Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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days’. He was strong enough to divide his army without either part of it being

outnumbered if it had to ﬁght on its own, but he had to take Worcester’s

defences seriously, for they were strenuously improved and extended during

the twelve days between the royalists’ arrival and the battle, and the rivers

Severn and Teme complicated his problem. His plan was to attack the city

from two sides simultaneously, and to draw the enemy into the open—a plan

which involved two bridges of boats, one for each river. Their preparation

took time, because they needed to be piloted into place and then spanned with

planks just at the right moment for the cavalry to ride across them. Even with

his great numerical superiority, an attack on an army protected as the king’s

was by man-made and natural defences ran the risk of heavy losses, and the

most consistent characteristic of all Cromwell’s campaigns is his care for his

soldiers’ lives and his pride in keeping casualties to a minimum.

He struck when he was ready, and he struck surely, though the day was not

without its dangers. It was the longest and most complex of all his battles,

fought in several stages and raging on several sites, and it lasted from early

afternoon until after nightfall. In his own words, written that same night

when he was ‘so weary [as] scarce able to write’, it was ‘as stiff a contest, for

four or ﬁve hours, as ever I have seen’.

He himself led his men across the

bridge of boats over the Severn in the initial attack, timed to coincide with that

of Fleetwood’s brigade over the Teme, upon the Scots’ position between the

two rivers, and he was in the thick of the ﬁghting at more than one later stage

of the battle. The Scots and their English auxiliaries fought skilfully, as well

as with the courage born of desperation, and Charles himself risked his life

time and time again in encouraging them at the heart of the action. The course

of the battle deﬁes brief summary, but apart from one temporary setback its

outcome was never in real doubt. Cromwell did not want it to be a bloodbath,

and when the Scots were clearly facing defeat he rode round in front of their

infantry lines at considerable personal risk, offering them quarter. They

replied only with musket-ﬁre. The battle was fully decided by 8 p.m., but the

rounding up of prisoners and the slaughter of fugitives went on until after

midnight. When they were counted the next day, the dead in and around the

city numbered well over 2,000, and somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000

prisoners were taken. About 3,000 cavalry escaped from the ﬁeld, but many

did not get home, because they had to run the gauntlet of highly hostile coun-

tryfolk and townsmen all the way back to the border. Cromwell put the

losses of all the Commonwealth’s forces in the battle at under 200 killed, a

crowning achievement in his record of low casualties.

The only royalist leaders who got clean away were the king himself, Buck-

ingham, and Wilmot. The Scottish prisoners included the second Duke of

498 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, II, 461.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 498

Hamilton, who died of gangrene within a few days, Leslie, and Lauderdale,

who languished in prison until the Restoration, and Middleton, who escaped

from the Tower. The Earl of Derby was captured, though not until he had

seen the king into the safe hands of the catholic Penderell family, tenant farm-

ers in Wiltshire. Derby was court-martialled and executed for treason, even

though Cromwell strongly supported his appeal to parliament against his

sentence. As for Charles’s own escape, the story of it became a legend, and as

is the way with legends it accreted a wealth of dubious detail, some of it con-

tributed by Charles himself, who never tired of recounting it. He was

passed from household to household, generally disguised as a tenant farmer’s

son, and the catholic community played a crucial part in hiding and protect-

ing him. Although he was frequently recognized and had the very large sum

of £1,000 on his head, no one betrayed him in all the six weeks between the

battle and his sailing from Shoreham to Fécamp in mid-October. And he real-

ly did spend a night amid the branches of that royal oak from which countless

English pubs have taken their name.

Soon after he reached France the Duke of Orleans, the French king’s uncle,

asked him if the rumour was true that he intended to return to Scotland. ‘I had

rather have been hanged ﬁrst’, he replied, and he never in his life set foot in his

northern kingdom again. His reaction was unkind to the thousands of Scots

who had died for him, but it is understandable, and in any case there was soon

nowhere in the country to which he could have returned. Monck’s impressive

progress in the absence of Leslie’s army still left a vast area of northern Scot-

land unaccounted for, but the obstacles to tapping the reserves of royalist

sentiment in the Highlands were formidable. The Earl of Crawford-Lindsay,

whom Charles had designated as his commander-in-chief in Scotland, had

been captured at Alyth, together with Leven and the Earl Marischal. Huntly,

the greatest royalist magnate, had men under arms in his Gordon territory,

but Aberdeen, the city at its heart, had no stomach for war now, and when

Monck sent Okey with a body of cavalry to secure it, its council soon sub-

mitted. Its distinguished provost, Alexander Jaffray, was already one of

Cromwell’s and Owen’s converts. The Highland nobility were never united.

