many foes to contend with, both among natives and European nations, among whom the French were as powerful as the Portuguese. § 3. CROMWELL’S COMMERCIAL WARS—The monopoly of Spain was first really attacked by Cromwell. James I. had been too timid to declare war, and Charles I. was too much in danger himself to think of trusting his subjects to support him if he did so. But Cromwell was supported both by the religious views of the Puritans and the desires of the merchants when he declared war against England’s great foe. He demanded trade with the Spanish colonies, and religious freedom for English settlers in such colonies. Of course his demands were refused, as he well knew that they would be. Whereupon he seized Jamaica (1655) and intended to secure Cuba; and at any rate succeeded in giving the English a secure footing in the West Indies. He seized Dunkirk also from Spain (then at war with France), with a view to securing England a monopoly of the Channel to the exclusion of our old friends the Dutch. Dunkirk, however, was a useless acquisition, and was sold again by Charles II. Not content with victory in the West, Cromwell with the full consent of mercantile England declared war against the Dutch, who were now {124} more our rivals than our friends. It would have been perfectly possible for the English and the Dutch to have remained upon good terms; but the great idea of the statesmen and merchants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to gain a sole market and a monopoly of trade, and so the Dutch had to be crushed. It was a mistake, but mistakes have frequently been made, owing to a lack of that indispensable concomitant of statesmanship, accurate economic knowledge. Cromwell succeeded in his object. He defeated the Dutch and broke their prestige in the two years’ war of 1652–54, and designed to ruin their trade by the Navigation Acts of 1651 (p. 130). The contest between the Dutch and English for the mastery of the seas was already practically decided, and the capture of New Amsterdam (New York as we called it afterwards) in 1664, and the subsequent wars of Charles II.’s reign, completed the discomfiture of Holland.