: But indeed the Dutchman is routed to your complete satisfaction his final discomfiture being achieved by the aid of the learned and witty Sir John Burroughs. ('The Sovereignty of the British Seas proved by Records, History, and the Municipall Lawes of this Kingdome. Written in the year 1633 by that learned Knight, Sir John Burroughs, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London,' 1651. Cited by Pepys, December 7-8, 1661. Cf. also William Ryly, Deputy Keeper of the Records, his collections for James II.) The taunt as to the perversion of Grotius is particularly effective. Selden, by the bye, quotes his poem addressed to King James I., already alluded to, at greater length in vol. ii. chap. 32: "Great Britain stands Confined by the shores of other lands; And all that may by winds and sails be known Is an accession of so great a Crown." But as to the rest of this forgotten pamphlet itself, is it not to be read in the Bodleian? Sir Walter Raleigh, looking back regretfully in his later years on the glory of the Tudors, resents the whole Selden controversy. In Queen Elizabeth's reign, he says ('Invention of Ships'), the Dutch did not "dispute de mari libero, but readily acknowledged the English to be Domini maris Britannici." Yet in reality the Duty of the Flag was heartily enough enforced, even by the Stuarts. Monson, in James I.'s time (1604), imposed it in the Downs on the Dutch; and Mansell, in 1620, off the coast of Spain, on the French. Under Charles I. (in 1635) Lindsey was sent to sea specially to vindicate it; and in the next year Northumberland successfully asserted it against both the Dutch and the French. few years previously, in 1626, Deal Castle had fired at a recalcitrant Dutchman in the Roads; and had, moreover, made him pay ten shillings as the cost of the shot. In 1632 the captain of a man-of-war visiting Calais forced the French to lower their flag in their own port. But under the Commonwealth the claim was even more vigorously pressed. The Dutch were making their bid for oceanic empire, and we challenged them at all points. We still claimed, and we now again enforced, tolls upon all foreign fishermen who plied their calling in the four seas. After the passing of the Navigation Act of 1651, while the Dutch ambassadors were setting sail for England with peace or war in their hands, our patrol ships were collecting "the tenth herring" from the Dutch fishing fleet on the Dogger Bank. Some of the Dutch vessels refused to submit to the tax; and one of them was incontinently sunk. 66 By the treaty of 1654, which followed, our rivals agreed that "Dutch ships-of-war and otherwise," in the British Seas, "shall strike their flags and lower their topsails, as heretofore practised." And the article of the treaty (article 15), providing for the Duty of the Flag," stipulates further for "all other respects due to the said Commonwealth of England, to whom the Dominion and the Sovereignty of the British Seas belong." To the undoubting minds of our seamen, "British Seas" extended far beyond Cape Finisterre. Blake was lying once at Cadiz about this time; and a Dutch officer, who had duly struck his flag, found it wise to keep it struck, even in that neutral harbour and in time of peace, until the English admiral had left. That tale smells, it is true, of mere superior force. But we habitually insisted on the right under very different circumstances. In 1657 two English ships made good our claim against thirty sail of Dutch in the Channel; though not until after they had threatened to engage him till they should be sunk would the Dutch commander comply, which he did "in a great rage." Again, in 1662, after the Restoration, three frigates, under Captain Anthony Young, off the Start, fell in with a Dutch squadron of twelve ships, which, after an interchange of broadsides, struck their flags. Von Tromp himself struck his topsail, sulkily enough, to an inferior force in this same year. sea Finally, at the peace of 1674, Holland submitted to a full acknowledgment of our sovereignty, which remained undisputed, by them at least, for the next hundred years. Molloy, the ninth edition of whose work was published in 1769,1 says that "in all treaties, before anything is ascertained, the Dominion of the Sea and striking the topsail was always provided for "; and failure on the part of the Dutch to strike to the King of England's flag is " open rebellion." The Dutch, then, may be taken to have ceased from all protest. France, however, gave us more trouble; and, especially about the middle of the eighteenth century, there are many traces of bickerings on this subject between our navy and theirs. The leading case of Admiral Thomas Smith "Tom o' Ten Thousand". -is worth quoting. Tom Smith was called by the seamen of his day Tom o' Ten Thousand because, while first lieutenant of the Gosport, in Plymouth Sound, in the absence of his captain, he compelled a French frigate to lower her topsails. "For this act," says Clowes, "Lieutenant Smith was court-martialled and dismissed the service, but, on the following day, both restored and posted." His subsequent dossier is interesting. He was Captain in 1730; Rear - Admiral 1747; sat as President of Byng's court 1 De Jure Maritimo et Navali. 2 vols. London: 1769. a -A martial; and became Admiral in 1757. (He is to be distinguished from the racing notable a whose nickname was handed on to him that Tom Thynne who was murdered in Pall Mall by Konigsmark's agents.) But however popular Tom o' Ten Thousand may have been, both in his profession and with the nation at large; and although, as we have seen, the Admiralty instruction on the subject was not to be withdrawn till after Trafalgar, there is no doubt that our claims, in the reign of George III., were weakening. In 1769, while the Duke of Grafton was Premier, one Captain John Holwell, in strict obedience, of course, to his orders, sent a lieutenant to demand the payment of the proper compliment from French frigate. The demand was refused. Our frigate fired two shots over her, and she complied. But strong remonstrances were received from the French king: our Government was not prepared to back its own instructions; and the zealous Captain Holwell, on the advice of Admiral Hawke, was smuggled out of the way. The whole story of our Ministers' embarrassment, and the way out, as shown to them by the resourceful admiral hastily sent for from Dover, is to be found in the Duke of Grafton's own memoirs ('Autobiography,' Anson, p. 242), and is particularly well worth reading at the present moment. The Duke shall tell his own tale. He says― "In this month [September 1769] we were involved in a very serious and delicate business, which ap VOL. CLXXVI.