flung at the Dutch the charge that they were lacking in the "constant and laborious zeal for the salvation of unbelievers, the most obvious and distinguishing mark of the true Church of Christ."
From the beginning, the fortunes of the Dutch colony of New Netherland were in jeopardy. The territory on which it was planted was claimed by the English on grounds of prior discovery. On its eastern frontier it was early threatened by advancing pioneers in Connecticut, who offered a direct menace to the farmers and traders of the Hudson Valley. Even the Pilgrims far away at Plymouth, while they remembered the kind treatment they received in Holland, grumbled about the trading cruises of the Dutch along the coast and the transfer of business in peltries to the market at New Amsterdam. Besides this, the English at home, already imperial rivals of the Dutch in two hemispheres, were in a mood to put a term to their competition in the New World at least.
In 1664 the blow fell. King Charles II granted to his brother, the Duke of York, the whole region between the Hudson and the Delaware and, without giving the Dutch any warning, an English fleet descended upon New Amsterdam with a thundering command to surrender. In vain did the testy old governor, Peter Stuyvesant, storm and protest. New Netherland passed under the English flag.
The Duke of York, now in possession of his goodly domain, after assigning a part of it, as we have seen, to Carteret and Berkeley for their colony of New Jersey, gave his name to the rest and ruled it as high proprietor until he ascended the throne in 1685. Fort Orange became Albany; New Amsterdam became New York; and English homesteads began to rise among the Dutch boweries. Under the genial favor of the Duke, English fortune hunters now secured huge grants, running in size from fifty thousand to a million acres, at negligible quitrents, thus adding an English aristocracy, partly absentee, to the Dutch gentry created by the West India Company and retarding
