Still pursuing the affair of the flag, the British informed the States General in Sir Joseph Yorke’s most peremptory terms that it must formally disavow the salute to the rebels, punish the culprit and recall and dismiss the Governor of St. Eustatius. Further, until satisfaction was received, he warned that “His Majesty will not delay one instant to take such measures as he will think due to the interests and dignity of his crown.” In the long intimate and cranky relationship of Britain and Holland, this was overt hostility.
Yorke’s démarche was one that might be expected from this haughty envoy whose father, having been in April, 1754, raised in the peerage to an earldom—that step in the life of the English that went to their heads like wine—his son could now look down from heights that disdained the conventional, even advisable, courtesies of an ambassador. Adams said Yorke addressed the States General in the same tone the British had used to Boston.
His veiled threat was angrily met by the Duke of Brunswick, chief adviser to the Prince and unofficial premier, as “the most insolent and improper piece that I have ever seen sent from one sovereign to another.” When made public, it caused furious indignation, although another of the Prince’s advisers pointed out that it was “not easy to swallow, but vana sine viribus ira [wrath without power is in vain], and so we’ll be compelled to come down a peg or two.” And the needed power, the adviser pointed out, the Netherlands did not have.
To the British, de Graaff’s return to his post in St. Eustatius was seen as an insult rather than the satisfaction London had demanded, and they began to contemplate active reprisal. A warning hint appeared in murmurs about abrogating the century-old Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1674, which Britain had always disliked as affirming rights of neutrality on the basis of “free ships, free goods.” Holland was too disjointed politically to pay attention to the hint.
This was the time when wrathful citizens suggested blocking the delivery of supplies to the British embassy. Serenely unaware of how close had been his discomfort, Sir Joseph acknowledged with some satisfaction to his Minister in London that his memorial had “raised a violent fermentation through the country” and alarmed and frightened the people. On his part, the Duke of Brunswick replied to William V that the threat expressed by the Ambassador of the King of England was an insult as well as an injustice to the United Provinces. Worse, in his opinion, was Yorke’s oral statement that he would be recalled if satisfaction were not given within three weeks. Yorke well knew, as the Duke reminded him, that the necessity of obtaining agreement by all the consultative bodies in the Dutch system precluded any decision within three weeks. Honor and dignity required, Brunswick said, that satisfaction be denied until the accused could be heard. The States General were obliged to protect the country’s commerce and her ports. The Duke was clearly put out. The excess of Yorke’s language had only succeeded in antagonizing a strong partisan of Britain. Brunswick concluded that Yorke’s threat was a scare tactic to justify the searching and seizing of Dutch ships.
In this affair Yorke had accomplished the exact opposite of an ambassador’s function—maintenance of mutual amiability cloaking whatever displeasure might lie beneath. In this atmosphere, the deepest and most serious debate in Dutch politics and public opinion erupted, and turned against the British. At issue was a demand of the Amsterdam merchants to the States General for a vote in favor of unlimited convoy, meaning in effect resistance to search and seizure in full performance of the principle of “free ships, free goods.” From the beginning, Britain, in her assumption as dominant sea power of her right to make the rules on the high seas, had bitterly rejected the idea of a mare liberum or “freedom of the seas,” as the United States was later to call it. The Prince-Stadtholder, anxious to keep Britain’s good will, which he saw as his protector against French invasion and more especially against revolutionary overthrow by the pro-French Patriot party, was strongly opposed to unlimited convoy, and the Orangist party of his supporters was no less so. The advocates of convoy, representing the shipping magnates of Amsterdam, the province that paid the bills and exercised the greatest influence in the country, were determined to protect not only their own but the country’s seaborne trade, the stream of its livelihood and source of its prosperity. They foresaw its ruin in unchecked British interference. The debate split the country, although not in class division, for the middle class of farmers, artisans and shopkeepers supported the demand of the merchants, as did many of the proletariat, especially seamen, because they were dependent on seaborne trade and on import of raw materials for the manufacturers who gave them employment. Consequently, they shouted for convoy along with the rich.
The government did not want war for fear of its total interruption of trade. When, after a year’s stormy debate, Amsterdam carried the vote for unlimited convoy, the States General refused to confirm the provincial vote. While the Dutch in the West Indies tried to appease the situation, all men of substance, Adams wrote, “seemed to shudder with fear,” and while Yorke keeps up the commotion, “I shall certainly have no success at all in obtaining a loan.” He found himself avoided “like a pestilence by every man in government.”
VI
The Dutch and the English: Another War
SOON AFTER the old century had turned over into the 18th, the multinational war called the War of the Spanish Succession came to an end. Essentially a war to prevent France from dominating Europe by combining the thrones of Spain and France in one kingship, it flickered out at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 with the successful thwarting of Louis XIV’s boast, “Il n’y a plus de Pyrénées” (There are no more Pyrenees).
