In early December 1653, the Nominated Parliament granted the Dutch deputies their passports in recognition that their negotiation had failed. Cromwell and his more moderate colleagues, however, hinted to the Dutch that they should hold out a bit longer, that a change of government was imminent. The Dutch knew that it was the radical members of the Nominated Parliament and their fiery preachers who had obstructed the negotiations. Cromwell, Hugh Peter, and many of the commissioners had made it clear to the Dutch deputies that their hands were tied by the temporary ascendancy of the radical millenarians. However, the Dutch were convinced, as were most political observers, that the situation could not last for long, that Cromwell would put an end to this Parliament just as he had dissolved the Rump. A new regime, especially a new regime which was not so deeply influenced by Thomas Harrison and the hot men of St. Anne's Blackfriars, would certainly be more amenable to peace.

Sure enough, as soon as the Nominated Parliament submitted its resignation and the Protectorate was proclaimed, the prospects for peace were dramatically transformed. Cromwell immediately sent word to the Dutch deputies “that now he is advanced to a quality fit to treat with them” assuring them “of his desires of peace.” “There is probability of peace with the Dutch,” trumpeted the Several Proceedings of State Affairs. The bookstalls in London were filled with copies of The Peace-Maker which outlined the benefits of an Anglo-Dutch alliance.

Seventeenth-century English foreign policy has more often been written off than written about. Domestic constitutional and social developments have dominated the recent historiographical headlines. Foreign policy's retreat from the stage of early modern English history has been so complete that one well-respected historian has recently challenged his readers to “ponder the question of how many English victories over continental powers you can name between the battles of Agincourt (1415) and Blenheim (1704).” The lack of memorable English victories, John Brewer has implied, indicates the relative unimportance of seventeenth-century England on the European scene, and consequently the insignificance of the study of its foreign policy. Brewer's is not a unique assessment. “For three centuries before 1688, the English state had been unable to raise adequate revenues from taxes,” Lawrence Stone has claimed in order to explain away the historiographical neglect of seventeenth-century foreign policy, “as a result of which [England] was no more than a marginal player in the European power game.”

Nevertheless seventeenth-century foreign policy was not always thought to be so marginal. Contemporaries thought of England as one of the great powers of Europe. Agents from Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, and France stood in line for favors from Oliver Cromwell. “The sea is your own and now all nations greet / with bending sails each vessel of your fleet,” bragged one panegyric to Cromwell, “your power extends as far as winds can blow / or swelling sails upon the globe may go.” This seventeenthcentury national self-image was not soon forgotten.

The three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the seventeenth century have never caused much concern for historians content to separate domestic and foreign policy. Whether ideology or factional squabbles accounted for domestic political turmoil, England's foreign involvements could always be explained by geopolitical considerations. Since contemporaries thought of England and the United Provinces as the two great commercial states of seventeenthcentury Europe, it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that both sides understood themselves to be economic rivals. The long lists of commercial disputes placed on the negotiating table by the trading companies from each side provides ample confirmation for scholars predisposed towards an economic account of these wars. The willingness of both the English Commonwealth and the Restored Monarchy to fight the same enemy appears to clinch the argument: the English fought the Dutch, it is said, because their economic interest demanded it. England's emergence from these struggles as the great trading power of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, coupled with the United Provinces' resubmergence into the watery bogs from which they had unnaturally sprung, has overshadowed English defeats in the second and third Anglo-Dutch Wars. The English might have lost the military battle, but they won the economic war.

A close examination of the first two of these Anglo-Dutch confrontations, however, reveals that these all-too-plausible hypotheses have little basis in the contemporary evidence. Neither war was an English attempt to capture trade routes from a chief economic rival.

Far from being a period in which public issues were deemed uninteresting or unimportant, the Restoration was an age mad for news and political information. “You cannot imagine to what a disease the itch of news is grown,” John Cooper informed the appreciative government newsletter-writer Joseph Williamson. Sir George Fletcher confessed that he was “infected” with “the love of news,” while George Davenport begged his friend William Sancroft, the Dean of St. Paul's, to send “a lick of news” to Durham. “You could not come into a tavern, alehouse, tippling or coffee-house, or sit at dinner” without being entertained with political gossip, “men, women and children of every rank to the very lowest, raving out their ill-digested humor which they call'd opinion, sparing neither law nor gospel, as if they would have as many governors as people.”

