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 528 TRADING WITH THE ENEMY AND October give directions on the matter as soon as he heard from the pensioner on the subject, which he had not done by the last post. 1 If any trace of this incident survives in the correspondence of William and Heinsius, it does not seem to have been judged worthy of publication ; but nothing seems to have come of the proposal. Most likely the new duties were as much in the way of prohibition as William wanted from the English. The official view of the English still seems to have been that they had not thrown open the trade with France. Thus in the autumn of 1696 Shrewsbury wrote : I hope the King will take care that the Dutch shall not open a trade with France during the war. Such a proceeding in Holland would do him a great deal of harm here. 2 It was the firm belief of Englishmen that they showed more determination in the trade war than any of their allies. 3 Without statistics it can hardly be proved, but in all probability they were right. If the English measures against enemy trade were less thorough and effective than the king desired, the Dutch were worse still. Throughout the war there was a long series of resolutions of the states-general and the governing assemblies, laying down a policy and forbidding one device after another by which the merchants evaded it. The endless repetitions and the delays of procedure are themselves proofs enough that the policy was never fully put into force. A plakkaat on reprisals on 8/18 October 1688 and the declaration of war on 27 February/ 9 March 1688/9 4 forbade the importation of French goods, but it was after these that William wrote to Heinsius, with the coming meeting of the states of Holland in his mind : I hope that you will be able in this assembly to win over the gentlemen of Amsterdam, and other members who might cause difficulties, to the prohibition of the consumption of French goods, otherwise the [existing] prohibition is useless and does no damage to France, and I should be brought into the greatest embarrassment here. 5 This further step seems never to have been taken. Instead there began the resolutions in which the states -general tried to enforce the existing prohibitions. It is not worth wj^ile to describe the shortcomings of the various provinces and admiralties, amongst which Zeeland gave the greatest trouble but all gave some, or of minor obstructionists like the, town officers of Middel- 1 Trumbull to Villiers, 29 November/8 December, 3/13 December. 2 To Hill, 29 September/9 October 1696 (Montague House Papers, n. i. 414). 3 For an able but typical expression of this opinion see J Hampden, Some Short Considerations concerning the State of the Nation, 1692, reprinted in State Tracts of William III, ii. 320, and in Cobbett, Parliamentary Hist., v. lxvi. 4 Groot Placcaet Boek. 6 6/16 July 1689 (Archives de la maison d' Orange- Nassau, 3rd series, i. 29).