By the summer of 1653 the First Anglo-Dutch War was strangling the Dutch Republic. After the English victory at the Battle of the Gabbard in June, General-at-Sea George Monck had taken 120 ships up the coast and put a blockade on the Dutch ports. Merchant traffic - the lifeblood of a country whose economy ran almost entirely on the sea - had stopped. Warehouses were empty, dockyards were idle, sailors and lightermen had nothing to do, and the streets of Amsterdam and Rotterdam filled with men out of work. Vice-Admiral Witte de With and 27 ships were bottled up at Texel, unable to break out. The States General were running out of time. They needed Maarten Tromp to lift the blockade, and Tromp - 55 years old, with thirty years of fighting behind him - put to sea on 24 July with the flagship Brederode and 100 ships.

Five days out, the English sighted Tromp and chased him south. They caught two of his ships in the running fight before nightfall, but the chase was the point: while Monck's fleet pursued Tromp down the coast, Witte de With slipped out of Texel and worked his way south. Tromp, by what one Dutch historian called brilliant manoeuvring, had positioned himself by the next morning to the north of the English fleet, exactly where De With could join him. The Dutch were now united off Scheveningen, the long sandy beach in front of The Hague, right next to the small village of Ter Heijde. The wind was fierce on 30 July and through the night that followed. Both fleets pulled their canvas in and waited for daylight.

At 7 a.m. on 31 July - 10 August in the modern calendar - the Dutch had the weather gauge and went in fast, Brederode leading. The two fleets passed through each other four times that morning and into the afternoon, broadsides hammering at close range. Tromp's death came in one of those early passes, killed by a marksman aloft on William Penn's ship. The Dutch officers hid the news with desperate care, keeping his flag aloft and his cabin closed, because if his men knew their admiral was gone they would lose heart. The trick held for several hours. By late afternoon twelve Dutch ships had been sunk or captured and many more were too damaged to keep firing, and morale finally cracked. A large group of merchant captains broke off and ran for the north. De With tried to stop them, then gave up and covered their retreat to Texel. The English fleet, also badly cut up and with many wounded crying for surgeons, broke off as well and limped back to refit. They could not maintain the blockade.

Both sides reported the action as a victory, and both were telling a truth. The English had been tactically dominant: more Dutch ships sunk, more captured, the field of action theirs. The Dutch had achieved their strategic goal: the English blockade was broken, the coast was open again, and Witte de With was out of Texel. But Tromp was dead. He had been the steady spine of Dutch naval resistance for a generation, the man who had won at the Downs in 1639 and made the orange flag a thing the Spaniards and the English both took seriously. With him gone, the Orangist faction in Dutch politics lost much of its leverage. The Grand Pensionary, Johan de Witt, the rising power in the Republic, was now willing to make formal assurances to Oliver Cromwell - the infant William III of Orange, the future King of England, would never become stadtholder of the Netherlands. The republican faction would not let the Stuart cause use the Netherlands as a base.

Peace negotiations began in earnest after Scheveningen. They ended on 15 April 1654 with the Treaty of Westminster, which closed the First Anglo-Dutch War and bound the Republic to the secret Act of Seclusion barring William III from high office in Holland. The damage to the Dutch fleet, and the loss of Tromp, had effectively ended the war for the Republic. The English commercial ambitions that had started it were not satisfied - there would be a Second Anglo-Dutch War in twelve years, and a Third after that - but the immediate fight was over. Today the long beach of Scheveningen is filled with cafés, tourists, and the upright pier of a Dutch resort town. The action that ended Tromp's life happened a few miles out from the strand, looking back at Ter Heijde - a place that, in 1653, was a small fishing village watching, from the dunes, the smoke of two great fleets killing each other.