, though they refused to expel many Royalist exiled in the Netherlands. The fact that it was the Staaten-General, and not the infant King who made the recognition only encouraged the English. In January of 1651, a delegation of nearly two hundred fifty English appeared in the Hague, to negotiate the conditions on where the United Provinces might unite with the Commonwealth.
Decades before, the Dutch declared that never again shall they be ruled from a foreign capital, though negotiations did drag on for weeks. The English were quite upset upon learning, that after so much effort, the Dutch never had any intention on political union. The delegation left in June, rather disappointed they reported the Dutch as untrustworthy, and a threat to English security. The fact that the United Provinces had no interest in that little island off their shores never entered into the equation. Why would they want to invade a place as atrocious sounding as York when they could stay comfortably in elegant, and classy Amsterdam.
Continuing trouble with the Royalist, and French support there of, prompted England’s parliament to issue letters of reprisal against French ships and French goods on any neutral ships. The United Province might not wage war over another’s territory, but it most certainly would if its trade interests were threatened, and most of the ‘neutral’ ships happened to be Dutch. To further antagonize the Dutch, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts in October of 1651.
Simply put, the Navigation Acts were a declaration of war in all but name. It ordered that only English ships, or ships from the originating country, could import goods to England, thus eliminating any middleman. This measure was almost exclusively aimed at the trade-orientated Dutch, and to put it simply, the Dutch have too much trade and the English were resolved to take it from them. Take it they did. Many privateers and ships of the English Royal Navy used the Acts as a pretext to seize Dutch ships. The English went even as far as to demand that all ships in the English Channel and North Sea dip their flag in salute to English ships. It was one too many insults for a Netherlander to stand.
Maarten Tromp
May 29, 1652, English General-at-Sea Robert Blake commanded a fleet that encountered another Dutch fleet commanded by Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp. As per Parliamentary demands, Blake waited for the Dutch to dip their flag in salute. When Tromp did not comply swiftly enough to satisfy Blake, the English ships opened fire, starting the brief Battle of Goodwin Sands. Tromp managed to escort his convoy to safety, but lost two ships in the preceding battle. Born in Den Briel in 1598, Maarten Tromp was the son of an officer in the fledgling Dutch Navy. At the age of nine, Tromp went to see with his father, and was present at the Battle of Gibraltar.
Tromp was captured twice, once when he was twelve, when pirates killed his father, and again when he was twenty-two, this time by Corsairs of the Barbary Coast. Both times Tromp was sold into slavery in Arab markets. The first time he was freed by pity, the second time he impressed the Bey of Tunis greatly with his maritime skills, that the Bey set him free. His own time in bondage transformed Tromp into an early opponent to slavery. His attempts to rally the freedom-loving Dutch people against the institution met with only limited success during his lifetime. It was not until well after his death did the slave trade come to an end. Between his times in slavery, Tromp supported his mother and sisters by laboring in the Rotterdam shipyards.
In 1622, Tromp was commissioned into the Dutch Navy as a lieutenant. He spent much of his tenor battling pirates in North Africa. He rose through the ranks, achieving his Admiral ranks by 1637, when Lieutenant-Admiral van Dorp was removed for incompetence. His first years as Admiral were spent blockading Dunkirk and combating a resurgence of pirates plaguing the Dover Strait.
On July 10, 1652, England formally declared war on the United Provinces. In the opening months of war, the English targeted Dutch merchant ships. Any ship sailing alone would not stand a chance. As Admiral, Tromp gathered a fleet of ninety-six ships to do battle with the English privateers. At the Battle of the Kentish Knock, the Dutch attacked the English fleet near the mouth of the Thames, but were beaten back with the loss of too many men.
The loss was a minor setback for the Dutch, but the English perceived that the Dutch were near defeat, so diverted twenty of their warships to the Mediterranean. This division of forces lead to the English defeat by Tromp during the Battle of Dungeness, and further to the destruction of the English Mediterranean fleet in 1653.
Blockade of the United Provinces
In February of 1653, the English were ready to challenge the Dutch again. In one of the turning points in the First Anglo-Dutch War, the English defeated the Dutch during the three day battle, and drove them from the English Channel. For the first time since its formation, the United Provinces were not the dominate navy in European waters. The defeat made it clear to the Staaten-General that they were not invincible.
By March 1653, the Dutch sent delegates, peace feelers, to London. After such a resounding victory, the English Parliament was no longer motivated for a peaceful solution. Why negotiate when they could conquer. Their desires to conquer were stillborn. With the exception of an invasion of Long Island by colonist in Massachusetts and Connecticut, land battles were not an equation in the war. Colonist managed to conquer two-thirds of Long Islands, the parts not inhabited by Dutch settlers, and even kept their new conquest after the war’s end.
In June, the English were again victorious at sea. Following the two day long Battle of the Gabbard, England drove the Dutch out of the North Sea. With North Sea and English Channel closed, the United Provinces found themselves cut off from their colonies, and more importantly, from their trade. Following the battle, England set up a blockade of the Netherlands, a land dependent on agricultural imports.
With trade disrupted, the Dutch economy collapsed, and famine spread across the Provinces for the first time in decades, if not centuries. The Hague sent out more delegates, growing desperate for a peaceful resolution, but again they were rebuffed. Cromwell became more interested in punishing the Netherlands than negotiating. With little choice, the already battered Dutch fleet was forced to attempt to break the blockade.
The Battle of Scheveningen
After pushing the Dutch out of the North Sea, the English set up a blockade of one hundred twenty ships under the command of General-at-Sea George Monck. Any Dutch merchant ship that attempted to slip past the blockade was captured, its cargo confiscated. In a sense, Monck turned out to be one of the most successful pirates in history. Not only did he acquire a large amount of booty, but his blockade led to wide scale unemployment and starvation in Dutch cities.
On August 3, 1653, Admiral Tromp put to sea in the Brederode with a fleet of one hundred ships at the island of Texel, were another twenty-seven ships under the command of Witte de Withe were trapped by the English. Once the English spotted Tromp’s fleet, they turned their attention away from de With, allowing his ships to escape, and later join Tromp.
August 10, the English fleet engaged the combined Dutch fleet off Scheveningen. The battle was short and fierce, with each fleet moving through each other four times, inflicting much damaged. Maarten Tromp was killed early in the battle, by a sharpshooter in the rigging of, reportedly, William Penn’s ship. His death was kept secret from the rest of the fleet, for fear of demoralizing. Morale aside, by the afternoon, the Dutch already lost twelve ships and many more were simply too damaged to continue the fight.
In the end, morale broke anyway and a large group of ships, all under the command of merchant captains, broke formation and fled north. De With attempted to assert order and rally the ships, but to no avail. He was limited to covering their retreat as far as Texel. However, damage was not one-sided. The English, too, suffered many casualties, and lost many ships to damage. So many, that the fleet was forced to give up the blockade and return to port for refit and repair.
Scheveningen was a battle were both sides could honestly claim victory. The English won the day on the tactical field, defeating the Dutch fleet, and hurting them more than they were hurt in turn. However, the United Provinces set out with a simple strategic goal; lifting the blockade. That was exactly what the fleet accomplished, and the Dutch claim a strategic victory. Either way, it was the last major battle of the war.
Treaty of Westminster
Over the course of the war, Oliver Cromwell continued to call for political union between the Provinces and the Commonwealth. He targeted specifically the northern provinces, with the large proportion of Protestants. Unfortunately for the English, they were largely Calvinist, and untrusting to anyone who was not them. At least with the Catholics in the south, the Calvinist were dealing with fellow Netherlanders. Cromwell never did understand the nature of Dutch nationalism.
Cromwell, a little disappointed, set down a peace proposal of twenty-seven articles, two of which were unacceptable; all Royalists were to be expelled, and the personal union with Denmark-Norway was to be ended. Again, Cromwell failed to grasp reality; the Dutch king was only four, and no four-year-old would give up what was his. Cromwell was forced to accept peace minus two articles, and in April 1564, the Staaten-General accepted the proposal. On May 8, 1654, the Treaty of Westminster was signed.
It was truly an inconclusive victory where the English managed to gain two-thirds of Long Island, the two-third not inhabited by enterprising Dutch settlers. However, peace of not, the commercial rivalry between the two nations was not solved, and hostilities continued between colonial companies of the two, both of which had navies and armies of their own. The East Indies were still fought over, with the Dutch companies based in Batavia, the English ones in Manilla.
Humiliation of the Treaty of Westminster, which still had the Navigation Acts in place, along with the loss of trade only fueled bitterness in the Dutch people. There would be peace, for now, but because of no decisive victor, a second war between the English and Dutch was in the making.
Naval Buildup
As soon as the ink on the Treaty of Westminster was signed, the Dutch were already launching an aggressive shipbuilding program. The Staaten-General were well informed about the battles at sea, and decided the lack of Ships-of-the-Line was a key role in the United Provinces failure to obtain victory. Their reliance upon modified commercial vessels for fighting a war proved somewhat of a weakness. They learned hard lessons, and learned them well. Over the following decade, leading up to the second war, the United Provinces built more than a hundred ships dedicated exclusively to war.
Before hand, Dutch warships were little more than merchant ships overhauled and heavily armed, and susceptible to far more damage. Inexperienced commercial captains also proved the weak link in Dutch fleets. Thousand of sailors passed through the naval academies in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp, where a strict discipline and respect for the chain of command was impressed upon them. A professional navy would be the key to future victories. The United Provinces were not the first nor last nation to learn that untrained militia and other part-time soldiery could prove more a liability than a benefit.
The Staaten-General were not the only ones humiliated by the treaty. Thousands of sailors, once believing Dutch mariners best in the world, were infuriated by the humiliation and burned for revenge. Not just revenge for themselves, but they saw it their duty to avenge the insults against national honor. One such officer, a veteran of the First Anglo-Dutch War would rise to leadership and become the most famous admiral in Dutch history.
Michiel de Ruyter
Michiel de Ruyter was born in 1607, in the waning days of the Forty Years War. Little is known about de Ruyter’s early life, except he likely started his life as a sailor around the age of eleven. Such early starts in lifelong careers were not uncommon during the Seventeenth Century. Only today, when one must attended higher educations for the better part of a decade to obtain something that was once apprenticed does such a young start seem odd, even prodigy-like.
The name de Ruyter came from the Dutch word ‘ruyten’ which more-or-less translates into ‘to raid’. De Ruyter was known for this as his work as a privateer, and later on for hunting pirates. During the First Anglo-Dutch War, de Ruyter quickly rose to the rank of Admiral. He commanded a small reserve fleet at the Battle of Plymouth, winning the battle against English Admiral Ayscue, a raider of Dutch merchantmen.
A year before the outbreak of a second war, de Ruyter clashed with the English off the West African coast. One of the articles of the peace treaty involved dipping the flag in salute, one that de Ruyter always ignored. Like many sailors, he never forgave the insults postulated in the treaty. Like many, he spent ten years preparing revenge. De Ruyter continued his raids, expanding his territory into the Carribean. In April 1665, he hit Barbados, followed up by a large scale raid on the pirate den of Port Royale, Jamaica.
March 4, 1665, war officially broke out between England and the United Provinces. The two were evenly matched once various considerations were taken into account. Though England boasted a population twice that of the Provinces, a majority of them fell into the category of broke peasants. The Dutch offset this by a large middle class population. Another factor was the end of the Commonwealth. By 1660, the Stuarts were restored to power. By 1665, the United Provinces’s king finally took the throne. At fifteen, William III might lack the life experience of Charles II, but he hungered to avenge the wrongs against his Kingdom.
The first encounter between English and Dutch fleets occurred at the Battle of Lowestoft, on June 13. Though the resounding defeat was the worst in Dutch history outside of the Battle of Java Sea centuries later, England failed to capitalize on their own momentum. English victories back home were offset by Dutch victories in the Americas. De Ruyter continued to be the bane of English trade.
