British Foreign Policy 1660-1972

Sir Keith Feiling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714614731
• eBook ISBN: 9781136241543
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First Published in 1968. This study was written to provide a more modern day look at the history of British Foreign policy since 1658 and the second half of the seventeenth century.  It includes investigations into the Dutch war, the choice of systems and the eve of War in 1670 to 1672.

CHAPTER I

THE INHERITANCE AND THE HEIR

THE last ceremonies at the Hague were over. The King’s dogs were safely aboard; his aunt and sister, the wise Elizabeth of Bohemia and the foolish Mary of Orange, stepped into their barge, and with Mary’s ten-year-old son William made for the shore. At four o’clock the fleet set sail, till six the crowds on the Dunes watched the sails sinking out of sight. At last Montagu, the English admiral, had performed the task for which he, like the soldier Monk, had worked since the autumn; his squadron might itself be taken as a symbol of Restoration, for Royalist exiles, Parliamentary commissioners, and politicians on the make, jostled every cabin, and the ships, whose names commemorated battle-fields and heroes of Cromwellianism, were rebaptized this day with titles more comfortable to the ear. It was the 23rd of May, a glorious evening at sea, and on the quarter-deck of the Charles (yesterday Naseby) the King paced up and down, telling of his travels and escapes.

Odysseus was returning to England, the Penelope who for him had warded off many suitors—weak Protectors, dangerous soldiers, democratic saints, specious foreign envoys. Sirens had sung to him, not wholly in vain; one indeed, Barbara Villiers, later Lady Castle-maine, had met him at the Hague and waited him at London. But from one, the most dangerous, he had escaped—the spectre of being handed to his throne by the arms of a foreign power.

Against that danger Edward Hyde, the exile’s chief minister, had long struggled, and now he was reinforced by Puritan England, for Monk had in April urged Charles to move from Catholic and Spanish Brussels to Breda, the patrimony of the House of Orange. But the English counter-revolution had moved so fast, its issues were throughout so uncertain, that to the very end foreign intervention was a real possibility. When in February Monk was ending his march at London, Charles was penniless; dependent for his bread on credit from Spain, and attracted by strong magnets towards France, both of which Powers were trying to carve the shape of the English Restoration—“to cutt him his morsels”, as our agent at Brussels put it.¹ A catholic Irish clique was promising a joint Franco - Spanish démarche to win toleration for Catholics. The Paris circle round Charles’ mother, Henrietta Maria, which had done much to destroy the father, were bent on ruining the son. Mazarin armed the Abbé Montague with funds, and Henry Jermyn was agitating for a return to Paris. Some English royalist regiments in Flanders were still in Spanish pay; Spanish authorities at Brussels had tried to keep Charles in their territories by force, and now they too begged him to take Brussels on his way to London. Rival French and Spanish dinner parties at the Hague prolonged this competition to the very eve of his embarcation.²

Happily for England, the conditions that made the Restoration a political compromise must govern also the relation of the restored King to foreign affairs. He could no more cancel Puritan foreign policy than he could their Church settlement, and for war and peace, as for the management of Parliament, he must depend on their experience, their co-operation, and their wealth. If his hands were tied by predilections dating from his exile, he was bound also by heavy commitments to the formidable Englishmen who had brought him home, and he returned, in short, to an England that was “a going concern”. Such continuity was nowhere more marked than in our European relations, nor did a few superficial accompaniments of counter-revolution, the bickerings of Royalist merchants with Cromwellian merchants¹ or the like, contradict this permanence in high policy. Ex-Puritans formed half of the new Cabinet that was to prolong Cromwell’s friendship with France and his hostility to Holland. The first resident ambassador it sent to Paris was Denzil Holles, twenty years earlier one of those five members whom Charles I in a fatal hour had tried to seize in the House of Commons. Cromwell’s envoy at the Hague, George Downing, returned there for another four years to represent Charles II. Philip Meadowes, the Protector’s envoy in 1657–58 to Denmark and Sweden, sent a minute to Clarendon as to the probable attitude of those courts in the event of another Dutch war.² Thurloe, Oliver’s secretary and foreign minister, himself drew up similar notes on our relation with France and Holland,³ and bequeathed the names of his secret agents.⁴

