the Admiral Bankert on the left to the attack of the French; Van Gend on
the right, with the purpose of engaging the blue squadron commanded by
Montague, Earl of Sandwich; while De Ruyter in the middle directed his
course toward the red flag of the English, and, pointing with his finger to
the Duke of York's vessel, said to his pilot, "There is our man." The pilot
instantly steered the ship right down upon that of the Duke, and a terrific
broadside was returned with equal fury. After two hours' incessant firing,
the English admiral retreated, his ship being so damaged that he was
obliged to transfer his flag on board the London. At the same time Braakel,
a captain who had signalized himself in the burning of Chatham, with a
vessel of sixty-two guns, attacked the Royal James, of one hundred four
guns, the ship of the Earl of Sandwich, which he boarded and fired.
Montague, refusing to surrender, was drowned in the attempt to escape in a
boat. On the other hand, Van Gend, the admiral of the squadron engaged with
the Earl's, was killed in the beginning of the action. The contest was
maintained with the daring and steady valor characteristic of both nations,
from seven in the morning until nightfall. The French had received
instructions to keep aloof from the fight, and allow the two fleets to
destroy each other; and these they took care to carry out to the full.
Thus, the only assistance they afforded to the English was to prevent
the Dutch squadron engaged in watching their movements from acting, an
advantage more than counterbalanced by the discouragement their behavior
occasioned among their allies.
Though both parties claimed the victory, it undoubtedly inclined in favor
of the Dutch, who sustained a loss somewhat inferior to that of their
antagonists, and had the satisfaction, moreover, of preventing a descent
upon Zealand by the combined fleets, which was to have been the immediate
consequence of a defeat. This was, however, attempted about a month after,
when the disasters attending the arms of the States by land, having induced
them to diminish the number of their ships, De Ruyter received commands to
remain in the ports and avoid an engagement. The whole of the English fleet
appeared in the Texel provided with small craft for the purpose of landing.
But, by a singular coincidence, it happened that, on the very day fixed for
the attempt, the water continued, from some unknown cause, so low as to
render it impossible for the vessels to approach the shore, and to impress
the people with the idea that the ebb of the tide lasted for the space of
twelve hours. Immediately after, a violent storm arose, which drove the
enemy entirely away from the coasts.
The internal condition of the United Provinces was at this time such as to
incite the combined monarchs, no less than their own successes, to treat
them with insolence and oppression. They beheld the inhabitants, instead of
uniting with one generous sentiment of patriotism in a firm and strenuous
defence of their fatherland, torn by dissensions, and turning against each
other the rage which should have been directed against their enemies. The
divisions in every province and town were daily becoming wider and more
embittered. Though both parties had merited an equal share of blame for the
present miscarriages, the people imputed them exclusively to the government
of Jan de Witt and his adherents; who, they said, had betrayed and sold the
country to France; and this accusation to which their late pusillanimous
counsels gave but too strong a color of plausibility, the heads of the
Orange party, though well aware of its untruth, diligently sustained and
propagated. The ministers of the Church, always influential and always on
the alert, made the pulpits resound with declamations against the treachery
and incapacity of the present government as the cause of all the evils
under which they groaned; and emphatically pointed to the elevation of the
Prince of Orange to the dignities of his ancestors as the sole remedy now
left them. To this measure De Witt and his brother were now regarded as the
only obstacles; and, so perverted had the state of public feeling become
that the most atrocious crimes began to be looked upon as meritorious
actions, provided only they tended to the desired object of removing these
obnoxious ministers.
On one occasion, Jan de Witt, having been employed at the Chamber of the
States to a late hour of the night, was returning home attended by a single
servant, according to his custom, when he was attacked by four assassins.
He defended himself for a considerable time, till having received some
severe wounds he fell, and his assailants decamped, leaving him for dead.