Four Days Battle
On June 11, 1666, one hundred fifty ships from the English and Dutch navies met near North Foreland for the longest battle in naval history. Eighty-four Dutch ships, commanded by de Ruyter faced seventy-nine ships under the command of Monck. England was under the impression that a French fleet would soon join the Dutch, and acted first to split the forces. The rumor of French intervention prompted Monck to send a squadron of ships to defend the Strait of Dover.
As a result, the Dutch vastly outnumbered the English, yet de Ruyter could not bring the battle to a speedy conclusion. The first encounter between the two navies, Monck targeted the Dutch fleet anchored near Dunkirk, commanded by Admiral Cornelis Tromp, son of Maarten, hoping to cripple his force and even the odds. Monck tried to force his enemy onto the hazardous Flemish shoals. The Dutch center, commanded by de Ruyter arrived in time to prevent the younger Tromp’s squadron from being knocked out of action.
Once the Dutch forces formed up, minus a few mishaps of Inexperienced commanders colliding with their neighbors, the English brought out a weapon the Dutch were unaware of. They fired hollow brass shells, filled with highly combustible materials. The shots were devastating to the Dutch, however, lucky for the Dutch, the English fleet had few of these shells due to high cost of production.
Mock retreated on the first night, but the ships of Admiral Harmam drifted into the Dutch lines and were suddenly set ablaze. It was a tactic that dated back to the battle against the Spanish Armada, but did not break the Dutch the same way it did Spain. On the Morning of the second day, Monck attempted to destroy the Dutch by a direct attack. After all, the Dutch during the First Anglo-Dutch War scattered when beaten, why should they not during the Second?
Before the attack could commence, de Ruyter preempted him, by crossing the English line and severely damaging several ships. After a first pass, the red flag was razed, signaling an all-out attack by the Dutch. The ensuing melee caused much devastation between the two fleets. Tromp was forced to transfer his flag four times due to damage caused by his own overzealous assault. De Ruyter held such an advantage in numbers, he sent several ships to escort both damaged and captured ship back to port.
During the second night and the third day, the English retreated westward, with the Dutch in pursuit. Unlike the Battle of Scheveningen, the Dutch captains held rank and the ships held formation. Several English ships were cut off from retreat, and were forced to surrender or be sunk. Even Admiral Ayscue had to surrender to Tromp when one of his men struck the flag. It was the first and last time an English Admiral was captured at sea.
Where the third day was the biggest disaster in the history of the (English/British) Royal Navy, the fourth day could only be worse. Several ships joined Monck, with fresh sailors and a hold load of ammunition. But these few newcomers were not enough to turn the battle, even with de Ruyter’s force shrunk. Many of the English ships engaging in the battle from day one were already out of powder. It was not lack of planning, but rather the English gunners proved more efficient than their Dutch counterparts, and thus extended their ammunition faster.
The English continued their retreat, but several stragglers were boarded, captured and later added to the (Dutch) Royal Navy. With his own ships damaged, though still packing powder, de Ruyter called of pursuit once the English vanished into a fog bank. He would not press his luck and turn victory into a disaster. Though many historians call the Four Days Battle inconclusive, it is certain that after the battle, the English had little chance of forcing their peace on the Dutch.
St. James Day Battle
August 5, English and Dutch navies clashed again near North Foreland, this time they outnumbered the Dutch by one ship. That one ship made it possible for the English to secure victory. It was not a decisive victory, but it did keep de Ruyter from landing Dutch Marines on English shores, at least for the time being. That was de Ruyter’s intention, to land and destroy the English ships while they were under repair.
The English discovered the Dutch sailing into position and engaged them before the Dutch could form ranks. The English scattered many of the Dutch navy, sailing from banks of fog like banshees. The surprise was enough to break the momentum of the Dutch. For most of the day, the two fleets attempted to gain advantage of wind against their foe. By the next morning, the losses were light; England lost one ship, the Dutch two.
However, by now, de Ruyter discovered his position was hopeless and ordered a general retreat. Many of the ships were already scattered and retreated on their own, leaving the Dutch Admiral with a mere forty ships. The English were still in fair shape, and if their Admiral, the Prince of the Rhine, had chose to, he likely could have rolled up de Ruyter and crippled the Dutch. However, he was satisfied by simply humiliating the Dutch Navy.
The Brazilian Expedition
In late 1666, the English considered capturing the Netherlands’ most vital trading post in North America, New Amsterdam. After some consideration, the English Admiralty decided why have a trading post when you could have all the sugar. The planned for an invasion of Brazil, similar to the one lead by van Bohr decades earlier. However, unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch were well prepared for attack against their colonies. Without them, they would have no commodities to trade.
In the Battle of the Amazon Delta, Dutch Admiral, the Count of Natal, lead a small fleet of seventeen warships against a much larger English fleet. However, out of the twenty-six ships, more than half were transports, carrying soldiers and supplies needed for the conquest and occupation of Dutch Brazil. Natal used the strong currents of the Amazon, which extended far into the Atlantic, to carry his force quickly across the English formation. In one pass, the Dutch crippled two English warships, weakening their ability to defend the transports.
Due to the river’s currents, several hours were required to reposition the Dutch fleet. Natal took a gamble on this attack, for it permitted the English enough time to sail out of reach, and perhaps land on the northern coast of Brazil. As it were, Natal took this into consideration, and instead of sailing an arc, decided to intercept the English, knowing they would rush for land.
Five hours later, Natal made another pass at the English, pounded them with broadsides, knocking three more ships out of action, one of which was captures. One Dutch ship was sunk in the course of action. With even less protection for essentially defenseless transports (they could defend themselves against Dutch Marines, but why board them when you could sink them?) The English Admiral opted for retreat.
English Setbacks
Despite whatever successes England experienced at sea, they suffered several set backs on the home front during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The first of these set backs struck in 1665, in the form of Yersinia pestis. The Plague was seen by many on both sides as divine wrath against the English. Newspapers in the United Provinces announced God’s favor in their just war against English oppression. It was a sentiment that both Catholic and Protestant Netherlanders could agree. Those of means fled London, including much of the government. Charles II and his court relocated to Oxford for the duration. At its height, the Plague claimed seven thousand victims per week.
The Plague, or rather its carriers, common rats, were only eradicated by the second of England’s set backs. In the following year, and raging inferno put the English capital to the torch. Where the Plague was praised as divine wrath by the Dutch, the London Fire was condemned by newspapers across England as a Dutch plot. The fire was not the work of Dutch agents, but of an overcrowded city built from flammable material. It is now known that the fire actually started in a bakery, and failure to quash it early was more the fault of London’s Mayor than the United Provinces’ King.
With their capital in ruins, and damage that ranks in the tens of millions of guilders, the dispersed people of London were looking for scapegoats. With few Netherlanders to be found, the English turned towards other victims. The perennial enemy and their Pope were targeted, with more than a few Catholics hung after the embers finally died, no matter the fact that their king was pro-Catholic. Danger of an uprising in and around the ruins prompted the English government to resettle as many people as possible. Such internal strife caused England a great deal of trouble as they continued their struggle for domination of the world’s oceans.
The Raid on Medway
After having his first attempt thwarted, de Ruyter launched a second attempted landing in England, again English ships in dock were his target. This time, his efforts would prove to be the biggest disaster in Britain’s Royal Navy’s history. Instead of attempting a one-shot attack, de Ruyter divided his forces, sending the ships of Denmark-Norway north to attack Scottish ports. The Scots were not happy with their own union with England. De Ruyter’s northern force, commanded by Danish Admiral Eirikson, feigned an attempted landing in Yorkshire, which would divide the island. He escorted a number of armed, and unoccupied Danish transports to complete the deceit.
Upon hearing a force scouting near York, Charles II ordered Monck to defend the Yorkshire Coasts. Only when the English were committed to the voyage did de Ruyter move into position. He took a trick from the English book and sailed out of the fog. With sixty-two Ships-of-the-Line, de Ruyter entered the Thames River unopposed. The few English ships on station sailed to engage the Dutch. Only when the fog was blown away did the English see the size of the Dutch fleet. Their target was not York after all, it was London. The remaining English ships sailed up the Thames to bring word of invasion.
With no fleet in sight, several aging merchantmen were sunk in the Thames, an attempt to block any further advance. De Ruyter unloaded some fifteen hundred marines, under the command of the Baron van Ghent. Local English lords called forth militia, knights and anyone who could hold a pike. Their attempt to stop a battle-hardened contingent of Dutch Marines failed miserably. Many of the English peasants fled at the sight of the Marines’ first shot.
Further calls-to-arms rang across most of south-eastern England. Charles II prepared to leave London for Oxford once again should it come to that. Reports brought to the English King gave him the impression that fifteen thousand Netherlanders were marching on the capital. Lucky for them, the Dutch were on their way to Kent. The call-to-arms fell on mostly deaf ears. England faced financial troubles after the Brazilian debacle, and many of the sailors and some soldiers have not been paid in months, thus were not overly motivated to risk their lives. As far as they were concerned, whatever was to happen, the cheapskates deserve it.
Five days passed before the Dutch reached Chatham, due to some trouble in landing and navigating the shoals. Alarms were sounded at Chatham Shipyards. Some of the smaller Dutch ships sailed up the Medway on June 12, and commenced attacking English defenses around a large chain spread across the river. Marine artillery opened up on the shipyard shortly afterwards. With little defense in the shipyards, and few sailors to man those ships in dry dock, the Dutch Marines advanced after a minimal bombardment.
Dockworkers and shipwrights fled at the sight of Marines. What few militiamen were around merely fired a few shots for the honor of King and Country before retreating. The Marines did not give pursuit, their orders were clear. As soon as the defense was clear, they turned on the shipyard. Once the chain was clear, many vessels of de Ruyter’s fleet sailed into dock. As soon as the gangplanks were lowered, Dutch sailors helped themselves to everything that was not nailed down.
The following day, a general panic struck a London still trying to recover from two years worth of disaster. Rumors flew around without restraint. The Dutch were in the process of loading a French army in Dunkirk, and planned to ferry them across the sea. The populous of London were feeling especially vulnerable after the fire that gutted their city a year earlier. The wealthy who still had homes boarded up their houses, loading their valuables and headed off to their country estates, hoping to escape the full-scale invasion they believed imminent. There was no French army, and the French were not even involved in the war, aside from the occasional mercenary or sailor.
By June 14, the Dutch were through plundering the shipyard. Cannons, shot, powder, salted beef and fish, bullion, coins and anything shinny swiftly vanished from the shipyards and warehouses along the wharf. Dry docks were flooded and English ships towed away by the Dutch. The English flagship, HMS Royal Charles was towed away by de Ruyter as a personal trophy. Dutch sailors and marines manned the captured vessels, often with skeleton crews. Any ships that could not be taken, had their hulls breach and packed full of tinder, before set ablaze. The Dry docks themselves were set ablaze, and the piers torched. De Ruyter would not leave a single ship, not even a rowboat, for the English to use.
The raid on the Medway was one of the most brilliant victories in the history of the United Provinces. Sixteen English warships were stolen right out of dry dock, and two dozen more were scuttled. It was the Seventeenth Century equivalent of destroying the aircraft on the ground. England could not recover from the raid, and it soon was forced to sue for peace. Charles II still feared invasion. Upon leaving English waters and returning home, de Ruyter is known to have said to the Count of Holland, “Had I known landing would be so easy, I would have brought an army.”
For his part in the raid, and leading the Dutch to victory in the war, Michiel de Ruyter was granted the title of Marquis of New Amsterdam, along with an estate on Manhattan and lands along the Mauritius River. If the Dutch did invade instead of raid, they might very well have eliminated England once and for all, perhaps even transforming it into another colony. London’s own state lead many in the Netherlands to believe the island nation might no longer be a problem even without full conquest.
