16. =The Repeal of the Triennial Act. 1664.=--In the spring of =1664=, before the passing of the Conventicle Act, the Cavalier Parliament had been alarmed lest it should be thought that it ought to be dissolved in the following May, because it would then have sat three years, in compliance with the Triennial Act. In reality there was nothing in the Triennial Act or in any other Act which rendered Parliament liable to dissolution, as long as the king lived, unless he chose to dissolve it; but Charles, who did not like the fetters which that Act imposed upon him, took the opportunity to ask Parliament to repeal it. This was promptly done, though in the Act of Repeal was included a clause to the effect that there should, in future, be no intermission of Parliaments for more than three years. As the whole of the machinery invented by the Long Parliament for giving effect to such a clause (see p. 530) had vanished, no king could now be compelled to summon Parliament unless he wished to do so. 17. =Growing Hostility between England and the Dutch. 1660-1664.=--It was not fear, but commercial rivalry, which made England hate the Dutch. In =1660= the Convention Parliament had re-enacted the Navigation Act (see p. 565). Legislation alone, however, could not prevent the Dutch from driving the English out of the markets of the world, either by superior trading capacity, or by forcibly excluding them from ports in which Dutch influence was supreme. Besides this, the Dutch refused to surrender Pularoon, a valuable spice-bearing island in the East Indies, though they had engaged to do so by treaty. If there was anything about which Charles II. was in earnest it was in the spread of English colonies and commerce. He had also private reasons for bearing ill-will against the Dutch, who by abolishing the office of Stadholder (see p. 565) in =1650=, had deprived the young William of Orange, the son of Charles's sister Mary, of any post in the Republic. The seven provinces were held together by the necessity of following the counsels of the Province of Holland, by far the most extensive and the wealthiest of the seven, if they were to preserve any unity at all. The opinion of this Province was the more readily accepted because the provincial states by which it was governed submitted to be led by their pensionary, John de Witt, one of the most vigorous and most prudent statesmen of the age. A pensionary was only an officer bound to carry out the orders of the States, but the fact that all business passed through his hands made a man of John de Witt's ability, the director of the policy which he was supposed to receive from others.