Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/192

 relieved from duties which at intervals pressed heavily on their class, and only contributed to the cost of a national navy in a rateable proportion together with their fellow subjects. Combined with other concurring causes which supervened, these legislative measures gave hereafter no ordinary impulse to the merchant shipping of England. But they engendered a sanguinary civil war, besides a series of much more sanguinary struggles with the Dutch, to disenthrall the English merchant service from the state of dependence in which it had lingered during many ages.

While England was fighting for political freedom, the Dutch, having already become a free republic, were the real masters of the seas. They were now at the height of their maritime glory. Their merchant ships penetrated to every quarter of the globe. No wonder then that they openly and derisively claimed the dominion of the Narrow Seas. We may now smile at such absurd pretensions, but these were then the cause of deep alarm and excitement in England, for statesmen well knew that the dominion of the Narrow Seas was an attribute of real and material power. It was at this period that the great Selden wrote his celebrated work, which was honoured with every mark of royal approbation and popular commendation. The Dutch, having a vast number of merchantmen afloat, feared the increasing naval power of England, but nevertheless made all the encroachments they dared. Their busses fished on her coasts and were fired upon, but at last paid the stipulated sum of 3000l., tribute to the King, to obtain his consent to their prosecution of the coast fisheries