Treaty of Breda
The treaty was signed in the city of Breda, by England, United Provinces and Denmark-Norway on July 31, 1667. It brought a swift end to the Second Anglo-Dutch War, an end that favored the Dutch victors. The humiliation of Westminster was finally avenged. By the time negotiations began, de Ruyter virtually controlled all the seas surrounding Britannia. Despite their decisive victory, William III insisted on lenient terms. He did not want England to spend the next ten years plotting its own revenge.
The first order of business was the repeal of the Navigation Acts, allowing the Dutch to import goods to England and its colonies. Furthermore, the United Provinces secured a worldwide monopoly on nutmeg and cinnamon, forcing the English to give up their operations in the East Indies. The war bankrupted England, and another article of the treaty allowed for England to take out loans from the Bank of Amsterdam along with other Dutch banks at low interest rates, a subject introduced by certain members of the Second Chamber.
The Treaty of Breda did more than end a war, it reversed the face of European Alliances. An amendment to the treaty was hammered out by personal representatives of both William III and Charles II, in which, in return for Dutch support of England against its other enemies, Charles II promised his then five year old niece Mary, to William III. Another ten years would pass before Mary would make her matrimonial voyage to the House of Orange’s estate in Delft. With the signing of the treaty, it would seem that trade and commerce would be safe for the foreseeable future. However, with the passing of Charles II, his son James II would take the throne and immediately begin to welch on England’s end of the deal, and in a generation, the Dutch would return to England.
Piracy
Even after making peace with England, Dutch merchants still had to contend with piracy upon the high seas. With the Treaty of Breda, and closer ties hoped to form by the future royal marriage, it was hoped Dutch shipping would be better protected. To an extent, it was. English privateers no longer harassed Dutch commerce. Independent pirates continued to plague the seas around Dutch possessions. With the Caribbean being effectively a Spanish lake, Dutch trade was rather limited, and thus came into little contact with the romanticized pirates of the Caribbean. They would remain the Spanish monopoly’s problem.
Other coastal waters were home to Dutch traders. West Africa was one such hotspot, though with English possessions in the area, they tended to run more along the lines of privateering, and plagued French shipping instead. The Royal Dutch Navy had its own strong presence in the area, a necessity to keep the spice flowing. The Indian Ocean proved to be less of a problem for the Dutch, for its defense was under the jurisdiction of the VOC. The East India Company had zero tolerance for piracy, and a policy of better sorry than “in the red”. VOC ships traveled in convoys, protected by the Company’s private navy.
The Barbary Coast proved to be a problem. Though the Mediterranean provided only a small amount of trade on a global scale, the Dutch government was not about to let any pirates off the hooks. Independent traders and small countries often paid tribute, a polite enough word for bribe if ever there was one, to the various ports as a price for doing business. The United Provinces were not so generous. Following a string of attacks on Dutch ships in 1673, the United Provinces mounted an expedition against Algiers. Thousands of Dutch soldiers were transported to North Africa, where they marched upon the city. After a two month siege, the city’s defenses were breached. The net result was that of a general massacre of the city’s population, followed by the razing of Algiers. The expedition cost the United Provinces a great deal of capital, but William III decided an example had to be made.
In the decades afterward, the Barbary pirates learned to avoid any ship flying orange-white-blue banners.
Rising Tensions
Upon taking the throne, shortly after Charles’s untimely death following the Treaty of Breda, James II of England tried to back out of many aspects of the Treaty of Breda, including the marriage alliance. A converted Catholic, James II was opposed to having his daughter merry a Protestant king. The House of Orange, along with the United Provinces, was divided between both Catholic and Protestant, yet like the Provinces, it managed to exist without tearing itself apart. William III was a private Protestant, believing his own faith had no business in the affair of the state. The King of England was having the opposite problem with his own parliament; he was only allowed to take the throne as a private Catholic.
Only fear of a Third Anglo-Dutch War, and complete dismantling of England’s overseas empire, forced James II to relent. In 1677, he boarded his daughter Mary on one of the finest ships in the English Navy for a one-way voyage to the United Provinces. The marriage of William and Mary was widely celebrated across the United Provinces and William’s other kingdom, Denmark-Norway. It was seen not only as a marriage between two people, but between two nations. Any offspring of the two would potentially be King of three nations.
After two miscarriages, Princess-consort Mary soon conceived and gave birth to her and William’s only child, Johann Willem, in 1678. Again, the United Provinces celebrated, as did Denmark-Norway, though William I of Denmark-Norway did not address the nobility of Denmark as often as William III of the United Provinces addressed the Staaten-General. He ruled the distant nordic kingdom through a viceroy. However, in England, James II did not welcome the birth. He secretly hoped for the couple to be childless, for now a Netherlander was in line for the English and Scottish crowns, and the potential for a North Sea Empire.
Tensions were further heightened when France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, turned his eyes towards the southern Provinces. Before he claimed that the Rhine River was France’s natural boundary with the rest of Europe. Only fear of complete blockade, especially following the resounding victory of the Dutch during in 1667, prevented the French from carrying out their designs against the Netherlands. It did not, however, protect various other states along the Rhine.
When war with France appeared inevitable, William III called for his allies across the North Sea to raise an army. As King of Denmark-Norway, William easily razed an army of Danes. However, England was its own country, with its own King. James III refused the pleas, and went as far as to declare the alliance null and void. He claimed that any agreement signed under duress (especially after the Medway raid) was no longer binding.
William could have had James II simply eliminated, for the English King had enough enemies in parliament. However, by 1687, James II already had a son and heir, so removing him would only put another James on the throne, this one with plots to avenge his father’s death. Instead, William III hatched a plan with key nobles of the Firsts Chamber. Not only would he removed James II from the English throne, but would also install his wife, Mary as Queen of England.
The Glorious Revolution
By 1688, James further alienated the United Provinces by forbidding any Englander or Scotlander (not that the Irelanders had much choice to begin with) from serving in the Dutch army. He demanded that many English and Scottish mercenaries be released from service. In total, only one hundred fifty British returned home.
William III knew if he was going to move against James, he would have to do so fast. The French were already preparing to launch an attack into Flanders, and likely aimed at Antwerp once again. In September, the French began to seize Dutch merchantmen in French ports, an act of war in the eyes of the Staaten-General and Dutch trading companies. A Dutch fleet of some eighty warships was assembled to escort thirty thousand men and five thousand horses across the narrowest sections of the North Sea.
Following the Second Anglo Dutch War, the English Navy shrunk drastically. With debts to pay off, the funding for more ships simply did not exist. It left England in the position of second-rate naval power for the next century. Twenty years later, the Dutch did not particularly fear interception by England’s now decrepit fleet. Nonetheless, the Dutch ships made a thorough pass through waters between the Provinces and Britannia before allowing the invasion force to set sail.
Though they suffered through bad weather, they finally made landfall on November 5, disembarking in Torbay, near Brixham. Using lessons learned from the small-scale raids of the last war, the landing went without incident. To his surprise, William was greeted with a show of popular support. William already declared before the Staaten-General and in letters to England’s parliament that he had no desire to take the crown for himself, and that it was his wife, and England’s rightful Queen, who would sit upon the throne.
The question has been asked, why did William not become William III of England? England and Scotland spent a better part of the Sixteenth Century locked in civil war. At the center of these struggles, was religion. Always. William III was a Protestant, as per Danish law. Only a Protestant could take the throne of Denmark-Norway, and in that realm, he had to publicly admit his faith. The United Provinces has a strong secular tradition. What one believes is one’s own business, whether they be Catholic, Protestant, or one of the small, but growing Buddhists population. Even if these were not an issue, Scotland itself would prove an obstacle. There was great doubt that the Scots would accept an Oranje as their King, though the Scottish lords had no violent opposition to his Stuart wife.
England simply made their faith too public, going as far as to persecute those who did not view the same world view as the majority. In fact, it was a tyranny of the majority in that respect. To a monarch from the Netherlands, England was simply more trouble than it was worth. Religion aside, it cost the United Provinces a great deal of capital to raise such a large army, and would cost even more to occupy a nation that might not want to be occupied.
Again, before the crowds in Torbay, William renounced any claim to the English crown. England should be ruled by an Englander, thus Mary will be Queen. The crowds did not listen. James II was so detested, they were pleased to have anyone but him on the throne. As soon as his army was organized, William marched inland with eighteen thousand soldiers and three thousand cavalry, the rest fanned out to scout and to hold their landing sites.
Dutch and English armies met on the Salisbury plains on November 19. Almost immediately, James begin to loose any support in his army. Only a few skirmishes, in which English actually won, around Salisbury spilled any blood. The rest of the ‘battle’ consisted of desertion, along with anti-Catholic rioting in London. Hearing of desertion, the English commander, Lord Cornbury, ordered the English Army to retreat. Many soldiers deliberately straggled, just to desert. On the 24th, one of James’s chief commanders, Lord Churchill, defected to William’s side. Two days later, James other daughter, Princess Ann, went over to the Dutch. It is more likely she simply went over to his sister and brother-in-law, though James felt no less betrayed.
By early December, enough of the English Army deserted James, that his wife, and the Prince of Wales both fled to France. James attempted to flee the next day, however was captured by fishermen on December 11. With chaos reigning in London, rioting and looting ruling day and night, many members of Parliament welcomed the arrival of the Dutch Army, with King William III at its head. Parliament itself extended an invitation for William to take the crown. After his attempt to flee his won country, no Englander was likely to follow the rule of James II ever again.
William politely refused, and upon entering London, sent word back to Delft, summoning his wife to London. By the middle of December, with the Army effectively disbanded, England declared for Mary. Many in the English Government debated as to James II’s fate. William interceded on behalf of his father-in-law. If James wishes to leave, then there was no reason why they (England in general) should prevent it. On the 23rd, James boarded a ship in Kent and set sail to rejoin with his wife in France.
Mary arrived in London on January 3, 1689, to much jubilation. Not only did her arrival prevent another round of religious violence, but she permitted Parliament to pass the Exclusion Act, banning any Catholic from taking the English crown. William was staunchly opposed to the law on principle, however not only was he not the King of England, but he was not even English. This was his wife’s nation, and Mary II decided nobody like her earlier namesake, Mary I, should ever be allowed to take the throne. Many Dutch politicians could not help but feel that by effectively banning a whole religious sect from public service, that they have betrayed the ideals of the Pacification of Ghent.
However, Mary was not put on the throne for sake of English personal freedoms, but rather to bring England into compliance with their alliance. War with France was at hand, and the whole adventure into England was launched because William III feared that under James II, England might just side with Louis XIV against the United Provinces. It is called the Glorious Revolution, but there was nothing glorious about it, nor was it terribly revolutionary.
The Nine Years War
With Mary II reigning in England and Scotland (with William as Prince-consort), William III prepared to face the French. War with France was a long time coming. After the Thirty Years War, France began to gobble up small states surrounding her, gradually making her way towards the Rhine River. Lorraine, parts of the Saar Valley, and even Strasbourg fell under the sway of Louis XIV. The Catholic Sun King believed that the southern Provinces would welcome the self-proclaimed Defender of the Faith with open arms.
He could not be any more wrong. He failed to understand that what a Catholic Netherlander loved more than his faith was his freedom. In the 1680s, the inhabitants of the United Provinces were the freest people in all of Europe. Gone were the days a feudal lord ruled a village with an iron fist. Instead, the Dutch effectively governed themselves on a municipal level. They elected mayors, councilors and even attended public forums, where the public, not any one lord, would decide what laws and ordinances should be passed. These customs eventually evolved into the modern referendum system that now range across most of Europe.
