Sir William COURTEN, meanwhile, prosecuted with his characteristic vigour his vast enterprises already established; made new and large ventures in the reclaiming of waste lands in England; and established the ‘Fishery Association of Great Britain and Ireland,’ with a view to the rescue from the Dutch of that productive herring fishery on our own coasts, which the growing supineness of English governments during at least two generations had permitted to become almost a monopoly in their hands. Of this Association COURTEN, during the closing years of his life, was the mainspring. The Dutch, as was natural, strove vigorously to retain the advantage they had acquired, and were little scrupulous about the means of opposition. English herring busses were occasionally captured. And the captors had the great incidental advantage in the strife of dealing with a Government already weak at home, and yearly losing ground. [Sidenote: THE TRADE WITH INDIA.] The East Indian adventures were, at length, attended by circumstances still more complex than those pertaining to the fishery business at home, or to the trading in Holland. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, Charles I, vol. cccxxiii, p. 58; vol. cccxliii, § 19.] For, in the former, English rivalry had to be encountered, as well as Dutch rivalry. And the rivalry took such a shape as to make the carrying on of trade extremely like the carrying on of war. But, as if the care of these varied interests, in addition to all the toils and anxieties of ordinary commerce on an extraordinary scale, were all too little to occupy the mind of a man who had now reached his sixty-sixth year, we find Sir William COURTEN taking, just at the close of life, a new and leading part in the business of redeeming captives who had been taken by the pirates of Morocco and Algiers. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, Charles I, vol. cccxv, § 16; vol. ccclxviii, § 82.] Nor was this merely an affair of the provision of money and the conduct of correspondence. It involved an intimate acquaintance with the circumstances and the needs of the Barbary States, being carried on, in part, on the principle of barter. But all these far-spread activities were now fast approaching their natural close. COURTEN’S career had been, as a whole, wonderfully prosperous, until very near its close. Already it contained, indeed, the germ of a series of reverses, hardly less remarkable; but the growth of that germ was to depend on the as yet unseen course of public events. His ambition to ‘found a family’ had also been gratified by the marriage of his only surviving son[40]—William COURTEN, third of his name—with the Lady Katherine EGERTON, daughter of John EGERTON, Earl of Bridgewater. [Sidenote: _Courten Papers_, in MS. Sloane, 3515.] On that son and his heirs, Sir William COURTEN settled landed estates amounting to nearly seven thousand pounds a year.