One only, James van der Graaf, was arrested; the other three took refuge in
the camp, where, though the States of Holland earnestly enjoined the Prince
of Orange and the other generals to use diligent means for their discovery,
they remained unmolested till the danger was passed. Van der Graaf was
tried and condemned to death. The pensionary was strongly solicited by
his friends to gratify the people by interceding for the pardon of the
criminals; but he resolutely refused to adopt any such mode of gaining
popularity. Impunity, he said, would but increase the number and boldness
of such miscreants; nor would he attempt to appease the causeless hatred of
the people against him by an act which he considered would tend to endanger
the life of every member of the Government. The determination, however
just, was imprudent. The criminal, an account of whose last moments was
published by the minister who attended him, was regarded by the populace as
a victim to the vengeance of Jan de Witt, and a martyr to the good of his
country. On the same day a similar attempt was made on the life of his
brother, Cornelius de Witt, at Dordrecht, by a like number of assassins,
who endeavored to force their way into his house, but were prevented by the
interference of a detachment of the burgher guard.
Cornelius had already, on his return from the fleet in consequence of
impaired health, been greeted with the spectacle of his picture, which had
given such umbrage to the King of England, cut into strips and stuck about
the town, with the head hanging upon the gallows. These symptoms of tumult
rapidly increased in violence. A mob assembling, with loud cries of
"_Oranje boven! de Witten onder_!" ("Long live the Prince of Orange! down
with the De Witts!") surrounded the houses of the members of the council,
whom they forced to send for the Prince, and to pass an act, repealing the
"Perpetual Edict," declaring him stadtholder, and releasing him from the
oath he had taken not to accept that office while he was captain-general.
Having been signed by all the other members of the council, this act was
carried to the house of Cornelius de Witt, who was confined to his bed
by sickness, the populace at the same time surrounding the house and
threatening him with death in case of refusal. He long resisted, observing
that he had too many balls falling around him lately to fear death, which
he would rather suffer than sign that paper; but the prayers and tears of
his wife and her threats, that if he delayed compliance she would throw
herself and her children among the infuriated populace, in the end overcame
his resolution. He added to his signature the letters V.C. _(vi coactus_),
but the people, informed by a minister of their purport, obliged him to
erase them.
Similar commotions broke out at Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leyden, Amsterdam, and
in other towns, both of Holland and Zealand, where the populace constrained
the magistrates by menace and violence to the repeal of the edict.
Reluctant to have such a measure forced upon them by tumult and sedition,
the States of Holland and Zealand now unanimously passed an act revoking
the Perpetual Edict, and conferring on the Prince of Orange the dignity of
stadtholder, captain, and admiral-general of these provinces.
Soon afterward Cornelius de Witt was thrown into prison and put to the
torture on a false charge of planning the assassination of the Prince of
Orange. Jan de Witt visited his brother in his agony, and a mob, bursting
into the jail, seized upon both brothers as traitors and murdered them with
horrid brutality.
From this time the authority of William became almost uncontrolled in the
United Provinces. Most of the leaders of the Louvestein party, either
convinced of the necessity of his elevation to power in the present
emergency or unwilling to encounter the vexation of a fruitless opposition,
acquiesced in the present state of things; many were afterward employed by
him, and distinguished themselves by fidelity and zeal in his service. The
constant coöperation and participation in his views also of the pensionary,
Fagel, gave him an advantage which none of his predecessors had ever
enjoyed; the influence of the pensionaries of Holland having hitherto been
always opposed, and forming a counterpoise, to that of the stadtholder.
Unquestionably the Dutch, while thus parting with their liberties, reaped
in some degree the benefits usually attendant on such a sacrifice, in
the increased firmness and activity of a government conducted by a sole
responsible head. At the time of the embassy of Peter de Groot to solicit
peace from the King of France, the Prince had so far partaken of the
general dejection as to ask permission of the States to nominate a deputy
to treat of his particular interests; but no sooner was he created
stadtholder than he began to adopt bolder and more spirited resolutions
for the safety of a country to which he felt himself attached by new and
stronger ties. Being invited by the Assembly of the States to give his
opinion on the terms offered by the allied monarchs, he declared that their
acceptance would entail upon them certain ruin, and that the very listening
to such was pernicious in the highest degree to affairs, as tending to
disunite and dispirit the people.