On a provincial and national level, law-abiding citizens were mostly left alone by officials. The Dutch determined that the best way to contribute to society was by making a profit. The only regulating before the age of Napoleon came in the form of regulating trade between the Provinces. Delegates to the Staaten-General did their best to prevent their neighbors from growing to powerful. Tax collectors were a necessary bane, a functionary to keep the nation alive, and taxation was kept to a bare minimum, just enough to balance the Staaten-General’s books.
France, on the other hand, the state was everywhere. Louis XIV ruled his kingdom with all the restraint as a Roman Caesar. He claimed divine rights as an excuse for his despotism. In France, lords still presided over their lands, and their serfs. The French people could not up and leave as they pleased, for they were bound by custom and law to the land of their birth. Nor were they allowed independent thought. In theory, heirs in an absolutist system were groomed from birth for the role of King, taught that the welfare of their people were their greatest responsibility. Like more than a few points of political science, theory did not always translate into practice. Practiced or not, Kings of France were not known to be the most tolerant in religious issues. Anyone who did not conform with the Vatican faced repression, expulsion, and on occasion, extermination by the French government.
In violation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis dispersed all Protestant communities within his realm. Huguenots fled to England, the United Provinces, and Germany, bringing with them tales of the brutality of France’s monarch. In total, two hundred thousand French Protestants fled the persecution. Tens of thousands of these refugees found their way into Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam, Brazil, and the VOC’s supply depot of Capestaat. Huguenots were essential in founding the city of Willemsbourg, in southern Brazil on the site that was once the French colony of Henryville, and the Portuguese town of Rio de Janeiro.
The Nine Years War began in September of 1688 when Louis commanded Marshall Boufflers to invade the Rhineland. Phillippsburg fell on October 30, followed by Mannheim, Oppenheim, Worms, Heidelberg, and the fortress city of Mainz. One city refused to surrender to the thirty thousand man army, and in return, when Coblenz fell, Boufflers ordered it reduced to ashes. By 1689, Louis was master of the Rhine, and a direct threat to Dutch trade throughout the decaying Holy Roman Empire. Even before France rose to this position, they were already impounding Dutch merchantmen in French harbors. That alone compelled William to undertake his landing in England and force the ally into supporting him. If not for such premature seizures, it is entirely possible that a French invasion could have taken the United Provinces by surprise, and with James II refusing to help, it would have dire consequences on the (alternate) history of the Netherlands.
Louis hoped for a quick victory. With the Holy Roman Empire along with the Habsburgs, fighting Turks in the East it should have been easy. The impact on Emperor Leopold had the opposite effect. He recalled army under the Electorate of Bavaria from the Ottoman Front to defend southern Germany. The French failed to prepare for such an eventuality. Realizing this would not be a brief and decisive parade of French glory, Louis resolved upon a scorched-earth policy in the Rhineland.
In March of 1689, Louis selected the cities intended for destruction, starting with Heidelberg. The Count of Tesse torched the city, and on March 8, Montclair leveled Mannheim. Both Oppenheim and Worms were destroyed by the end of May. In June, the Elector of Brandenburg, aided by the Dutch commander, Menno van Coehoorn, besieged Kaiserwerth, and forced it capitulation on the 26th. Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, commanded an army of sixty thousand men, resolved on retaking Mainz. The town yielded on September 8, followed by the surrender of Bonn one month later.
Mons
On May 12, 1689, William III signed the Grand Alliance with the Emperor, with the lofty goal of forcing France back into pre-Thirty Years War boundaries, thus depriving Louis XIV of all his gains. After his losses across the Rhineland, Louis turned France’s attention towards the city of Luxembourg. The Duchy of Luxembourg had the misfortune of standing at a crossroads between great European powers. Luxembourg often appeared out of place in the United Provinces. It lacked the wide-scale commercial success of the other Provinces, and was considered by others as a backwater, a place of quaint little villages and rustic inns.
Backwater or not, it was one of the United Provinces, and an attack on it was an attack on the other sixteen. It was the first city to fall under the guns of Louis XIV, but by far not the last. It held out against siege until 1691, when the Dutch Army, under the command of the Duke of Brabant, lifted the siege and drove the French from the Duchy. As with anywhere in the southern Provinces, the French came forth claiming to be liberators, to free the cities from the oppression of the heretics.
The same was declared at Mons, in 1690. The French, under the command of recently humiliated Boufflers, invested the city with forty-six thousand men. What little defense the city could muster was easily brushed aside. Boufflers marched down the avenues of Mons as if he were the liberator, though not a single Netherlander was safe from his wrath. The first to go where the small population of Buddhists living in the city.
Since the VOC established colonies on Ceylon and Formosa, the peoples of the East were free to travel west, as long as they proved useful to the company. Upon arriving in the United Provinces, monks set forth into the Netherlands, establishing temples in every major city, along with Monasteries in the countryside. Their goal was not to convert the locals, though they would teach to those who wished to listen, but rather to learn all they could about this new land. They studied Europe’s religions, literature, science and arts. Every so often, a monk would return to the East, bringing the treasure of knowledge with him.
The French simply declared the peaceful monks, and any Netherlander who followed their path as heathens, showing them no mercy. Hundreds of monks were slaughtered in Mons when they attempted to nonviolently resist the invasion. Every other Buddhist who could not flee north were given the choice between embracing the Christian God, or meeting that same god in person. Some relented, paying lipservice to the Church, but a few remained defiant to the end, and learned that French were as tolerant under Louis XIV as they were under Charlemagne.
The next to suffer were both Protestant and Jewish populations in Mons. The Jews resisted especially hard, for the United Provinces were the only nation in all of Europe that accepted them as citizens and not aliens. This was their home, and they would fight for it. Those who did not follow both Buddhist and Protestants north, were killed mercilessly. All the bloodshed enraged the Catholic population. They were faithful to their Church, but these were their neighbors being killed. Though the Dutch people pride themselves on tolerance (as well with their business savvy) there were always extremist within a society. These were the only ones to welcome the French with open arms.
Antwerp Under Fire (Again)
After the fall of Mons, the French Army continued its march northward, to the city of Antwerp. Antwerp only recently began to recover from the siege during the Thirty Years War, and before that the Dutch Revolution. The city never regained the glory it knew under the Burgundians, but by 1691, it was just starting to grow into a (minor) commercial center. The locals knew they could not overshadow the colossus that is Amsterdam, but they did not desire such. They only wish to live profitable lives.
Their profits were cut short again in the spring of 1691. Two Dutch armies, one under the command of the Count of Holland, another commanded by Tomas van Leir, numbering some sixteen thousand men-at-arms, holed up within the city and surrounding areas. Instead of launching a direct assault against fortified strongholds, the French set up a parameter to the south of Antwerp, laden with dozens of cannon. Boufflers was content to starve the Dutch into submission. He could not threaten them, for tales of the atrocities committed within Mons only fueled the resolve of the citizens and defenders.
The siege was only in its second week when it was broken by the King of the United Provinces. William was quite delayed in returning home when James II landed in Ireland and provoked the Irish to rebel. Too many men died and too many resources were expended in keeping his wife’s Kingdom from disintegrating. When William landed, a scant six kilometers down river from Antwerp, he was not alone. Tens of thousands of Dutch and English soldiers were under his command.
The following battle ended in near disaster for the French. Boufflers attempted to hold ground against William’s landing, but in the end, he was forced to sound a retreat. Upon returning to Mons, the French left three thousand of their own dead on the battlefield, seven times as many than the Dutch lost. Though France’s ambitions were stalled in the north for the time being, they engaged and defeated both Spain and Savoy along the Mediterranean. As much as any Netherlander loathed to admit it, Spain must be kept in the war. If they let them lose, France would turn those forces north.
Anglo-Dutch and French forces clashed repeatedly in the County of Namur. Each battle lacked the decisive edge needed to bring the other side to the negotiating tables. By 1693, Louis XIV had four hundred thousand men in the French Army (at least on paper). Such a large army required large amounts of funding, and France faced an economic crisis. Topped off with crop failures and famine in 1694, France was teetering on the brink of collapse.
Before the Grand Alliance would offer reasonable terms in its peace proposal, William III decided to go on the offensive. By April of 1695, Namur was cleared of all French forces. Mons held out against all attempts at liberation, offering the French a minimal toehold on the United Provinces. William failed to remove the French forces by the time all sides sat down for negotiations at Ryswick. The Staaten-General wished to continue the war until all of the Netherlands were free, but Spain was ready for peace, as was the United Province’s ally, England. The cession of Mons started a tragic chapter in that city’s history. For more than a century to follow, the city would change hands until finally being rewarded to France during the Congress of Vienna.
Treaty of Ryswick
Though called a treaty, it was anything but. At most, it was but a cease-fire, one that would last until Spain fell into dynastic crisis in 1701. The parties involved in the Nine Years War met in Ryswick, near the Hague. By the terms of the treaty, Louis was allowed to keep Alsace and Strasbourg, but forced to give up all claim to Luxembourg. In order to curry favor with Spain (over the upcoming succession question) France evacuated all of its gains in Catalonia. Lastly, though still sheltering James II, who escaped from Ireland, France recognized Mary II as the rightful Queen of England.
Emperor Leopold was the only holdout on the treaty. He desired a continuation of war, to strengthen his own claim to the Spanish Throne. His initial resistance was weakened by the fact that he still was at war with the Ottomans, and could not face France alone. He signed the treaty, and netted a sizable accretion of power. His own son was named King of the Romans, and the chief candidate for the Polish-Lithuanian Throne.
The treaty was signed in October, 1697. The United Provinces, knowing this was a temporary peace at best, increased the size of garrisons and expanded fortifications in the southern Provinces. The biggest question of the day, the of Spanish succession, was not discussed at Ryswick. Perhaps if it had been, war might have been prevented. Within three years, the Spanish King would be dead, and the Grand Alliance would plunge Europe back into war.
King William III
Many princes are destined to become kings before they are born, few actually obtain the title before birth. Such is the case with King William III, though he was not called that until after his official coronation fifteen years later. Throughout his life, William III would be the Dutch monarch most closely tied with England. Two wars would be waged against their neighbors across the North Sea (though Princess Christina was regent through the first war), followed by an alliance through marriage, ending with William III landing in England and installing his English wife as Queen.
By the age of fifteen, Princess Christina died, leaving young William an orphan. Much debate raged within the Staaten-General as what to do next. Was William too young to take the throne? There was some discussion as to appointing a regent until William proved himself capable of taking the crown. That begged the question who would decide when he was worthy? None of the Second Chamber were for keeping William from his rightful throne. A few in the First mused over being regent themselves, and perhaps king.
In the end, it was William’s other holding, the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway that decided the issue. Nobility ranging from Kopenhagen to Oslo to Bergen refused to accept any Netherlander the Staaten-General appointed as their regent. William would be their king. Before the Danes could crown him, the Dutch coronation went forward in Liege, and William III was crowned king of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the King of Denmark-Norway. His first act as King would be to wage was against the English and Scottish in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
Portuguese Restoration
In the second year of William II’s reign, Portugal declared independence from Spain. For eighty years, both Portugal and Spain shared the same king, and following their defeat during the Forty Years War, Spain pressed for full political union. Without its vast colonial holding or wealth in the spice trade, Portugal was powerless before annexation. It was not until the end of the Thirty Years War, and another resounding defeat for Spain did the Portuguese make their move. As soon as the war ended, Portuguese nobles placed Joao IV on the throne in Lisbon.
Portugal was not looking just to regain its status in the brotherhood of nations, but to reclaim its once glorious empire as well. Even if they defeated the Spanish, Portugal was still no match for the Dutch Navy. In decades past, Portugal held an alliance with England, and upon reclaiming its throne, it reactivated that alliance. It was Portugal’s hope that the English Navy could defeat the Dutch, and allow them to regain at the very least, Brazil.