Huntly, always a ﬁrm royalist, never collaborated easily with Balcarres, who

sat on the Committee of Estates and had been a Covenanter. Argyll con-

tinued to sulk at Inverary, and his brother Loudoun, who as Chancellor was

the senior ofﬁcer of state in the kingdom, remained a thorough Kirkman.

The difﬁculty after Worcester was to assemble any body or council that

could speak as the government of Scotland, and to get it, if assembled, to

speak with a single voice. Of the members of the Committee of Estates who

had not been captured at Alyth, Loudoun managed to bring together seven

nobles (including Argyll), three lairds, and three burgesses at Killin at the foot

of Loch Tay on 10 September, but Balcarres refused to attend. Balcarres did

The Commonwealth at War 499

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 499

agree, however, to bring his clansmen to a general gathering of the Highland

forces, including Huntly’s, at Dunkeld on the 24th, but in the event no such

rendezvous took place. The Committee of Estates met again at Dumbarton

on the 25th, but because the English forces in Glasgow were uncomfortably

close it moved on ﬁrst to Rosneath and then in mid-October to Rothesay on

the island of Bute. By this time it lacked a quorum, but it nevertheless ordered

that the parliament, which had been scheduled to reassemble at Stirling in

November, should meet instead at Finlarig, near Killin. Argyll saw the hope-

lessness of it all and wrote to Monck on 15 October to propose peace negoti-

ations. These did not materialize for some time, but when Loudoun went to

Finlarig to preside over the parliament he found there just three nobles and no

lairds or burgesses at all. The government of Covenanting Scotland had

disintegrated, for even the remnant of the Committee of Estates faded away.

Huntly signed articles of surrender later in the month, and Balcarres on

3 December. Meanwhile Monck and his subordinates encouraged the

resumption of normal economic life in the Lowlands, including ﬁshing, and

most Scots welcomed the relief from the long rigours of war. The harvest had

been poor, and the feeding of the forces and in places the scarcity of labour

had created food shortages.

When the Rump ﬁrst launched its pre-emptive strike in 1650 it had not

intended to annexe the Scottish kingdom, but before the end of 1651 it had to

deal with something like a political vacuum there. Amid the rejoicings after

Worcester it gave a single reading to ‘an Act asserting the title of England to

Scotland’, but the bill proceeded no further. Within a month the plan of

annexation was quickly dropped, and the very different concept of a union

substituted: Scotland was to be incorporated into one commonwealth with

England. It is likely that Cromwell himself was mainly responsible for this

change of policy. He was given a triumphal entry when he returned to

London on 12 September, and the great cheering crowds that lined the streets

testify to the very real popularity of his victory. Some republicans feared that

it would give him notions about making himself head of state, perhaps even

aiming at the crown, but there was (and is) no evidence of this. Describing his

conduct amid all this celebration, Whitelocke wrote in his diary: ‘He was

affable and humble in his carriage, and in his discourses about the business of

Scotland and of Worcester, he would seldom mention any thing of himself,

but the gallantry of the ofﬁcers and soldiers, and gave (as was due) all the

glory of the action unto God.’

Modest though he was, however, there was

little that the parliament could refuse him at this juncture, and we have the

testimony of John Swinton, another Scottish convert of Cromwell’s who had

been with his army at Worcester, had travelled up to London with him and

500 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford, 1990), p. 271.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 500

returned home later in the month, that Cromwell opposed the many in Eng-

land who favoured ‘declaring this a conquest’ and was ‘for making it one

nation’.

A declaration outlining the terms for a union of Scotland with

England was prepared by the Council of State (on which Cromwell had of

course resumed his place) during early October, laid before parliament on the

23rd, and agreed to with minor amendments after two days’ debate. In it was

enshrined the Cromwellian principle that England had no quarrel with the

Scottish nation at large but only with those who had made war on her in the

past four years. It promised in particular that the Scots should enjoy the same

liberty of conscience in religion as the English. The precise terms of the union

were to be deﬁned after consultation between commissioners of the parlia-

ment and elected Scottish representatives; meanwhile, in January 1652, the

Rump dispatched eight commissioners ‘for the managing of the civil govern-

ment’. The civilians among them included Vane and St John, the soldiers

Lambert and Monck. They were given large powers and they were backed by

the English army in Scotland, but they genuinely tried to persuade the Scot-

tish people of the beneﬁts of a union and to win their unforced assent to it.

