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so completely at cross purposes that nothing was achieved, either on this or on the
return English visit to the Netherlands two years later. But the dispute caught the
attentionofEngland'sown,slightlyyounger,versionofdeGroot.Seldenhadyetto
attain the celebrity that de Groot enjoyed, having barely started down the scholarly
path that would bring the two men to the attention of all Europe - and of each oth-
er. But he probably harboured the same ambition, which was to use his boundless
knowledge of the law to guide the public course of human affairs. Although cir-
cumstances placed them on opposite sides of the debate that opened the new field
of international law, they became each other's most ardent admirers. As de Groot
did not return to England after 1613 and Selden never left the island, they never
met.Hadtheydoneso,theywouldhavebeenthetwocleverestpeopleintheroom.
Selden must have heard about the young de Groot's star turn in front of King
James while he was just a junior barrister penning the occasional verse for friends'
publications. We will never know exactly what prompted his interest, but Selden
got his hands on a copy of
Mare Liberum
and decided to write a rebuttal - also in
Latin,ofcourse.Theresultis
Mare Clausum
,literally
The Closed Sea
,towhichthe
English translation of 1652 gives the clumsy title
Of the Dominion, or, Ownership,
of the Sea
.ThisisthelegaltreatisethatBuckinghamhopedwouldsupplyhimwith
arguments over who controlled the herring fishery.
Selden didn't immediately give Buckingham the original draft of
The Closed
Sea
in1618becausehewantedtodeveloptheworkintosomethingmajor.
The His-
torie of Tithes
had run to five hundred pages, and so would
The Closed Sea
by the
time its author was done with it. The following summer he submitted a handwrit-
ten copy of his enlarged manuscript to James. It was passed from James to Buck-
ingham to the Court of the Admiralty, then back to the king. The timing was not
brilliant. Selden argued that British sovereignty extended over the entire North Sea
right up to the shores of Denmark - not a little unlike China's current claim to the
entiretyoftheSouthChinaSea.Butreal-worldpoliticsgotintheway.Itturnedout
that James owed his wife's brother a considerable sum of money, and that brother-
in-law was the king of Denmark. He was in no position to tell his brother-in-law
that his subjects had no right to fish in the North Sea. So Selden obediently re-
moved the claim from the manuscript and then resubmitted it, but
The Closed Sea
languished somewhere along the corridors of power, possibly unread, certainly un-
published. Word of
Mare Clausum
got out on the continent, prompting a colleague
in Paris to write to its author in 1622, asking whether it had yet been published.
Meanwhile royal attention, as it so often does, turned elsewhere.
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