Joao IV did declare war on the United Provinces, though the English held back for the moment. England had its own problems at the moment, and by 1649, a change in government was at hand. Charles I was recently executed, and Oliver Cromwell’s ‘Commonwealth’ was on the rise. The Commonwealth had no use for Iberian problems. After all, why should English blood be spilt for a bunch of Catholics. Puritan England would just as soon add rich Brazil to its own domain.
Portugal’s ambition was not to be. By 1653, Spain all but crushed the rebellion, forcing Joao IV into exile, and eliminated many of the Portuguese nobles who sought to break from Spain. Ironically, by then England and the United Provinces were already at war with each other, alliance or not. Never again would the Portuguese flag wave above the Iberian peninsula. Many Portuguese fled across the ocean, escaping Spanish retribution, to the only part of the world were their language was spoken among freemen; Dutch Brazil.
Act of Navigation
By the middle of the Seventeenth Century, the United Provinces possessed the largest trading fleet in Europe, which more vessels than most other nations combined. Their maritime based economy gave them a dominate position in Europe. France could invade, but the United Province could close borders, seal trade and strangulate the economy of any nation that may wish to make her an enemy. They profited greatly from the spice trade, and in the colonies taken from Portugal. More over, because of civil war in England, the Dutch were gaining significant influence over England’s own colonies in North America.
With Oliver Cromwell and his Commonwealth victorious, England’s Royal Navy was a force on the rise. During the English Civil War, the United Provinces supported Charles I and the Royalist, and were subsequently outraged by the Commonwealth’s act of regicide upon Charles’s execution. Therefore, Cromwell considered the Dutch an enemy. More precisely, considered William II an enemy.
Upon William’s death, relations changed. The Staaten-General recognized the English Commonwealth, though they refused to expel many Royalist exiled in the Netherlands. The fact that it was the Staaten-General, and not the infant King who made the recognition only encouraged the English. In January of 1651, a delegation of nearly two hundred fifty English appeared in the Hague, to negotiate the conditions on where the United Provinces might unite with the Commonwealth.
Decades before, the Dutch declared that never again shall they be ruled from a foreign capital, though negotiations did drag on for weeks. The English were quite upset upon learning, that after so much effort, the Dutch never had any intention on political union. The delegation left in June, rather disappointed they reported the Dutch as untrustworthy, and a threat to English security. The fact that the United Provinces had no interest in that little island off their shores never entered into the equation. Why would they want to invade a place as atrocious sounding as York when they could stay comfortably in elegant, and classy Amsterdam.
Continuing trouble with the Royalist, and French support there of, prompted England’s parliament to issue letters of reprisal against French ships and French goods on any neutral ships. The United Province might not wage war over another’s territory, but it most certainly would if its trade interests were threatened, and most of the ‘neutral’ ships happened to be Dutch. To further antagonize the Dutch, Parliament passed the Navigation Acts in October of 1651.
Simply put, the Navigation Acts were a declaration of war in all but name. It ordered that only English ships, or ships from the originating country, could import goods to England, thus eliminating any middleman. This measure was almost exclusively aimed at the trade-orientated Dutch, and to put it simply, the Dutch have too much trade and the English were resolved to take it from them. Take it they did. Many privateers and ships of the English Royal Navy used the Acts as a pretext to seize Dutch ships. The English went even as far as to demand that all ships in the English Channel and North Sea dip their flag in salute to English ships. It was one too many insults for a Netherlander to stand.
Maarten Tromp
May 29, 1652, English General-at-Sea Robert Blake commanded a fleet that encountered another Dutch fleet commanded by Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp. As per Parliamentary demands, Blake waited for the Dutch to dip their flag in salute. When Tromp did not comply swiftly enough to satisfy Blake, the English ships opened fire, starting the brief Battle of Goodwin Sands. Tromp managed to escort his convoy to safety, but lost two ships in the preceding battle. Born in Den Briel in 1598, Maarten Tromp was the son of an officer in the fledgling Dutch Navy. At the age of nine, Tromp went to see with his father, and was present at the Battle of Gibraltar.
Tromp was captured twice, once when he was twelve, when pirates killed his father, and again when he was twenty-two, this time by Corsairs of the Barbary Coast. Both times Tromp was sold into slavery in Arab markets. The first time he was freed by pity, the second time he impressed the Bey of Tunis greatly with his maritime skills, that the Bey set him free. His own time in bondage transformed Tromp into an early opponent to slavery. His attempts to rally the freedom-loving Dutch people against the institution met with only limited success during his lifetime. It was not until well after his death did the slave trade come to an end. Between his times in slavery, Tromp supported his mother and sisters by laboring in the Rotterdam shipyards.
In 1622, Tromp was commissioned into the Dutch Navy as a lieutenant. He spent much of his tenor battling pirates in North Africa. He rose through the ranks, achieving his Admiral ranks by 1637, when Lieutenant-Admiral van Dorp was removed for incompetence. His first years as Admiral were spent blockading Dunkirk and combating a resurgence of pirates plaguing the Dover Strait.
On July 10, 1652, England formally declared war on the United Provinces. In the opening months of war, the English targeted Dutch merchant ships. Any ship sailing alone would not stand a chance. As Admiral, Tromp gathered a fleet of ninety-six ships to do battle with the English privateers. At the Battle of the Kentish Knock, the Dutch attacked the English fleet near the mouth of the Thames, but were beaten back with the loss of too many men.
The loss was a minor setback for the Dutch, but the English perceived that the Dutch were near defeat, so diverted twenty of their warships to the Mediterranean. This division of forces lead to the English defeat by Tromp during the Battle of Dungeness, and further to the destruction of the English Mediterranean fleet in 1653.
Blockade of the United Provinces
In February of 1653, the English were ready to challenge the Dutch again. In one of the turning points in the First Anglo-Dutch War, the English defeated the Dutch during the three day battle, and drove them from the English Channel. For the first time since its formation, the United Provinces were not the dominate navy in European waters. The defeat made it clear to the Staaten-General that they were not invincible.
By March 1653, the Dutch sent delegates, peace feelers, to London. After such a resounding victory, the English Parliament was no longer motivated for a peaceful solution. Why negotiate when they could conquer. Their desires to conquer were stillborn. With the exception of an invasion of Long Island by colonist in Massachusetts and Connecticut, land battles were not an equation in the war. Colonist managed to conquer two-thirds of Long Islands, the parts not inhabited by Dutch settlers, and even kept their new conquest after the war’s end.
In June, the English were again victorious at sea. Following the two day long Battle of the Gabbard, England drove the Dutch out of the North Sea. With North Sea and English Channel closed, the United Provinces found themselves cut off from their colonies, and more importantly, from their trade. Following the battle, England set up a blockade of the Netherlands, a land dependent on agricultural imports.
With trade disrupted, the Dutch economy collapsed, and famine spread across the Provinces for the first time in decades, if not centuries. The Hague sent out more delegates, growing desperate for a peaceful resolution, but again they were rebuffed. Cromwell became more interested in punishing the Netherlands than negotiating. With little choice, the already battered Dutch fleet was forced to attempt to break the blockade.
The Battle of Scheveningen
After pushing the Dutch out of the North Sea, the English set up a blockade of one hundred twenty ships under the command of General-at-Sea George Monck. Any Dutch merchant ship that attempted to slip past the blockade was captured, its cargo confiscated. In a sense, Monck turned out to be one of the most successful pirates in history. Not only did he acquire a large amount of booty, but his blockade led to wide scale unemployment and starvation in Dutch cities.
On August 3, 1653, Admiral Tromp put to sea in the Brederode with a fleet of one hundred ships at the island of Texel, were another twenty-seven ships under the command of Witte de Withe were trapped by the English. Once the English spotted Tromp’s fleet, they turned their attention away from de With, allowing his ships to escape, and later join Tromp.
August 10, the English fleet engaged the combined Dutch fleet off Scheveningen. The battle was short and fierce, with each fleet moving through each other four times, inflicting much damaged. Maarten Tromp was killed early in the battle, by a sharpshooter in the rigging of, reportedly, William Penn’s ship. His death was kept secret from the rest of the fleet, for fear of demoralizing. Morale aside, by the afternoon, the Dutch already lost twelve ships and many more were simply too damaged to continue the fight.
In the end, morale broke anyway and a large group of ships, all under the command of merchant captains, broke formation and fled north. De With attempted to assert order and rally the ships, but to no avail. He was limited to covering their retreat as far as Texel. However, damage was not one-sided. The English, too, suffered many casualties, and lost many ships to damage. So many, that the fleet was forced to give up the blockade and return to port for refit and repair.
Scheveningen was a battle were both sides could honestly claim victory. The English won the day on the tactical field, defeating the Dutch fleet, and hurting them more than they were hurt in turn. However, the United Provinces set out with a simple strategic goal; lifting the blockade. That was exactly what the fleet accomplished, and the Dutch claim a strategic victory. Either way, it was the last major battle of the war.
Treaty of Westminster
Over the course of the war, Oliver Cromwell continued to call for political union between the Provinces and the Commonwealth. He targeted specifically the northern provinces, with the large proportion of Protestants. Unfortunately for the English, they were largely Calvinist, and untrusting to anyone who was not them. At least with the Catholics in the south, the Calvinist were dealing with fellow Netherlanders. Cromwell never did understand the nature of Dutch nationalism.
Cromwell, a little disappointed, set down a peace proposal of twenty-seven articles, two of which were unacceptable; all Royalists were to be expelled, and the personal union with Denmark-Norway was to be ended. Again, Cromwell failed to grasp reality; the Dutch king was only four, and no four-year-old would give up what was his. Cromwell was forced to accept peace minus two articles, and in April 1564, the Staaten-General accepted the proposal. On May 8, 1654, the Treaty of Westminster was signed.
It was truly an inconclusive victory where the English managed to gain two-thirds of Long Island, the two-third not inhabited by enterprising Dutch settlers. However, peace of not, the commercial rivalry between the two nations was not solved, and hostilities continued between colonial companies of the two, both of which had navies and armies of their own. The East Indies were still fought over, with the Dutch companies based in Batavia, the English ones in Manilla.
Humiliation of the Treaty of Westminster, which still had the Navigation Acts in place, along with the loss of trade only fueled bitterness in the Dutch people. There would be peace, for now, but because of no decisive victor, a second war between the English and Dutch was in the making.
Naval Buildup
As soon as the ink on the Treaty of Westminster was signed, the Dutch were already launching an aggressive shipbuilding program. The Staaten-General were well informed about the battles at sea, and decided the lack of Ships-of-the-Line was a key role in the United Provinces failure to obtain victory. Their reliance upon modified commercial vessels for fighting a war proved somewhat of a weakness. They learned hard lessons, and learned them well. Over the following decade, leading up to the second war, the United Provinces built more than a hundred ships dedicated exclusively to war.
Before hand, Dutch warships were little more than merchant ships overhauled and heavily armed, and susceptible to far more damage. Inexperienced commercial captains also proved the weak link in Dutch fleets. Thousand of sailors passed through the naval academies in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp, where a strict discipline and respect for the chain of command was impressed upon them. A professional navy would be the key to future victories. The United Provinces were not the first nor last nation to learn that untrained militia and other part-time soldiery could prove more a liability than a benefit.
The Staaten-General were not the only ones humiliated by the treaty. Thousands of sailors, once believing Dutch mariners best in the world, were infuriated by the humiliation and burned for revenge. Not just revenge for themselves, but they saw it their duty to avenge the insults against national honor. One such officer, a veteran of the First Anglo-Dutch War would rise to leadership and become the most famous admiral in Dutch history.
