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 CHAPTER III

A Fight to a Finish

N the period of Lancaster's absence on his voyage the great Elizabeth had passed to her rest. Her successor, James I, was to a certain extent in the position of the king who knew not Joseph. He was not only lacking in his predecessor's enthusiasm for the cause of trade expansion in the East, but his mind failed to grasp the essential conditions on which a policy of the kind could then be successfully prosecuted. On no other basis than as a monopolistic power—as the accredited commercial representative of England—could the East India Company hope to make good its footing and that of its country in the distant regions of the Orient. Elizabeth fully realized this when she gave the Company its exclusive charter and invested its representative with powers which were hardly to be distinguished from those of an ambassador. James I, on the other hand, appears to have felt that a ship or two in the East more or less did not matter, and that it was for the conflicting interests to fight out their differences 55