STADHOLDERATE OF WILLIAM V, _continued_, 1780-1788
The outbreak of war meant the final ruin of the Dutch Republic. Its
internal condition at the close of 1780 made it hopelessly unfitted to
enter upon a struggle with the overwhelming sea-power of England. Even
had William V possessed the qualities of leadership, he would have had
to contend against the bitter opposition and enmity of the anti-Orange
party among the burgher-regents, of which Van der Capellen was one of
the most moving spirits, and which had its chief centre in Amsterdam.
But the prince, weak and incompetent, was apparently intent only on
evading his responsibilities, and so laid himself open to the charges of
neglect and mal-administration that were brought against him by his
enemies.
Against an English fleet of more than 300 vessels manned by a force of
something like 100,000 seamen, the Dutch had but twenty ships of the
line, most of them old and of little value. Large sums of money were now
voted for the equipment of a fleet; and the Admiralties were urged to
press forward the work with all possible vigour. But progress was
necessarily slow. Everything was lacking--material, munitions,
equipment, skilled labour--and these could not be supplied in time to
prevent Dutch commerce being swept from the seas and the Dutch colonies
captured. The Republicans, or Patriots, as they began to name
themselves, were at first delighted that the Orange stadholder and his
party had been compelled to break with England and to seek the alliance
of France; but their joy was but short-lived. Bad tidings followed
rapidly one upon another. In the first month of the war 200 merchantmen
were captured, of the value of 15,000,000 florins. The fishing fleets
dared not put out to sea. In 1780 more than 2000 vessels passed through
the Sound, in 1781 only eleven. On February 3 St Eustatius surrendered
to Admiral Rodney, when one hundred and thirty merchantmen together with
immense stores fell into the hands of the captors. Surinam and Curaçoa
received warning and were able to put themselves into a state of
defence, but the colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo were taken,
also St Martin, Saba and the Dutch establishments on the coast of
Guinea. In the East Indies Negapatam and the factories in Bengal passed
into English possession; and the Cape, Java and Ceylon would have shared
the same fate, but for the timely protection of a French squadron under
the command of Suffren, one of the ablest and bravest of French seamen.
The losses were enormous, and loud was the outcry raised in Amsterdam
and elsewhere against the prince of being the cause of his country's
misfortunes. "Orange," so his enemies said, "is to blame for everything.
He possessed the power to do whatsoever he would, and he neglected to
use it in providing for the navy and the land's defences." This was to a
considerable extent unjust, for William from 1767 onwards had repeatedly
urged an increase of the sea and land forces, but his proposals had been
thwarted by bitter opposition, especially in Amsterdam itself. The
accusations were to this extent correct that he was undoubtedly invested
with large executive power which he had not the strength of will to use.
It was at this period that Van der Capellen and others started a most
violent press campaign not only against the stadholder, but against the
hereditary stadholdership and all that the house of Orange-Nassau stood
for in the history of the Dutch Republic. Brunswick was attacked with
especial virulence. The "Act of Consultation" had become known; and, had
the prince been willing to throw responsibility upon the duke for bad
advice he might have gained some fleeting popularity by separating
himself from the hated "foreigner." But William, weak though he was,
would not abandon the man who in his youth had been to him and to his
house a wise and staunch protector and friend; and he knew, moreover,
that the accusations against Brunswick were really aimed at himself. The
duke, however, after appealing to the States-General, and being by them
declared free from blame, found the spirit of hostility so strong at
Amsterdam and in several of the Provincial Estates that he withdrew
first (1782) to Hertogenbosch, of which place he was governor, and
finally left the country in 1784.
The war meanwhile, which had been the cause, or rather the pretext, for
this outburst of popular feeling against Brunswick, was pursuing its
course. In the summer of 1781 Rear-Admiral Zoutman, at the head of a
squadron of fifteen war-ships, was ordered to convoy seventy-two
merchantmen into the Baltic. He met an English force of twelve vessels,
which were larger and better armed than the Dutch, under Vice-Admiral
Hyde Parker. A fierce encounter took place at the Doggerbank on August
5, which lasted all day without either side being able to claim the
victory. Parker was the first to retreat, but Zoutman had likewise to
return to the Texel to repair his disabled ships, and his convoy never
reached the Baltic. The Dutch however were greatly elated at the result
of the fight, and Zoutman and his captains were feted as heroes.
