The fall of the Dutch republic

Front matter

WILLIAM V

After a mezzotint by Hodges

THE

Contents

I. Political Development 1

II, Economic and Social Development .... 42

in. William IV 116

Chapter I

In December of the year of our Lord 1794, the revolutionary French armies crossed the frozen rivers of Brabant to attack the Dutch Repubhc. During the first days of January, 1795, they crossed the Maas and the Waal and entered Dutch territory.^ Wherever they came, towns and villages fell into their hands, and the few fortifications they met were surrendered without the firing of a single gun. On January 16, the strong town of Utrecht opened its gates to the invaders. On the evening of the next day, the States General assembled in the Hague decided that under the circumstances further opposition was impracticable and that surrender was the only possibility. At midnight of the next day, the 18th, William V, the last hereditary Stadholder of the Republic of the United Netherlands, left the country and fled to England. A few weeks more and the Republic had ceased to exist. Her place was taken by the "Batavian Republic," a political dependency of victorious France. So, in a few days.

a work was destroyed which it had taken centuries to build up.

To the contemporary the end came in no way as a surprise. If there was occasion for surprise it was in the fact that the Repubhc had managed to exist as long as it had. For many years it had been on the road towards political and economical bankruptcy. But the respect which the Republic as a rich and well-managed community had enjoyed for many centuries had enabled it to survive long after its affairs had ceased to be sound. Like many another business (and as matter of fact it was little more than a large business house with a small admixture of politics), it had been living on its old reputation, contented to vegetate in peace, striving with all its might to put off the day when the true state of its affairs should be discovered.

But now a new power had sprung up in Europe, a power which respected neither hereditary rights nor old traditions, and which, having put its own house in order after its own fashion, had started out to bring its own particular salvation to its immediate neighbors and the world in general, whether they wanted it or not.

And behold, a very little shock and the old established Republic fell to pieces! The board of directors with their president at their head fled for their lives, and the stockholders permitted themselves to be reorganized upon an entirely new basis. So disgusted had the general mass of the public become with their former leaders and their methods that they hailed the reorganization with joy and loudly welcomed the new era of liberty, equality and fraternity, which their new masters had promised.

In the following pages we shall try to describe how all this was possible; how the mighty Republic which had once held in its hands the destiny of Europe became a smug-living society of "rentiers"; how all attempts to instill new blood, new energy, and vigor into the decaying body failed through the stupidity of those who were called to be the leaders of the people; and how it came to pass that dependency upon France seemed to most citizens preferable to independence under the old national system of government.

The Republic of the United Seven Netherlands had been unique among the states of Europe. Other republics had existed before, from the very times of Athens and Sparta to the days of Venice and the Federation of the Swiss Cantons. Never before, however, had there been a republic which had been created and was maintained exclusively by the third estate — by the middle classes. This origin gave the Republic a character which stuck to it until the end of its days. It is true, the government soon developed into an oligarchy, and even in its best days it had nothing in common with a true democracy. But the essential fact remains that the Republic until its very end was true to its original character, and that the oligarchy which ruled it never sueceeded in changing itself into an established aristocracy.

During the early and the late Middle Ages, the different provinces, which later constituted the commonwealth, were not in any respects different from the rest of Europe. They had this marked advantage, that they were situated upon the confines of the great German Empire and were therefore spared much of the annoyance of the mediaeval struggle between German Emperor and Roman Pope. But like the whole of Europe of that day, the Low Countries were gradually divided into a number of duchies, counties, and bishoprics, and witnessed the foundation of a number of cities which as seats of the local potentates came to some small power and influence, though they did not play much of a role. Their isolated position and the many large rivers and inland seas which divided them from the mainland gave them a certain amount of safety, and made them familiar with life on the water. At the same time, the total absence of raw products of any sort forced their surplus population to look for a different occupation from that of farming, with which during the Middle Ages the majority of mankind was engaged. This occupation they found in trade, in carrying goods in their small ships from the Continent to England and along the coast of the Baltic. When in the thirteenth century the herring left the Baltic and came to the North Sea, they also established fisheries. During the Middle Ages, the southern part was by far the more prosperous. As early as the twelfth century the town of Bruges played a role similar to that of London or New York in our own day. The northern part, which in sizeand shape corresponds to the present Kingdom of Holland, was fairly comfortable, but certainly no more. It had a few industries, but these worked exclusively for home consumption.