Michiel de Ruyter
Michiel de Ruyter was born in 1607, in the waning days of the Forty Years War. Little is known about de Ruyter’s early life, except he likely started his life as a sailor around the age of eleven. Such early starts in lifelong careers were not uncommon during the Seventeenth Century. Only today, when one must attended higher educations for the better part of a decade to obtain something that was once apprenticed does such a young start seem odd, even prodigy-like.
The name de Ruyter came from the Dutch word ‘ruyten’ which more-or-less translates into ‘to raid’. De Ruyter was known for this as his work as a privateer, and later on for hunting pirates. During the First Anglo-Dutch War, de Ruyter quickly rose to the rank of Admiral. He commanded a small reserve fleet at the Battle of Plymouth, winning the battle against English Admiral Ayscue, a raider of Dutch merchantmen.
A year before the outbreak of a second war, de Ruyter clashed with the English off the West African coast. One of the articles of the peace treaty involved dipping the flag in salute, one that de Ruyter always ignored. Like many sailors, he never forgave the insults postulated in the treaty. Like many, he spent ten years preparing revenge. De Ruyter continued his raids, expanding his territory into the Carribean. In April 1665, he hit Barbados, followed up by a large scale raid on the pirate den of Port Royale, Jamaica.
March 4, 1665, war officially broke out between England and the United Provinces. The two were evenly matched once various considerations were taken into account. Though England boasted a population twice that of the Provinces, a majority of them fell into the category of broke peasants. The Dutch offset this by a large middle class population. Another factor was the end of the Commonwealth. By 1660, the Stuarts were restored to power. By 1665, the United Provinces’s king finally took the throne. At fifteen, William III might lack the life experience of Charles II, but he hungered to avenge the wrongs against his Kingdom.
The first encounter between English and Dutch fleets occurred at the Battle of Lowestoft, on June 13. Though the resounding defeat was the worst in Dutch history outside of the Battle of Java Sea centuries later, England failed to capitalize on their own momentum. English victories back home were offset by Dutch victories in the Americas. De Ruyter continued to be the bane of English trade.
Four Days Battle
On June 11, 1666, one hundred fifty ships from the English and Dutch navies met near North Foreland for the longest battle in naval history. Eighty-four Dutch ships, commanded by de Ruyter faced seventy-nine ships under the command of Monck. England was under the impression that a French fleet would soon join the Dutch, and acted first to split the forces. The rumor of French intervention prompted Monck to send a squadron of ships to defend the Strait of Dover.
As a result, the Dutch vastly outnumbered the English, yet de Ruyter could not bring the battle to a speedy conclusion. The first encounter between the two navies, Monck targeted the Dutch fleet anchored near Dunkirk, commanded by Admiral Cornelis Tromp, son of Maarten, hoping to cripple his force and even the odds. Monck tried to force his enemy onto the hazardous Flemish shoals. The Dutch center, commanded by de Ruyter arrived in time to prevent the younger Tromp’s squadron from being knocked out of action.
Once the Dutch forces formed up, minus a few mishaps of Inexperienced commanders colliding with their neighbors, the English brought out a weapon the Dutch were unaware of. They fired hollow brass shells, filled with highly combustible materials. The shots were devastating to the Dutch, however, lucky for the Dutch, the English fleet had few of these shells due to high cost of production.
Mock retreated on the first night, but the ships of Admiral Harmam drifted into the Dutch lines and were suddenly set ablaze. It was a tactic that dated back to the battle against the Spanish Armada, but did not break the Dutch the same way it did Spain. On the Morning of the second day, Monck attempted to destroy the Dutch by a direct attack. After all, the Dutch during the First Anglo-Dutch War scattered when beaten, why should they not during the Second?
Before the attack could commence, de Ruyter preempted him, by crossing the English line and severely damaging several ships. After a first pass, the red flag was razed, signaling an all-out attack by the Dutch. The ensuing melee caused much devastation between the two fleets. Tromp was forced to transfer his flag four times due to damage caused by his own overzealous assault. De Ruyter held such an advantage in numbers, he sent several ships to escort both damaged and captured ship back to port.
During the second night and the third day, the English retreated westward, with the Dutch in pursuit. Unlike the Battle of Scheveningen, the Dutch captains held rank and the ships held formation. Several English ships were cut off from retreat, and were forced to surrender or be sunk. Even Admiral Ayscue had to surrender to Tromp when one of his men struck the flag. It was the first and last time an English Admiral was captured at sea.
Where the third day was the biggest disaster in the history of the (English/British) Royal Navy, the fourth day could only be worse. Several ships joined Monck, with fresh sailors and a hold load of ammunition. But these few newcomers were not enough to turn the battle, even with de Ruyter’s force shrunk. Many of the English ships engaging in the battle from day one were already out of powder. It was not lack of planning, but rather the English gunners proved more efficient than their Dutch counterparts, and thus extended their ammunition faster.
The English continued their retreat, but several stragglers were boarded, captured and later added to the (Dutch) Royal Navy. With his own ships damaged, though still packing powder, de Ruyter called of pursuit once the English vanished into a fog bank. He would not press his luck and turn victory into a disaster. Though many historians call the Four Days Battle inconclusive, it is certain that after the battle, the English had little chance of forcing their peace on the Dutch.
St. James Day Battle
August 5, English and Dutch navies clashed again near North Foreland, this time they outnumbered the Dutch by one ship. That one ship made it possible for the English to secure victory. It was not a decisive victory, but it did keep de Ruyter from landing Dutch Marines on English shores, at least for the time being. That was de Ruyter’s intention, to land and destroy the English ships while they were under repair.
The English discovered the Dutch sailing into position and engaged them before the Dutch could form ranks. The English scattered many of the Dutch navy, sailing from banks of fog like banshees. The surprise was enough to break the momentum of the Dutch. For most of the day, the two fleets attempted to gain advantage of wind against their foe. By the next morning, the losses were light; England lost one ship, the Dutch two.
However, by now, de Ruyter discovered his position was hopeless and ordered a general retreat. Many of the ships were already scattered and retreated on their own, leaving the Dutch Admiral with a mere forty ships. The English were still in fair shape, and if their Admiral, the Prince of the Rhine, had chose to, he likely could have rolled up de Ruyter and crippled the Dutch. However, he was satisfied by simply humiliating the Dutch Navy.
The Brazilian Expedition
In late 1666, the English considered capturing the Netherlands’ most vital trading post in North America, New Amsterdam. After some consideration, the English Admiralty decided why have a trading post when you could have all the sugar. The planned for an invasion of Brazil, similar to the one lead by van Bohr decades earlier. However, unlike the Portuguese, the Dutch were well prepared for attack against their colonies. Without them, they would have no commodities to trade.
In the Battle of the Amazon Delta, Dutch Admiral, the Count of Natal, lead a small fleet of seventeen warships against a much larger English fleet. However, out of the twenty-six ships, more than half were transports, carrying soldiers and supplies needed for the conquest and occupation of Dutch Brazil. Natal used the strong currents of the Amazon, which extended far into the Atlantic, to carry his force quickly across the English formation. In one pass, the Dutch crippled two English warships, weakening their ability to defend the transports.
Due to the river’s currents, several hours were required to reposition the Dutch fleet. Natal took a gamble on this attack, for it permitted the English enough time to sail out of reach, and perhaps land on the northern coast of Brazil. As it were, Natal took this into consideration, and instead of sailing an arc, decided to intercept the English, knowing they would rush for land.
Five hours later, Natal made another pass at the English, pounded them with broadsides, knocking three more ships out of action, one of which was captures. One Dutch ship was sunk in the course of action. With even less protection for essentially defenseless transports (they could defend themselves against Dutch Marines, but why board them when you could sink them?) The English Admiral opted for retreat.
English Setbacks
Despite whatever successes England experienced at sea, they suffered several set backs on the home front during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The first of these set backs struck in 1665, in the form of Yersinia pestis. The Plague was seen by many on both sides as divine wrath against the English. Newspapers in the United Provinces announced God’s favor in their just war against English oppression. It was a sentiment that both Catholic and Protestant Netherlanders could agree. Those of means fled London, including much of the government. Charles II and his court relocated to Oxford for the duration. At its height, the Plague claimed seven thousand victims per week.
The Plague, or rather its carriers, common rats, were only eradicated by the second of England’s set backs. In the following year, and raging inferno put the English capital to the torch. Where the Plague was praised as divine wrath by the Dutch, the London Fire was condemned by newspapers across England as a Dutch plot. The fire was not the work of Dutch agents, but of an overcrowded city built from flammable material. It is now known that the fire actually started in a bakery, and failure to quash it early was more the fault of London’s Mayor than the United Provinces’ King.
With their capital in ruins, and damage that ranks in the tens of millions of guilders, the dispersed people of London were looking for scapegoats. With few Netherlanders to be found, the English turned towards other victims. The perennial enemy and their Pope were targeted, with more than a few Catholics hung after the embers finally died, no matter the fact that their king was pro-Catholic. Danger of an uprising in and around the ruins prompted the English government to resettle as many people as possible. Such internal strife caused England a great deal of trouble as they continued their struggle for domination of the world’s oceans.
The Raid on Medway
After having his first attempt thwarted, de Ruyter launched a second attempted landing in England, again English ships in dock were his target. This time, his efforts would prove to be the biggest disaster in Britain’s Royal Navy’s history. Instead of attempting a one-shot attack, de Ruyter divided his forces, sending the ships of Denmark-Norway north to attack Scottish ports. The Scots were not happy with their own union with England. De Ruyter’s northern force, commanded by Danish Admiral Eirikson, feigned an attempted landing in Yorkshire, which would divide the island. He escorted a number of armed, and unoccupied Danish transports to complete the deceit.
Upon hearing a force scouting near York, Charles II ordered Monck to defend the Yorkshire Coasts. Only when the English were committed to the voyage did de Ruyter move into position. He took a trick from the English book and sailed out of the fog. With sixty-two Ships-of-the-Line, de Ruyter entered the Thames River unopposed. The few English ships on station sailed to engage the Dutch. Only when the fog was blown away did the English see the size of the Dutch fleet. Their target was not York after all, it was London. The remaining English ships sailed up the Thames to bring word of invasion.
With no fleet in sight, several aging merchantmen were sunk in the Thames, an attempt to block any further advance. De Ruyter unloaded some fifteen hundred marines, under the command of the Baron van Ghent. Local English lords called forth militia, knights and anyone who could hold a pike. Their attempt to stop a battle-hardened contingent of Dutch Marines failed miserably. Many of the English peasants fled at the sight of the Marines’ first shot.
Further calls-to-arms rang across most of south-eastern England. Charles II prepared to leave London for Oxford once again should it come to that. Reports brought to the English King gave him the impression that fifteen thousand Netherlanders were marching on the capital. Lucky for them, the Dutch were on their way to Kent. The call-to-arms fell on mostly deaf ears. England faced financial troubles after the Brazilian debacle, and many of the sailors and some soldiers have not been paid in months, thus were not overly motivated to risk their lives. As far as they were concerned, whatever was to happen, the cheapskates deserve it.
Five days passed before the Dutch reached Chatham, due to some trouble in landing and navigating the shoals. Alarms were sounded at Chatham Shipyards. Some of the smaller Dutch ships sailed up the Medway on June 12, and commenced attacking English defenses around a large chain spread across the river. Marine artillery opened up on the shipyard shortly afterwards. With little defense in the shipyards, and few sailors to man those ships in dry dock, the Dutch Marines advanced after a minimal bombardment.
Dockworkers and shipwrights fled at the sight of Marines. What few militiamen were around merely fired a few shots for the honor of King and Country before retreating. The Marines did not give pursuit, their orders were clear. As soon as the defense was clear, they turned on the shipyard. Once the chain was clear, many vessels of de Ruyter’s fleet sailed into dock. As soon as the gangplanks were lowered, Dutch sailors helped themselves to everything that was not nailed down.
