Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/558

 650 DUTCH MISSIONS TO ENGLAND IN 1689 October first of these conditions was in existence. As to the other, he made no pretensions. In a moment of frankness he even said : ' I will have it so : it is droit du canon.' ^ The greatest difficulties of the missions in 1689 arose during the negotiation of this convention over another maritime question, the question of the limits of British admiralty jurisdiction. This was raised in cases of two kinds : first, those of Dutch ships and goods confiscated for trading to France ; secondly, those of Dutch privateers which put into British harbours with their prizes. The English coast of the Channel, along which rather than along the French side the trade-routes ran, was the happiest hunting- ground of the privateers of both nations. The English officials at the ports acted on the principle that all prizes there brought in were subject to the jurisdiction of the British courts of admiralty. During May and June a number of prizes taken by the Dutch were accordingly detained in English harbours to await the end of the usually very dilatory admiralty proceedings. The Dutch ambassadors pressed that their privateers should be allowed to take their prizes with them for adjudication in their own pro- vinces.^ In one case in May the English privy council had already permitted this to be done ' as the treaties direct ' ; ^ but the English did not hold to this principle, and on 24 Jime the Dutch handed in a long memorial in its favour.* They argue that the king's sovereign right to liberate the privateers and prizes detained in British ports could not be limited by accounta- bility to any authority in his kingdom, and that the rule, if it were made general, would subject captors to an indefinite number of foreign jurisdictions. They assert the doctrine that all ships and goods are to be judged in the courts of the captor state, which they say was recognized, two or three years before, even in the case of Algerine pirates putting into a British port with Dutch prizes, and again in the marine treaty of 1674,^ and in William's instructions of 1689 to both his Dutch and his English captains. Lastly, it was implied in the treaty for the union of the fleets in 1689 and in the decision of one case during the war. The English, however, did not allow themselves to be convinced by this reasoning. At the end of clause 2 in the treaty for prohibiting commerce with France, they proposed the words : ' seront reputez de bonne prize par les Admirautez ou les dits • Witsen's lost verbaal, quoted by Wagenaar. xvi. 36 ; Sirtema de Grovestins, vL 162. • Dispatches of 23 April/3 May, 31 May/10 June, 7/17 June, 21 June/1 July. • Privy (DouncU Register, 6/16 May 1689. • The original, dated 21 June, is in State Papers, Foreign, Holland 220. • Heie, they say, although an express prohibition of the opposite was regarded as superfluous, the principle is implied in arts, ix-xii. See the text in Dumont, vol. vii, pt. i, p. 282.