In the Holy Roman Empire, to which they belonged officially, these different little states took no interest after the eleventh century. In the twelfth century they began to separate themselves from their large neighbor in the matter of language. This separation made a common sovereign impossible, and allowed each of the little feudal lords to work out his own salvation. Fortunately for the country the lord's own salvation and that of his subjects did not run in as diametrically opposite directions as they usually did during the days of feudalism. The country was not favorable for the development of petty tyrants. Liberty has always followed the shores of the ocean. Peasants in the Tyrol or central Germany, when maltreated by their masters, had nowhere else to go except to the next county, where they might find a worse employer than the one they had left at home. In a country, open on all sides and surrounded by water, the disgruntled subject could sail away and begin a new life within the walls of some near-by city. These little cities, the result of the moderate amount of prosperity caused by trade and commerce, were strongholds ^against which more than one small potentate broke his neck. Wherefore it behooved the small potentate to leave them in peace and treat his devoted subjects with some circumspection.

The absence of agricultural life, as known in the rest of the world, made an early introduction of the economic system possible and brought its benefits to the country as a whole. For the feudal master could subsist only so long as there was a feudal system to support him. The moment the economic system of life prevailed over the feudal, his feudal lordship commenced to. starve. The only way to keep from starvation was by obtaining actual money, not butter and beeswax and cattle and the hke. This actual money was not to be found among the peasants, many of whom never saw a coin during their entire lives. It was to be found only within the walls of the cities, and there were two ways in which to get it. One was to take the city and steal its contents. The other was to offer to the city for money what you might have to give it some day for nothing. This latter method was the more advantageous. Gradually the feudal lords, for certain considerations of cash-down, sold as many rights and privileges as the cities cared to buy. The cities put those rights and privileges, duly signed and sealed, in a strong-box, and placed the strong-box in the tower of the town hall. In the few cases where the town hall has not been burned down, we may still see these documents, and from them understand how a certain amount of the old Germanic spirit of freedom never died out.

A detailed history of the Northern Lowlands during the Middle Ages may be of interest to the specialist; to humanity in general it means little more than the mediaeval history of Denmark or Corea. There was no essentially Dutch civilization, no Dutch school of architecture or music. As for painting, there was very little, except in the south, where the Flemish School attracted all the young talent of the north — attracted it by better pay and by a more congenial civilization.

Up to the middle of the fifteenth century, the south had it all its own way. The north was the backwoods, the country districts, where people took an interest in religious matters and started all manner of queer puritanical brotherhoods, long after that sort of thing was out of fashion in the civilized world.

During the fifteenth century, the north simply went the Way of the rest of the thousands of little states that formed the political map of Europe. A powerful house of French origin, with the ambition of reviving what once had been the inheritance of Lothar, the grandson of Charlemagne, started to buy, steal, or marry the different little principalities between the Meuse and the North Sea; and in little more than a century it acquired the majority of the little states, and began upon a course of gradual amalgamation. To each little duchy or county, or whatever it was, was left its own shape and form and local government; but the Dukes of Burgundy became their common head, and replaced the former duke or count or lord, and ruled over them through their appointed representatives — their governors or stadholders.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the great plans of the House of Burgundy collapsed because the family had died out. Its inheritance went to the House of Hapsburg, which, from a small Swiss family of second-rate nobles, had by this time worked itself up to a position of great importance in Europe. A Hapsburg was Emperor in Germany, King of Spain, and King of Hungary, Supreme Ruler of all the little states in the Netherlands and of many in Italy.

If we translate its position into modern terms, we might say that the House of Hapsburg of the sixteenth century held a controlling interest in the shipping trust, the food trust, and the railroad trust. Most of the world paid it tribute in some way or other. Nowadays, the same house holds a controlling interest in Austria and in Spain only.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the head of the house was of exceptional capacities. Under normal conditions he would no doubt have succeeded in getting his Dutch possessions into such shape that a large and united Dutch kingdom might have grown out of it; a combination of present-day Belgium and Holland. But the same conditions, which in Germany retarded the process of centralization until within the last fifty years, also prevented the small Dutch states from continuing in their normal development.

The chief cause of this retardation was the Reformation.

