The Character of the Nine Years War, 1688-97

The Character of the Nine Years War, 1688-97Author(s): George ClarkSource: Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1954), pp. 168-182Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3021075 .

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I68

III. THE CHARACTER OF THE NINE YEARS WAR, I688-97

BY SIR GEORGE CLARK

I N a book published twenty years ago, the present writer expressed the following opinion on the European wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: 'It was not that the wars of that period meant less in

expense and suffering than those of later times. Armies and navies were smaller, and even smaller in proportion to the number of the peoples; but they were as large as the poorer and simpler societies of those days could afford. In every great war there was some state that fought until it came within sight of revolution at home.'1 The purpose of the present article is to consider, for the special case of the Nine Years War, whether this opinion may still be maintained or ought to be modified in the light of the many relevant publications of the intervening twenty years. The words quoted above relate to the social and economic aspects of the wars, but these, of course, cannot be entirely detached from the military aspects, and it will be well to begin by stating an assumption as to these military aspects. This assumption is that those who directed the fighting, whether on land or on sea, apart from such exceptions as the weaknesses of human nature must always occasion, fought to win and fought as hard as they could. For the present purpose this will be assumed, but it is not accepted as true by all historians. Some of them have applied to this period a famous sentence of Gibbon: 'in War the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests '. This sentence was partly anticipated by an entry which James Boswell made at Utrecht on 27 February 1764 in his diary: 'Rose said wars were going out, from their mildness nowadays.'3 Whether such sentiments were ever expressed in the time of Louis XIV may well be doubted, but even in his day there were some instances of the ceremonious exchange of compliments between opposing armies and this leads some modern writers to suppose that warfare was less deadly in proportion to its superficial polish. A profound historical thinker has, however, pointed out that the 'ludic' element of punc- tilious or even courteous correctness has been characteristic of war in many different times and environments.4 Those, again, who have considered the actual fighting seem to agree in a judgement which Sir Winston Churchill has

' The Later Stuiarts (1934), p. 405.

2 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xviii. Dr A. J. Toynbee in quoting this sentence in his Study of History, iv (1939), p. 148, places it before a passage which it follows and does not indicate that the two are separated by some intervening paragraphs.

3 Boszuell in Holland (1952), pp. 38, i6S. Rose was a Scottish gentleman afterwards in Anglican or Scottish orders.

4J. Huizinga, 'Homo Ludens' (1940), in Verzamelde Werken, v (1950), pp. 117-33.



THE NINE YEARS WAR, I688-97 I69

given on the war immediately subsequent to that with which we are concerned: 'We do not think that the warriors of our own time, unsurpassed in contempt of death or endurance of strain, would have regarded these old battles as a light ordeal.'5

In several books written from igo9 to 191ii6 the French military historian General Jean Colin discussed, or rather attacked, the doctrine that the slowness of military operations before the time of Frederick the Great was due to a political system, the system of conserving the expensive mercenary armies of the time by moderate warfare. This was supposed to be a system of avoiding battle, aiming instead at the conquest of fortresses and provinces, mere 'geographical objectives', a system entirely lacking the speed and the impetus of the national warfare of later ages, in which the life or death of states is at stake. Colin attributed the doctrine to certain military writers of the preceding half century; and it ran counter to his fundamental principle that the thought of battle has always dominated all the operations of war. He maintained that the dilatoriness of campaigns was not peculiar to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but that it had its origin as far back as the origin of armies, that it affected the citizen armies of antiquity and armies recruited in various other ways as much as it affected mercenary forces. He held it ridiculous to suggest that Louis XIV and William III, among others, incurred enormous expenses in raising armies which they did not intend to use except for 'un genre de guerre anodin'. He remarked that merely by violating such a tacit agreement any one of these sovereigns could have won greater glory and wider conquests in six months than Napoleon compassed in ten years. The records, he wrote, show that the statesmen, so far from restraining their generals, constantly censured their slowness. Then as always, he held, the general character of warfare did not determine its detailed conduct, but was itself determined first by the weapons, then by the methods of combat and the evolutions which they required and so finally by the resulting structure of the battle and the man- oeuvres preparatory to battle. He even brushed aside the suggestion that the fighting was slowed down by the ponderous supply services, with their magazines and convoys. For the period of Louis XIV at any rate, he seems to have proved that the strategists were not intentionally unenterprising.

An entirely different notion, which very likely originated in Germany, dis- tinguishes the wars of Louis XIV and of the early eighteenth century from those which preceded, and also from those which followed them, on the ground that these eighteenth-century wars were waged for trivial and insignificant dynastic purposes and in disregard of the welfare and interest of peoples. John Morley expressed it as follows: 'From the Peace of Westphalia to the

s Marlborough, II (1934), p. 114- 8 L'education militaire de Napoleon (I90I), pp. I-z8; L'infanterie au XVIIIe siecle (I907),

pp. 2, 23, 30; Les transformations de la guerre (I9II), pp. 16z, i69-72. The last named is a popular book and restates the theses of the others, sometimes in the same words but sometimes less guardedly.



