page_title: Second Anglo-Dutch War
section_title: War agitation
hierarchical_section_title: Second Anglo-Dutch War / Background / England / War agitation
context_page_description: The Second Anglo-Dutch War or the Second Dutch War was a conflict between England and the Dutch Republic partly for control over the seas and trade routes, where England tried to end the Dutch domination of world trade during a period of intense European commercial rivalry, but also as a result of political tensions. After initial English successes, the war ended in a Dutch victory. It was the second of a series of naval wars fought between the English and the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries.
context_section_description: As enthusiasm for war rose among the English populace, privateers began to join navy ships in attacking Dutch ships, capturing them and taking them to English harbors. By the time that the United Provinces declared war on England, about two hundred Dutch ships had been brought to English ports. Dutch ships were obligated by the new treaty to salute the English flag first. In 1664, English ships began to provoke the Dutch by not saluting in return. Though ordered by the Dutch government to continue saluting first, many Dutch commanders could not bear the insult.
  Whether to secure concessions from the Dutch or provoke open conflict with them, James already in late 1663 had sent Robert Holmes, to protect the interests of the Royal African Company. Holmes captured the Dutch trading post of Cabo Verde in June 1664 and confiscated several ships of the Dutch West India company in West Africa, allegedly as reprisals for English ships captured by that company, and England refused any compensation for these captures, for disrupting that company's trading operations or for other hostile acts. Slightly later, the English invaded the Dutch colony of New Netherland in North America on 24 June 1664, and had taken control of it by October.
  The States General responded by sending a fleet under Michiel de Ruyter that recaptured their African trading posts and captured most of the English trading stations there, then crossed the Atlantic for a punitive expedition against the English in America. In December 1664, the English suddenly attacked the Dutch Smyrna fleet. Though the attack failed, the Dutch in January 1665 allowed their ships to open fire on English warships in the colonies when threatened.
  The war was supported in England by propaganda concerning the much earlier Amboyna Massacre of 1623. In that year, ten English factors, resident in the Dutch fortress of Victoria and ten Japanese and Portuguese employees of the Dutch East India Company on Ambon were executed by beheading following accusations of treason. After their arrest, many of the English prisoners were, according to the trial records, tortured by having a cloth placed over their faces, upon which water was poured to cause near suffocation, now called waterboarding. Other, more sadistic, tortures were alleged although denied by the Dutch. The incident provoked a major crisis in Anglo-Dutch relations at the time and continuing popular anger, although the matter had been be officially settled with the Treaty of Westminster. The East India Company set out its case against the Dutch East India Company in a pamphlet published in 1631, which was used for anti-Dutch propaganda during the First Anglo-Dutch War and revived by pamphleteers as a second war neared. When De Ruyter recaptured the West African trading posts, many pamphlets were written about presumed new Dutch atrocities, although these contained no basis in fact.
  Another cause of conflict was mercantile competition. The major monopolistic English trading companies had suffered from a loss of trade on the 1650s, which they attributed to illegal contraband trading and Dutch competition. They wished the government to exclude the Dutch from trading with British colonies, and force those colonies to trade only with the licensed English trading companies. The Dutch, whose maritime trade was substantially that of an intermediary, rejected the policies of Mercantilism in favour of the mare liberum where it was in their interest to do so, while enforcing a strict monopoly in the Dutch Indies, and attempted to expand it to their other settlements.
caption: English propaganda in 1655: the Amboyna massacre of 1623, in which Dutch agents tortured and executed Englishmen
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