THE STADHOLDERLESS REPUBLIC, 1715-1740
The thirty-four years which followed the Peace of Utrecht are a period
of decadence and decay; a depressing period exhibiting the spectacle of
a State, which had played a heroic part in history, sinking, through its
lack of inspiring leadership and the crying defects inherent in its
system of government, to the position of a third-rate power. The
commanding abilities of the great stadholders of the house of
Orange-Nassau, and during the stadholderless period which followed the
untimely death of William II, those of the Council-Pensionary, John de
Witt, had given an appearance of solidarity to what was really a loose
confederation of sovereign provinces. Throughout the 17th century
maritime enterprise, naval prowess and world-wide trade had, by the help
of skilled diplomacy and wise statesmanship, combined to give to the
Dutch Republic a weight in the council of nations altogether
disproportionate to its size and the number of its population. In the
memorable period of Frederick Henry the foundations were laid of an
empire overseas; Dutch seamen and traders had penetrated into every
ocean and had almost monopolised the carrying-trade of Europe; and at
the same time Holland had become the chosen home of scholarship,
science, literature and art. In the great days of John de Witt she
contended on equal terms with England for the dominion of the seas; and
Amsterdam was the financial clearing-house of the world. To William III
the Republic owed its escape from destruction in the critical times of
overwhelming French invasion in 1672, when by resolute and heroic
leadership he not only rescued the United Provinces from French
domination, but before his death had raised them to the rank of a great
power. Never did the prestige of the States stand higher in Europe than
at the opening of the 18th century. But, as has already been pointed
out, the elevation of the great stadholder to the throne of England had
been far from an unmixed blessing to his native land. It brought the two
maritime and commercial rivals into a close alliance, which placed the
smaller and less favoured country at a disadvantage, and ended in the
weaker member of the alliance becoming more and more the dependent of
the stronger. What would have been the trend of events had William
survived for another ten or fifteen years or had he left an heir to
succeed him in his high dignities, one can only surmise. It may at least
be safely said, that the treaty which ended the war of the Spanish
succession would not have been the treaty of Utrecht.
William III by his will made his cousin, John William Friso of
Nassau-Siegen, his heir. Friso (despite the opposition of the Prussian
king, who was the son of Frederick Henry's eldest daughter) assumed the
title of Prince of Orange; and, as he was a real Netherlander, his
branch of the house of Nassau having been continuously stadholders of
Friesland since the first days of the existence of the Republic, he soon
attracted to himself the affection of the Orangist party. But at the
time of William III's death Friso was but fourteen years of age; and the
old "States" or "Republican" party, which had for so many years been
afraid to attempt any serious opposition to the imperious will of King
William, now saw their opportunity for a return once more to the state
of things established by the Great Assembly in 1651. Under the
leadership of Holland five provinces now declared for a stadholderless
government. The appointment of town-councillors passed into the hands of
the corporations or of the Provincial Estates, not, however, without
serious disturbances in Gelderland, Utrecht, Overyssel and also in
Zeeland, stirred up partly by the old regent-families, who had been
excluded from office under William, partly by the gilds and working
folk, who vainly hoped that they would be able to exercise a larger
share in the government. In many places faction-fights ensued. In
Amersfoort two burghers were tried and beheaded; in Nijmwegen the
burgomaster, Ronkens, met the same fate. But after a short while the
aristocratic States party everywhere gained control in the
town-corporations and through them in the Provincial Estates. In
Zeeland the dignity of "first noble" was abolished.
The effect of all this was that decentralisation reached its extreme
point. Not only were there seven republics, but each town asserted
sovereign rights, defying at times the authority of the majority in the
Provincial Estates. This was especially seen in the predominant
province of Holland, where the city of Amsterdam by its wealth and
importance was able to dictate its will to the Estates, and through the
Estates to the States-General. Money-making and trade profits were the
matters which engrossed everybody's interest. War interfered with trade;
it was costly, and was to be avoided at any price. During this time the
policy of the Republic was neutrality; and the States-General, with
their army and navy reduced more and more in numbers and efficiency,
scarcely counted in the calculations of the cabinets of Europe.
But this very time that was marked by the decline and fall of the
Republic from the high position which it occupied during the greater
part of the 17th century, was the golden age of the burgher-oligarchies.
A haughty "patrician" class, consisting in each place of a very limited
number of families, closely inter-related, had little by little
possessed themselves, as a matter of hereditary right, of all the
offices and dignities in the town, in the province and in the state.
Within their own town they reigned supreme, filling up vacancies in the
_vroedschap_ by co-option, exercising all authority, occupying or
distributing among their relatives all posts of profit, and acquiring
great wealth. Their fellow-citizens were excluded from all share in
affairs, and were looked down upon as belonging to an inferior caste.