In a sense far wider than such personal services, English policy could not fail to be continuous, guided as it must be by continuous geographic law. The seas that bound in triumphant Britain carried upon them the means of her wealth and the power of her enemies. If, as foreigners thought, her rulers nourished the “old English error”¹ of splendid isolation, a multitude of motives must soon explode it. Even on its purely political side the struggle for the Hapsburg inheritance could not leave England unmoved, for in the Netherlands it touched her in a spot vital to her strategic and economic salvation. But the sixteenth century had entailed upon Europe two yet greater things—a new religion and a new world of commerce. Protestantism and oceanic trade were born together; for a short time making common cause, in the long run they complicated and transformed out of all recognition the original issue of Hapsburg or anti-Hapsburg predominance.

If divisions of time can ever be given to matter so liquid as diplomacy, it can be said that one scheme of alliances represented the normal British system for the century ending in 1674. A hundred years before that date Queen Elizabeth, with her wonted reservation and delay, had abandoned the traditional Spanish friendship of her family and taken the decision pressed or forced upon her by Protestant counsellors and godly pirates. The anti-Hapsburg bloc to which she committed her country was to survive many divergencies, that increased with each additional member. Originally it turned upon the three poles of London, Paris, and Protestant Germany; to these Holland was added by 1590, Sweden by 1620, while in 1640 Portugal was remade from the rib in the side of Spain.

But such consistency as this confederation ever possessed began to melt almost as soon as formed, and by 1648 was shaking in liquid confusion. The European grouping began to break at either end. French ambition, sheltered by the pauperism and fantasies of our Charles I, became portentous to her allies. In 1648 Austria received the sentence of lifelong imprisonment within the East, passed on her by the Peace of Westphalia, and left Spain to fight France alone; Holland, on the contrary, terrified for the Low Countries by the Peace of Münster, deserted France as an ally too powerful to be aggrandized further. During the next eleven years—exactly the life of the English Commonwealth—territorial greed, economic war, and Mazarin’s diplomacy tore away more fragments of the old system. Holland fought one war with England for the carrying trade, another with Portugal for Brazil and western India. The Cardinal’s machination turned to prolong English civil strife—a game to be repeated with variations till 1688—and French privateers preyed upon our commerce. Sweden’s passion to master all the Baltic banded together against her the fellow-Protestants of Holland, Brandenburg, and Denmark, and a bitter contest for the customs-revenue of the Sound and Dantzig weakened the common tie of the Gospel. Within five years the militarist Charles X set glowing again the furnaces of the Thirty Years’ War—Catholic Austria and Poland combining with his Protestant rivals.

In such a world stood England when at last the Protectorate put her house in order, and again she could take thought for her place in Europe. Cromwell’s contribution to the reconstruction of our policy was bold in decision but characteristically conservative, and laid the base of no new system. His Protestant sword was half unsheathed to protect the Vaudois; a lucky occupation of Jamaica, the reconciliation of Barbados and Virginia, and some expansion in Acadia and New England did something to justify a neo-Elizabethan war; in Flanders and the Mediterranean the first regular English army and navy revealed a new English power. Essentially the antique alliance system lived on, though stabbed with suspicion and hopes deferred.

Of that system, amity with Holland was one cornerstone, but the Peace of Westminster, signed in 1654, was almost more wearing than battle. The ejection of the Stuarts from Holland, or the salute conceded to the English flag, did nothing to exorcise the spirit making for war. Alike uncontrolled by, and defying control from, their central governments, the traders of both countries continued their fight in every sea—wresting to their own advantage the “right of search” and the law of contraband, claiming monopoly or free trade in the tropics just as occasion suited. English parliamentary debate grew raucous with anti-Dutch declamation, not least from Secretary Thurloe; English harbours flourished on the proceeds of Dutch prizes, often captured under cover of Swedish and Portuguese commissions; Sussex farmers made themselves easy with the honey and fine linen taken from Dutch wrecks. On their side the Hollanders shipped munitions to Spain, with whom England was at war, and offered ships to convey Charles II with Spanish auxiliaries to attack the Commonwealth.¹

