Spain or the Netherlands? The Dilemmas of Early Stuart Foreign Policy

Sir Simonds D'Ewes and the levying of ship money, 1635–1640

“…The 'autobiography's' rejection of the official case for the 'necessity' of ship money on the ground that 'the roiall fleete was neuer stronger or in better case' might suggest that D'Ewes was blind, as other contemporaries appeared to be, to the need, in early seventeenth-century conditions, for a specialized navy and therefore for additional regular naval expenditure. 37 During the Long Parliament, D'Ewes insisted that naval costs ought to be met out of tonnage and poundage and hinted that corruption explained the decayed state of the navy, but a recognition of the need for additional financial resources is implied by his hope that tonnage and poundage might 'yeild moore in a legall way, then it did being taken without law'. 38 This suggests that his rejection of the official argument for the 'necessity' of ship money derived less from a lack of understanding of the fiscal problems generated by early seventeenth-century naval strategy than from a very good understanding of the strategic uses to which the fleet sustained by ship money was likely to be put, given the policies which predominated in the absence of a parliament to show the king who (in D'Ewes's eyes) his true enemies were; D'Ewes had heard 'from the court' in June 1636 that a war between England and France was again agitated, and the origins of the ship money fleet indeed lay partly in discussions with the Spanish ambassador about 'giving assistance to the King of Spain', deriving from the king's concern 'to carry a jealous and a watchful eye over the growing greatness' of the protestant Dutch.…”