170 SIR GEORGE CLARK

beginning of the Seven Years War, it is not too much to say that there was a century of purely aimless strife on the continent of Europe, of wars and factions as merely personal, as unmeaning as the Civil War of the Fronde was all of these things.'7 The dates here chosen are I648 and 1756, and they require a moment's attention. Why did Morley choose 1756, sixteen or perhaps even twenty-five years before Gibbon wrote his 'General Observations'? We can only suppose tiiat he thought European politics became significant then because India and Canada were added to the customary stakes. Why did he choose I648? Undoubtedly because that was the end of the Thirty Years War in Germany, which was popularly regarded as the last of the wars of religion. Morley did not say that the wars of Louis XIV and the earlier eighteenth century were mild; he was concerned with their political objectives. It happens, however, that the German historians emphasized the horrors of the Thirty Years War, and so we sometimes find in close association the idea that the subsequent wars were more humane and the idea that they were comparatively unmeaning. The latter idea is no more acceptable than the former, and there is a consensus of historical opinion against it. The Nine Years War involved all the chief states of western and central Europe, and, within certain limits which we shall notice later, each of them tried to do the utmost damage to its enemies. Among them the most powerful was France, and it is agreed that Louis XIV was the only aggressor, at least in the narrow sense that if he had not moved his armies there would have been no fighting at that time. If his opponents had not resisted, some of them would have lost parts of their territory, and they would all have lost their freedom of action in many matters, including religious, commercial and industrial policy. On neither side was there any uncertainty or triviality of purpose. In a general review of the period of Louis XIV a French historian of high authority recently characterized the course of the war in these just and witty words, 'brusquement, des negocia- tions de plus en plus accentuees ont succede aux faits militaires de plus en plus r6duits'.18 He is none the less convinced that the Ryswick treaties of I697 marked 'une modification sensible' in the state of Europe.

Starting from these views of its military and political character we may then inquire what was the effect of this war on the wealth and the social stability of Europe. There is an advantage in considering this one war by itself, and apart from any comparison with previous or subsequent wars. Historical social studies in general have suffered much distortion because they have so often been pressed into some evolutionary framework. Comte, Hegel, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx have influenced successive generations both of general and of specialist historians, and no study reflects these influences more

I Voltaire (1872), p. I63. 8 The late L. Andre, Louis XIV et l'Europe (1950), especially pp. 244, 272. This is a

volume in M. Henri Berr's series 'L'6volution de l'humanite'. The second edition of the Louis XIV in the series 'Peuples et civilisations' by P. Sagnac and A. de Saint-Leger was published in the preceding year; it supports the same conclusion.



THE NINE YEARS WAR, i688-97 171

markedly than the study of war. For each war we can easily find narratives of operations in the field and of their political accompaniments; but we find very few social or economic studies of separate wars, and hardly any of this war in particular. For its economic aspects we must look in Sombart's books which trace the mutual effects of war and capitalism;9 for international law we depend on books of which some are concerned with actual events only as they advanced or retarded or embodied a general progress towards the humanization of war and the peaceful settlement of international disputes, while others are equally shaped by the assumption of a general progress towards total war and yet others trace only the development of the rules of international law actually recognized when they were written. Any one of these preoccupations may deflect our attention from some of the features of the concrete historical whole which we call a war, and which were not links in any evolutionary chain but helped to make it unique, in some ways different in its causes, its course and its results from all other wars.

The Nine Years War of I 688-97 is by no means easily dealt with in this way. Our own methods in the social sciences are largely if not fundamentally statistical; but the rudimentary statistical studies of the seventeenth century provide us with very few of the data which would be useful for this purpose and little has been added to them by subsequent study. Nor can we obtain much help from the writings of those who were living at the time of the war. They were destitute of any mature concept of society in all its aspects as a subject of investigation. They propounded certain fundamental problems of politics and economics and they formulated the general principles on which their solutions depended; but just as they took it for granted that any society must include certain elements such as the family, and any civilized society certain other elements such as a judiciary, so they took it for granted that the relations between a plurality of states would sometimes be warlike. Dr Richard Schlatter, in his book The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders, 1660-168810 remarks that in practice English clerical theory was of little use in dealing with the problem of war, that it failed to take into consideration the great political and economic forces which were the root causes, except in so far as it tacitly assumed that war was inevitable. That is generally true of the theo- logical and also of the juridical literature written and read in i 689-97, and it applies not only to the causes but to the whole social nature of war."1 Political and economic writers did not observe any connexion between the problems which they discussed and the changes from peace to war and back again. There is an instance of this in the work of the English Board of Trade. The foundation of this board was closely connected with conflicts about shipping losses

