Yet, although this principle of extending and limiting the territorial jurisdiction to 100 miles was not accepted in the English Courts, we find it made use of in the diplomatic correspondence of the time. The Earl of Salisbury in a letter to Cornwallis, the English ambassador at Madrid, explanatory of James’s proclamation in 1609 forbidding unlicensed fishing, did not seek to defend the action of the king by reason of any intrinsic right of the crown of England to sovereignty in the neighbouring sea, but rather upon what he alleged was the practice of the civil law. A sovereign prince or state, he said, was _Mundi Dominus, Lex Maris_, both because of the protection afforded to navigation in the adjacent sea and from prescription: the adjoining sea, as Baldus said, pertained to the territory of the neighbouring state, and thus the Venetians, as lords of the Adriatic, could impose taxes and penalties on navigation. “In respect of both which titles,” continued the Earl, “the Kings and Princes in general fronting upon the seas, as Spayne, France, Denmark, &c., have upon occasion offered, not only made ordinances and published edicts for the ruling and better ordering of the seas, but also have put them in execution; as well civilly for deciding of contracts, as criminally for transgressions; and have raised taxes and gabells in the seas as on the land to their best benefit, as part of their regalities properly belonging unto them, in sign of their sovereignty.” As to the distance to which this sovereignty extended, he said it was “generally received to be about one hundred miles at the least into the seas,” unless in narrow seas only, in which case the limits are divided by the channel, “except the princes of the one shore have prescribed the whole, as it falleth out in his Majesty’s narrow seas between England and France, where the whole appertayneth to him in right, and so hath been possessed tyme out of mind by his progenitors.”