This glaring outrage on English soil caused the Council to arrest a Dutch man-of-war, to be held until the one that had committed the misdeed should be delivered up; for, said Windebank, it was a matter that concerned the king himself in point of honour and the safety of the kingdom, as an act of hostility, “little less than an invasion,” had been committed in landing armed men on his Majesty’s territories, “violating his imperial chamber and threatening his subjects.” Nevertheless, in the next month a like offence was committed at Blyth, when a Dutch man-of-war not only attacked a Dunkirk privateer lying in the harbour, but landed fifty men armed with muskets, who marched in military order nearly half a mile, “to the great terror of the inhabitants,” and by seizing the fishing-boats, captured the Dunkirker and took her away. Not only so, but thirty of the Hollanders, armed, and with trumpets, pursued the crew of the privateer on land for a distance of two miles.[452] There was a natural excuse for the violence of the Hollanders in these proceedings. They were exasperated by the immense havoc which the privateers had just committed on their herring-busses, by sinking or burning over 100 of them, the remainder of the fishing fleet escaping into Scottish and English harbours.[453] This insecurity of the sea and the open and daring violation of English ports remind one of the conditions that too frequently prevailed in earlier centuries. The misdeeds must have been galling to Charles, for only a short time before he had issued a public proclamation with the object of putting a stop to them. In February 1633 Sir H. Marten, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, along with the Attorney-General, had been instructed, in view of the war between Spain and the United Provinces, to draw up a regulation whereby “his Majesty’s ancient rights, honours, and sovereignty in the narrow seas and in the chambers and ports may be preserved, and the trade of the kingdom of England and Ireland secured.”[454] In this regulation (which is printed in Appendix H) a claim to absolute dominion over the Four Seas was made. The king spoke of “that sovereignty and especial and peculiar interest and property which he and his predecessors, time out of mind, have had and enjoyed in the said seas, and so approved not only by the fundamental laws of this his kingdom, but by the acknowledgment and assent of the bordering princes and nations, as appeareth by undoubted records”--language which seems like an echo of Selden’s _Mare Clausum_. Moreover, in referring to the limits of the “King’s Chambers,” he continued: “Albeit his Majesty doth justly challenge sovereignty and property in all those his seas, far beyond the limits hereafter to be described, and might with like justice require from all persons using those his seas a forbearance from injuries and all hostile actions, yet (in and through all the same) suddenly to tie the hands of his friends