Sea Power, the Navigation Acts and the Dutch Wars

Mercantilism: A Zero-Sum World

Mercantilism shaped Restoration economic policy. Its core assumption was that the world’s wealth was fixed: one nation’s gain in trade was another nation’s loss. To prosper, a nation must export more than it imported, hoard precious metal (bullion), found colonies that supplied raw materials and bought back finished goods, and protect its trade with monopoly chartered companies. The Dutch Republic, with its tiny population and vast trading fleet, was the model and the rival: by 1660 the Dutch carried more freight by tonnage than every other European nation combined.

The Navigation Acts

The first Navigation Acts had been passed in 1651 by the Commonwealth, but the Restoration Parliament strengthened them. The Act of 1660 required that goods carried to or from English colonies must travel in ships built and owned in England or its colonies, with English masters and three-quarters English crews. The Act listed ‘enumerated’ goods — sugar, tobacco, cotton, ginger, dyestuffs — that could only be sent to England, even if their final market was elsewhere. The Staple Act of 1663 added that European goods bound for the colonies must first be landed in an English port and pay duties before re-export. The Act of 1673 added export duties on those colonial goods sent direct between colonies.

Key Fact

The Navigation Acts of 1660, 1663 and 1673 required colonial trade to use English or colonial ships, listed enumerated goods (sugar, tobacco, cotton) that must land in England, and forced European goods bound for the colonies through English ports. Their target was Dutch shipping.

The Second Dutch War, 1665–67

The first major conflict came in 1665. England declared war over trade rivalry, the seizure of New Amsterdam (renamed New York in honour of the Duke of York) the year before, and skirmishes off West Africa. Early English success at the Battle of Lowestoft on 3 June 1665 — in which the Dutch flagship blew up — gave way to disease and money problems on the English fleet through 1666. In June 1667 the war ended in humiliation: Admiral Michiel de Ruyter sailed up the river Medway, broke the chain at Chatham and burned much of the English fleet at anchor. The flagship ‘Royal Charles’ was towed back to the Netherlands as a trophy. The Medway raid was the worst defeat in English naval history.

The Treaty of Breda and Pepys’s Reforms

The war ended at the Treaty of Breda in July 1667. Under it England kept New York and New Jersey; the Dutch kept Suriname and the spice island of Run; both sides relaxed the Navigation Acts slightly to ease trade. The political fallout was severe: Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, was impeached and fled to France in November 1667. Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator, used the post-war period to push through reforms of naval victualling, of pay and of shipbuilding contracts. New ships of the line were ordered, the dockyards at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth were upgraded, and a coherent system of naval administration began to emerge.

Naval battles in the Restoration moved from chaotic mêlées to disciplined formations. Under line of battle tactics, fleets sailed in a single column so that every ship’s broadside cannon could fire on the enemy line in turn. The English Fighting Instructions of 1653 had codified the tactic, and the Restoration navy refined it. Ships were classified into six rates by gun count; the largest, the three-decked ‘ship of the line’, carried 90 to 100 guns. Pepys’s shipbuilding programme of the 1670s and 1680s created the early ships of the line that would fight under William III against Louis XIV in the 1690s.

The Third Dutch War, 1672–74

Five years after the Medway humiliation, Charles II went to war on the Dutch again — this time as Louis XIV’s ally under the secret Treaty of Dover. The Third Dutch War began in 1672. The English fleet under James, Duke of York fought De Ruyter at Solebay in May 1672 to a bloody draw. On land, the French overran the Dutch Republic, but the Dutch broke the dykes to flood the country and held out. Parliament was furious about both the Catholic alliance with France and the costs of the war. In 1674 it forced Charles to make a separate peace at the Second Treaty of Westminster, four years before France finished its own war. The political effect was significant: Parliament had used the power of the purse to override royal foreign policy, and Charles never again pushed an open military alliance with France.

Spain and France framed Charles II’s naval policy throughout. Spain remained the old enemy of the Cromwellian period, but its empire was visibly declining and its main use to England was as the target of the privateering raids on its Caribbean colonies that the governors of Jamaica licensed. France was the rising danger: Louis XIV’s navy, built up by Colbert from 1661, grew from twenty ships to over 270 by the 1680s. Charles II danced between the two: his ministers signed the Triple Alliance with the Dutch and Sweden against France in January 1668, and two years later he reversed course and allied with Louis XIV under the Treaty of Dover. By the end of the reign Parliament feared France far more than it feared Spain — a shift that would define William III’s wars against Louis after 1689.

Effects of the Wars

Despite the Medway disaster, English shipping grew strongly across the reign. By the 1680s the English merchant fleet was approaching the size of the Dutch and pulling ahead in colonial routes. The Navigation Acts shifted carrying-trade business from Dutch shippers to English ones. Sugar imports from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia and Maryland, and African gold and slaves from West Africa increasingly travelled in English bottoms. The customs revenue from this booming trade was what kept Charles II solvent during his rule without Parliament after 1681. Pepys’s naval reforms left a stronger navy and a working dockyard system. The age of Dutch maritime dominance was ending.