Closing the British seas

Abstract

Such were the rights claimed by Britain during the 17th century in the Narrow Seas. They were not fanciful or academic claims. Sir Leoline Jenkins was a Judge of the Admiralty Court in the reign of King Charles II. John Selden’s book Maw Clausurn had been commissioned by King James I and was published in 1635 by the ‘express command’ of King Charles I ‘for the manifesting of the right and dominion of us and our Royal Progenitors in the seas which encompasses these our realms and Dominions of Great Britain and Ireland’. Judge and scholar alike were expressing the official view of the British State. They were not even engaging in propaganda. As they understood it, they were expounding law and stating policy. The claims they had advanced were forcibly asserted by the Royal Navy both in time of peace and in a succession of wars against the Dutch and French. British pretensions then went rather far, particularly in demanding salutes from foreign vessels to British warships. The articles of peace ending the Third Dutch War in 1674, for instance, provided that ‘the Dutch were to pay an indemnity of 800.000 patacoons and to strike flag and lower topsail to the King’s Jack between Finisterre and Norway.” Not until 1806 was the duty of naval commanders to enforce salutes in the British Seas omitted from the Naval Instructions issued by the Admiralty. Even thereafter no formal abandonment of the British claim to salutes was ever made.J British pretensions were not unique, even if the Royal Navy, from the middle of the 17th century onwards, was better able than others to assert them. The Pope’s division of the oceans between Spain and