Doggerbank battle was but, at the most, an indecisive engagement on a
very small scale, and it brought no relaxation in the English blockade.
No Dutch admiral throughout all the rest of the war ventured to face the
English squadrons in the North Sea and in the Channel; and the Dutch
mercantile marine disappeared from the ocean. England was strong enough
to defy the Armed Neutrality, which indeed proved, as its authoress
Catherine II is reported to have said, "an armed nullity." There was
deep dissatisfaction throughout the country, and mutual recriminations
between the various responsible authorities, but there was some justice
in making the stadholder the chief scapegoat, for, whatever may have
been the faults of others, a vigorous initiative in the earlier years of
his stadholdership might have effected much, and would have certainly
gained for him increased influence and respect.
The war lasted for two years, if war that could be called in which there
was practically no fighting. There were changes of government in
England during that time, and the party of which Fox was the leader had
no desire to press hardly upon the Dutch. Several efforts were made to
induce them to negotiate in London a separate peace on favourable terms,
but the partisans of France in Amsterdam and elsewhere rendered these
tentative negotiations fruitless. Being weak, the Republic suffered
accordingly by having to accept finally whatever terms its mightier
neighbour thought fit to dictate. On November 30, 1782, the preliminary
treaty by which Great Britain conceded to the United States of America
their independence was concluded. A truce between Great Britain and
France followed in January, 1783, in which the United Provinces, as a
satellite of France, were included. No further hostilities took place,
but the negotiations for a definitive peace dragged on, the protests of
the Dutch plenipotentiaries at Paris against the terms arranged
between England and France being of no avail. Finally the French
government concluded a separate peace on September 3; but it was not
till May 20, 1784, that the Dutch could be induced to surrender
Negapatam and to grant to the English the right of free entry into the
Moluccas. Nor was this the only humiliation the Republic had at this
time to suffer, for during the course of the English war serious
troubles with the Emperor Joseph II had arisen.
Joseph had in 1780 paid a visit to his Belgian provinces, and he had
seen with his own eyes the ruinous condition of the barrier fortresses.
On the pretext that the fortresses were now useless, since France and
the Republic were allies, Joseph informed the States-General of his
intention to dismantle them all with the exception of Antwerp and
Luxemburg. This meant of course the withdrawal of the Dutch garrisons.
The States-General, being unable to resist, deemed it the wiser course
to submit. The troops accordingly left the barrier towns in January,
1782. Such submission, as was to be expected, inevitably led to further
demands.
The Treaty of Münster (1648) had left the Dutch in possession of
territory on both banks of the Scheldt, and had given them the right to
close all access by river to Antwerp, which had for a century and a
quarter ceased to be a sea-port. In 1781, during his visit to Belgium,
Joseph had received a number of petitions in favour of the liberation
of the Scheldt. At the moment he did not see his way to taking action,
but in 1783 he took advantage of the embarrassments of the Dutch
government to raise the question of a disputed boundary in Dutch
Flanders; and in the autumn of that year a body of Imperial troops took
forcible possession of some frontier forts near Sluis. Matters were
brought to a head in May, 1784, by the emperor sending to the
States-General a detailed summary of all his grievances, _Tableau
sommaire des prétentions_. In this he claimed, besides cessions of
territory at Maestricht and in Dutch Flanders, the right of free
navigation on the Scheldt, the demolition of the Dutch forts closing the
river, and freedom of trading from the Belgian ports to the Indies. This
document was in fact an ultimatum, the rejection of which meant war. For
once all parties in the Republic were united in resistance to the
emperor's demands; and when in October, 1784, two ships attempted to
navigate the Scheldt, the one starting from Antwerp, the other from
Ostend, they were both stopped; the first at Saftingen on the
frontier, the second at Flushing. War seemed imminent. An Austrian army
corps was sent to the Netherlands; and the Dutch bestirred themselves
with a vigour unknown in the States for many years to equip a strong
fleet and raise troops to repel invasion. It is, however, almost certain
that, had Joseph carried out his threat of sending a force of 80,000 men
to avenge the insult offered to his ships, the hastily enlisted Dutch
troops would not have been able to offer effectual resistance. But the
question the emperor was raising was no mere local question. He was
really seeking to violate important clauses of two international
treaties, to which all the great powers were parties, the Treaty of
Münster and the Treaty of Utrecht. His own possession of the Belgian
Netherlands and the independence and sovereign rights of the Dutch
Republic rested on the same title. Joseph had counted upon the help or
at least the friendly neutrality of his brother-in-law, Louis XVI, but
France had just concluded an exhausting war in which the United
Provinces had been her allies. The French, moreover, had no desire to
see the Republic over-powered by an act of aggression that might give
rise to European complications. Louis XVI offered mediation, and it was
accepted.