He encouraged them to hope for speedy assistance from his allies; pointed
out the resources which yet existed for the support of the war; and
persuaded them rather to resolve, if they were driven to extremity, to
embark on board their vessels and found a new nation in the East Indies,
than accept the conditions. At the same time he spurned with indignation
the flattering proposals made him both by the Kings of France and England;
for--so singularly are men appointed to work out their own destiny--these
monarchs now vied with each other, and were in fact principally
instrumental, in exalting the power and dignity of a prince who ere long
was to hurl the brother of the one from the throne of his ancestors, and
prepare for the other an old age of vexation and disgrace, if not to lay
the first foundation of the ruin of his kingdom in the next century.
Louis, upon the appointment of the Prince to the office of stadtholder, was
liberal in offers of honor and advantages to his person and family, and
among the rest was one which he considered could scarcely fail of its
effect; that, namely, of making him sovereign of the provinces under the
protection of France and England. William, however, was found wholly
immovable on this point, declaring that he would rather retire to his
lands in Germany, and spend his life in hunting, than sell his country and
liberty to France. Nor were the dispiriting representations made by the
English ambassadors, that Holland was utterly lost unless he consented to
the terms proposed, at all more influential; "I have thought of a means,"
he replied, "to avoid beholding the ruin of my country--to die in the last
ditch."
Neither, indeed, was the state of the country, though sufficiently
deplorable, such as to leave him no choice but to become the vassal of her
haughty enemies. The progress of the invader in Holland was effectually
arrested by the state of defence into which that province had been put.
Imitating the noble example set them by Amsterdam, the other towns readily
opened the sluices of the Lek, Meuse, Yssel, and Vecht, inundating by that
means the whole of the intervening tracts of land.
The Dutch army was stationed at the five principal posts of the provinces;
Prince Maurice John being placed at Muyden and Weesp; Field Marshal
Wurtz at Gorcum; the Count of Horn at the Goejanverwellen Sluys;
another detachment occupied Woerden; and the Prince himself took up his
head-quarters at Bodergrave and Nieuwerburg.
At length, finding his army increased by the addition of subsidies from
Spain to twenty-four thousand men, William determined to infuse new vigor
into the public mind by the commencement of offensive hostilities. He
first formed the design of surprising Naarden and Woerden, both of which
attempts, however, proved unsuccessful. He then marched toward Maestricht,
captured and demolished the fort of Valckenburg, by which that town was
straitened, and, with the view of diverting the force of the enemy
by carrying the war into his own territory, advanced to the siege of
Charleroi. But the middle of winter having already arrived before he
commenced the enterprise, he was soon after compelled, by the severity
of the weather, to abandon it and retire to Holland, which, during his
absence, had, from the same cause, been exposed to imminent danger.
The Duke of Luxemburg, who had been left in command of the forces in
Utrecht on the departure of the King of France, for Paris, finding that the
ice with which the land-water was covered, was sufficiently strong to bear
the passage of cavalry, marched with a strong body of troops to Zwammerdam,
and thence to Bodergrave, both of which were abandoned. The purpose of the
French commander was to advance directly upon The Hague, and to force the
States to acknowledge the sovereignty of the King of France; a measure
which would, he conceived, involve the immediate submission of the whole
of the provinces. But, happily, his project was defeated by a sudden thaw,
which obliged him to return to Utrecht; and had it not been that the fort
of Nieuwerburg, situated on the dike, which afforded the only passage
thither, was deserted by the commander, _Pain-et-Vin_, his retreat must
have been cut off, and his army exposed to almost certain destruction.
Before his departure, Luxemburg revenged himself on the luckless villages
he had captured, which he pillaged and burned to the ground.[1] Pain-et-Vin
was afterward tried for breach of duty and executed.
