REBUFFED on land in Scotland and Ireland, Louis saw his ships inflict a humiliating defeat on a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet at Beachy Head on June 10th, 1690. England braced for invasion, while French forces harassed English colonies as far afield as New England,* the Caribbean, and even India, where French ships bombarded Madras. But no invasion came, and revenge for the Allies at Barfleur and La Hogue in the summer of 1692 reduced Louis’s battered navy to harassing English merchantmen.
But the financial burden of fighting so long and so far afield was growing, and in September 1697 peace was agreed at Ryswick in the Dutch Republic.* Territorial changes were small, but the balance of power shifted. Louis the ‘Sun King’ no longer dazzled the smaller states of Europe. William’s right to the English crown was admitted. The Royal Navy was the envy of Europe, and England’s merchant sailors, rid of French harassment, were hunting spices, tea and fabrics across the seven seas.* A new power was rising.
At this time, though England controlled the eastern coast of North America from modern-day Georgia to Maine, much of the interior was a French colony named New France. It extended from the Gulf of Mexico up through Louisiana and Illinois to Quebec and Montreal, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. See a map at Wikimedia Commons.
Today, Rijswijk in the Netherlands. To refinance the Treasury, Parliament raised a variety of new taxes, and in 1694 the Bank of England was founded, with a brief to raise £1.2m by the sale of gilt-edged securities to private investors.
England acquired her taste for tea in the 1660s, when Queen Catherine, Charles II’s Portuguese wife, introduced the fashion to court. The East India Company began importing tea commercially from Indonesia in 1669, and the first tea-shop was opened at 216 The Strand in 1706, by Thomas Twining, from which the company still trades today.