admiral sir john norris
Estonia and Livonia.52 This empire was difficult to administer, for the Baltic was more a hindrance to effective government than it was the nation’s moat. Yet the area this empire embraced was immensely rich in the staple commodities which were the life-blood for any European sea-faring nation in the centuries of sail: all types of planking, mast, and spar, timber; practically all the hemp required for rigging and cables; flax for canvas, and pitch and tar, though in decreasing quantities during the 18th century, for caulking, and protection of standing rigging. 53 In this situation Sweden was in a seller’s market, and her studied protectionism had long bedevilled her political as well as her commercial relations with the British and the Dutch.54 Again, and certainly no less pregnant for the future, Sweden’s dominance of the east Baltic littoral and hinterland blocked a burgeoning Russian commerce which could only move along the region’s historic trade routes, and use its ports of Viborg, Narva, Reval and Riga, at Swedish pleasure and to Swedish profit. Russia’s White Sea exit to the west at Archangel, in contrast to these other ports, was ice-bound for more than half the year.55 The other trading nations had therefore to accept Sweden’s writ in the Baltic, but those nations, and especially the Maritime Powers of Britain and the United Provinces of Holland, had also to look to their interests at the entrance to the Baltic itself. Here, since a dominance of both shores of the Copenhagen Sound by one power was undesirable, Danish claims on Sweden’s coastal provinces were not looked upon with favour. Cromwell, in 1658,56 and William III, in 1689, had intervened decisively to re-establish a power balance between Denmark and Sweden in this strategically vital area; on both occasions rather more to the Swedish than the Danish advantage. But it is to the southern part of the area we must look, in order to identify the source of Dano-Swedish tensions in the second half of the 17th century. Here the bounds of the Danish kingdom marched with the territory of Schleswig, in which both Denmark and the dukes of Holstein-Gottorp held sovereignties, though in some parts Holstein-Gottorp held territory in fee to Denmark. To the south of Schleswig, in Holstein, Denmark and Holstein-Gottorp again held sovereignties, but about half of the territory of Holstein was comprised of ‘Unions’ where both kingdom and ducal house shared sovereignty. In point of mere title the Danish crown was in a stronger position than the ducal house in Holstein because Holstein lay within the empire’s boundaries, and the kings of Denmark were ‘imperial’ dukes of Holstein, rendering them imperial vassals senior to the dukes 50