All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad. After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance in 1643. It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois. But, in the years immediately following the formation of the league, there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance. Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord, who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland frontiers by natural boundaries. Of course all New Englanders protested about the “murderous” Dutch trade in arms for beaver. William Pynchon protested even about the Hollanders supplying the distant Iroquois with firearms. But since all the colonies of the confederation were guilty in some degree of this practice, it is questionable whether the complaints sprang as much from moral considerations as they did from vexation over the diversion of beaver pelts to the more freehanded Hollanders. In any case, while the New Englanders protested so virtuously about the Dutch trade in firearms, they complained strenuously also about Stuyvesant’s new excises on furs, and they took the occasion to pass laws excluding the Hollanders from any trade with Indians under their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, it seemed, now comprehended everything along the coast east of Greenwich and unlimited claims to the interior. This brought about a diplomatic showdown.