Quite to the amazement of the Directors of the West India Company, the States-General recalled Stuyvesant, ordering him to return immediately to Holland to give an account of his administration.  He had been in the main the faithful agent of the Company, carrying out its wishes in opposition to popular reform.  They therefore wrote to him, stating that the requirement was in violation of their charter, and requesting him “not to be in too much haste to commence his voyage, but to delay it until the receipt of further orders.”

It so happened, however, that then the States-General were just on the eve of hostilities with England.  It was a matter of the first importance that New Netherland should be under the rule of a governor of military experience, courage and energy.  No man could excel Stuyvesant in these qualities.  Yielding to the force of circumstances, the States-General revoked their recall.  Thus narrowly Stuyvesant escaped the threatened humiliation.

The English government was angry with Holland for refusing to expel the royalist refugees, who, after the execution of Charles I., had taken refuge in Holland.  The commerce of the Dutch Republic then covered every sea.  England, to punish the Dutch and to revive her own decaying commerce, issued, by Parliamentary vote, her famous “Act of Navigation,” which was exultantly proclaimed at the old London Exchange “with sound of trumpet and beat of drum.”

This Act decreed that no production of Asia, Africa or America should be brought to England, except in English vessels, manned by English crews, and that no productions of Europe should be brought to England, unless in English vessels, or in those of the country in which the imported cargoes were produced.  These measures were considered very unjust by all the other nations, and especially by the Dutch, then the most commercial nation on the globe.

The States-General sent ambassadors to London to remonstrate against such hostile action; and at the same time orders were issued for the equipment of one hundred and fifty ships of war.  The States-General had not yet ratified Stuyvesant’s treaty of Hartford.  The ambassadors were instructed to urge that an immovable boundary line should be established between the Dutch and English possessions in America.

The reply of the English Government was not conciliatory.  The English, it was said, had always been forbidden to trade in the Dutch colonies.  The Dutch ought therefore to find no fault with the recent Navigation Act, from which measure the Council did not “deem it fitting to recede.”  As to the colonial boundary, the ungracious reply was returned,