For all their worldly success, the Dutch in 1780 were losing their hold through a malfunctioning system of government, conflicting domestic interests, disunited policies and obvious military weakness. Immensely competent in their formative period, brave and determined in the 16th century, enterprising, invincible and even glorious in the 17th, the Dutch had allowed the disunity of their component parts to paralyze effective policy in the 18th century. The fragmented political system could hardly have allowed anything else. The constitution was “so complicated and whimsical a thing,” wrote Adams to the President of the Congress at home, and the structure of government so cumbersome and the antagonisms of the parties so various, as to make his post here “the most difficult embassy in Europe.”
Every province of the Netherlands had its own stadtholder, the provincial office often being given by election to the Prince of Orange in addition to his chief position. William the Silent while Stadtholder had also held the stadtholderships of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht. Every province also had its own Pensionary, an executive office equivalent to the Governor of an American state. Over all, a Grand Pensionary elected by his colleagues functioned as the virtual Prime Minister. The Grand Pensionary of Holland, Pieter Van Bleiswijk, though described by Adams as “a great scholar, linguist, natural philosopher, mathematician and even physician … with great experience in public affairs,” had no force of personality animating these talents and apparently no decided political position one way or another.
Money and empire had not had charms enough to placate separatism in the Netherlands and lure the Dutch toward unity. Business interests, to be sure, had succeeded in amalgamating merchant adventurers in the great trading companies, but the management of naval affairs with the duty to oversee the maintenance of warships was divided among no less than five regional admiralties: at Rotterdam on the Meuse in South Holland, at Amsterdam, Zeeland, Friesland and the “North Quarter.” Their rival interests, conditioned by geographical location, made impossible a national naval policy essential to support an adequate and healthy fleet. The five admiralties could occupy themselves in protection of coastal waters against privateers and other marauders and in the supervision of prize courts and of the rowdy element, in all the port cities, of sailing men, who reportedly numbered some 80,000. Any man who could stand the appalling physical conditions of shipboard life—with its floggings and filth
and poor or inadequate nourishment, plus the storms and the crashing of shells and flying splinters from enemy fire—was likely to be a rough character and, when ashore, ready for any riot or disturbance if discontented with the division of prize money or any other cause, or just to let off steam after being confined on the ship. Though an orderly people with a reputation for propriety and probity, the Dutch, like other nations, had their roughnecks.
In contrast, the governing class, called the Regents, was exclusively patrician. The Regents were the body and soul of Dutch governorship. They filled the offices of town councilors and deputies to the provincial and national states. They held office under a system nominally elective, but no candidate could even be considered for office unless he belonged to a known and substantial family of property and recognized social position, based on fortune and connections. Regents married into each other’s families, supported each other, appointed each other to the important offices of town government—burgomaster, sheriff, captains of militia, members of the town council, directors of financial corporations, including the sacred seventeen who were the East India Company’s Board of Governors—and through town offices to seats as representatives in the provincial and general estates. They kept outsiders outside. The system was the same as—and in fact was derived from—the medieval system of filling the offices of local government. As it became entrenched, the whole of the Republic came to be dominated after the Abjuration of 1581 by an oligarchy of the upper middle class representing some 10,000 persons, one-eighth the number of working sailors. Yet, whether sailor or Regent, every man called himself a Haarlemer or Leydener, or Amsterdammer, identifying with his city rather than with the nation—to its loss.
Complacent and conservative, the Regents shared the point of view toward the working class of any privileged class prior to the French Revolution, seeing them as the “little people”—the popolo minuto, as the Italians called them—and were not shy about expressing it. “While the burgher is small,” said a Regent of Dordrecht, whose family had been Regents in his city for generations, “he should be kept small.” It was a calm assertion of the social order established, as was firmly believed, by the Almighty.
The belief of the Regents—like that of the English governing class, who undertook the actual work of government, and unlike the French gratin, who did nothing for the state but fuss about protocol and precedence based on the relative antiquity of their respective titles—was that they were qualified for the task, whereas “unqualified and mean persons,” in the words of Jan de Witt, called “the perfect Hollander,” should have nothing to do with government or administration “which must be reserved for qualified people alone.” As Grand Pensionary or Governor of the province of Holland and the most effective statesman his country had produced to date, Jan de Witt could justifiably call himself qualified, except perhaps in political tact. Too open in his contempt for the commoners, de Witt made himself hated, with the result that he and his brother Cornelis were torn to pieces by a lynch mob in 1672, when the commoners, suffering the fury of a French invasion, believed the de Witts were responsible for failing to prevent it. The murder was a strange paradox of extremism to erupt through the orderly surface of Dutch life.
