at the Kentish Knock were punished, but the unpopularity of De With left the authorities with no alternative but to offer the command-in-chief once more to Martin Tromp.  Full of resentment though he was at the bad treatment he had received, Tromp was too good a patriot to refuse.  At the end of November the old admiral at the head of 100 warships put to sea for the purpose of convoying some 450 merchantmen through the Straits.  Stormy weather compelled him to send the convoy with an escort into shelter, but he himself with sixty ships set out to seek the English fleet, which lay in the Downs.  After some manoeuvring the two fleets met on December 10, off Dungeness.  A stubborn fight took place, but this time it was some of the English ships that were defaulters.  The result was the complete victory of the Dutch; and Blake’s fleet, severely damaged, retreated under cover of the night into Dover roads.  Tromp was now for a time master of the Channel and commerce to and from the ports of Holland and Zeeland went on unimpeded, while many English prizes were captured.

This state of things was however not to last long.  Towards the end of February, 1653, Blake put to sea with nearly eighty ships, and on the 25th off Portland met Tromp at the head of a force nearly equal to his own in number.  But the Dutch admiral was convoying more than 150 merchantmen and he had moreover been at sea without replenishment of stores ever since the fight at Dungeness, while the English had come straight from port.  The fight, which on the part of the Dutch consisted of strong rear-guard actions, had lasted for two whole days, when Tromp found that his powder had run out and that on the third day more than half his fleet were unable to continue the struggle.  But, inspiring his subordinates De Ruyter, Evertsen and Floriszoon with his own indomitable courage, Tromp succeeded by expert seamanship in holding off the enemy and conducting his convoy with small loss into safety.  Four Dutch men-of-war were taken and five sunk; the English only lost two ships.

Meanwhile both nations had been getting sick of the war.  The Dutch were suffering terribly from the serious interference with their commerce and carrying trade and from the destruction of the important fisheries industry, while the English on their side were shut out from the Baltic, where the King of Denmark, as the ally of the United Provinces, had closed the Sound, and from the Mediterranean, where Admiral van Galen, who lost his life in the fight, destroyed a British squadron off Leghorn (March 23).  In both countries there was a peace party.  Cromwell had always wished for a closer union with the United Provinces and was averse to war.  In the Dutch republic the States party, especially in Holland the chief sufferer by the war, was anxious for a cessation of hostilities; and it found its leader in the youthful John de Witt, who on the death of Adrian Pauw on February 21, 1653, had been appointed council-pensionary.