It was in vain that the envoys of the Dutch and Venetian republics sought redress for the enormous damage inflicted on their commerce by English pirates, and invoked the protection of public law.  It was always easy for learned juris-consuls to prove such depredations to be consistent with international usage and with sound morality.  Even at that period, although England was in population and in wealth so insignificant, it possessed a lofty, insular contempt for the opinions and the doctrines of other nations, and expected, with perfect calmness, that her own principles should be not only admitted, but spontaneously adored.

Yet the piratical interest was no longer the controlling one.  That city on the Thames, which already numbered more than three hundred thousand inhabitants, had discovered that more wealth was to be accumulated by her bustling shopkeepers in the paths of legitimate industry than by a horde of rovers over the seas, however adventurous and however protected by Government.

As for France, she was already defending herself against piracy by what at the period seemed a masterpiece of internal improvement.  The Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone were soon to be united in one chain of communication.  Thus merchandise might be water-borne from the channel to the Mediterranean, without risking the five or six months’ voyage by sea then required from Havre to Marseilles, and exposure along the whole coast to attack from the corsairs of England Spain and Barbary.

The envoys of the States-General had a brief audience of the new sovereign, in which little more than phrases of compliment were pronounced.

“We are here,” said Barneveld, “between grief and joy.  We have lost her whose benefits to us we can never describe in words, but we have found a successor who is heir not only to her kingdom but to all her virtues.”  And with this exordium the great Advocate plunged at once into the depths of his subject, so far as was possible in an address of ceremony.  He besought the king not to permit Spain, standing on the neck of the provinces, to grasp from that elevation at other empires.  He reminded James of his duty to save those of his own religion from the clutch of a sanguinary superstition, to drive away those lurking satellites of the Roman pontiff who considered Britain their lawful prey.  He implored him to complete the work so worthily begun by Elizabeth.  If all those bound by one interest should now, he urged, unite their efforts, the Spaniard, deprived not only of the Netherlands, but, if he were not wise in time, banished from the ocean and stripped of all his transmarine possessions, would be obliged to consent to a peace founded on the only secure basis, equality of strength.  The envoy concluded by beseeching the king for assistance to Ostend, now besieged for two years long.