The North Sea in wartime (1688-1713)

Introducing extracts from the king-stadholder's correspondence with Heinsius, Leopold von Ranke observed that 'brought together in anything like completeness and sufficiently elucidated, it would be a history of the age'. Anyone who has broken the seal of the confidential letters of Marlborough and Godolphin to each other between 1701 and 1710 must feel likewise. And yet how much remains to be elucidated! How recall the once passionate drama in such dead questions as the Protestant Succession or the Barriere? Louis XIV, especially if we have pro-French inclinations, has become so much less threatening than the Jacobin crusade or the Napoleonic tyranny; indeed, the more we have been taught of the party strife in countries opposed to him, the more sympathetic do we risk becoming to the rationality and courtesies, if also at times the despair, that inform the correspondence of the Great King's servants. When the political quarrelling is analysed, much of it is found to revolve round personal, local or at best domestic issues which strike us as trivial by comparison with the foresight and single-mindedness of a William III. His stature, like that of Godolphin, is increased by the trouble they caused him, so that we can admire the man without fully sharing his inspiration. But correspondingly, historical justice to the troublemakers particularly perhaps to the Dutch vredesvrienden (peace party) requires that fuller account be taken of the relentless, day-to-day pressure of two long wars on civilian life. 'War-weariness' is too often a historian's deus ex machina, a phrase empty of living content, supported at best by reference to crushing taxes, the alarming growth of public borrowing, strategie or diplomatic stalemate, the distortion of international traffic. My purpose now is to address your minds to this last element, which had moral besides economic implications. The North Sea, with its crowded shipping lanes of great antiquity, is intimately known to us and I need not spend time describing the tightly woven tapestry of the