It is doubtful indeed whether the emperor, whose restless brain was
always full of new schemes, really meant to carry his threats into
execution. In the autumn of 1784 a plan for exchanging the distant
Belgian Netherlands for the contiguous Electorate of Bavaria was
beginning to exercise his thoughts and diplomacy. He showed himself
therefore ready to make concessions; and by the firmness of the attitude
of France both the disputants were after lengthy negotiations brought to
terms, which were embodied in a treaty signed at Fontainebleau on
November 8,1785. The Dutch retained the right to close the Scheldt, but
had to dismantle some of the forts; the frontier of Dutch Flanders was
to be that of 1664; and Joseph gave up all claim to Maestricht in
consideration of a payment of 9,500,000 florins. A few days later an
alliance between France and the Republic, known as "the Defensive
Confederacy" of Fontainebleau, was concluded, the French government
advancing 4,500,000 florins towards the ransom of Maestricht. The return
of peace, however, far from allaying the spirit of faction in the
Republic, was to lead to civil strife.
The situation with which William V now had to deal was in some ways
more difficult and dangerous than in the days of his greater
predecessors. It was no longer a mere struggle for supremacy between the
Orange-Stadholder party (_prins-gezinderi_) and the patrician-regents of
the town corporations (_staats-gezinderi_); a third party had come into
existence, the democratic or "patriot" party, which had imbibed the
revolutionary ideas of Rousseau and others about the Rights of Man and
the Social Contract. These new ideas, spread about with fiery zeal by
the two nobles, Van der Capellen tot de Pol and his cousin Van der
Capellen van den Marsch, had found a fertile soil in the northern
Netherlands, and among all classes, including other nobles and many
leading burgomasters. Their aim was to abolish all privileges whether in
Church or State, and to establish the principle of the sovereignty of
the people. These were the days, be it remembered, which immediately
succeeded the American Revolution and preceded the summoning of the
States-General in France with its fateful consequences. The atmosphere
was full of revolution; and the men of the new ideas had no more
sympathy with the pretensions of an aristocratic caste of
burgher-regents to exclude their fellow-citizens from a voice in the
management of their own affairs, than they had with the quasi-sovereign
position of an hereditary stadholder. Among the Orange party were few
men of mark. The council-pensionary Bleiswijk was without character,
ready to change sides with the shifting wind; and Count Bentinck van
Rhoon had little ability. They were, however, to discover in burgomaster
Van de Spiegel of Goes a statesman destined soon to play a great part in
the history of the country. During this period of acute party strife
Patriot and Orangeman were not merely divided from one another on
questions of domestic policy. The one party were strong adherents of the
French alliance and leant upon its support; the other sought to renew
the bonds which had so long united the Republic with England. Indeed the
able representatives of France and England at the Hague at this time,
the Count de Vérac and Sir James Harris (afterwards Lord Malmesbury),
were the real leaders and advisers, behind the scenes, of the opposing
factions.
The strength of parties varied in the different provinces. Holland,
always more or less anti-stadholder, was the chief centre of the
patriots. With Holland were the majority of the Estates of Friesland,
Groningen and Overyssel. In Utrecht the nobles and the regents were
for the stadholder, but the townsmen were strong patriots. Zeeland
supported the prince, who had with him the army, the preachers and the
great mass of small _bourgeoisie_ and the country folk. Nothing could
exceed the violence and unscrupulousness of the attacks that were
directed against the stadholder in the press; and no efforts were spared
by his opponents to curtail his rights and to insult him personally.