They naturally faced a considerable amount of opposition to it, not only from

Scots who prized their national independence or were unwilling to renounce

their king, but most of all from the clergy, who stridently denounced the very

idea of religious toleration. They could not ignore the facts that a large part

of the Scottish nation had recently been at war with England and that resis-

tance was by no means over, but the process of consultation that they set in

train was honestly aimed at winning agreement to beneﬁts that they believed

to be real, and was not a mere cover-up for a cynical process of subordinating

Scottish interests to English.

How far they succeeded, and what shape the

union eventually took, will be described in a later chapter. Meanwhile our

account of the Commonwealth at war remains seriously incomplete, since it

has so far considered only the campaigns fought on land.

The Commonwealth at War 501

F. D. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland 1651–1660 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 30–1.

Dow writes that ‘what was in theory to be a political merger . . . was in fact a take-over bid

by the English’, and that ‘the period from January 1652 to April 1653 was one of unremitting and

successful efforts by the English to subordinate the Scots to their will’ (Cromwellian Scotland,

p. 35). I think this is an overstatement, though I am greatly indebted to Dr Dow’s scholarly study.

ch15.y8 27/9/02 11:40 AM Page 501

sixteen

The Commonwealth in Crisis

The navy had a vital role to play in the defence of the Commonwealth, but it

was not in a healthy state when the republic was ﬁrst established. The second

Civil War and the execution of the king had, as has been seen, alienated many

captains and crews. In addition to those who openly declared for Charles II

and joined Prince Rupert, many others, while stopping short of changing

sides, felt a strong dislike for the New Model Army and for sectaries and rad-

icals in general. Warwick, the Lord Admiral, had been openly opposed to the

king’s trial and the abolition of the Lords; moreover he was 61, old for his age

and in poor health. He had to be removed, but it was scarcely less necessary

to get rid of the excessive personal authority and patronage that attached to

his ofﬁce. The navy needed to be brought more closely under the control of

parliament and the council, so before discharging Warwick the Rump

enlarged the powers of its Navy Committee. It dealt with Warwick simply by

repealing, in February 1649, the act that had appointed him Lord Admiral,

and then leaving that ofﬁce in abeyance. The actual command of the ﬂeet was

entrusted jointly to three Generals at Sea, Robert Blake, Richard Deane, and

Edward Popham, all former army colonels. Warwick had served the parlia-

ment well in his time and he suffered no disgrace, though he was unable to

save his brother Holland, who had fought for the king in 1648, from execu-

tion. Warwick withdrew from public life for some years, but he was to

support Cromwell as Lord Protector. He carried the sword at his second

investiture in 1657, and a grandson of his was to marry Cromwell’s youngest

daughter.

