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Home Foreign Policy, 1649-1688, and the Beginnings of Greater Britain, 1603-1688 1603-1688; Part 5 |
1603-1688; Part 5From 1674 to 1688 England ceases to be of importance in foreign affairs. Occasionally the king showed some independence of France, as, in 1677, when the Princess Mary, the daughter of the Duke of York, married William of Orange, the ruler of Holland. But for the greater part of the time the English kings were the pensioners of Louis XIV. That monarch paid Charles II large sums of money for the prorogation of Parliament, and when he seemed to be too independent he bribed the Opposition in Parliament instead. Finally, Charles, a year before he died, gave up Tangier in order to please Louis XIV. When James II came to the throne, in 1685, the French ambassador was the chief supporter of his disastrous policy. Meantime Louis XIV's powers and ambitions were extending, and when the Revolution of 1688 came, his ascendancy was threatening all Europe.From the history of English foreign policy we may turn to the history of the British Empire in the seventeenth century, for the two are not disconnected. The British Empire, when James I ascended the throne in 1603, was nonexistent. Attempts had been made to colonize Virginia, but they had failed; the East India Company had been formed in 1600 for the promotion of trade with the East, but its first expedition had not returned from the East Indies when Elizabeth died (It returned six months after James's accession with one million pounds of pepper). With the Stuarts, however, the beginnings of Empire came, and the seventeenth century is, therefore, from an imperial as well as from a domestic point of view, a very important one. And it is worth pointing out that the successful development of this Empire in the seventeenth century was largely due to private enterprise. We may turn to affairs in the East first. It was under Portuguese auspices that the route to India and the Far East by the Cape of Good Hope had been discovered in 1502, and during the sixteenth century Portugal had been successful in preserving a monopoly of the Eastern trade for her own merchants (A few Englishmen did, however, succeed in reaching India in the reign of Elizabeth. The first Englishman known to have visited India was a Jesuit, Stephens by name, in 1579). But in the seventeenth century both the Dutch and English nations determined to secure some share in that trade. In the Far East the Dutch proved themselves persistent and intrepid traders. The Dutch East India Company conquered the Spice Islands from the Portuguese, and established their own supremacy. The English East India Company also endeavoured to trade in the Far East, but the Dutch Company was wealthier and stronger. Disputes between Dutch and English occurred, and culminated in the massacre at Amboyna (1623), when ten Englishmen were executed on a trumped-up charge of conspiring with some Japanese soldiers against the Dutch governor of that place (No reparation was extracted from the Dutch for this flagrant injustice for thirty-one years; then Cromwell insisted on a large money indemnity being paid to the English company and to the relatives of the executed men). Soon after this the English practically gave up their attempts to compete with the Dutch for trade in the Far East, and they did not re-enter the contest till the close of the eighteenth century. |
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