Daendels had obtained permission to leave the French service and had assumed command of the Dutch troops. A strange conglomeration of troops, by the way, not unlike the mercenary armies of the Middle Ages: regiments composed of every nationality—Swiss grenadiers and Saxon cavalry, Scotch life guards and Mecklenburg chasseurs, a few Dutch engineers and some Waldeck infantry; the officers partly Dutch, but mostly foreign; the higher officers mostly in exile; the lower ones awaiting the day when their friend the Prince should return. Surely before this army could be reorganized into a national army of 24,000 well-equipped men, hot-blooded Daendels would have a chance to exercise that swift temper of his. For after a year of drilling there was not even a single company that could be depended upon in a regular skirmish in time of war.
With the fleet the government did not experience such very great difficulties. The fifteen millions necessary for reorganization had been quickly collected, and Paulus a specialist on this subject, had gone to work with a will. The old officers and men had either left the service, or had surrendered their ships to the English as the allies of their commander-in-chief, the Stadholder. But there were enough sailors in the country to man the ships. Such of the old ships as had remained in Dutch harbours were rebaptized with more appropriate names—the William the Silent became the Brutus, the Estates General was renamed the George Washington, and the Princess Wilhelmina was delicately changed to the Fury—and twenty-four new ships of the line and twenty-four frigates were planned for immediate construction.
Capetown captured by the English
After half a year Admiral de Winter (former second lieutenant of the navy and French general of infantry) was ready to leave Texel with the first Batavian fleet. He sailed from Texel with a couple of ships, and after having been beaten by an English squadron off the coast of Norway, he returned to Texel with a few ships less. Two special squadrons were then equipped and ordered to proceed to the West and East Indian Colonies; but before they left the republic news was received of the conquest of these colonies by the British, and the auxiliary squadrons were given up as useless.
Now all these puzzling questions facing untrained politicians took so much of their time that nothing was apparently done toward the great goal of this entire revolution—the establishment of a national assembly to draw up a constitution and put the country upon a definite legitimate basis.
The country began to show a certain restlessness. The old Orangeists smiled. "They knew what all this desultory business meant. Provisional, indeed? Provisional for all times." The more extreme Patriots, who knew how sedition of this sort was preached all over the land, showed signs of irritation. "It was not good that the opposition could say such things. Something must be done and be done at once. Would the Provisional kindly hurry?"
But when the Provisional did not hurry, and when nothing was done toward a materialization of the much-heralded constitution, the Jacobins bethought themselves of what they had learned in their Parisian boarding school and decided to start a lobby—a revolutionary lobby, if you please; not a peaceful one which works in the dark and follows the evil paths of free cigars and free meals and free theatre tickets. No, a lobby with a recognized standing, a clubhouse visible to all, and rules and by-laws and a well-trained army of retainers to be drawn upon whenever noise and threats could influence the passing of a particular bill.
On the 26th of August, 1795, there assembled in The Hague more than sixty representatives from different provincial patriotic clubs. The purpose of the meeting was "to obtain a national assembly for the formation of a constitution based upon the immovable rights of men—Liberty and Equality—and having as its direct purpose the absolute unity of this good land." Here at last was a program which sounded like something definite—"the absolute unity of this land."