The appointment of the Generals at Sea was part of a policy of bringing the

navy into line with the army in its relations with the state, and of encouraging

an interchange of personnel between the two services. Very soon after the

Council of State was established it set up an Admiralty Committee, which

assumed most of the administrative functions that had previously been under

the Lord Admiral’s authority. The dominant ﬁgure on it was Sir Henry Vane,

who had been Treasurer of the Navy since 1642, but Cromwell’s brother-in-

law Valentine Walton was scarcely less inﬂuential. Since the council was

elected annually there was a new Admiralty Committee each year, but Vane

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 502

and Walton were regularly reappointed. Walton was a link with the parlia-

ment’s Navy Committee, whose other most active members were his fellow-

regicides Miles Corbet and Gregory Clement. The function of both

committees was of course continuous, but to tackle the urgent immediate task

of purging the disaffected elements from the ofﬁcer corps, the ships’ crews,

the dockyards, and Trinity House, the Rump appointed sixteen ‘Regulators’,

even before it established the Council of State, indeed even before the king

was sentenced. They were sometimes known as the Committee of Merchants,

for most of them were big men in the City, independents in their politics, and

trading mainly with the colonies and other distant markets. That gave them a

stronger interest in naval protection, and they formed a distinct interest from

that of the Merchant Adventurers and other older chartered companies,

whose political orientation tended to be presbyterian if not royalist. The Regu-

lators tempered genuine zeal with discretion, and their recommendations

were subject to parliamentary approval. Those whom they succeeded in

removing included the Master of Trinity House, many ship’s captains, and

several of the Navy Commissioners, those very senior salaried ofﬁcials who

were responsible for the dockyards and the manning and ﬁtting out of all war-

ships. The Regulators were lenient towards those master-craftsmen in the

dockyards and warrant ofﬁcers, boatswains and gunners on board ship

whose conduct had been suspect but who were now ready to serve the Com-

monwealth faithfully, but from ofﬁcers and ofﬁcials in higher positions they

required unquestionable loyalty. They acted swiftly, and when they had done

their work two-thirds of the captains of men-of-war were relatively new to

their commands, having been appointed since 1647. A fair number of them

were experienced masters of merchant ships rather than promoted naval ofﬁ-

cers. The Rump itself enacted a very rigorous disciplinary code for the pun-

ishment of crimes committed at sea, but this was generally held in terrorem

rather strictly enforced. Those who reformed the navy in 1649 were not all

above the suspicion of feathering their own nests, but on the whole they did

an effective job. When Rupert issued a declaration in March, offering good

employment to all ships and seamen who would join him, only one little

sixth-rate responded, and she was soon recaptured.

Even more impressive than the rapid transformation of a widely disaffect-

ed navy into an arm wholly loyal to the Commonwealth was the increase in

its size. Within three years it was almost doubled. Twenty new warships were

built between the spring of 1649 and the end of 1651, and twenty-ﬁve more

were added to the strength either by capture or purchase. Of the latter, many

were armed merchantmen suitable for conversion. The government’s admin-

istrative structure, what with the overlapping and sometimes conﬂicting

The Commonwealth in Crisis 503

Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, ch. 3; Aylmer, State’s Servants, pp. 40–1 and passim.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 503

authorities of the Navy Commissioners, the parliamentary Navy Committee,

the conciliar Admiralty Committee and for a time the Regulators, may look

like a recipe for confusion, and the placing of land warriors in command over

ship’s captains an invitation to disaster. But the navy was in fact on the brink

of a heroic chapter in its history, and none of the Generals at Sea proved inad-

equate. Robert Blake, whose name is one of the greatest in British naval

annals, was celebrated in 1649 only as the heroic defender of Lyme and

Taunton, and he is not known ever to have gone to sea before that year,

though as a member of a mercantile family in Bridgwater he may already have

had some knowledge of shipping. His case is not unique; Monck, whose pre-

vious experience was wholly military, was soon to distinguish himself as a

naval commander, and after the Restoration he fought the Dutch again at sea

alongside his fellow-admiral Prince Rupert.

The role of the ﬂeet was secondary to that of the armies during the ﬁrst

three years of the Commonwealth’s existence, but it was nevertheless vital. It

had to support, supply, and protect the land campaigns against the Irish and

the Scots. The navy also had to combat the many royalist privateers that were

preying on English merchant ships, mainly from French bases. Since Charles II’s

mother was a daughter of the royal house, France was ready at ﬁrst to give

him all possible support short of actual war, and did indeed wage an unde-

clared war against English shipping in the Channel and the Mediterranean.

The losses became so heavy and the participation of the French navy so

blatant that in 1650 the Rump authorized its Generals at Sea to attack French

warships as well as merchantmen. English naval power commanded increas-

ing respect, and before very long drove ﬁrst Spain and then France to give

formal recognition to the Commonwealth.

Long before that, however, the navy’s ﬁrst task was to deal with the ﬂo-

tilla of warships that Rupert commanded, and had brought to Kinsale to

facilitate a possible landing by Charles II. Rupert was soon collaborating with

a score or so of Irish privateers in preying upon English shipping, but he was

not allowed to do so for long. Blake, Popham, and Deane joined forces in May

1649 with such ships as they had ready, and they soon had Rupert blockaded

in Kinsale. The harbour, however, was too strongly fortiﬁed for a direct

assault by sea, and for some months there was stalemate. But Cromwell’s

rapid progress laid Rupert’s ships open to an attack from the land, and

the threat became acute when Cork, only a dozen miles away, declared for the

parliament on 16 October. Then in the next few days a heavy storm forced the

blockading ships out to sea, and Rupert seized the chance to slip away with

the seven men-of-war that he had manned and ready, along with four small

frigates. He made ﬁrst for northern Spain, but the authorities there had no

desire to provoke the English Commonwealth and they gave him a cold recep-

tion. Spain still had the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal on her hands, as

504 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 504

well as the long, exhausting war with France. King John of Portugal, how-

ever, was prepared to give the little squadron a welcome, and it wintered in the

Tagus, taking toll of the English shipping that cruised along the Portuguese

coast to and from the Straits of Gibraltar.