The inhabitants of the Low Countries had always been good Catholics. More than that, they had been intensely and almost puritanically interested in religious matters. The Catholic Church, in its struggle with the German Empire for supremacy in political as well as in religious matters, had more and more become a worldly institution and had gradually lost its old character. To the average Latin mind of the sixteenth century the Church was a sort of general club to which you belonged as a matter of course, which baptized you and which buried you and kept a record of your marriage, but which otherwise was not expected to interfere with the agreeable pursuits of your daily life. You took a sort of polite interest in its established doctrines and went through certain formulas at certain times. More was not necessary. But here in the north, in the depressing and serious atmosphere of a country lower than sea-level, religion had always been taken with a terrible amount of seriousness. The easy-going and superficial mind of the Latin races was a horror to the heavy and plodding mind of the Hollander. He took his religion seriously because he took everything in life seriously.

In these countries nothing was (nor is now for that matter) passed over lightly — neither the affairs of the soul nor those of the body. The people could not help it. They were made that way. No longer was each little state obliged to be forever on guard against the attacks of its nearest neighbors. Murder and pillaging between rival counties had been seriously discouraged. There was no longer any demand for interstate warfare, since all the states belonged to one master. The cities developed rapidly, and the prosperity of their inhabitants increased out of all proportion to what it had been before. Greater prosperity meant greater leisure and more time to devote to study. Since the printing-press had brought books within the reach of the well-to-do, reading had become very general. It was reading of a solid sort, too, most of the books being theological works. Good Latin and Greek schools were within reach of anybody who showed exceptional ability.

The inherent desire to get at the real internal value of things, rather than to be contented with accepting their superficial meaning, made these people take a most serious and intense interest in the great theological discussion of their day. The great spiritual revolution which occurred during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant to the mind of man what the revolution of our own century, in economic matters, may yet mean to our material lives. People felt that the life of their souls could not go on the way it was then going on, just as we, in our day, feel that there is something wrong with a system of economics which starves the majority without really making the minority happier or better.

During the fifteenth century repeated attempts had been made to reform the Church. These attempts had all failed utterly. During the early part of the sixteenth century they were renewed with great ardor by the Germans. Gradually and much against their own will and their general desires, the new reformers were forced to leave the fold of their own Church and to establish themselves independently.

We are very apt to think of the Reformation as a sudden great upheaval, a sort of a Chinese revolution, to-day this, to-morrow that. In Germany it took more than a century before a final and definite break occurred. It took quite as long in the Lowlands, before it became clear what was going to be the definite outcome of the original vague movement. For half a century, at least, a compromise seemed quite possible. But it so happened that the Low Countries had as their common ruler King Philip II of Spain, who had inherited them from his father Charles V, ^who had inherited them from his grandmother, Maria of Burgundy. Mr. Motley n FALL OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

having done full justice to the character of King Philip, it would be sufl&cient to state that, under anybody else, less stupidly narrow-minded and less bigoted, there would have been a great chance of preventing the religious reformation from also becoming a political movement and from preventing the political movement from becoming an actual rebellion. Revolutions are seldom caused by a majority of all the people. The majority of the people everywhere and at all times is extremely conservative. When outward conditions are such that the majority for the moment is forced to give up its indifference and is willing to give silent support to the minority, a revolution usually succeeds. So it was in this revolution; so it was in England during Cromwell's time, in America during the years 1775- 83, in France during the days of the great Revolution.

The people of the Netherlands were driven into open revolt through a combination of circumstances, some of a religious and some of a political nature. An attempt was made to force upon them a political system which was tolerated in Spain, but which no more fitted their Dutch nature than the Manchu system would have fitted America. The nature of the people was of an old Germanic, individualistic sort, and instinctively rejected all attempts at trying to press it into the coUectivistic system of an absolute monarchy.

The old nobility of the land, discontented with the political innovations which deprived them of some of their ancient rights and of their former privileges, were the first leaders of this vague movement against the religious and civic reforms being introduced by the Spanish king. Soon, however, the nobility saw that its chief support in acting against the sovereign came from the side of the middle classes — from the inhabitants of the cities. We cannot expect any class of people to commit suicide for the benefit of others. The nobility had nothing to expect from the middle classes. It had everything to expect from the king. Therefore the nobles soon came to an understanding with their legitimate sovereign and returned to their old allegiance. The cities were left to their own fate.