The Regents of the Netherlands upholding a tradition of care for the poor, not always a feature of a comfortable ruling class, supported a system of public charity that impressed foreign visitors. In Amsterdam every house had a box hanging by a chain on which was written “Think of the Poor.” Small change from every merchants’ sale was deposited and the boxes kept locked until the deacons came on their rounds to retrieve the money. Twice a week they rang a bell at every house to ask what donation the resident might be expected to leave in the box. Amsterdam’s almshouse for the aged and indigent was a handsome building with a charming garden, which is still selected as a tourist sight in guidebooks. Orphanages, hospitals for “lame and decrepit” soldiers, shelters for aged sailors and for care of the insane were part of the system whose acts of charity were thought by William Carr, a contemporary English visitor, to “surpass all other cities in the world.”
Political voice was confined to the upper class. Because commoners without property qualification had no franchise, there could be no popular vote. Policy was decided by vote of the States General depending upon an authorizing vote in the provincial states, which were headed by burgomasters of the town councils and made up of two councilors, two burgomasters, two schepens or judges and the Pensionary of the province. Though an important person, the Pensionary was under the authority of the burgomasters.
The political system reached an extremity of nominal democracy. Decisions of policy by the States General had to be referred back to the provincial states for a positive or negative vote, and by them to the town councils and by them forwarded back to the States General, with the result that a decision might have to be discussed by some 2,000 people representing fifty cities. As has been said of the Polish Diet, “They created chaos and called it a constitution.” The result in delay and subdivision of authority was another sacrifice of efficiency to fear of dictatorship—sometimes, in cases of crisis, with serious consequences. In a petty case the problem was epitomized when the Grand Pensionary in an interview with the French Ambassador on an urgent matter was asked for an early answer to report back to the King. He replied, in despair and almost in tears, “You know I cannot get an answer in three weeks.”
Though a tight and narrow company representing only one economic and social section of the population, Dutch government was so restricted by its method of policymaking as to be as impotent as Gulliver tied down by the strings of the Lilliputians. The system, as Adams, disenchanted, soon found out when he had to work with it, was a “complicated and perplexed constitution.” In the first place, where was sovereignty? For nationals no less than for foreigners it was hard to locate. Nominally it resided in the Prince-Stadtholder, but did the last word lie with him or with their High Mightinesses of the States General representing the union of the seven United Provinces? The presidency of the States General rotated weekly among the deputies, hardly an effective method of functioning, but the Dutch seemed so afraid of any ruler gaining dictatorial control that they preferred an almost ridiculous precaution to the dangers of efficiency. Americans, too, in designing their constitution dreaded any whiff of monarchy, but they managed simply to write it out of bounds rather than put the chief of their deliberative body in a condition of helpless desuetude. In general, the Americans, facing many of the same decisions of statehood as the Dutch, came to more sensible solutions, no doubt because they were fortunate in the sensible and sophisticated political thinkers to whom their constitution is owed.
The chief of state was the Stadtholder, formerly the representative or viceroy for the Emperor Charles V in his capacity as King of Spain, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had come into possession of the Low Countries or Netherlands by inheritance from Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, son of the King of France, and from the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian through a convoluted set of relationships and dynastic marriages which we may ignore. Possession passed, when Charles V abdicated in 1555, to his son Philip II.
In 1579, year of the Union of Utrecht, the office of Stadtholder, then held by William the Silent, was made hereditary, though not royal. At independence it was occupied by his grandson William II. A young man with the Orange family truculence, he opposed the terms of independence at the Treaty of Münster because he believed there should be no dealing with Spain but only war to the bitter end. More significantly, he married the eldest daughter of Charles I of England, starting the succession by the Oranges of marriages to princesses of England that forged the connection with the English royal family in spite of past wars and future quarrels. Their son, William III of Orange, made the most noticeable of these alliances when he married Mary, daughter of James II of England. When her father was ousted in the overthrow called the Glorious Revolution of 1688, his Dutch son-in-law was invit
ed to succeed him. Fitting neatly into the English numerical line, William accepted the invitation and became King of England as William III, ruling jointly with his consort as William and Mary. As England’s King and, in his Dutch capacity, as ally, William was the centerpiece and driving force of the European coalition to stem the advance of Louis XIV for the control of Europe. Louis, seeing him as his chief European enemy, hated him vengefully and set his mind to destroy him and regain the former French Netherlands along the frontier. In his insatiable lust for extending French territory, Louis XIV was the prime generator of the epidemic of wars that afflicted Europe during his mature reign (c. 1660–1715). His drive for supremacy, and the determination of his fellow-nations to contain him, was the source of ceaseless conflicts at every border, most famously represented by the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, and by its chief captain, the Duke of Marlborough. “But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out,” says the old grandfather in answer to the child’s question in Southey’s poem. With a greater perspective, we can suggest the answer. What they fought for was that bodiless yet weighty matter called the balance of power—essentially, that France should not gain supremacy in Europe by absorbing the dominions of the Hapsburg or Spanish empires.
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