Blake was on Rupert’s track by March 1650, and after sending a polite note

to King John he sailed boldly into the Tagus to engage the royalist ships. But

the forts on shore opened ﬁre on him, and the king refused all his requests to

hand Rupert’s vessels over to him, or to let him attack them where they lay,

or to order both ﬂeets to leave. A period of stalemate ensued, with the two of

them anchored a couple of miles apart, and their crews skirmishing at inter-

vals ashore. But Portugal could not go on protecting Rupert indeﬁnitely,

because she depended on hiring English merchantmen to maintain her vital

trade with Brazil, and Blake put the pressure on by capturing nine of them

that were sailing under contract with the outward-bound Brazil ﬂeet. Just

after that Popham joined him with strong reinforcements, and it was increas-

ingly clear that the Commonwealth was ready to risk war with Portugal in

order to destroy Rupert’s ﬂotilla. In September Blake attacked the home-

ward-bound Brazil ﬂeet as it entered the Tagus, sinking one ship and captur-

ing seven. That was enough to make King John press Rupert to depart, and

the prince shortly took his six remaining ships through the Straits into Span-

ish Mediterranean waters. There they took some prizes and forced their way

into Spanish harbours to burn English merchantmen, but Blake caught up

with them in November. One of them surrendered, ﬁve were driven ashore

and wrecked or burnt; the offended Spanish authorities left them at Blake’s

mercy. Rupert himself and Maurice, his vice-admiral, had a lucky escape

from Blake’s attack because they had sailed off on their own to chase a

prize, and they got away to Toulon. With French help Rupert managed to

put together another tiny ﬂotilla, which spent an adventurous two years in

ranging down the west African coast and across to the Caribbean, where

Barbados and other islands still remained loyal to the king. But he could

inﬂict no serious damage on the Commonwealth’s increasingly powerful

navy or on the trade routes that it protected, and after he had lost all his ships

save one he limped back to France in 1653.

The main task of the Generals at Sea during 1651 was to reduce the still

resisting offshore islands, namely Jersey, the Scilly Isles, and Man, which the

royalists were using as bases for privateering. The Scillies, where Sir John

Grenville was governor, were the ﬁrst to be tackled, and the task was initial-

ly entrusted to a small amphibious force under Sir George Ayscue, the Ad-

miral of the Irish seas. But the situation became more serious when it was learnt

that Admiral Tromp and his Dutch ﬂeet were sailing against the islands.

Grenville had had the folly to let his privateers take Dutch prizes and prison-

ers, despite the king’s need to keep on the right side of the States-General—all

The Commonwealth in Crisis 505

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 505

the stronger now, since William II had died in 1650. There was a real danger

that the Dutch might take possession of the Scillies and use them as a privat-

eering base of their own, so Blake was sent to join Ayscue and make sure that

the Commonwealth secured them ﬁrst. It was not an easy operation, for

Grenville had excellent defences, both natural and man-made, and he put up

a stout resistance. But Blake took Tresco by assault with the loss of only four

men, and after that Grenville was persuaded to surrender St Mary’s Castle on

honourable terms.

Blake’s main responsibility during the summer of 1651 was to prevent any

supplies or reinforcements from reaching the king and the Scots from over-

seas during their advance to Worcester, but after their defeat he could turn his

attention to the Channel Islands. Late in the season though it was, he sailed

from Weymouth with thirteen warships and numerous transports carrying

about 2,000 soldiers. Sir George Carteret, the governor of Jessey, had slight-

ly more men, but although he was stout of heart his foot soldiers were not. A

major problem, however, was that Blake’s transports drew too much water

to put his troops directly ashore on those difﬁcult coasts. He solved it by send-

ing his smaller vessels—victuallers, probably—ahead, building bridges to

them from his larger transports, and then getting his infantry swiftly on land

under the protection of his well-armed seamen. Most of Carteret’s foot ﬂed

before them, and though a few of his horse and dragoons fought bravely he

was forced to take refuge in the island fortress of Elizabeth Castle. Colonel

Heane completed the conquest of Jersey, and when Carteret surrendered on

12 December all resistance in the Channel Islands ceased.

The Isle of Man was the Earl of Derby’s base, and after his capture in the

Worcester campaign it was held by his French wife Charlotte de la Tremoille,

who had already made a reputation as the gallant defender of Lathom House.