The following day, a general panic struck a London still trying to recover from two years worth of disaster. Rumors flew around without restraint. The Dutch were in the process of loading a French army in Dunkirk, and planned to ferry them across the sea. The populous of London were feeling especially vulnerable after the fire that gutted their city a year earlier. The wealthy who still had homes boarded up their houses, loading their valuables and headed off to their country estates, hoping to escape the full-scale invasion they believed imminent. There was no French army, and the French were not even involved in the war, aside from the occasional mercenary or sailor.
By June 14, the Dutch were through plundering the shipyard. Cannons, shot, powder, salted beef and fish, bullion, coins and anything shinny swiftly vanished from the shipyards and warehouses along the wharf. Dry docks were flooded and English ships towed away by the Dutch. The English flagship, HMS Royal Charles was towed away by de Ruyter as a personal trophy. Dutch sailors and marines manned the captured vessels, often with skeleton crews. Any ships that could not be taken, had their hulls breach and packed full of tinder, before set ablaze. The Dry docks themselves were set ablaze, and the piers torched. De Ruyter would not leave a single ship, not even a rowboat, for the English to use.
The raid on the Medway was one of the most brilliant victories in the history of the United Provinces. Sixteen English warships were stolen right out of dry dock, and two dozen more were scuttled. It was the Seventeenth Century equivalent of destroying the aircraft on the ground. England could not recover from the raid, and it soon was forced to sue for peace. Charles II still feared invasion. Upon leaving English waters and returning home, de Ruyter is known to have said to the Count of Holland, “Had I known landing would be so easy, I would have brought an army.”
For his part in the raid, and leading the Dutch to victory in the war, Michiel de Ruyter was granted the title of Marquis of New Amsterdam, along with an estate on Manhattan and lands along the Mauritius River. If the Dutch did invade instead of raid, they might very well have eliminated England once and for all, perhaps even transforming it into another colony. London’s own state lead many in the Netherlands to believe the island nation might no longer be a problem even without full conquest.
Treaty of Breda
The treaty was signed in the city of Breda, by England, United Provinces and Denmark-Norway on July 31, 1667. It brought a swift end to the Second Anglo-Dutch War, an end that favored the Dutch victors. The humiliation of Westminster was finally avenged. By the time negotiations began, de Ruyter virtually controlled all the seas surrounding Britannia. Despite their decisive victory, William III insisted on lenient terms. He did not want England to spend the next ten years plotting its own revenge.
The first order of business was the repeal of the Navigation Acts, allowing the Dutch to import goods to England and its colonies. Furthermore, the United Provinces secured a worldwide monopoly on nutmeg and cinnamon, forcing the English to give up their operations in the East Indies. The war bankrupted England, and another article of the treaty allowed for England to take out loans from the Bank of Amsterdam along with other Dutch banks at low interest rates, a subject introduced by certain members of the Second Chamber.
The Treaty of Breda did more than end a war, it reversed the face of European Alliances. An amendment to the treaty was hammered out by personal representatives of both William III and Charles II, in which, in return for Dutch support of England against its other enemies, Charles II promised his then five year old niece Mary, to William III. Another ten years would pass before Mary would make her matrimonial voyage to the House of Orange’s estate in Delft. With the signing of the treaty, it would seem that trade and commerce would be safe for the foreseeable future. However, with the passing of Charles II, his son James II would take the throne and immediately begin to welch on England’s end of the deal, and in a generation, the Dutch would return to England.
Piracy
Even after making peace with England, Dutch merchants still had to contend with piracy upon the high seas. With the Treaty of Breda, and closer ties hoped to form by the future royal marriage, it was hoped Dutch shipping would be better protected. To an extent, it was. English privateers no longer harassed Dutch commerce. Independent pirates continued to plague the seas around Dutch possessions. With the Caribbean being effectively a Spanish lake, Dutch trade was rather limited, and thus came into little contact with the romanticized pirates of the Caribbean. They would remain the Spanish monopoly’s problem.
Other coastal waters were home to Dutch traders. West Africa was one such hotspot, though with English possessions in the area, they tended to run more along the lines of privateering, and plagued French shipping instead. The Royal Dutch Navy had its own strong presence in the area, a necessity to keep the spice flowing. The Indian Ocean proved to be less of a problem for the Dutch, for its defense was under the jurisdiction of the VOC. The East India Company had zero tolerance for piracy, and a policy of better sorry than “in the red”. VOC ships traveled in convoys, protected by the Company’s private navy.
The Barbary Coast proved to be a problem. Though the Mediterranean provided only a small amount of trade on a global scale, the Dutch government was not about to let any pirates off the hooks. Independent traders and small countries often paid tribute, a polite enough word for bribe if ever there was one, to the various ports as a price for doing business. The United Provinces were not so generous. Following a string of attacks on Dutch ships in 1673, the United Provinces mounted an expedition against Algiers. Thousands of Dutch soldiers were transported to North Africa, where they marched upon the city. After a two month siege, the city’s defenses were breached. The net result was that of a general massacre of the city’s population, followed by the razing of Algiers. The expedition cost the United Provinces a great deal of capital, but William III decided an example had to be made.
In the decades afterward, the Barbary pirates learned to avoid any ship flying orange-white-blue banners.
Rising Tensions
Upon taking the throne, shortly after Charles’s untimely death following the Treaty of Breda, James II of England tried to back out of many aspects of the Treaty of Breda, including the marriage alliance. A converted Catholic, James II was opposed to having his daughter merry a Protestant king. The House of Orange, along with the United Provinces, was divided between both Catholic and Protestant, yet like the Provinces, it managed to exist without tearing itself apart. William III was a private Protestant, believing his own faith had no business in the affair of the state. The King of England was having the opposite problem with his own parliament; he was only allowed to take the throne as a private Catholic.
Only fear of a Third Anglo-Dutch War, and complete dismantling of England’s overseas empire, forced James II to relent. In 1677, he boarded his daughter Mary on one of the finest ships in the English Navy for a one-way voyage to the United Provinces. The marriage of William and Mary was widely celebrated across the United Provinces and William’s other kingdom, Denmark-Norway. It was seen not only as a marriage between two people, but between two nations. Any offspring of the two would potentially be King of three nations.
After two miscarriages, Princess-consort Mary soon conceived and gave birth to her and William’s only child, Johann Willem, in 1678. Again, the United Provinces celebrated, as did Denmark-Norway, though William I of Denmark-Norway did not address the nobility of Denmark as often as William III of the United Provinces addressed the Staaten-General. He ruled the distant nordic kingdom through a viceroy. However, in England, James II did not welcome the birth. He secretly hoped for the couple to be childless, for now a Netherlander was in line for the English and Scottish crowns, and the potential for a North Sea Empire.
Tensions were further heightened when France’s Sun King, Louis XIV, turned his eyes towards the southern Provinces. Before he claimed that the Rhine River was France’s natural boundary with the rest of Europe. Only fear of complete blockade, especially following the resounding victory of the Dutch during in 1667, prevented the French from carrying out their designs against the Netherlands. It did not, however, protect various other states along the Rhine.
When war with France appeared inevitable, William III called for his allies across the North Sea to raise an army. As King of Denmark-Norway, William easily razed an army of Danes. However, England was its own country, with its own King. James III refused the pleas, and went as far as to declare the alliance null and void. He claimed that any agreement signed under duress (especially after the Medway raid) was no longer binding.
William could have had James II simply eliminated, for the English King had enough enemies in parliament. However, by 1687, James II already had a son and heir, so removing him would only put another James on the throne, this one with plots to avenge his father’s death. Instead, William III hatched a plan with key nobles of the Firsts Chamber. Not only would he removed James II from the English throne, but would also install his wife, Mary as Queen of England.
The Glorious Revolution
By 1688, James further alienated the United Provinces by forbidding any Englander or Scotlander (not that the Irelanders had much choice to begin with) from serving in the Dutch army. He demanded that many English and Scottish mercenaries be released from service. In total, only one hundred fifty British returned home.
William III knew if he was going to move against James, he would have to do so fast. The French were already preparing to launch an attack into Flanders, and likely aimed at Antwerp once again. In September, the French began to seize Dutch merchantmen in French ports, an act of war in the eyes of the Staaten-General and Dutch trading companies. A Dutch fleet of some eighty warships was assembled to escort thirty thousand men and five thousand horses across the narrowest sections of the North Sea.
Following the Second Anglo Dutch War, the English Navy shrunk drastically. With debts to pay off, the funding for more ships simply did not exist. It left England in the position of second-rate naval power for the next century. Twenty years later, the Dutch did not particularly fear interception by England’s now decrepit fleet. Nonetheless, the Dutch ships made a thorough pass through waters between the Provinces and Britannia before allowing the invasion force to set sail.
Though they suffered through bad weather, they finally made landfall on November 5, disembarking in Torbay, near Brixham. Using lessons learned from the small-scale raids of the last war, the landing went without incident. To his surprise, William was greeted with a show of popular support. William already declared before the Staaten-General and in letters to England’s parliament that he had no desire to take the crown for himself, and that it was his wife, and England’s rightful Queen, who would sit upon the throne.
The question has been asked, why did William not become William III of England? England and Scotland spent a better part of the Sixteenth Century locked in civil war. At the center of these struggles, was religion. Always. William III was a Protestant, as per Danish law. Only a Protestant could take the throne of Denmark-Norway, and in that realm, he had to publicly admit his faith. The United Provinces has a strong secular tradition. What one believes is one’s own business, whether they be Catholic, Protestant, or one of the small, but growing Buddhists population. Even if these were not an issue, Scotland itself would prove an obstacle. There was great doubt that the Scots would accept an Oranje as their King, though the Scottish lords had no violent opposition to his Stuart wife.
England simply made their faith too public, going as far as to persecute those who did not view the same world view as the majority. In fact, it was a tyranny of the majority in that respect. To a monarch from the Netherlands, England was simply more trouble than it was worth. Religion aside, it cost the United Provinces a great deal of capital to raise such a large army, and would cost even more to occupy a nation that might not want to be occupied.
Again, before the crowds in Torbay, William renounced any claim to the English crown. England should be ruled by an Englander, thus Mary will be Queen. The crowds did not listen. James II was so detested, they were pleased to have anyone but him on the throne. As soon as his army was organized, William marched inland with eighteen thousand soldiers and three thousand cavalry, the rest fanned out to scout and to hold their landing sites.
Dutch and English armies met on the Salisbury plains on November 19. Almost immediately, James begin to loose any support in his army. Only a few skirmishes, in which English actually won, around Salisbury spilled any blood. The rest of the ‘battle’ consisted of desertion, along with anti-Catholic rioting in London. Hearing of desertion, the English commander, Lord Cornbury, ordered the English Army to retreat. Many soldiers deliberately straggled, just to desert. On the 24th, one of James’s chief commanders, Lord Churchill, defected to William’s side. Two days later, James other daughter, Princess Ann, went over to the Dutch. It is more likely she simply went over to his sister and brother-in-law, though James felt no less betrayed.
By early December, enough of the English Army deserted James, that his wife, and the Prince of Wales both fled to France. James attempted to flee the next day, however was captured by fishermen on December 11. With chaos reigning in London, rioting and looting ruling day and night, many members of Parliament welcomed the arrival of the Dutch Army, with King William III at its head. Parliament itself extended an invitation for William to take the crown. After his attempt to flee his won country, no Englander was likely to follow the rule of James II ever again.
William politely refused, and upon entering London, sent word back to Delft, summoning his wife to London. By the middle of December, with the Army effectively disbanded, England declared for Mary. Many in the English Government debated as to James II’s fate. William interceded on behalf of his father-in-law. If James wishes to leave, then there was no reason why they (England in general) should prevent it. On the 23rd, James boarded a ship in Kent and set sail to rejoin with his wife in France.