News – especially news about the war with the Dutch – was widely desired and ubiquitously available throughout the three kingdoms, and amongst a wide variety of social strata. In both London and Dublin, the Earl of Arlington thought, “the licentious discourses of the people” had “grown too big to be mastered.” Samuel Pepys gossiped about the merits of the Dutch War with his friends at the Royal Society and with his cheesemonger. “We are all very much concerned in this war,” Robert Mein reported from Edinburgh, “so that thousands of people attend the post office for good news.”

Despite the predictions of all the international pundits, no Anglo-Dutch war did break out in the summer of 1662. What explains this tremendous change of events? In order to answer that question it is necessary to examine English domestic politics.

The Restoration, even if it was not a complete return to the pre-Civil War polity, was a victory for the Anglican Royalists. Republicans, religious radicals, and even some Cromwellians were quite dissatisfied with the new regime. But the discussion and ultimate passage in May 1662 of the Act of Uniformity deeply offended the sensibilities of the Presbyterians who considered themselves responsible for the triumphant return of Charles II. The strict requirements of the Act of Uniformity made it impossible for even the more moderate of Presbyterian clergymen to remain within the Established Church. For many it must have seemed as if the ideological and religious divisions of the late 1630s and 1640s had been recreated.

Not surprisingly the movement of the Bill for Uniformity through the Houses of Parliament began to rekindle old fears. The Essex minister Ralph Josselin “heard many strange passages visional and prophetical of alterations in England.” The passage of the Act forced Independents, Presbyterians, and sectaries to shelve the differences which had dominated the politics of the 1640s and 1650s. “Three or four societies that for this 12 years or more could scarcely give each other a good word now upon publishing of the Act of Uniformity are all united,” warned the government informant William Williamson, “there will be some villainy designed or else they lost their old orders.”

The English, convinced that God had shown his favor towards them in demolishing the tyranny of Charles I and subsequently in defeating the invasion of his son at the head of a Scottish army, could not help but place a special significance on their struggle with the Dutch. The English could be certain that this was no minor squabble, after all the Dutch naval war hero Martin Van Tromp had proclaimed that “no quarter shall be given to the English and that [the Dutch] will revenge themselves with fire and sword.” Indeed, the entire Dutch navy had “taken an oath and protestation to live and die together, and to fight it out to the last man.” Consequently the importance of the war against the Dutch was clear to a wide variety of observers. “Many eyes are on our breach with Holland,” noted the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin, “God is shaking the earth and he will do it.” “So terrible a sea-fight hath not been heard of in the remembrance of any man, ” commented one pamphleteer after a minor skirmish in August 1652, “the discolored sea showing the effects of their wrath. ” After the battle of Portland in February 1653, observers had more reason to express wonder at the scale and ferocity of the conflict. “The battle of Lepanto was not comparable to this,” thought the Canary merchant John Paige; “there was never the like battle fought upon the salt waters since the creation of the world.”

In May 1660, after almost a decade in the political wilderness, Charles II entered the United Provinces, the last stop on his triumphal return to the British Isles. The treatment which the States General and the States of Holland afforded their royal guest “was incredibly splendid and noble,” recalled the Earl of Clarendon, “and the universal joy so visible and real, that it could only be exceeded by that of [the king's] own subjects.” Samuel Pepys, who had come with his fellow former Cromwellian the Earl of Sandwich to The Hague to bring Charles II back to England, could not “speak enough of the gallantry of the town.” Charles II himself declared “his meaning of keeping a true and firm friendship and alliance with [the Dutch], nay that he should be jealous if any other king or prince should have a more near and stricter friendship and alliance with them than himself.” On 23 May after almost interminable festivities Charles finally boarded his ships at Scheveling. The shore, wrote one observer, was “covered black with people … come from several towns far and near to see the king's departure and were forced for want of lodgings to walk all night or lie in the open fields.” The salutes and countersalutes from the English and Dutch ships were so tremendous that “the air was set on fire and the smoke like a cloud had made the fleet invisible.”