[Footnote 1: The accounts given by the Dutch historians of the revolting
outrages and barbarities exercised by the invaders on this expedition are
strenuously denied by the writers on the French side; their conduct in
Utrecht, however, which we shall have occasion hereafter to notice, affords
but too ample evidence that there was some truth in the accusations. On the
other hand, that the Dutch authors are guilty of exaggeration may be easily
believed, since one of them gravely puts into the mouth of the Duke of
Luxemburg the following address to his soldiers: "Go, my children, plunder,
murder, destroy, and if it be possible to commit yet greater cruelties, be
not negligent therein, that I may see I am not deceived in my choice of the
flower of the king's troops."]
Though it might well have been feared that the failure of all the
enterprises of the Prince of Orange would have renewed the discontents
lately prevalent in the United Provinces, such an effect was in no degree
produced. The very boldness of the designs, it seemed, had been the cause
of their ill-success, and argued a zeal and activity for the public good
which inspired unbounded confidence in his future measures. The appearance
of renovated vigor in the United Provinces, moreover, encouraged
surrounding states to make some demonstrations in their favor. They had
wished to see them humbled, but not destroyed. The Emperor and princes of
Germany, in especial, contemplated with dread the prospect of exchanging
the neighborhood of the inoffensive and industrious people, who rarely
appeared to them in any other light than as the dispensers of abundance,
wealth, and luxury, for that of an ambitious and unscrupulous monarch,
whose glory was in destruction, and from whose encroachments their
boundaries would be for not one moment safe.
Though deeply imbued with these sentiments, the Elector of Brandenburg had
hitherto been deterred from lending them any assistance, lest, should they
be forced to make a peace with the King of France, the whole power and
vengeance of that monarch might be directed against himself. He now induced
the Emperor Leopold to enter into an alliance with him, by virtue of which
he levied a force of twenty-four thousand men, to be joined with an equal
number furnished by himself, for the purpose of opposing the advances of
Louis. Though the secret treaty which the Emperor had made with France,
binding himself not to afford aid to any member of the Triple Alliance,
and of which the Elector was in ignorance, limited the employment of the
imperial army strictly to the protection of the empire, and consequently
prevented it from marching at once to the support of the provinces, its
movement was of considerable advantage to their affairs, in calling off
Turenne from Bois-le-Duc, to which he had laid siege, to the defence of the
places on the Rhine. The Bishops of Muenster and Cologne, also, whom the
brave defence of the garrison of Groningen had forced to raise the siege,
were under the necessity of abandoning both that province and Guelderland,
and hastening to the protection of their own territories.
Among the benefits which the Dutch anticipated with the utmost confidence
as the consequence of the elevation of the Prince of Orange to his paternal
dignities was the appeasing the hostility of his uncle, the King of
England. In this, however, they were wholly deceived. On the meeting of
Parliament in this year, the chancellor, Shaftesbury, addressed the two
Houses in a strain of hostile feeling to the Dutch nation, more bitter than
the court as yet ventured to express. He represented that, "besides the
personal indignities in the way of pictures, medals, and other public
affronts which the King received from the States, they came at last to
such a height of insolence as to deny him the honor of the flag, though an
undoubted jewel of the crown, and disputed the King's title to it in all
the courts of Europe, making great offers to the French King if he would
stand by them in this particular.
"But both kings, knowing their own interest, resolved to join against them,
who were the common enemies of all monarchies, but especially the English,
their only competitor in commerce and naval power, and the chief obstacle
to their attainment of the dominion they aimed at, a dominion as universal
as that of Rome; and so intoxicated were they with that vast ambition that
under all their present distress and danger they haughtily rejected every
overture for a treaty or a cessation of arms; that the war was a just and
necessary measure, advised by the Parliament itself from the conviction
that, at any rate, _Delenda est Carthago_--such a government'must be
destroyed; and that therefore the King may well say it was their war; which
had never been begun, but that the States refused him satisfaction because
they believed him to be in so great want of money that they must sit down
under any affronts."