In the north, with the exception of Amsterdam, they were now all devoted to the new religion, to the doctrines of Martin Luther or to those of Calvin. After many years of rebellion, the cities were willing to compromise upon political matters, to recognize their ruler's right to institute such political innovations as he thought necessary. But, one and all of them, they positively refused to promise to give up their new religious convictions. Some of the cities of the south which had suffered terribly at the hands of the extreme Calvinistic demagogues were willing to make a compromise. They returned oflScially to their old faith, were pardoned, and in the future were treated with circumspection. But the cities in the seven provinces of the northern part could not do this. They stuck to their demands for free worship. When these were flatly refused, they were forced to continue the struggle. Either they must go forward, whatever the consequences, or they must perish.

Of all the great leaders who played a part during these first two decades of the struggle for religious independence, only one of great prominence had remained faithful to the cause of these seven provinces. This was a German prince of eminent rank, once a very rich man, but now a pauper. His name was William. His rank that of a Count of Nassau Dillenburg. He is better known by his higher title of a Prince of Orange. Posterity, without any foundation for the by-name, has called him William the Silent. Ofl&cially he was the representative of the King of Spain in the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht, — the Stadholder.

In character he was everything which Philip was not. His eminent abilities as a statesman and an organizer, together with his tact and his patience in adversity, made him the man around whom the whole revolution developed. He was not, like Cromwell or Washington, a great military leader. As a general his abilities were indeed very mediocre. Neither was he at any time the recognized official head of the combined opposition. With many of the provinces which continued the hopeless struggle, he was not even officially connected. He was merely the executive head of three provinces, and the work which he did he accompKshed through the sheer strength of his personahty. He was the man who, quite naturally and without great effort on his part, gradually became the personification of those ideas which caused the common opposition to the Spanish king. Nobody recognized this better than did King Philip himself when, in 1579, he offered an enormous sum in money and several additional rewards in honor to whosoever would murder WiUiam.

The difficulties of William's life during the years from 1575 to 1584 were enormous. Broken in health, covered with debts, and suffering under the loss of his oldest son, who was kept a prisoner in Spain, he actually did not have enough to provide for the wants of his large family. He passed his days in trying to keep the different rebellious provinces from flying at one another's throats ; for all the time during which they were fighting the common enemy they never forgot their petty jealousies of each other, and small misunderstandings occurred continually.

Fortunately for their final cause, their condition gradually became so precarious that in 1579 they were obliged to forget all their different rivalries for the time being and were forced into a defensive alliance. This alliance, concluded in January of 1579, has since become known as the Union of Utrecht; and it has laid the foundation for the development of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, and later for the Kingdom of Holland. From that moment on the seven rebellious provinces, while retaining their complete provincial autonomy, for the purpose of all foreign matters, became as one province.^

After this step had been taken, it was comparatively an easy matter to reach the logical conclusion of this initial action, and in the year 1581 the representatives of the seven provinces solemnly abjured their common sovereign, King Philip, as he had broken his part of the contract existing between ruler and subject, and had actually persecuted his subjects, where he ought to have taken care of them with fatherly love and foresight.^

It was this principle of a contract between king and people which was followed up a century later by the English when they cut off their sovereign's head, and which served, still another hundred years afterward, as an example to France and to America, when the enraged inhabitants of these two countries, in France decapitated Louis XVI, and in America rebelled successfully against King George III.

Having in this way disposed of one sovereign, the new republic was now obhged to find another ; for nobody as yet thought of establishing an absolutely independent democratic state, such as in our own day is established once in a while in Portugal, Panama, or China. Holland and Zeeland wanted to revive the old feudal dignity of count, and wanted to make William a sort of constitutional count of their provinces.^ The step would not have been a difficult one. The executive powers of the former feudal lords of Holland had continued in the Burgundian princes and were assumed by the Spanish kings, who exercised them through their representative, the Stadholder. But the other provinces were afraid of Holland's large money-bags and the influence which they gave this province in the Union. They foresaw that Holland's ruler would also become the ruler of the Union. This their particularism would not allow, and in order to prevent it they tried all sorts of experiments with foreign potentates.