In two quarters particularly the two peoples’ interests directly conflicted. For both the Baltic trade was fundamental; “the best trade of Christendom”, said Clarendon. Each depended upon it for their naval equipment—for masts, iron, tar, and hemp. Holland, in all but geography an island city, bought her cattle from Jutland, and her staple foods from Baltic ports, to which six thousand Dutch ships were said to ply every year.¹ Dutch intervention in the Northern war of 1658–60 was, therefore, suspect to the English government, who remembered the exclusive privileges in the Sound extorted earlier by the Dutch from Denmark, and when Charles X was hurling himself against the unholy coalition of Austrians and Poles, Dutchmen and Prussians, a blend of evangelical sympathy and economic fear determined the despatch of an English squadron to the Baltic. French interests so far coincided with ours, that France could not suffer Sweden to perish, and the Peace of Oliva, which with the death of Charles ended the Northern wars, was made in the main by the intervention of the two western Powers. By it the Swedes’ attempt to close the Sound to foreign warships and the Dutch bid for commercial monopoly were alike frustrated, but so late as the 18th March preceding the Restoration Monk’s administration found it necessary to send a strong protest against a last effort from Holland to galvanize Danish resistance.²

Nearer home, in Belgium, the Dutch aspirations cut across English policy. Were the masters of Amsterdam also to control Antwerp? Already by the Münster treaty they had achieved a long-cherished ambition in closing the Scheldt. Since then, faced by the French thrust upon Belgium, de Witt in 1658–59 discussed with Mazarin some plans, agreed upon by his predecessors and Richelieu, for a regulation of this Naboth’s vineyard to their mutual advantage, whether in the shape of downright partition, or the “cantonment” of Belgium as a “free” republic.¹

Till the eve of Restoration the possibility of a second Dutch war beset the rulers of England, who, moreover, could find no compensation in steady friendship with France. Mazarin’s first instincts were, and remained, hostile. He had hoped to settle the Belgian question before England was again free to act, and in 1653 offered, at this price, an alliance to Holland. The Anglo-French treaty of March 1657 was only signed after two years of parley and hesitation, and in Mazarin’s eyes was definitely a pis aller. Peace with Spain, preferably with Belgium thrown in, was his primary object, and only Spanish obstinacy made him resolve to take “the necessary poison” of an English alliance, or to concede what England long had asked, the possession of Dunkirk.²

Contemporary England, like posterity, was acutely divided regarding the wisdom of Cromwell’s choice. The Republicans generally disliked it; business interests feared that we should jeopardize our Spanish markets. Sympathy for the Huguenots combined with a dread of French ambition—a dread amply justified by French schemes in Belgium and by the formation in 1658 of the League of the Rhine, the French instrument to perpetuate the “liberties”, or anarchy, of Germany.

On the other side our diplomatic tradition, and many anti-Hapsburg ministers abroad,³ pointed to the Spanish Main as England’s destiny. The frightful scourge of privateering and the insecurity of our trade routes were arguments to the same purpose. If Sweden could not be induced to yield Bremen, Dunkirkand perhaps Gibraltar could be extorted from Spain. And if it came to haggling between French and Spanish offers, Spanish pauperism, not for the last time, might settle the question. Most of all, a French alliance might detach the French from Holland, and dispel the nightmare of a Franco-Dutch partition of Belgium.¹

But Dunkirk was surrendered by the French with transparent reluctance, and mutual suspicion betrayed the frailty of this friendship. Parliamentary leaders so powerful as Henry Vane attacked our ally, and even before the armistice was signed in May 1659 between France and Spain, Mazarin was accusing England of intrigue at Madrid. Finally, at the treaty of the Pyrenees in November, France abandoned us, pledging he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter I: The Inheritance and the Heir
• Chapter II: First Contacts and Impressions
• Chapter III: The Origins of the Dutch War
• Chapter IV: The Dutch War and the Search for Allies, 1664–1666
• Chapter V: The Choice of Systems, 1666–1667
• Chapter VI: The Choice of Systems: Breda to Aix
• Chapter VII: The Final Choice
• Chapter VIII: The Eve of War, 1670–1672
• Chapter IX: Epilogue, 1672–1674
• Appendices
• Index