ABSTRACT
In 1652, shortly after the outbreak of the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-54), a Dutch author, calling himself ‘a free Hollander’, published an anti-English pamphlet, the Dutch title of which could be translated as ‘English Alarm, or signs of war detected in her unfaithful and godless actions against the regents and subjects of the seven free United Provinces’. The patriotic pamphleteer characterised the leaders of the English Commonwealth as ‘presumptuous devils who believe everyone should dance to their tune’. The aggression of the ‘godless tailed men’ against the Dutch Republic was motivated by jealous greed, he claimed, while the execution of King Charles I in 1649 by Parliament had been ‘disgraceful’, ‘tyrannical’ and a ‘regicide’. England could not bear comparison with the United Provinces, which had always, until the premature death of stadholder William II in 1650, been governed by a lord and provincial Estates in joint sovereignty and had never, in recent times, deposed a lawful sovereign, as the English Commonwealth had now done. Thus, comparisons between the two states did not hold water. 1
