historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
have caused the same Booke to be printed in some place beyond the Seas, and
to the same impression haue added some other things, as if they were parts of
that which was first printed here by Our command’. 25 The most likely suspect
that matches that description is the pirate edition of Selden’s Mare Clausum
(The Closed Sea, 1635) that had appeared in the Dutch Republic in 1636 and
to which an anonymous printer, probably from Amsterdam or Leiden, had
attached a work of Boxhorn called the Apologia pro Navigationibus Hollandorum
(Defense of the Navigations of the Hollanders) and a copy, from Boxhorn’s library,
of the Magnus Intercursus (Great Treaty), the famous treaty that the English
king Henry VII (1457-1509) and Philip the Fair (1478-1506), lord of the Habsburg
Netherlands, had signed on February 24, 1496. 26 Both Boxhorn’s Apologia
and his copy of the Magnus Intercursus had previously been published in one
tome together with Grotius’s Mare Liberum and the De Maribus (On the Seas,
1633) of Paulus Merula (1558-1607), professor of history at Leiden University,
and it is easy to see why. 27 For they produced evidence that supported Dutch
claims that the Dutch held ancient rights to fish freely and undisturbed in the
seas surrounding the British Isles and that the Dutch had explored and were
accustomed to navigate and fish in the Northern seas. These claims diametrically
opposed Charles I’s own claims to lordship over the seas that adjoined
he feared that ‘that part of the work which dealt with the northern seas might offend his brother-in-law’,
king Christian IV of Denmark, whose sister Anne (1574-1619) James had married in 1589 and ‘who also
claimed sovereignty over the same waters and to whom James was in debt’. In 1635 Charles I asked
Selden to rewrite the original version to add weight to his claims that the king of England was sovereign
over the seas surrounding the British Isles and that he therefore could legally license the, predominantly
Dutch, herring fleets fishing in those waters. Christianson, Discourse on History, Law, and Governance in
the Public Career of John Selden, pp. 246-51, and Helen Thornton, “John Selden’s Response to Hugo Grotius:
The Argument for Closed Seas”, in International Journal of Maritime History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2006), pp.
107-8, with quotes on p. 107.
25 Quotations taken from Peter J. Lucas, “Printing Anglo-Saxon in Holland and John Selden’s Mare
Clausum seu de Dominio Maris”, in Quaerendo, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2001), pp. 125-26.
26 Ibidem. The title page of the Boxhorn pirate edition reads: ‘Ioannis Seldeni Mare Clavsvm sev
de Dominio Maris Libri Duo … Accedunt Marci Zverii Boxhornii Apologia Pro navigationibus Hollandorum
adversus Pontum Hevterum, et Tractatvs Mvtvi Commercii & navigationis inter Henricvm
VII. Regem Angliae & Philippvm Archiducem Austriae’. According to the title page, the book was printed
by William Stanesby in London in 1636. The Boxhorn edition was one of three pirate editions of Mare
Clausum that appeared in the Dutch Republic in 1636, indicating the great interest in Selden’s book
immediately after its publication. In a letter to Pontanus, June 14, 1636, Boxhorn informed Pontanus
that in Leiden it was not possible to get a hold of a copy of Mare Clausum that was printed in England.
Boxhorn, Epistolae et poemata, p. 70. ‘Exemplaria Maris Clausi, quae in Anglia excusa, apud nos non possunt
haberi.’
27 Hugo Grotius, De mari libero et P. Merula de Maribus. Marci Zuerii Boxhornii Apologia pro Navigationibus
Hollandorum adversus Pontum Heuterum. Qua praecedentium saeculorum navigationes, earumque jura
& instituta, ex tabulis praesetim publicis asseruntur. Tractatus pacis et mutui commercii, sive intercursus mercium,
conclusus Londini Anno 1495 die Februarii XXIV inter Henricum Septimum Angliae regem, & Philippum
Archiducem Austriae, Burgundiae, &c. Ex Bibliotheca Marci Zuerii Boxhornii. (Elzevier; Leiden, 1633).
Three editions had appeared that same year. Boxhorn had dedicated the Apologia to Willem de Bont,
the bailiff of Leiden. For De Bont, see chapter 3. In this thesis all page references to the Apologia and the
Tractatus refer to their editions in the edition of Grotius’s De mari libero of 1633.
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