Mary arrived in London on January 3, 1689, to much jubilation. Not only did her arrival prevent another round of religious violence, but she permitted Parliament to pass the Exclusion Act, banning any Catholic from taking the English crown. William was staunchly opposed to the law on principle, however not only was he not the King of England, but he was not even English. This was his wife’s nation, and Mary II decided nobody like her earlier namesake, Mary I, should ever be allowed to take the throne. Many Dutch politicians could not help but feel that by effectively banning a whole religious sect from public service, that they have betrayed the ideals of the Pacification of Ghent.
However, Mary was not put on the throne for sake of English personal freedoms, but rather to bring England into compliance with their alliance. War with France was at hand, and the whole adventure into England was launched because William III feared that under James II, England might just side with Louis XIV against the United Provinces. It is called the Glorious Revolution, but there was nothing glorious about it, nor was it terribly revolutionary.
The Nine Years War
With Mary II reigning in England and Scotland (with William as Prince-consort), William III prepared to face the French. War with France was a long time coming. After the Thirty Years War, France began to gobble up small states surrounding her, gradually making her way towards the Rhine River. Lorraine, parts of the Saar Valley, and even Strasbourg fell under the sway of Louis XIV. The Catholic Sun King believed that the southern Provinces would welcome the self-proclaimed Defender of the Faith with open arms.
He could not be any more wrong. He failed to understand that what a Catholic Netherlander loved more than his faith was his freedom. In the 1680s, the inhabitants of the United Provinces were the freest people in all of Europe. Gone were the days a feudal lord ruled a village with an iron fist. Instead, the Dutch effectively governed themselves on a municipal level. They elected mayors, councilors and even attended public forums, where the public, not any one lord, would decide what laws and ordinances should be passed. These customs eventually evolved into the modern referendum system that now range across most of Europe.
On a provincial and national level, law-abiding citizens were mostly left alone by officials. The Dutch determined that the best way to contribute to society was by making a profit. The only regulating before the age of Napoleon came in the form of regulating trade between the Provinces. Delegates to the Staaten-General did their best to prevent their neighbors from growing to powerful. Tax collectors were a necessary bane, a functionary to keep the nation alive, and taxation was kept to a bare minimum, just enough to balance the Staaten-General’s books.
France, on the other hand, the state was everywhere. Louis XIV ruled his kingdom with all the restraint as a Roman Caesar. He claimed divine rights as an excuse for his despotism. In France, lords still presided over their lands, and their serfs. The French people could not up and leave as they pleased, for they were bound by custom and law to the land of their birth. Nor were they allowed independent thought. In theory, heirs in an absolutist system were groomed from birth for the role of King, taught that the welfare of their people were their greatest responsibility. Like more than a few points of political science, theory did not always translate into practice. Practiced or not, Kings of France were not known to be the most tolerant in religious issues. Anyone who did not conform with the Vatican faced repression, expulsion, and on occasion, extermination by the French government.
In violation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis dispersed all Protestant communities within his realm. Huguenots fled to England, the United Provinces, and Germany, bringing with them tales of the brutality of France’s monarch. In total, two hundred thousand French Protestants fled the persecution. Tens of thousands of these refugees found their way into Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam, Brazil, and the VOC’s supply depot of Capestaat. Huguenots were essential in founding the city of Willemsbourg, in southern Brazil on the site that was once the French colony of Henryville, and the Portuguese town of Rio de Janeiro.
The Nine Years War began in September of 1688 when Louis commanded Marshall Boufflers to invade the Rhineland. Phillippsburg fell on October 30, followed by Mannheim, Oppenheim, Worms, Heidelberg, and the fortress city of Mainz. One city refused to surrender to the thirty thousand man army, and in return, when Coblenz fell, Boufflers ordered it reduced to ashes. By 1689, Louis was master of the Rhine, and a direct threat to Dutch trade throughout the decaying Holy Roman Empire. Even before France rose to this position, they were already impounding Dutch merchantmen in French harbors. That alone compelled William to undertake his landing in England and force the ally into supporting him. If not for such premature seizures, it is entirely possible that a French invasion could have taken the United Provinces by surprise, and with James II refusing to help, it would have dire consequences on the (alternate) history of the Netherlands.
Louis hoped for a quick victory. With the Holy Roman Empire along with the Habsburgs, fighting Turks in the East it should have been easy. The impact on Emperor Leopold had the opposite effect. He recalled army under the Electorate of Bavaria from the Ottoman Front to defend southern Germany. The French failed to prepare for such an eventuality. Realizing this would not be a brief and decisive parade of French glory, Louis resolved upon a scorched-earth policy in the Rhineland.
In March of 1689, Louis selected the cities intended for destruction, starting with Heidelberg. The Count of Tesse torched the city, and on March 8, Montclair leveled Mannheim. Both Oppenheim and Worms were destroyed by the end of May. In June, the Elector of Brandenburg, aided by the Dutch commander, Menno van Coehoorn, besieged Kaiserwerth, and forced it capitulation on the 26th. Charles, the Duke of Lorraine, commanded an army of sixty thousand men, resolved on retaking Mainz. The town yielded on September 8, followed by the surrender of Bonn one month later.
Mons
On May 12, 1689, William III signed the Grand Alliance with the Emperor, with the lofty goal of forcing France back into pre-Thirty Years War boundaries, thus depriving Louis XIV of all his gains. After his losses across the Rhineland, Louis turned France’s attention towards the city of Luxembourg. The Duchy of Luxembourg had the misfortune of standing at a crossroads between great European powers. Luxembourg often appeared out of place in the United Provinces. It lacked the wide-scale commercial success of the other Provinces, and was considered by others as a backwater, a place of quaint little villages and rustic inns.
Backwater or not, it was one of the United Provinces, and an attack on it was an attack on the other sixteen. It was the first city to fall under the guns of Louis XIV, but by far not the last. It held out against siege until 1691, when the Dutch Army, under the command of the Duke of Brabant, lifted the siege and drove the French from the Duchy. As with anywhere in the southern Provinces, the French came forth claiming to be liberators, to free the cities from the oppression of the heretics.
The same was declared at Mons, in 1690. The French, under the command of recently humiliated Boufflers, invested the city with forty-six thousand men. What little defense the city could muster was easily brushed aside. Boufflers marched down the avenues of Mons as if he were the liberator, though not a single Netherlander was safe from his wrath. The first to go where the small population of Buddhists living in the city.
Since the VOC established colonies on Ceylon and Formosa, the peoples of the East were free to travel west, as long as they proved useful to the company. Upon arriving in the United Provinces, monks set forth into the Netherlands, establishing temples in every major city, along with Monasteries in the countryside. Their goal was not to convert the locals, though they would teach to those who wished to listen, but rather to learn all they could about this new land. They studied Europe’s religions, literature, science and arts. Every so often, a monk would return to the East, bringing the treasure of knowledge with him.
The French simply declared the peaceful monks, and any Netherlander who followed their path as heathens, showing them no mercy. Hundreds of monks were slaughtered in Mons when they attempted to nonviolently resist the invasion. Every other Buddhist who could not flee north were given the choice between embracing the Christian God, or meeting that same god in person. Some relented, paying lipservice to the Church, but a few remained defiant to the end, and learned that French were as tolerant under Louis XIV as they were under Charlemagne.
The next to suffer were both Protestant and Jewish populations in Mons. The Jews resisted especially hard, for the United Provinces were the only nation in all of Europe that accepted them as citizens and not aliens. This was their home, and they would fight for it. Those who did not follow both Buddhist and Protestants north, were killed mercilessly. All the bloodshed enraged the Catholic population. They were faithful to their Church, but these were their neighbors being killed. Though the Dutch people pride themselves on tolerance (as well with their business savvy) there were always extremist within a society. These were the only ones to welcome the French with open arms.
Antwerp Under Fire (Again)
After the fall of Mons, the French Army continued its march northward, to the city of Antwerp. Antwerp only recently began to recover from the siege during the Thirty Years War, and before that the Dutch Revolution. The city never regained the glory it knew under the Burgundians, but by 1691, it was just starting to grow into a (minor) commercial center. The locals knew they could not overshadow the colossus that is Amsterdam, but they did not desire such. They only wish to live profitable lives.
Their profits were cut short again in the spring of 1691. Two Dutch armies, one under the command of the Count of Holland, another commanded by Tomas van Leir, numbering some sixteen thousand men-at-arms, holed up within the city and surrounding areas. Instead of launching a direct assault against fortified strongholds, the French set up a parameter to the south of Antwerp, laden with dozens of cannon. Boufflers was content to starve the Dutch into submission. He could not threaten them, for tales of the atrocities committed within Mons only fueled the resolve of the citizens and defenders.
The siege was only in its second week when it was broken by the King of the United Provinces. William was quite delayed in returning home when James II landed in Ireland and provoked the Irish to rebel. Too many men died and too many resources were expended in keeping his wife’s Kingdom from disintegrating. When William landed, a scant six kilometers down river from Antwerp, he was not alone. Tens of thousands of Dutch and English soldiers were under his command.
The following battle ended in near disaster for the French. Boufflers attempted to hold ground against William’s landing, but in the end, he was forced to sound a retreat. Upon returning to Mons, the French left three thousand of their own dead on the battlefield, seven times as many than the Dutch lost. Though France’s ambitions were stalled in the north for the time being, they engaged and defeated both Spain and Savoy along the Mediterranean. As much as any Netherlander loathed to admit it, Spain must be kept in the war. If they let them lose, France would turn those forces north.
Anglo-Dutch and French forces clashed repeatedly in the County of Namur. Each battle lacked the decisive edge needed to bring the other side to the negotiating tables. By 1693, Louis XIV had four hundred thousand men in the French Army (at least on paper). Such a large army required large amounts of funding, and France faced an economic crisis. Topped off with crop failures and famine in 1694, France was teetering on the brink of collapse.
Before the Grand Alliance would offer reasonable terms in its peace proposal, William III decided to go on the offensive. By April of 1695, Namur was cleared of all French forces. Mons held out against all attempts at liberation, offering the French a minimal toehold on the United Provinces. William failed to remove the French forces by the time all sides sat down for negotiations at Ryswick. The Staaten-General wished to continue the war until all of the Netherlands were free, but Spain was ready for peace, as was the United Province’s ally, England. The cession of Mons started a tragic chapter in that city’s history. For more than a century to follow, the city would change hands until finally being rewarded to France during the Congress of Vienna.
Treaty of Ryswick
Though called a treaty, it was anything but. At most, it was but a cease-fire, one that would last until Spain fell into dynastic crisis in 1701. The parties involved in the Nine Years War met in Ryswick, near the Hague. By the terms of the treaty, Louis was allowed to keep Alsace and Strasbourg, but forced to give up all claim to Luxembourg. In order to curry favor with Spain (over the upcoming succession question) France evacuated all of its gains in Catalonia. Lastly, though still sheltering James II, who escaped from Ireland, France recognized Mary II as the rightful Queen of England.
Emperor Leopold was the only holdout on the treaty. He desired a continuation of war, to strengthen his own claim to the Spanish Throne. His initial resistance was weakened by the fact that he still was at war with the Ottomans, and could not face France alone. He signed the treaty, and netted a sizable accretion of power. His own son was named King of the Romans, and the chief candidate for the Polish-Lithuanian Throne.
The treaty was signed in October, 1697. The United Provinces, knowing this was a temporary peace at best, increased the size of garrisons and expanded fortifications in the southern Provinces. The biggest question of the day, the of Spanish succession, was not discussed at Ryswick. Perhaps if it had been, war might have been prevented. Within three years, the Spanish King would be dead, and the Grand Alliance would plunge Europe back into war.