The old simple habits of their forefathers were abandoned. French
fashions and manners were the vogue amongst them, and English clothes,
furniture and food. In the country--_platteland_--people had no voice
whatever in public affairs; they were not even represented, as the
ordinary townspeople were by their regents. Thus the United Netherlands
had not only ceased to be a unified state in any real sense of the word,
but had ceased likewise to be a free state. It consisted of a large
number of semi-independent oligarchies of the narrowest description;
and the great mass of its population was deprived of every vestige of
civic rights.
That such a State should have survived at all is to be explained by the
fact that the real control over the foreign policy of the Republic and
over its general government continued to be exercised by the band of
experienced statesmen who had served under William III and inherited his
traditions. Heinsius, the wise and prudent council-pensionary, continued
in office until his death cm August 3, 1720, when he was succeeded by
Isaac van Hoornbeck, pensionary of Rotterdam. Hoornbeck was not a man of
great parts, but he was sound and safe and he had at his side Simon
van Slingelandt, secretary of the Council of State since 1690, and
others whose experience in public office dated from the preceding
century. In their hands the external policy of the Republic, conducted
with no lack of skill, was of necessity non-interventionist. In internal
matters they could effect little. The finances after the war were in an
almost hopeless condition, and again and again the State was threatened
with bankruptcy. To make things worse an epidemic of wild speculation
spread far and wide during the period 1716-1720 in the bubble companies,
the Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company, associated with the
name of Edward Law, which proved so ruinous to many in England and
France, as well as in Holland. In 1716 such was the miserable condition
of the country that the Estates of Overyssel, under the leadership of
Count van Rechteren, proposed the summoning of a Great Assembly on the
model of that of 1651 to consider the whole question of government and
finance. The proposal was ultimately accepted, and the Assembly met at
the Hague on November 28. After nine months of ineffectual debate and
wrangling it finally came to an end on September 14, 1717, without
effecting anything, leaving all who had the best interests of the State
at heart in despair.
In the years immediately succeeding the Peace of Utrecht difficulties
arose with Charles XII of Sweden; whose privateers had been seizing
Dutch and English merchantmen in the Baltic. Under De Witt or William
III the fleet of the Republic would speedily have brought the Swedish
king to reason. But now other counsels prevailed. Dutch squadrons sailed
into the Baltic with instructions to convoy the merchant vessels, but to
avoid hostilities. With some difficulty this purpose was achieved; and
the death of Charles at the siege of Frederikshald brought all danger of
war to an end. And yet in the very interests of trade it would have been
good policy for the States to act strongly in this matter of Swedish
piracy in the Baltic. Russia was the rising power in those regions. The
Dutch had really nothing to fear from Sweden, whose great days came to
an end with the crushing defeat of Charles XII at Pultova in 1709. Trade
relations had been opened between Holland and Muscovy so early as the
end of the 16th century; and, despite English rivalry, the opening out
of Russia and of Russian trade had been almost entirely in Dutch hands
during the 17th century. The relations between the two countries
became much closer and more important after the accession of the
enterprising and reforming Tsar, Peter the Great. It is well known how
Peter in 1696 visited Holland to learn the art of ship-building and
himself toiled as a workman at Zaandam. As a result of this visit he
carried back with him to Russia an admiration for all things Dutch. He
not only favoured Dutch commerce, but he employed numbers of Hollanders
in the building and training of his fleet and in the construction of
waterways and roads. In 1716-17 Peter again spent a considerable time in
Holland. Nevertheless Dutch policy was again timid and cautious; and no
actual alliance was made with Russia, from dread of entanglements,
although the opportunity seemed so favourable.
It was the same when in this year 1717 Cardinal Alberoni, at the
instigation of Elizabeth of Parma the ambitious second wife of Philip V,
attempted to regain Spain's lost possessions in Italy by an aggressive
policy which threatened to involve Europe in war. Elizabeth's object was
to obtain an independent sovereignty for her sons in her native country.
Austria, France and England united to resist this attempt to reverse the
settlement of Utrecht, and the States were induced to join with them in
a quadruple alliance. It was not, however, their intention to take any
active part in the hostilities which speedily brought Spain to reason,
and led to the fall of Alberoni. But the Spanish queen had not given up
her designs, and she found another instrument for carrying them out in
Ripperda, a Groningen nobleman, who had originally gone to Spain as
ambassador of the States. This able and scheming statesman persuaded
Elizabeth that she might best attain her ends by an alliance with
Austria, which was actually concluded at Vienna on April 1, 1725. This
alliance alarmed France, England and Prussia, but was especially
obnoxious to the Republic, for the emperor had in 1722 erected an East
India Company at Ostend in spite of the prohibition placed by Holland
and Spain in the treaties of 1714-15 upon Belgian overseas commerce. By
the Treaty of Alliance in 1725 the Spanish crown recognised the Ostend
Company and thus gave it a legal sanction. The States therefore, after
some hesitation, became parties to a defensive alliance against Austria
and Spain that had been signed by France, England and Prussia at Hanover
in September, 1728. These groupings of the powers were of no long
duration. The emperor, fearing an invasion of the Belgian provinces,
first agreed to suspend the Ostend Company for seven years, and then, in
order to secure the assent of the maritime powers to the Pragmatic
Sanction, which guaranteed to his daughter, Maria Theresa, the
succession to the Austrian hereditary domains, he broke with Spain and
consented to suppress the Ostend Company altogether. The negotiations
which took place at this time are very involved and complicated, but
they ended in a revival of the old alliance between Austria and the
maritime powers against the two Bourbon monarchies of France and Spain.