9 Krieg und Kapitalismus (1913); Moderne Kapitalismus, znd ed., 3 vols. (I9 i6-28). (O ( 940), p. 23 I .

II The partial exception of the schemes for perpetual peace, for instance that in S. Rachel, De 7ure Naturae et Gentium Dissertationes (I676), does not invalidate this generalization




during the war. Its commission was dated 6 July i69812-a year and two months before the peace of Ryswick. One of its first tasks was the preparation of a report on the general state of the trade and manufactures of the kingdom.'3 This includes both an estimate of the existing position and detailed proposals for improving it in every possible direction. It was signed on 23 December I697, and one of the signatories was John Locke. We should expect such a report in our own day to examine the effect of the war on 'the economy', and to pay attention to the special needs of the transition to peace. Instead, in this report we find only two allusions to the war, neither of them implying anything that deserves to be called thought. Nor must we assume that the writers had deeper reflexions in their minds but chose not to refer to them in that context. No seventeenth-century writer, however much a 'mercantilist', had any such conception as we normally accept of the organic inter-con- nexions of the different elements of an economy. The French economic writer Pierre le Pesant de Boisguillebert wrote in so many words that foreign war was no obstacle to the restoration of general happiness; and that 'la paix ou la guerre etrangere n'ont nulle relation avec ce qui se passe au dedans du royaume a l'egard des tributs '.4

If war seemed to contemporaries not to cut deeply into the social structure their social analysis may have been defective; and yet they may have been right on this point. The outbreak of the war may have been like the change from vacation to term, which alters the flow of goods and labour in a university town, but does not change its economic structure and will in due course be easily reversed. In certain respects, indeed, there were deliberate attempts at the outbreak of the Nine Years War to make it interfere more sharply with economic life than previous wars had done.'5 King Louis XIV was bound by two recent treaties to allow Dutch merchants resident in France six months in which they could remove their goods from the kingdom.'6 He broke these treaties and by a decree of 15/25 November i688 after declaring war on the Dutch, he confiscated all Dutch ships in French harbours and all the property of Dutch merchants in France.17 These measures should not indeed be taken

12 Commons' Journals, XII, p. 71. 13 Ibid. XII, pp. 432ff. I" These words occur in the Suppl&nent au detail de la France, not, as is stated by E.

Silberner (La guerre dans la pensee economique du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle (I939), p. So) in the Detail itself. The Supplement was published in or after 1707: F. Cadet, Pierre de Boisguilleber-t (I871), pp. 74, 423-4, correcting pp. iS8, I67, 263, 267 of E. Daire, tPconomistes financiers dii XVIIIC siecle (I843), in which the two works are reprinted. Although incautiously worded, the passages in question meant, reasonably enough, that fiscal reform need not wait for the peace, and they represent Boisguillebert's original view of I697.

16 This subject was treated in a book by the present writer: The Dutch Alliance and the War against French Trade (1924). For corrections to be made in this book, particularly in the light of later research, see the Appendix to the present article, p. i8o below.

16 Treaty of Nijmegen, I678, articles I5 and i9; Marine Treaty of io August 1678, article 39.

17 For the legal aspect of this decree see C. van Bijnkershoek, Qluaestiones Juris Publici (1737), lib. I, C. 2. The Dutch States General retaliated with decrees of 2 and 29 October 1690 forbidding enemy subjects to commence personal actions in courts of law.



THE NINE YEARS WAR, i688-97 173

at their face value. In practice they were softened by subsequent concessions, and it was probably foreseen that this would be so; but in manner they partook both of the bullying habit of Louvois and of that self-confidence and self- assertiveness which we recognize in the economic policy of Colbert. Colbert died between the making of those treaties and their violation; leaving to his comparatively ineffective successors a legacy not only of French economic aggressiveness but also of retaliatory resentment in Holland and England, the two countries which were chiefly injured by his protective system. The war of I688 had an economic prelude which may be roughly described as a three- cornered tariff-war of which the acute phase began during the year I687, when political events were setting sharply towards war.18

When the war broke out the English induced the Dutch to join them in measures for exerting the utmost possible naval pressure on the economic life of their enemies. They expected that their navies in alliance would be able to enforce what rules they pleased in regard to maritime commerce. With -this expectation they signed a treaty in August I689 agreeing that they would take up and repute as lawful prize all vessels of whatever nationality that were found sailing to or from French ports. This treaty went much further than any possible extension of recognized rights in regard to contraband and blockade, it threw away the 'type-provision' which had been put into practically every treaty since I640 dealing with seaborne commerce in time of war;19 it denied to neutrals any right to trade with the enemy at all. The outcome showed that it was utterly impracticable. Not only did the Danes and Swedes effectively assert their right to carry on some innocent trade with France, but the Hanse towns, which were members of the empire and as such belligerents, after reluctantly accepting the imperial prohibition of trade with the enemy, disregarded it as freely as they could. The Dutch, the merchants of the Spanish Netherlands and the English themselves were not much better, and after two campaigns they abandoned their extreme pretensions, to fall back on the traditional policy of settling the extent of neutral rights by negotiation. Whether because the conditions were not favourable or, as also seems to be the case, because the lesson of these events had really gone home, the maritime powers never renewed the attempt in any of the subsequent wars which they waged in alliance with one another. Since their abortive action resembled that of the French, there seems to be a prima facie case for maintaining that the three rich states of western Europe were in a condition of economic policy and organization which naturally engendered plans for exerting economic pressure.