King Philip made the whole question more complicated by his standing reward of forty thousand guilders for William's murder. On the 10th of July, 1584, this reward was at last won. William was murdered in Delft in his own home, and the chances of the House of Orange becoming the constitutional head of the republic came to naught. For William's oldest son, Maurice, who succeeded him as the commander-in-chief of the armies of the Republic, lacked all of his father's superior qualities as a statesman. It was impossible that this rough-andready cavalry leader should assume a position which required an amount of tact, patience, and circumspection almost beyond human endurance.

Maurice was, therefore, kept at the front, clearing the Republic's territory of the Spaniards, while the experiments with foreign princes were continued. These experiments, however, failed, and failed completely. Gradually and much against their own desires, the seven different provinces were forced to recognize the fact that none of their neighbors was willing to become their ruler on the terms which they were willing to offer. The only alternative was that they take the management of their own affairs into their own hands.

The Union of Utrecht, as the only tie which bound the different provinces together, now became a sort of common constitution, something for which it had never been intended and for which it was not in the least adapted. The estates of the seven provinces, as the principal surviving form of the old order of things, were obliged to assume the direct sovereignty of their states and to take the actual government into their own hands. In our days the sovereignty would have gone to the people, but in the sixteenth century the people as such had not yet been invented. They were a vast and intangible mass. The estates were their only tangible representatives. As such they assumed the command of the provinces and of the Union.

These estates had been in existence for almost two centuries.^ Originally they had been a sort of advisory board which was consulted by the feudal lord whenever he needed funds. At first they had only consisted of representatives from among the clergy and the nobility. Gradually, with the increase of their economic importance, the cities had been asked to send delegates. The influence of the civic members had quickly increased during the fifteenth century. During the Reformation the clergy had of course disappeared, and their share in the estates had been taken over by the cities. This meant that the nobility lost most of its power, for it was now opposed by two thirds of the total membership of the different estates. In many other countries, especially in Germany, the share of the clergy fell into the hands of the nobility, and meant a corresponding loss to the cause of the citizens.

After the seven provinces had abjured their king, the estates remained on the whole very much what they had been before. They still were chiefly a consulting body, composed of a certain number of representatives from different cities appointed directly by the town council and not in any way by the people. In no two provinces were the estates formed in the same way. The whole system was so complicated, and so typical of the Republic and its strong particularism, that we shall do well to describe it in short terms.

In Holland there were in all nineteen votes in the provincial estates. Eighteen of those votes belonged to the eighteen principal cities. One belonged to the seven members of the old nobility, who were obliged to vote collectively. The cities, therefore, had everything their own way. Each one could send as many delegates as it liked, but each city had but one vote. As for the small towns and the country districts, they were not represented at all. The nobility was vaguely expected to look after their needs.

In Zeeland there were seven members of the provincial estates and there were seven votes. Six of those belonged to the six largest cities, one to the nobility. But there was no nobility. Either the noble houses had died out or they had remained faithful to the Spanish rule and had been disfranchised. The one vote of the old local nobility now belonged to the Princes of Orange, who had bought the Marquisate of Vlissingen and Veere.

In Utrecht things were very complicated. This was owing to the fact that Utrecht had formerly been a bishopric, in which of course the clergy had played an unusually large part. The clergy as such had disappeared, but as it was found to be impossible to get out of the intricacies which were left by their departure from their ancient possessions in cloisters and farms covering a large part of the 1 province, the vote of the late clergy was continued. It now belonged to a number of delegates specially appointed by the nobility and the smaller cities. The nobility also possessed one vote. The four large cities had one vote together. Here we find, therefore, that the cities played a much less important role than they did in Holland and Zeeland. j

The same was true in Gelderland, where the system was even more complicated. This province, a former duchy, was divided into three so-called "quarters." Each of these quarters had small estates of its own, in each of which there were two votes, belonging to the combined cities and to the combined nobility. Furthermore, in most of the cities there was a body of thirty or forty specially selected men who might be consulted by these estates upon special occasions. Three times a year the three quarters met jointly. However, they never deliberated in common. The subjects for discussion were brought up in the meeting of the whole, but were debated separately, to be voted upon again in a joint meeting in which each quarter had one vote.

Overysel had somewhat the same complicated form of government.

Friesland was even worse, having four different quarters. One of these quarters consisted of the eleven large cities. The other three were again subdivided into eleven, ten, and nine sub-quarters. A joint meeting of the estates brought together more than eighty delegates who, however, had only four votes at their disposal, one for each quarter. In case of a tie, the Stadholder of the province was asked to decide.