-NO. MLXX. peared at one time to be big with alarming consequences. A French without paying the compliment to frigate had come into the Downs his Majesty's ships which the general instructions from the Admiralty to all commanders of ships direct them to require, but with which no nation except the Dutch ever complied and they, in consequence of a treaty. An officer from a King's ship went on board the the commander on his conduct, and French frigate remonstrating with assuring him that he must insist on the compliment; but, meeting with no satisfactory answer, the lieutenant of our ship soon fired his first shot ahead of the French ship, and on perceiving no notice to be taken of his gun, he fired into the Frenchman with ball, and, as was said, killed one of the men. sented by the Court of France, who "The proceeding was warmly rerequired the fullest satisfaction for the affront, together with the dismissal from the service of the officer who had presumed, in time of perfect peace, to fire into a frigate belonging to the French king. "Office papers were ransacked for precedents to justify the claim: few were found, and the paucity of these From the did not assist our cause. reign of Charles II., when a long and serious altercation took place on a similar occasion, and which may be found in the Memoirs of Mont d'Estrades and of his embassy here, one single instance (except the present) was found." were able." counsel with Sir Edward Hawke, and inquired of him "what, in his opinion, would, and would not, save the honour of the Navy, and the lustre of the British flag.” "In point of justice," Grafton observes at this point of his narrative, "not one word can be said: but it may be a question whether the ideal Sovereignty of the Narrow Seas be not essential in elevating the enthusiastic courage of our seamen. The admiral suggested an expedient of which the Minister made successful use in his visit to the French ambassador; to whom, after many compliments, he finally explained that, the officer implicated having unfortunately sailed for the East Indies, from whence his return could not be expected for three years, it was impossible to punish him "without hearing his account of this unfortunate transaction." Whereupon, as the Duc de Choiseul had no desire for war, the matter was allowed to drop. ... The Duke took our Courts of Admiralty have We have traced, then, roughly enough, but in a way which gives at least some view of the extent of our claims, the rise and fall of the legal fiction, or the political idea, of our seasovereignty in the Four Seas. This doctrine finds its fullest extension, perhaps, in the pages of Stephen and of Beawes. The former, in a passage already quoted, writes: "The main or high seas are part of the Realm of England, for therein "Britons proceed: the subject deep command, Awe with your navies every hostile land. Vain are their threats; their armies all are vain ; They rule the balanced world who rule the main." The balanced world, -the balance of power,-here is the key-word at once to our worldpolitics, to our Mediterranean 1 Stephen, Commentaries, Introd., sect. 4. 2 Lex Mercatoria Rediviva, or the Merchant's Directory, 1761, p. 247. policy, and to that funda- out the eighteenth century, mental opposition between our- from Blenheim to the battle selves and Europe of which of the Nile, the other side Europe, at all events, is at of the Channel was, for us, times dimly conscious, and for an armed frontier. After Trawhich an Anglo-French under- falgar our frontiers became constanding is the only palliative. terminous with the coasts of As a world - power we are the world. Those statesmen extra - European; or, as the who really have understood Napoleons saw, anti-European. our destiny have always conWe ought never to have for- tinued the Tudor imperial gotten that there was a British politics, envisaging England as Empire, an empire of the isles an Empire in opposition to the off the west coast of Europe, European system. At first or ever we owned a colony. sight, it would seem natural In a sense, to some extent, that they should therefore conpotentially,-even, from time to centrate their attention on time, almost actually,-Europe our over-sea dominions and on has been, and again may be, oceanic power, to the exclusion at least as much one country of all attention to European as is India. The Continental complications. The contrary, system is latent, but never however, is really the case. dead. Under Charlemagne, The distinction is between Charles V., Buonaparte, the meddling, on the one hand, Roman polity has all but found and being drawn into dynastic its later equivalent in an organ- and other quarrels on the ised Europe. It is to a Eu- Continent; and, on the other ropean system that we oppose hand, the maintenance of our our championship of the power in the Mediterranean smaller nationalities; and it is in support of the balance of in pursuit of this settled policy power in Europe. Divide that we thrust our Navy into nationes et impera oceanum. the Mediterranean, outflanking The true Hanoverian or Whig the whole south frontier of policy was always to involve Europe. Our power in the in the us in European complications, Mediterranean is the strategi- without attention to the balance cal equivalent of an armed of power: and the maritime State. As the North Sea once policy of Cromwell and Bolingwas, it may almost be deemed broke, the policy of maintaining a separate Dominion or King- our naval strength in the Medidom under the Common Crown. terranean, was reversed whenWe have reverted, after the ever Whig Ministers or soveperiod of mid Victorian reigns had their way. Six fatuousness, to the policy of times, between 1718 and 1783, Bolingbroke. Captain Mahan's English Ministers offered to doctrine, the strategy which surrender Gibraltar to Spain makes our frontiers (since the for an entirely inadequate sea is ours) at the ports of our equivalent. George I., indeed, enemies, was the national creed twice wrote himself proposing under George III. Through- to restore it, without suggest |