When the English and the Dutch attempted to override neutral rights one jurist, of no great ability, a subject of the king of Sweden, wrote against them,

18 A brief account of this is given in G. N. Clark, 'Anglo-Dutch relations of Commercial Policy and the Nine Years War' in Verslag van de algernene vergadering van het Historisch Genootschap (1932).

19 For this provision and for earlier examples of prohibitions of all trade with an enemy, see P. C. Jessup and F. Desk, Neutrality, I (I935), ch. iv, especially p. I 3.

12 Vol. 11




and he was answered from Berlin by Samuel Pufendorf, who was generally regarded as the greatest living authority on international law. This exchange of arguments, on the borderline between academic controversy and political propaganda, had no influence on events. It was by the stubborn interests which they had crossed that the maritime powers were forced back into the limits of the previously recognized international law. Nevertheless the structure of courts and legal rules, of legal education and literature, held firm and even, as far as we can judge, grew stronger during the war. The jurists, especially the civilians, were practitioners who drafted and interpreted treaties, and they communicated with one another not only through their text-books with a European circulation, but through their own personal comings and goings, and their learned correspondence. They were, of course, the custodians of international law. The most developed part of this, and the onlv part in which there was regular and flourishing practice, was maritime law. It is impressive to notice that the authority of maritime law, even of the rules respecting the capture of property at sea, was upheld in spite of the fact that this law was administered not by international courts, but by courts of the separate sovereign states. On 22 October I689 Sir Charles Hedges, the judge of the court of admiralty, wrote a strong, clear letter to the secretary of state, the earl of Nottingham, affirming his own duty 'to observe the law of nations ',20

Maritime international law was administered mainly by lawyers, but not entirely. Appeals from the decisions of the admiralty judges in England were heard not by some other professional tribunal but by commissioners of appeals wvho were not lawyers but laymen of high rank. A treaty between England and France in I677 had stipulated that when the French ambassador complained of sentences on ships or goods, they were to be referred by the king of England to nine of his council commissioned for the purpose.2' We must suppose that the reason for this was that a prize-appeal might involve political issues too high for the men of law. Actually no such questions seem to have arisen in practice. There was, however, another branch of international law in war- time over which the lawyers had much less control. It is partly for that reason that its history is far less accessibly recorded and therefore less well known. The laws of war on land were not administered by special courts like the courts of admiralty, civilian in both senses of the word; and some of their rules did not have a continuous existence in treaties and text-books from one war to another like the rules of maritime warfare.22 On certain special matters

20 Law andCustom of the Sea, ed. R. G. Marsden (Navy Records Society, 19I6), II pp. 132 ff. 21 The commissioners in I694 were or included the dukes of Leeds and Shrewsbury, the

earl of Bridgewater, Viscount Dursley and Sir Henry Goodricke (Cal. Treasury Books, X693-6, x, ii (I935), p. 636.

22 For a discussion of the origin and nature of these laws or customs see M. Bernard, 'The Growth of Laws and Usages of War' in Oxford Essays (i 856). I have not found any important discuLssion of them earlier than the i8th, 20th and 22nd chapters of J. J. Moser's Versuch des neuiesten Europdischen Volker-Rechts (I 779), the plan of which precludes references to the period before 1740.




two generals commanding against one another in the field might make agreements which resemble, or are derived from, such engagements as they might have entered into in the age of chivalry. These agreements were enforced in the courts martial of the parties, and, from the Mutiny Act of I689 British courts martial were military courts constituted by statutory authority, separate from the other courts and not composed of professionally trained lawyers. It appears that 'cartels' for the ransoming and exchanging of prisoners of war had no long history behind them. Among the signatories of these in the late seventeenth century there were generals, military administrators, civilian jurists and perhaps noblemen who were neither soldiers nor jurists.23 Besides the conditions for exchanging prisoners, such as the tariff for ransoms according to rank, the cartels included other clauses some of which were to be enforced in each army by court martial. A specially noticeable cartel was signed at Basel on 2 May I692 between the representatives of King Louis XIV on the one hand and, on the other, the emperor and the Circles of Franconia and Swabia and the duke of Wurtemberg.24 Among a number of clauses which seem to have been intended to humanize warfare the most remarkable imposes the death penalty for the use against either man or beast of Kugelen-cannon- balls or bullets or both-of tin or any other metal than lead, or poisoned projectiles or 'Tradt oder andersfigurirten Kugelen '.25 It would be interesting to know whether this clause appeared now for the first time, and if so who proposed it and why, and whether it found imitators or had any effect.

Hurmanitarianism was not the only, if it was the chief, motive of those who made such regulations. A recent writer on the British naval history of this war, after enumerating various improvements in the treatment of the seamen remarks that 'Greenwich Hospital, in its final form, is perhaps the only example in naval administration at this time of an unnecessarily bene- volent act'.26 The others were necessary in the sense that without them recruit- ing and discipline would have suffered. Up to a point good discipline in a fighting force is an interest not only of that force but of those which are opposed to it. One of the clauses agreed on in the cartel of r692 regulated the size and composition of military parties sent out to collect contributions in a theatre of war. If any such party went out without an officer or with fewer than nineteen unmounted or fifteen mounted men, they were to be treated by both

" See the names in the cartels printed in Du Mont, Corps diplomatique, viI, pts. i and ii.