Now, however, she tried to negotiate the surrender of the island in return for

her husband’s life, but in spite of Cromwell’s pleas that he should be spared

the Rump insisted that he should suffer death as a traitor. A force under

Colonels Duckenﬁeld and Birch, the governors of Chester and Liverpool,

reduced the remaining strongholds in Man by the end of the year, an unne-

cessary little campaign if ever there was one.

Meanwhile Ayscue was sent across the Atlantic with a small military force

to prevent Rupert from setting up another nest of pirates in Barbados. Lord

Willoughby, the royalist governor of the island, raised 6,000 men to defend

it, but on receiving the news of Worcester he negotiated its surrender and was

granted generous terms. The submission of the other West Indian islands

soon followed. Another small amphibious force secured that of Virginia in

March 1652 and of Maryland not long afterwards. There was now no patch

506 The Commonwealth 1649–1653

For all these various operations see Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, pp. 60–9.

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 506

of British soil in the world where a royalist could take refuge, and the naval

strength of the Commonwealth was making all the European powers chary of

offending it. By this time none of them could match its ﬂeet, and none could

boast a ﬁner admiral than Blake. He was now in full command, for his friend

Popham had died in 1651 and Deane had been made commander-in-chief of

the army in Scotland.

If the surrender of Maryland marked the ﬁnal tremor of the English Civil

Wars, only weeks separated it from the Commonwealth’s ﬁrst war with a for-

eign power, which began with a clash between Blake and Tromp in the

Downs. It may seem strange that the regicide state took up arms against its

fellow-republicans and fellow-Calvinists in the United Provinces, rather than

against either of the great catholic monarchies that had denounced the exe-

cution of Charles I so loudly. But Spain with Catalonia and Portugal still in

revolt, risings in Sicily and Naples only recently suppressed, and the long war

with France still on her hands, could not afford to add England to her open

enemies. France had been more belligerent; her conﬂict with England at sea

and her sympathy with the cause of Charles II as Henry IV’s grandson had

brought her to the brink of war in 1650. But from October of that year until

1653 she was locked in her own civil war, the second Fronde, as well as hav-

ing Spain’s Army of Flanders on her north-west frontier. Cardinal Mazarin

was a realist, and he increasingly saw the advantages to be drawn from the

English Commonwealth’s friendship. It would not be long before France and

Spain were competing for it.

There has been much argument as to whether the Dutch war came about

mainly through long-term commercial and colonial rivalries or through more

immediate political causes.

But the two explanations are not mutually

incompatible, and both factors contributed. To take the economic ones ﬁrst,

Dutch maritime supremacy had rested since James I’s time on two main foun-

dations, their control over the trade in corn, timber, and other ship-building

materials produced by the countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, and their

ability to carry the goods traded between foreign nations at a cost that those

countries’ native merchants could not compete with. This carrying trade in

north European waters was conducted in unarmed or lightly armed vessels

called ﬂuits (ﬂutes or ﬂyboats in English), which were far cheaper to build and

man than England’s typical armed merchantmen. By 1650 the total tonnage

of Dutch shipping probably exceeded England’s by at least ﬁve to one, and

The Commonwealth in Crisis 507

On the causes and issues of the Dutch war Charles Wilson, Proﬁt and Power: A Study of

England and the Dutch Wars (1957) retains great authority, especially on the economic factors,

but Steven C. A. Pincus in Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English

Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1996) has argued persuasively (if a little excessively) for

greater importance to be given to political and religious motivation. See also Worden, Rump

Parliament, ch. 14, and for source material Letters and Papers Relating to the First Dutch War,

ed. S. R. Gardiner and C. T. Atkinson (5 vols., Navy Record Society, 1898–1912).

ch16.y8 27/9/02 11:45 AM Page 507