Corps of patriot volunteers were enrolled in different places with
self-elected officers. The wearing of the Orange colours and the singing
of the _Wilhelmus_ was forbidden, and punished by fine and imprisonment.
In September, 1785, a riot at the Hague led to the Estates of Holland
taking from the stadholder the command of the troops in that city. They
likewise ordered the foot-guards henceforth to salute the members of the
Estates, and removed the arms of the prince from the standards and the
facings of the troops. As a further slight, the privilege was given to
the deputies, while the Estates were in session, to pass through the
gate into the Binnenhof, which had hitherto been reserved for the use of
the stadholder alone. Filled with indignation and resentment, William
left the Hague with his family and withdrew to his country residence at
Het Loo. Such a step only increased the confusion and disorder that was
filling every part of the country, for it showed that William had
neither the spirit nor the energy to make a firm stand against those who
were resolved to overthrow his authority.
In Utrecht the strife between the parties led to scenes of violence. The
"patriots" found an eloquent leader in the person of a young student
named Ondaatje. The Estates of the province were as conservative as the
city of Utrecht itself was ultra-democratic; and a long series of
disturbances were caused by the burgher-regents of the Town Council
refusing to accede to the popular demand for a drastic change in their
constitution. Finally they were besieged in the town hall by a numerous
gathering of the "free corps" headed by Ondaatje, and were compelled to
accede to the people's demands. A portion of the Estates thereupon
assembled at Amersfoort; and at their request a body of 400 troops were
sent there from Nijmwegen. Civil war seemed imminent, but it was averted
by the timely mediation of the Estates of Holland.
Scarcely less dangerous was the state of affairs in Gelderland. Here the
Estates of the Gelderland had an Orange majority, but the patriots had
an influential leader in Van der Capellen van den Marsch. Petitions
and requests were sent to the Estates demanding popular reforms. The
Estates not only refused to receive them but issued a proclamation
forbidding the dissemination of revolutionary literature in the
province. The small towns of Elburg and Hattem not only refused to obey,
but the inhabitants proceeded by force to compel their Councils to yield
to their demands. The Estates thereupon called upon the stadholder to
send troops to restore order. This was done, and garrisons were placed
in Elburg and Hattem. This step caused a very great commotion in Holland
and especially at Amsterdam; and the patriot leaders felt that the time
had come to take measures by which to unite all their forces in the
different parts of the country for common defence and common action. The
result of all this was that the movement became more and more
revolutionary in its aims. To such an extent was this the case that many
of the old aristocratic anti-stadholder regents began to perceive that
the carrying out of the patriots' programme of popular reform would mean
the overthrow of the system of government which they upheld, at the same
time as that of the stadholderate.
The reply of the Estates of Holland to the strong measures taken against
Elburg and Hattem was the "provisional" removal of the prince from the
post of captain-general, and the recalling, on their own authority, of
all troops in the pay of the province serving in the frontier fortresses
(August, 1786). As the year went on the agitation grew in volume;
increasing numbers were enrolled in the free corps. The complete
ascendancy of the ultra-democratic patriots was proved and assured by
tumultuous gatherings at Amsterdam (April 21, 1787), and a few days
later at Rotterdam, compelling the Town Councils to dismiss at Amsterdam
nine regents and at Rotterdam seven, suspected of Orange leanings.
Holland was now entirely under patriot control; and the democrats in
other districts were eagerly looking to the forces which Holland could
bring into the field to protect the patriot cause from tyrannous acts of
oppression by the stadholder's troops. In the summer of 1787 the forces
on both sides were being mustered on the borders of the province of
Utrecht, and frequent collisions had already taken place. Nothing but
the prince's indecision had prevented the actual outbreak of a general
civil war. At the critical moment of suspense an incident occurred,
however, which was to effect a dramatic change in the situation.