These are scarcely more than a chance collection: Du Mont printed those already included in collections of documents and those which happened to be available in feuilles volantes (see pt. I, p. 292, Pt. II, p. 270.) A wider collection or calendar would be useful.

"" The text is in Du Mont, Corps diplomatique, vii, ii, p. 310. It may be noted that the Circles of Swabia, Bavaria and Franconia had made a treaty of alliance in consequence of the danger to them from the south if France and Savoy were to make peace (Du Mont, Lettres historiques (I692), p. 336); for the text of this see Corps diplomatique, VII, ii, p. 289.

"' Since shells and chain-shot had long been used as ammunition for artillery, the whole passage presumably refers to projectiles fired from muskets, and this part of it to projectiles of other than spherical shape, perhaps including wire used in some way for this purpose.

26 J. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III (1953), p. I37.




sides as robbers and they were to be liable to two months imprisonment. No commander wanted his men to go off raiding the countryside without proper control. That led not only to outrages and consequent resentment on the part of the countryfolk, whose good will was always worth something and might be vitally important; it also led to quarrels among the marauders themselves, to neglect of their duties, to absence without leave and to desertion. On the other hand if the enemy's standards of discipline were much lower than one's own, it was impossible to prevent unauthorized reprisals and retaliatory atrocities. In the late seventeenth century therefore, each of the great belligerent states did something to bring its armed forces under better control, and there were instances-it seems impossible yet to say how many-of agreements in which this process was furthered jointly by opposing sides.

In the matter of discipline over the armed forces all the belligerents had good records in this war, and the main reason for this can easily be identified. There were indeed mutinies in the British land forces, partly for political reasons, at the beginning of the war.27 In the navy the seaman had far worse grievances than the soldier, especially in the matter of pay, and there were chronic unrest and desertions throughout the war and during the demobil- ization ;28 but even in the British forces no mutiny ever seriously interfered with the conduct of operations. The French navy seems, like the French army, to have been thoroughly under the control of the State. The British perhaps made the most headway in bringing privateers under control, while the Dutch perhaps made the least; but the regular Dutch forces on sea and land were well disciplined, and so were those of the emperor and the German princes. This is t be explained in the main by the state of the public finances of all these countries. The French and Dutch had already built up financial systems which were adequate for their needs. In England the systems of taxation and borrowing were undergoing drastic modernization during the war; the reforms did no more than barely suffice to carry the war through, but at the end the position was not unsatisfactory.

It seems permissible to generalize and say that the improvements of service discipline and finance in the belligerent states were aspects of a consolidation of the power of the State over the resources and energies of society. This consolidation had many other aspects. One of them was the application of scientific ideas and principles in administration.29 Another was the intentional repression, especially in France, of elements such as religious dissidence, which might hinder the king's freedom of action. Must we also conclude that their greater consolidation led the states, or some of them, to disregard their recognized legal obligations? Many historians have accused the French of this,

27 For observations on these in their social setting see M. Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances, 1660-1714 (1938), pp. 43, 113-14.

28 This matter is fully treated by Mr Ehrman, op. cit. 29 See J. E. King, Science and Rationalism in the Government of Louis XIV (I949).




and the chief count in the indictment is the ravaging of the towns and villages of the Rhineland in I689. Much was written about this by the allied pro- pagandists against Louis, but nothing so poignant as the letters of Louise Charlotte of the Palatinate, the sister-in-law of the king himself, who wrote from Versailles expressing her grief and indignation. The sufferers were the inhabitants of every rank from the prince-bishop of Mainz to burghers and peasants. The French ministers and generals themselves were not unanimous in approving of the devastation; but the reasons for it were purely military- it was an example of what is now called the scorched-earth policy-and, although it was not completely successful, it did to a considerable extent fulfil its military purpose.30

There is no similar instance of severity in the land-war on the part of the English or Dutch; but it would be rash to suppose that they were incapable of such action. Throughout the war they fought on their own soil. When King William arrested Marshal Boufflers as a reprisal for the treatment of the garrisons of Dixmude and Deijnse,31 his action showed that the French could be coerced into paying respect to the laws of war; but the French on occasion resorted to the same method against the English. They successfully used a threat of retaliation against one of William's generals who ordered Irish prisoners to be shipped off to servitude in the West Indies.32 When William appointed his general Ginckel, afterwards earl of Athlone, to the chief command in Ireland, he added a postscript to his dispatch: 'II y a une chose qu'il faut que je vous recommande bien serieusement, c'est d'etre plus severe que vostre naturel ne vous porte.'33

Although the French waged the war on land more brutally than their opponents, there are several points which might be urged against the English and Dutch in regard to the war at sea. The French were very indignant over the English bombardments of their coast towns from St Malo to Dunkirk. They were on weak ground here, since they had set the example by their own bombardment of Genoa in I684. Protests against the 'infernal machine' from which the English threw their bombs were perhaps not impressive; but some other French grievances were more substantial. First was the attempt to stop all trade with France, which can scarcely be called 'legal', however justifiable. Secondly there was the revival, in I693, of the old English claim to treat corn as contraband. The claim was made then because the previous harvest had failed in France, and there was a chance of cutting off supplies of

30 The best brief account of this major occurrence is probably still that of H. Martin, Histoire de France, XIV (i865), pp. I04-6.

