When challenged about their cautious responses to insurgent and Spanish privateering, British statesmen would often defend themselves by referring to the government's wider political objectives. Privateering was intrinsically linked to the competing sovereignty claims of Spain and the Spanish American revolutionaries. Therefore, the British government's response to privateering had to be carefully coordinated with its broader policy of neutrality in the Wars of Independence. However, when making this case British statesmen were quick to reassure their critics that if Britain ever faced the threat of simple piracy – dissociated from such political issues – their response would be swift and straightforward. George Cockburn, one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, told the House of Commons during a debate on privateering in 1822 that ‘if a vessel were met, sailing under a black flag, bearing an inscription — “We are friends to plunder, and enemies to every power we come up with,” … there could not be any doubt as to the course to be adopted towards her’. Similar confidence was exhibited in the High Court of Admiralty in the early nineteenth century where Judge Sir William Scott defined pirates as the ‘enemies of all mankind’ and asserted that states could claim universal jurisdiction to put them down.