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

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Chapter 4. Times of success. Defending the fatherland
content and intent of the many mutual agreements that the rulers of England
and the Netherlands had signed in the past centuries. 54 Their hobbyhorse
to substantiate their second line of argumentation was the Magnus Intercursus,
whom the Dutch time and again went off on. 55 Signed by Henry VII and
Philip the Fair at the end of the fifteenth century, the Magnus Intercursus had
regulated ‘the commercial relations between England and the Netherlands
during the whole of the Tudor period, and was still in force in 1609’, when
James I, breaking with tradition, decided that all foreign fishermen should
buy a licence in order to fish in the seas surrounding the British Isles. 56 Especially
article XIV of the Magnus Intercursus proved to be of great value for the
Dutch: it stipulated that fishermen from both countries ‘could go everywhere,
could sail, [and] could fish in safety the entire sea, without any hinderance,
license or safe-conduct’. 57 Indeed, the attraction of the Magnus Intercursus was
so great that right up until the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-
1654) the Dutch tried to convince their English counterparts that the Magnus
Intercursus was the most solid foundation upon which Anglo-Dutch relations
should be grounded. 58
54 As Thomas Hamilton (1563-1637), secretary of the Scottish Privy Council and probably involved
in the Anglo-Dutch negotations in the years 1617 and 1618, noticed there were internal contradictions
in the Dutch arguments. If, as the Dutch claimed, the seas were free by nature and that therefore they
had the right to fish, why did the Dutch felt the need to produce documents that could proof that they
had a ‘title’ to fish, granted to them by the English monarchs themselves? Grotius had tried to solve this
problem by asserting that the treaties ‘between the rulers of Holland and Zeeland on the one hand, and
the kings of England and Scotland on the other hand’ to solve maritime disputes ‘had always been in
harmony with the law of nations’. Thus in Grotius’s view, the Magnus Intercursus merely recognised a
right that the Dutch according to the law of nations already possessed. Ittersum, “Mare Liberum Versus
The Propriety of the Seas?”, pp. 255, 264.
55 Muller, Mare Clausum, pp. 29-30, 42-43.
56 Edmundson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, p. 21. At the basis of the Magnus Intercursus stood the Anglo-
Habsburg friendship at the end of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century that was dictated
by fear of French aspirations at sea. However, this did not stop Henry VII to force Philip the Fair to sign
the Intercursus Malus, a commercial treaty advantageous to the English but detrimental to the Dutch,
when, in 1506, Philip and his wife, queen Joan of Castile (1479-1555), caught by a storm on their way to
Spain, were forced to dock at Southampton to carry out repairs to some broken masts. Louis Sicking,
Neptune and the Netherlands: State, Economy, and War at Sea in the Renaissance (Brill; Leiden/Boston, 2004),
pp. 316, 325-26.
57 ‘Piscatoribus utriusque Principis subditis tam per Mare quam terra liberum commeatum fore’,
in Tractatus pacis et mutui commercii, sive intercursus mercium, XIV, p. 235. ‘Item, Conventum est ut supra,
Quod Piscatores utriusque partis partium praedictarum cujuscunque Conditionis existant, poterunt
ubique ire, navigare, per mare secure piscari, absque aliquo impedimento, licentia, seu salvo conductu.’
See also Edmundson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, p. 21.
58 Edmundson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, pp. 154-55; Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea, pp. 386, 394;
Simon Groenveld, “The English Civil Wars as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640-1652”, in
The Historical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1987), p. 554; idem, ““Als by het huwelyck van man ende wyff”:
puriteinse voorstellen voor een Nederlands-Engelse unie, 1642-1652”, in Klaas Grootes and J. den Haan
(eds.), Geschiedenis, godsdienst, letterkunde (Nehalennia; Roden, 1989), pp. 151-54. Walter Strickland
(c.1598-1671) and Oliver St. John (c.1598-1673), the Commonwealth’s ambassadors in The Hague, complained
that the Dutch profited from the Magnus Intercursus, but that they did not stuck to their end of
the agreement, violating articles IV-VI that guaranteed aid against, and expulsion of, rebels of either