31 Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, ed. Firth, v (1914), pp. 2526, 2534-6, tells the story, but says that the two garrisons were sent as prisoners to France. The point was that in breach of a cartel some of them had been induced to take service in the French army; see 0. Klopp, Der Fall des Hauses Stuart, vii (1879), p. 99.

32 R. Lee, Treatise of Captures in War (X759), p. 245, citing The Dutch Mercury (1690),

p. 245. 33 Correspondentie van Willem III en Bentinck, ed. N. Japikse, ii, in (X937), p. 235.




Baltic corn for the general population. Thirdly there was a decree of I 696, hard to reconcile with the principles of the law of nations, by which the Dutch threatened with death any enemy privateersmen unsupported by a fleet who should sail within their coastal buoys or land on their beaches for plunder.34

What all these instances amount to, however, is not a greater intensity of warfare due to the strengthening of authority. They imply a state of affairs similar to that of the nineteenth century, in which the severity of warfare was checked by the existence of a European community within which the war took place. The statesmen who had grown up in that community knew that it would outlast the war and that there might very well be changes in alliances and neutralities before there was another war. There was a balance of interests which restrained them from treating any member of the community as an outlaw or from running the risk of incurring such treatment themselves. It was this and not considerateness for civilians, nor levity in regard to the purposes of the wars, which kept them from waging unrestricted warfare.

When King William III used such expressions as 'the good estate of all Europe'35 he was not merely referring to a geographical continent; nor did he mean simply an aggregate of states which were in legal and diplomatic relations with one another, a political 'system'; he was thinking of a real community. It was the same international community which we know so well as the environment of art and literature, but which we seldom remember when we are concerned with the affairs of states in that time. William himself owed his personal position not only to his abilities and his labours but also to his birth in the highest stratum of this society. In republican Holland he was the highest civil and military official, and this brought him into contact with high civil and military officials of other states; but in England he was king, and the grand- son, nephew and son-in-law of kings. Of his eight grandparents three were German by birth, and two French; the others came from Scotland, Denmark and Florence. Thus William had family and business relations with many of the European dynasts. His mother was a first cousin of King Louis XIV himself, to whom he was also related, rather less closely, through his father. William was an international statesman in various senses, and only a few of those who worked with him apprehended as clearly as he did the existence of the European community. When Heinsius wrote to congratulate him on the victory of the Boyne, he thought of narrower interests, 'the common cause and the Protestant religion '.36 Some of his other Dutch collaboratorsthought his 'Europe' merely a fine word for covering his personal ambitions, and some

34 Res. stat. gen. 24 February I696, in Groot Placcaet Boek I. I. 17. 5; see Bijnkershoek, bk. i, ch. 3, where it is explained as a survival of the right to kill the vanquished, ch. 17, and where 'Groningani' are stated to have acted on this decree on 14 March I696.

35 'het welwezen van gansch Europa' to Heinsius 3 December

I689/ in Archives de la 8 January 699 nAcie el maison d'Orange-Nassau, 3rd ser., i (1907), p. 45.

36 Ibid. p. 78.




of his English contemporaries thought it a shadowy ideal, very much less substantial than the Dutch interests of which they were jealous. To modern historians, occupied with the military and diplomatic rivalries of the states, it may easily appear to have been a mere abstraction. The formulae in which it is invoked in the preambles to the Ryswick treaties are usually passed over as hollow if not hypocritical: 'Pendant le cours de la plus sanglante guerre, dont 1'Europe ait ete affligee depuis long tems, il a plu a la divine Providence de preparer a la Chrestiente la fin de ses maux; '37 'ad Divini Nominis gloriam et Christianae Reipublicae Salutem in mutuas Pacis et Concordiae Leges con- venerunt'.38 It is always difficult to know how much life remains in formulae when they are often repeated; but in this instance it would be unrealistic to regard them as empty phrases. The Europe of the French preamble was a genuine community, becoming more clearly visible in those days than the Christian commonwealth of the old-fashioned Latin, and, if this was so for William III it was so for Louis XIV as well. He was as much William's cousin as William was his. His dynastic ambitions gave him an excuse for attacking the Palatinate; they made him covet the whole Spanish inheritance (as the emperor also did), and they were among the factors which shook and threatened to disrupt the European community, yet they originated within this community and they were developed in accordance with its nature and its established practices.

Dynastic relationships were not mere facts in genealogical tables. They were part of the structure of this community which had its interconnected nerve- centres in courts. Diplomacy was conducted to a large extent by officials in or from their offices; but the relation of kings in their palaces to their ambas- sadors and those of other kings were no mere matter of ceremonial. The international relations of courts were not separate from the international relations of foreign offices. The usages of courts and the ethical codes of those who frequented them were not irrelevant to the relations of states in peace and war. Among these ideas one of the most deeply-rooted in tradition was the two-sided duty of the soldier to fight hard and to fight fair.

