The phrase ‘fire no guns, shed no tears’ is part of the chorus from a song called ‘Barret's Privateers’, which tells the story of a man who signed up to be part of the crew of a British privateer called The Antelope during the American War of Independence. The protagonist of the song deems himself deceived by the promise that the crew would have to fire no guns and shed no tears and that American ships would simply surrender themselves to The Antelope as prizes. As a whole the song evokes a darkly romanticized version of eighteenth-century privateers as poor sailors duped into joining leaky old ships with bad-tempered captains. These privateers would then ply the seas with abandon looking for gold-laden prizes with the blessing and non-intervention of the British state. It is the second part of this romantic outlook on privateers that this chapter seeks to address. Far from being a benign overseer of legalised piracy, British wartime governments in the eighteenth century were deeply concerned about the effect that the actions of privateers could have on British maritime strategy. Privateering as a concept and as a reality was deeply embedded in British strategic thinking and in British diplomacy with neutral nations. Far from operating as a remote arm of the British wartime mercantile sector, privateers played a key role in the delicate negotiations over neutral rights. This was certainly the case during the first four years of the Seven Years War when Anglo-Dutch relations were focused on Dutch neutral rights and the taking of Dutch prizes by British privateers.

From a strategic perspective, the ideal role for privateers in the first few years of the Seven Years War was to destroy French seaborne trade without needlessly molesting or antagonizing neutral shipping. This ideal role was consistently complicated by two factors. Firstly, neutral nations like the Dutch Republic often carried French goods in their ships in order to profit from wartime relaxations of mercantilist-inspired trade restrictions. Secondly, privateers were hard to control at sea and often captured neutral vessels indiscriminately. Much political effort was therefore expended in trying to contain the political damage done by privateers and in trying to get neutral nations to both remain neutral and to stop carrying French trade.