Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [65]
JAMES STUART, DUKE OF YORK
The challenges to Stuyvesant’s authority in and around New Amsterdam might not have mattered so much as they did, or mattered so quickly, were it not for events unfolding abroad. Although the first Anglo-Dutch War had ended without a clear-cut victor, England now had the Netherlands on the defensive. In 1655, just a year after the loss of Brazil, parliamentary forces seized Jamaica from Spain and turned that strategically located island into a base for the further expansion of English influence in the Caribbean. By the end of 1655, as word of New Netherland’s recent Indian troubles deepened the gloom on the Amsterdam exchange, West India Company stock had sunk to 10 percent of par, an all-time low. It soon fell to 5 percent, then 3.
Then, in 1660, after a decade of Puritan rule, Parliament restored the Stuarts to the throne. Charles II, the new king, was a cordial and witty man, conciliatory by temperament and conviction. Trailed by mistresses and illegitimate children—his court nicknamed him “Old Rowley” after one of the stallions in the royal stud—he would give his country twenty-five years of jolly sexual intrigue, extravagant private entertainments, and baroque scandals. When Parliament refused him enough money to pay for it all, he accepted secret bribes from Louis XIV of France.
The Restoration didn’t derail England’s pursuit of the Dutch, however, for even royalists now believed that the proper business of the state was business. Within months of Charles IPs accession, Parliament adopted a second Navigation Act reiterating Britain’s intention to drive the Dutch out of the American colonial trade. The new measure stipulated that the most valuable colonial products—sugar, tobacco, and indigo—could be shipped only to England in English ships, while all goods imported into British colonies from elsewhere were required to pass first through English ports. Concurrently, Charles II created a new body, the Lords of Trade, to supervise relations between the colonies and the mother country. The first imperial customs collectors weren’t far behind.
The King’s younger brother, James—duke of York, lord high admiral, master of vast estates in England and Ireland, and a far more conscientious man—played a key role in charting the course of British commercial policy. During the early 1660s, not quite thirty years old, he joined a circle of peers, navy officers, and great merchants whose envy of the Dutch was exceeded only by their visions of the rewards to be reaped in the field of colonial enterprise. Their diverse activities included the organization of several firms to spearhead the British assault on Dutch commercial supremacy. One, the Royal Fishery Company, undertook to break Dutch control over the lucrative Baltic fishing industry. Two others, the Morocco Company and the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (later reorganized as the Royal African Company), both led by the duke, aimed to smash the Dutch West India Company’s domination of the slave trade and to monopolize the importation of slave labor into the British colonies of the Caribbean and North America. The first expedition of the Royal Adventurers, sent out in 1663 in vessels borrowed from the Royal Navy, quickly captured almost every West India Company factory on the African coast, a blow that doomed the company’s hope of making New Amsterdam a base for the slave trade.
The duke’s circle also collected detailed accounts of rising Anglo-Dutch tensions along the borders of New Netherland. Only a few years earlier, Gravesend’s troublesome magistrates had raised Parliament’s colors over the town and declared that it would henceforth be subject only to the “laws of our nation and [the] Republic