In the political relations of states the European community was indeed nebulous; but in economic relations its limits and its structure can be defi- nitely plotted. One generalization about the economic aspect of the war has been confirmed by several writers in different countries, the statement that it imposed a severe economic strain and that this was one of the factors which made the powers willing to make peace in I697. Little has yet been done and perhaps little ever can be done to assign quantitative shares of the economic depression to this and other factors'.39 In France, according to a tradition

37 Treaty between Louis XIV and the States General, in H. Vast, Les grands traites du r~gne de Louis XIV, II (I898), p. I90.

38 Treaties of Louis XIV with Spain and the Emperor, ibid. pp. 214, 230.

39 It does not appear that the direct casualties of the war were of importance from the demographic point of view. G. Bodart, Losses of Life in Modern Wars (I9I6), estimates the total French killed and wounded at I6o,ooo, and those of the opponents of France at more than 200,000, but does not show how he reaches these figures.



i8o SIR GEORGE CLARK

which began at the time and has been questioned rather than directly chal- lenged, the impoverishment began before the war with the expulsion of the Huguenots.Y In England, Holland and Brandenburg the Huguenot immigra- tion presumably began to have an opposite effect before the war. Another factor operated unfavourably in most of the countries west of the Vistula, and apparently in some parts of America as well, the bad harvests of the I690's. In various countries publications on price-history are gradually preparing the way for a quantitative study of the shortage of corn. In spite, however, of these obscurities and of the local variations, the general state of the belligerent countries seems to be well enough expressed by the quotation from the Book of Proverbs which a nonconformist minister in one of the principal manu- facturing districts of England jotted down in the spring of I697: 'Money is scant, trading bad, people are breaking weekly, assessments heavy, poverty comes like an armed man; it is a wonder the country is quiet.'41 Naturally this does not mean that no one made money out of the war, or that it did not stimulate some industries and some branches of commerce. Some, like the copper-mining in Anglesey, were active during the war and subsided into inactivity again when the peace put an end to the exceptional demand. Others, like the export of quicksilver from Austria, which was promoted in connexion with a war-loan from the Dutch, came to stay.42 In various directions such as this the war left behind it a permanently changed economic organization. Broadly speaking, the stoppages and diversions of trade by the belligerent states hardened the prevailing protectionism and left Europe, for some time to come, more sharply divided into national economic units. The war was, however, followed by a 'replacement boom' and by a general recovery. It had pressed hard on the springs of economic life, but it had not permanently impaired their elasticity.

APPENDIX

THE DUTCH ALLIANCE AND THE WAR AGAINST FRENCH TRADE (see above, p. 172 n. 14)

The footnotes to the present article contain the titles of some books which include matter supplementing or correcting the materials on which my book with the above title, published in 1923, was based. In this Appendix I wish to add further titles and a few comments.

When the book was written I did not know of an older study of Swedish and Danish policy in relation to seaborne trade in this way, J. Thyren, 'Den forsta

40 The locus classicus is the relazione of the Venetian Venier quoted by Ranke, Franzosische Geschichte in Sdmmtliche Werke, 3rd ed., xiI (I877), p. 319.

41 The Rev. Oliver Heywood, his Autobiography, Diaries, etc., ed. J. H. Turner, Iv (I885), p. 174, under the date x6 March I697. It may be noted that Professor J. A. van Houtte in a recent and careful estimate of the degree of economic prosperity in the Spanish Netherlands in the seventeenth century, confirms the accepted view: Mededeelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamsche Akademie, Klasse der letteren, Jaarg. xv (1953), no. 8, pp. 20-I.

42 For this see H. Ritter von Srbik, Die staatliche Exporthandel Osterreichs (1907), pt. iv.



THE NINE YEARS WAR, I688-97 I8I

vapnade neutraliteten' in Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, xXI-xXII (I885-6). The London Library has a separately bound offprint of this article, which has 162 pages. N. Soderquist, Le blocus maritime (I908) prints in an appendix a letter of 2/12

October I 689 to Leijonbergh and Oxenstierna instructing them to protest in London and the Hague against the prohibition of trade with France. The treatment of the negotiations with the neutrals in c. v of my book would have been clearer if an account of Hop's fruitless mission to Denmark in I692-3 (and other details) had been added from pp. I63-99 of N. J. den Tex, acob Hop, gezant der Vereenigde Nederlanden (i86I). C. J. Kulsrud, Maritime Neutrality to 1780 (1936), gives references to one or two other Scandinavian publications which I have not seen, but which may be of use in this connexion. For the trade in timber and naval stores R. G. Albion, Forests and Sea-power (1926) is valuable.

The late Professor E. F. Heckscher, with a collaborator, published in I936 a work on Swedish economic statistics. In a letter of 6 November 1938 he explained that he had intended to refer to the statistics of Swedish trade given in Appendix Iv to my book, but had accidentally omitted to do so. He was kind enough to add a comment on these figures which I therefore print from his letter:

As to the reliability of the figures you have published, it is unfortunately impossible to decide in every case, but something may be said.