This return to the old policy of William III was largely the work of
Slingelandt, who had become council-pensionary on July 27, 1727.
Simon van Slingelandt, with the able assistance of his brother-in-law
Francis Fagel, clerk of the States-General, was during the nine years in
which he directed the foreign policy of the Republic regarded as one of
the wisest and most trustworthy, as he was the most experienced
statesman of his time. His aim was, in co-operation with England, to
maintain by conciliatory and peaceful methods the balance of power. Lord
Chesterfield, at that time the British envoy at the Hague, had the
highest opinion of Slingelandt's powers; and the council-pensionary's
writings, more especially his _Pensées impartiales_, published in 1729,
show what a thorough grasp he had of the political situation.
Fortunately the most influential ministers in England and France, Robert
Walpole and Cardinal Fleury, were like-minded with him in being sincere
seekers after peace. The Treaty of Vienna (March 18,1731), which secured
the recognition by the powers of the Pragmatic Sanction, was largely his
work; and he was also successful in preventing the question of the
Polish succession, after the death of Augustus of Saxony in 1733, being
the cause of the outbreak of a European war. In domestic policy
Slingelandt, though profoundly dissatisfied with the condition of the
Republic, took no steps to interfere with the form of government. He saw
the defects of the stadholderless system plainly enough, but he had not,
like Fagel, strong Orangist sympathies; and on his appointment as
council-pensionary he pledged himself to support during his tenure of
office the existing state of things. This undertaking he loyally kept,
and his strong personality during his life-time alone saved Holland, and
through Holland the entire Republic, from falling into utter ruin and
disaster. At his death Antony van der Heim became council-pensionary
under the same conditions as his predecessor. But Van der Heim,
though a capable and hard-working official, was not of the same calibre
as Slingelandt. The narrow and grasping burgher-regents had got a firm
grip of power, and they used it to suppress the rights of their
fellow-citizens and to keep in their own hands the control of municipal
and provincial affairs. Corruption reigned everywhere; and the patrician
oligarchy, by keeping for themselves and their relations all offices of
profit, grew rich at the same time that the finances of the State fell
into greater confusion. It was not a condition of things that could
endure, should any serious crisis arise.
John William Friso, on whom great hopes had been fixed, met with an
untimely death in 1711, leaving a posthumous child who became William
IV, Prince of Orange. Faithful Friesland immediately elected William
stadholder under the regency of his mother, Maria Louisa of
Hesse-Cassel. By her fostering care the boy received an education to fit
him for service to the State. Though of weakly bodily frame and slightly
deformed, William had marked intelligence, and a very gentle and kindly
disposition. Though brave like all his family, he had little inclination
for military things. The Republican party had little to fear from a man
of such character and disposition. The burgher-regents, secure in the
possession of power, knew that the Frisian stadholder was not likely to
resort either to violence or intrigue to force on a revolution.
Nevertheless the prestige of the name in the prevailing discontent
counted for much. William was elected stadholder of Groningen in 1718,
of Drente and of Gelderland in 1722, though in each case with certain
restrictions. But the other provinces remained obstinate in their
refusal to admit him to any place in their councils or to any military
post. The Estates of Zeeland went so far as to abolish the marquisate of
Flushing and Veere, which carried with it the dignity of first noble and
presidency in the meetings of the Estates, and offered to pay 100,000
fl. in compensation to the heir of the Nassaus. William refused to
receive it, saying that either the marquisate did not belong to him, in
which case he could not accept money for it, or it did belong to him and
was not for sale. William's position was advanced by his marriage in
1734 to Anne, eldest daughter of George II. Thus for the third time a
Princess Royal of England became Princess of Orange. The reception of
the newly married pair at Amsterdam and the Hague was, however, cool
though polite; and despite the representatives of Gelderland, who
urged that the falling credit and bad state of the Republic required the
appointment of an "eminent head," Holland, Utrecht, Zeeland and
Overyssel remained obdurate in their refusal to change the form of
government. William had to content himself with the measure of power he
had obtained and to await events. He showed much patience, for he had
many slights and rebuffs to put up with. His partisans would have urged
him to more vigorous action, but this he steadily refused to take.
The Republic kept drifting meanwhile on the downward path. Its
foreign policy was in nerveless hands; jobbery was rampant; trade
and industry declined; the dividends of the East India Company
fell year by year through the incompetence and greed of officials
appointed by family influence; the West India Company was
practically bankrupt. Such was the state of the country in 1740,
when the outbreak of the Austrian Succession War found the
Republic without leadership, hopelessly undecided what course of
action it should take, and only seeking to evade its responsibilities.
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