134 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)1609, as a short book entitled Freedom of the Seas, which was a reworking of
one of the chapters of the De Indis manuscript. It caused enough of a stir
to earn it a place on the Spanish Inquisition’s Index of Forbidden Books. In
the event, the book found its principal use in a context diff erent from the
one intended: to contest the lawfulness of a decree by the En glish govern-
ment in 1604, asserting a monopoly over fi shing in the adjacent seas. In
this dispute, the book enjoyed some modest success. A Dutch diplomatic
mission, armed with Grotius’s arguments, succeeded in persuading the En-
glish government to suspend the decree in 1610.
Grotius’s (and Vázquez’s) conclusions were subjected to vigorous chal-
lenge. Th e principal response came from a Portuguese writer named Serafi m
de Freitas, a friar who taught canon law at the University of Valladolid in
Spain. In a book entitled De iusto imperio Lusitanorum asiatico (On the Just
Empire of the Portuguese in Asia) in 1625, he presented what was, in sub-
stance, the Portuguese government’s case against Grotius. He advanced an
array of arguments, including an insistence that the papal grants were bind-
ing on the Dutch, as well on the Spanish and Portuguese themselves. He
disputed the existence of any natural- law right of freedom of trade for indi-
viduals and also contended that there was nothing in principle to bar a state
from exercising an eff ective control over at least an area of the high seas. His
principal argument, though, was founded on prescription: that Portugal had
begun to exercise its monopoly in the early fi ft eenth century and had consis-
tently maintained and enforced it. As a result, it now had legal validity with-
out regard to any defects in its origin.
Similar arguments— apparently in de pen dently derived— were expounded
ten years later by an En glish writer named John Selden. Selden was a poly-
math, lauded by one admiring contemporary as “the learnedst man on
earth.” He was said, among other things, to have been profi cient in some
fourteen foreign languages. In addition, he was also a minor poet and a friend
of Ben Jonson and John Milton. Long ser vice in the En glish parliament proved
eventful, as it included a period of arrest for excessively vigorous defenses of
parliamentary privileges. As a contribution to religious studies, Selden ad-
vanced an interesting thesis of the bisexuality of deities in various ancient
faiths (a theme that is refl ected in Milton’s Paradise Lost). In a somewhat
less speculative vein, he took an interest in international law, where his prin-
cipal endeavor, a book published in 1635 entitled Mare Clausum suede Do-