Robinson's figures for the trade of Stockholm in I694 (p. I55 of your book) are almost identical with those published by us on pp. 746-9, in so far as the places mentioned are concerned; Russia is excluded. For I693 (on the same page of your book) we have no access to Swedish materials at the moment, but I see no reason for doubting them, so that there would have been every reason for referring to them.

Other parts of your tables are a little more doubtful. The total given by Robinson (p. I52) for the annual value of ' Swedish' exports, ?700 000, is impossible as a figure for Sweden Proper, even including Finland, as you will find from p. 140 of our book. The total for i 685 is there given as somewhat above four million dollars 'silver money' (d.s.m.); and as there went three such dollars to the rixdollar, and, at the usual rate of exchange, a little more than four rixdollars to the C, this figure would give you no more than ?345 000. Robinson, however, probably intended to include the rest of the Swedish possessions, except Livonia; but it appears very improbable that Estonia, Swedish Pomerania and a little besides would have had more trade than Sweden and Finland put together. The figures for the value of Swedish exports to England, according to the Common's Yournals, are correct with regard to iron, but certainly wrong on other points, as you point out yourself in the case of hemp.

Coming at last to your table on p. I53, from Duncombe's despatch of 1690, the figure for copper wire to France, 12 000 ships' pounds, is clearly a slip of the pen for I 2o00, which would give the same unit value as the rest of the column. The prices for iron, Li or I2 d.s.m., and for copper wire, ?i0 or I2o d.s.m., are correct. But that for pitch and tar, ?6. 5s. or 72 d.s.m., is really that for pitch only, the price of tar being only half that amount; as the greater part of the exports consisted of tar, the figure becomes far too high. The value of copper wire is also too high, for the reason that the quantities given clearly include other forms of copper also, at a lower price. Otherwise it is difficult to judge about quantities, besides the fact they are incomplete as repre- senting total Swedish exports, which they do not purport to do. Only a very trouble- some working up of the cumbrous local accounts would enable us to find out about countries of destination; and that we cannot afford at the present time.

It follows from this that both correct and incorrect figures are to be found among the tables you have published, as might only have been expected.



i82 SIR GEORGE CLARK

Mr Ehrman's book (mentioned on p. I75 n. 26 above) has improved our knowledge of every aspect of the British naval history of the period. For the French navy the sixth volume of C. de la Ronciere, Histoire de la marine franfaise (I932) is valuable especially for the fighting, and an important professional study from the Dutch point of view is J. C. M. Warnsinck, De vloot van de koning-stadhouder, 1686-0 (I934).

On pp. I 5 ff. Captain Warnsinck discusses the virtual refusal of the English to allow Dutch admirals to command combined Anglo-Dutch fleets. He takes strong exception to the remark on p. 39 of my book that 'we shall probably be right in doing what Bentinck did, and treating this as a trifling matter'. After careful consideration I acknowledge that Captain Warnsinck's criticism is perfectly just and that the decision deprived Dutch admirals for many years of valuable opportunities for the experience of command.

A good many additions to our knowledge of the diplomatic history of the subject and some to other parts of it are made by Dr N. Japikse's edition of the Correspon- dentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck, 5 vols. (I927-37) and some by the fifth volume, covering I665-I700, of the Correspondance de la cour d'Espagne sur les affaires des Pays-Bas au XVIIe siecle, ed. J. Cuvelier and J. Lefevre (I935). For legal points F. J. W. H. Sandbergen, Nederlandsche scheepsnationaliteit (?I932) is useful; for the economic aspects of the shipping questions P. Masson, Histoire du commerce franfais dans le Levant au XVIIe siecle (I896), and A. Girard, Le Commerce franfais a Sdville et a Cadix au temps des Habsbourg (I932) are important. In the Tijdschrift voorgeschiedenis, LXI (I946) is a critical study by J. C. Westermann of the statistical work of Dr Becht which was used, as it turns out with justifiable caution, on pp. I3I ff. of my book. A number of French books on the 'corsairs', especially Jean Bart, have improved our knowledge, without changing the main conclusions to be drawn from it. The same may be said of a number of interesting articles in The Mariner's Mirror.

Two documents referred to in the book have since been published: that referred to on p. 23 n. 4 in F. M. G. Evans (Mrs Higham), The Principal Secretary of State (I923), pp. 364-5, and Duncombe's report on his mission (p. 93 n. i) by J. F. Chance in English Historical Review, XXXIX (I924), pp. 57I ff.

It may be useful to draw attention here to the considerable body of manuscript material bearing on the subject of the book which is to be found among the Ellesmere manuscripts in the Huntington Library at San Marino, California. This library includes the papers of the third earl of Bridgewater, who had to do with seaborne trade as the first commissioner of trade from I696, as a member of committees of the House of Lords, as a commissioner for prize appeals and, from I699, as First Lord of the Admiralty. Although he took up the last-named office after the war, he kept a number of Admiralty papers relating to it, and throughout his lifetime of public service he methodically preserved his notes of business that passed through his hands.



Documents

The Character of the Nine Years War, 1688-97