and their honor, and each resolved to risk everything for their mutual pretensions—­to perish rather than yield.  The United Provinces were assuredly not the aggressors in this quarrel.  They had made sure of their capability to meet it, by the settlement of all questions of internal government, and the solid peace which secured them against any attack on the part of their old and inveterate enemy; but they did not seek a rupture.  They at first endeavored to ward off the threatened danger by every effort of conciliation; and they met, with temperate management, even the advances made by Cromwell, at the instigation of St. John, the chief justice, for a proposed, yet impracticable coalition between the two republics, which was to make them one and indivisible.  An embassy to The Hague, with St. John and Strickland at its head, was received with all public honors; but the partisans of the families of Orange and Stuart, and the populace generally, openly insulted the ambassadors.  About the same time Dorislas, a Dutchman naturalized in England, and sent on a mission from the parliament, was murdered at The Hague by some Scotch officers, friends of the banished king; the massacre of Amboyna, thirty years before, was made a cause of revived complaint; and altogether a sum of injuries was easily made up to turn the proposed fantastic coalition into a fierce and bloody war.

The parliament of England soon found a pretext in an outrageous measure, under pretence of providing for the interests of commerce.  They passed the celebrated act of navigation, which prohibited all nations from importing into England in their ships any commodity which was not the growth and manufacture of their own country.  This law, though worded generally, was aimed directly at the Dutch, who were the general factors and carriers of Europe.  Ships were seized, reprisals made, the mockery of negotiation carried on, fleets equipped, and at length the war broke out.

In the month of May, 1652, the Dutch admiral, Tromp, commanding forty-two ships of war, met with the English fleet under Blake in the Straits of Dover; the latter, though much inferior in number, gave a signal to the Dutch admiral to strike, the usual salutation of honor accorded to the English during the monarchy.  Totally different versions have been given by the two admirals of what followed.  Blake insisted that Tromp, instead of complying, fired a broadside at his vessel; Tromp stated that a second and a third bullet were sent promptly from the British ship while he was preparing to obey the admiral’s claim.  The discharge of the first broadside is also a matter of contradiction, and of course of doubt.  But it is of small consequence; for whether hostilities had been hurried on or delayed, they were ultimately inevitable.  A bloody battle began:  it lasted five hours.  The inferiority in number on the side of the English was balanced by the larger size of their ships.  One Dutch vessel was sunk; another taken; and night parted the combatants.