seize Brazil, while at home the people, deprived of their trade, and unable to fish, were beginning to suffer severely. De Witt saw the necessity of making peace. Cromwell, who had now succeeded to the chief power in England, proved an easier taskmaster than the Parliament had been. He was willing to leave the United Provinces their independence, but he exacted their consent to the Act of Navigation, and their acknowledgment of the superiority of the English flag. [Sidenote: =The Act of Exclusion, 1654.=] Sharing with de Witt his dislike to the House of Orange, whom he looked upon as the chief supporters of the Stuart cause in Europe, he insisted on the perpetual exclusion of that house from the stadtholderate by the estates of Holland, as a necessary preliminary to peace. After protracted negotiations a treaty was at last signed on this basis in 1654. [Sidenote: =Continued rivalry with England, 1654–1665.=] John de Witt had thus succeeded in saving his country from destruction and in dealing his chief enemy a serious blow at the same time. To do away with the rivalry of the two nations, and to make the Dutch forget that a foreign power had compelled them to do injustice to a family which had served them with singular loyalty was beyond his power. The war ceased but the causes of the war remained. Each country was ready to continue the struggle when a fitting opportunity presented itself, but as long as the Commonwealth existed in England an identity of interest between the two governments served to keep things quiet. The English Restoration in May 1660 altered these relations, and so far strengthened the partisans of the House of Orange as to enable them to demand and gain the revocation of the Act of Exclusion by the estates of Holland in September 1660. The accession of Louis XIV. to power in 1661 further weakened the republican party by placing at the head of the councils of Europe one who regarded all republics with aversion, and looked upon ‘messieurs les marchands’ his neighbours with a contempt which was born of envy. Every month tidings came to the English government of some fresh defeat of the East India Company by its Dutch rival, of some new indignity inflicted on English sailors. Even the slave trade to Barbadoes had passed into Dutch hands. The time seemed to have arrived when it was necessary to make reprisals. In 1664 a piratical fleet was sent with the cognisance of the English government to the Guinea coast, which captured several Dutch ships and drove out the Dutch settlers from Goree and other places. In the same year a similar expedition to America seized New Amsterdam, which Charles unblushingly accepted and made over to his brother James, from whom it took its better known name of New York. [Sidenote: =Second war with England, 1665–1667.=] After this war was inevitable, and in March 1665 it was formally declared. The Dutch had profited by the experience of the late struggle; their ships were now better manned