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CHAPTER IV. 



UNDER THE STUARTS. JAMES I. A NEW POLICY. 



SHORTLY after the accession of James to the throne of England, 

 the liberal policy of his predecessors as to the freedom of the 

 sea suffered a marked change. In the previous century, under 

 the Tudors, little was heard of the pretension to the sovereignty 

 of the sea, with the exception of the striking of the flag to 

 the royal ships in the narrow seas a ceremony that was not 

 peculiar to England. Foreigners then, as always before, en- 

 joyed complete liberty of fishing on the coasts of England and 

 Ireland, and no attempts had been made to exact tribute from 

 them on the Scottish coasts. Queen Elizabeth, as has been 

 shown, not only refrained from putting forward claims to the 

 sovereignty of the sea, but on several occasions and in the most 

 positive manner asserted the freedom of the seas for both 

 navigation and fishing against the exclusive policy of Denmark 

 and Spain. At the end of the Tudor period England was the 

 great champion of mare liberum long before the Dutch Re- 

 public had challenged the monopolies of the Portuguese either 

 by the pen of Grotius or the guns of Jakob van Heemskerk. 



But under James the old doctrine was revived, and something 

 new was added in a claim to the fisheries along the British 

 coasts. Before he had been a year in England he took measures, 

 with the laudable object of defining the bays, or " King's 

 Chambers," within which the hostile actions of belligerents 

 were prohibited. In its essence this act was opposed to ex- 

 tensive claims t D maritime sovereignty, because it restricted a 

 most important attribute of such sovereignty to comparatively 

 a narrow space in the adjacent sea, though a space much 

 greater than that now comprised in the so-called territorial 

 waters. In point of fact, throughout his reign no assertion was 



