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By Root 1107 0

of the English off Africa. As part of the same initiative, the continuing state of heightened Anglo–Dutch tension led to Charles II’s resolving to put an end to Dutch settlement in North America. While Holmes was on the high seas, the King was putting together an expedition to seize New Netherland and give it to his brother James, Duke of York and Albany. In January 1664 a committee set up to consider the likely outcome of an attack concluded that ‘if the King will send three ships and three hundred soldiers under good officers’, the Dutch could be vanquished and their colonies seized. Charles assigned to his brother James (’his Heirs and Assigns’) not only all the lands currently held by the Dutch in New Netherland, but vast tracts of the new continent, from Maine to Delaware.

A convoy of ships was equipped, and a contingent of soldiers heavily armed for the enterprise, under the Duke of York’s command. James appointed his groom of the bedchamber Richard Nicolls his deputy governor, and Nicolls set off from Portsmouth in May 1664, arriving off Cape Cod ten weeks later, where he informed the English inhabitants of his intentions.

The English settlers along the east coast of North America had managed to co-exist remarkably amicably with their Dutch neighbours for more than thirty years, exchanging essential goods with one another, and cooperating in the defensive and other measures needed to prevent the precariously established colonies from destruction, by either hostilities with the local Indian population, or the depredations of the climate.

When the English ships arrived at the English Massachusetts Bay Colony and Nicolls’s forces disembarked, John Winthrop, the English governor of Connecticut (whom we met at the end of the last chapter, observing the moons of Jupiter through his telescope), was taken entirely by surprise. On his recent trip to London, the King had granted him much of the territory which he had now given with a flourish to James. Winthrop’s Connecticut colony charter was reneged on with a simple message transmitted by Nicolls, who had been ordered to ‘putt Mr Winthropp in mind of the differences which were on foot here’. Nicolls’s arrival with three frigates and three hundred combat-ready, heavily armed forces threatened to destabilise the entire region. Deeply disappointed on behalf of the community he had worked so hard for, John Winthrop was forced to cut his losses and step in as negotiator for Nicolls on the English side, to try to persuade Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland, to surrender rather than provoke a full-scale colonial war.

There was, however, one further, gratuitous piece of double-dealing by the English homeland administration to be coped with by the beleaguered Winthrop. One of the chief instigators of the aggressive move to seize New Netherland turned out to be his own cousin George Downing, who had grown up in New England, and graduated in the first year of the colony’s new university, Harvard. Now Resident English ambassador at The Hague, having managed to regain the post he had also held under the Commonwealth, Downing was one of the loudest voices arguing that Dutch commercial expansion could only be curtailed by striking at their trading posts across the world:

[The Dutch] discourse very publicly […] ‘we shall wholly destroy the English in the East Indies, we are masters of Guinea, we shall ruin the English trade in the caribee islands and western parts, and we doubt not but now by the order sent to Cadiz and the Streights, to be masters of those seas and to take and ruin all the English shipping there’.11

Downing, who was deeply unpopular with the Dutch, expressed vociferous concern at what he characterised as their damaging expansionist ambitions. ‘From 1661 to 1665 his insistence upon resolute English action against Dutch pretensions was sufficiently aggressive to be accounted a principal cause of the ensuing war.’12 His intervention in the Dutch colonial venture in North America was well-informed and effective. He knew both New Netherland and the governor