William's pusillanimous attitude (he was actually talking of withdrawing
from the country to Nassau) was by no means acceptable to his
high-spirited wife. The princess was all for vigorous action, and she
wrung from William a reluctant consent to her returning from Nijmwegen,
where for security she had been residing with her family, to the Hague.
In that political centre she would be in close communication with Sir J.
Harris and Van de Spiegel, and would be able to organise a powerful
opposition in Holland to patriot ascendancy. It was a bold move, the
success of which largely depended on the secrecy with which it was
carried out. On June 28 Wilhelmina started from Nijmwegen, but the
commandant of the free corps at Gouda, hearing that horses were being
ordered at Schoonhoven and Haasrecht for a considerable party,
immediately sent to headquarters for instructions. He was told not to
allow any suspicious body of persons to pass. He accordingly stopped the
princess and detained her at a farm until the arrival at Woerden of the
members of the Committee of Defence. By these Her Highness was treated
(on learning her quality) with all respect, but she was informed that
she could not proceed without the permit of the Estates of Holland. The
indignant princess did not wait for the permit to arrive, but returned
to Nijmwegen.
The British ambassador, Harris, at once brought the action of the
Estates of Holland before the States-General and demanded satisfaction;
and on July 10 a still more peremptory demand was made by the Prussian
ambassador, von Thulemeyer. Frederick William II was incensed at the
treatment his sister had received; and, when the Estates of Holland
refused to punish the offending officials, on the ground that no insult
had been intended, orders were immediately given for an army of 20,000
men under Charles, Duke of Brunswick, to cross the frontier and exact
reparation. The Prussians entered in three columns and met with little
opposition. Utrecht, where 7000 "patriot" volunteers were encamped, was
evacuated, the whole force taking flight and retreating in disorder to
Holland. Gorkum, Dordrecht, Kampen and other towns surrendered without a
blow; and on September 17 Brunswick's troops entered the Hague amidst
general rejoicings. The populace wore Orange favours, and the streets
rang with the cry of _Oranje boven_. Amsterdam still held out and
prepared for defence, hoping for French succour; and thither the leaders
of the patriot party had fled, together with the representatives of
six cities. The nobility, the representatives of eight cities, and the
council-pensionary remained at the Hague, met as the Estates of Holland,
repealed all the anti-Orange edicts, and invited the prince to return.
Amidst scenes of great enthusiasm the stadholder made his entry into the
Binnenhof on September 20. The hopes held by the patriot refugees at
Amsterdam of French aid were vain, for the French government was in no
position to help anyone. As soon as the Prussian army appeared before
the gates, the Town Council, as in 1650, was unwilling to jeopardise the
welfare of the city by armed resistance, and negotiations were opened
with Brunswick. On October 3 Amsterdam capitulated, and the campaign was
over.
The princess was now in a position to demand reparation for the insult
she had received; and, though her terms were severe, the Estates of
Holland obsequiously agreed to carry them out (October 6). She demanded
the punishment of all who had taken part in her arrest, the disbanding
of the free corps, and the purging of the various Town Councils of
obnoxious persons. All this was done. In the middle of November the main
body of the Prussians departed, but a force of 4000 men remained to
assist the Dutch troops in keeping order. The English ambassador,
Harris, and Van de Spiegel were the chief advisers of the now dominant
Orange government; and drastic steps were taken to establish the
hereditary stadholderate henceforth on a firm basis. All persons filling
any office were required to swear to maintain the settlement of 1766,
and to declare that "the high and hereditary dignities" conferred upon
the Princes of Orange were "an essential part not only of the
constitution of each province but of the whole State." An amnesty was
proclaimed by the prince on November 21, but it contained so many
exceptions that it led to a large number of the patriots seeking a place
of refuge in foreign countries, as indeed many of the leaders had
already done, chiefly in France and the Belgian Netherlands. It has been
said that the exiles numbered as many as 40,000, but this is possibly an
exaggeration. The victory of the Orange party was complete; but a
triumph achieved by the aid of a foreign invader was dearly purchased.
The Prussian troops, as they retired laden with booty after committing
many excesses, left behind them a legacy of hatred.
* * * * *