But the Parliament, always disinclined to the war, had now begun to view it
with absolute aversion; and though moved, by the King's representations
of the embarrassed condition he should be reduced to if the supply were
refused, to yield a subsidy of seventy thousand pounds a month for eighteen
months, they forced him to pay a high price for their complaisance by
extorting his consent to the "Test Act." By the operation of this act, the
Duke of York, the inveterate enemy of the Dutch, and Sir Thomas Clifford,
the minister who had the most zealously pushed forward the business of the
war, were forced to resign their offices. With the funds granted him by
Parliament, Charles was enabled to complete the equipment of a fleet,
which, when joined to a squadron of French ships under D'Estrées, numbered
one hundred fifty sail.
The Prince of Orange had wisely continued De Ruyter in the command of
the fleet as lieutenant-admiral of the provinces, with almost unlimited
instructions, and suffered himself to be wholly guided by him in naval
affairs, interfering only so far as to reinstate Tromp in the office
of admiral under the College of Amsterdam, and to effect a perfect
reconciliation between him and De Ruyter--a matter which the placable and
magnanimous temper of the latter rendered of easy accomplishment. Having
failed in a scheme of blocking up the Thames by means of sinking vessels in
the bed of that river, De Ruyter stationed himself at Schooneveldt, with
the purpose of protecting the coast of Zealand against a meditated descent
of the enemy. While at anchor he descried the hostile fleet approaching;
but a calm, succeeded by rough weather, prevented them for some days from
coming to an engagement.
The Dutch were considerably inferior in strength to the allies, the number
of their vessels being no more than fifty-two men-of-war and twelve
frigates, of which, moreover, the equipages were, owing to the scarcity of
seamen, by no means complete. But this deficiency was more than compensated
by the spirit and conduct of their great commander. "The weaker our fleet
is," observed De Ruyter, in answer to some remark made to him on the
subject, "the more confidently I expect a victory, not from our own
strength, but from the arm of the Almighty." Under a favorable breeze, the
French and English ships bore down upon their unequal antagonists, in the
full expectation that they would avoid the encounter, by retiring behind
the sand-banks of Flushing. The Dutch, however, firmly awaited the shock,
commenced by the squadron of French ships, which on this occasion had
been placed in the van to avoid the imputation cast upon them in the last
battle. They engaged with that of Tromp, whose impetuous firing compelled
the French admiral to retire for a time; but quickly rallying, he returned
to the charge with such vigor that Tromp was obliged to remove his flag on
four different vessels successively.
De Ruyter, meanwhile, had engaged the red squadron, commanded by Prince
Rupert, which after a sharp contest he threw into some disorder, and
succeeded in cutting off a considerable number of ships from the remainder.
Instead, however, of pursuing his advantage, De Ruyter, becoming aware of
the danger of his rival, who was now entirely surrounded by the enemy,
hastened to his rescue. On seeing him approach, Tromp exclaimed: "Comrades,
here is our grandsire [a pet name given to De Ruyter among the sailors]
coming to help us; so long as I live I will never forsake him!" The
generous aid was no less effectual than well timed, since the enemy,
astonished at his unexpected appearance, fell back. "I am pleased to see,"
he said, "that our enemies still fear the Seven Provinces," the name of the
vessel which carried his flag. The fight was continued with unremitting
obstinacy till darkness separated the combatants, when the Dutch found that
they had gained about three miles upon their antagonists.
That the issue of such a contest should be doubtful was in itself
equivalent to a victory on the side of the Dutch; a victory of which they
reaped all the advantages, as well as the glory, since, besides delivering
their coasts from the intended invasion, their loss was so inconsiderable
that within a week the fleet was able to put to sea in its original numbers
and strength. Another engagement, fought with less of energy and resolution
on the side of the English than usually distinguished them, terminated in
their retreat toward the Thames, which, De Ruyter conceiving to be a feint
to draw the Dutch fleet off their coasts, he declined the pursuit. The
movement, however, had its origin in a far different cause. The English
sailors fully participated in the feelings entertained by the great body of
the nation, who viewed the aggrandizement of their ally with jealousy, and
the undeserved misfortunes of their enemy with pity, and considered every
advantage gained over the Dutch as a step toward the completion of the
sinister designs they suspected their own sovereign of harboring against
their religion and liberties. They accordingly made no concealment of their
reluctance to fight longer in such a quarrel.