Holland: The History of the Netherlands

by Thomas Colley Grattan

Conferences were opened at Breda, but interrupted almost as soon as commenced. Hostilities were renewed. The memorable battle of Fontenoy was offered and gloriously fought by the allies; accepted and splendidly won by the French. Never did the English and Dutch troops act more nobly in concert than on this remarkable occasion. The valor of the French was not less conspicuous; and the success of the day was in a great measure decided by the Irish battalions, sent, by the lamentable politics of those and much later days, to swell the ranks and gain the battles of England's enemies. Marshal Saxe followed up his advantage the following year, taking Brussels and many other towns. Almost the whole of the Austrian Netherlands being now in the power of Louis XV., and the United Provinces again exposed to invasion and threatened with danger, they had once more recourse to the old expedient of the elevation of the House of Orange, which in times of imminent peril seemed to present a never-failing palladium. Zealand was the first to give the impulsion; the other provinces soon followed the example; and William IV. was proclaimed stadtholder and captain-general, amid the almost unanimous rejoicings of all. These dignities were soon after declared hereditary both in the male and female line of succession of the House of Orange Nassau.

The year 1748 saw the termination of the brilliant campaigns of Louis XV. during this bloody war of eight years' continuance. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, definitively signed on the 18th of October, put an end to hostilities; Maria Theresa was established in her rights and power; and Europe saw a fair balance of the nations, which gave promise of security and peace. But the United Provinces, when scarcely recovering from struggles which had so checked their prosperity, were employed in new and universal grief and anxiety by the death of their young stadtholder, which happened at The Hague, October 13, 1751. He had long been kept out of the government, though by no means deficient in the talents suited to his station. His son, William V., aged but three years and a half, succeeded him, under the guardianship of his mother, Anne of England, daughter of George II., a princess represented to be of a proud and ambitious temper, who immediately assumed a high tone of authority in the state.

The war of seven years, which agitated the north of Europe, and deluged its plains with blood, was almost the only one in which the republic was able to preserve a strict neutrality throughout. But this happy state of tranquillity was not, as on former occasions, attended by that prodigious increase of commerce, and that accumulation of wealth, which had so often astonished the world. Differing with England on the policy which led the latter to weaken and humiliate France, jealousies sprung up between the two countries, and Dutch commerce became the object of the most vexatious and injurious efforts on the part of England. Remonstrance was vain; resistance impossible; and the decline of the republic hurried rapidly on. The Hanseatic towns, the American colonies, the northern states of Europe, and France itself, all entered into the rivalry with Holland, in which, however, England carried off the most important prizes. Several private and petty encounters took place between the vessels of England and Holland, in consequence of the pretensions of the former to the right of search; and had the republic possessed the ability of former periods, and the talents of a Tromp or a De Ruyter, a new war would no doubt have been the result. But it was forced to submit; and a degrading but irritating tranquillity was the consequence for several years; the national feelings receiving a salve for home-decline by some extension of colonial settlements in the East, in which the island of Ceylon was included.

In the midst of this inglorious state of things, and the domestic abundance which was the only compensation for the gradual loss of national influence, the installation of William V., in 1766; his marriage with the princess of Prussia, niece of Frederick the Great, in 1768; and the birth of two sons, the eldest on the 24th of August, 1772; successively took place. Magnificent fetes celebrated these events; the satisfied citizens little imagining, amid their indolent rejoicings, the dismal futurity of revolution and distress which was silently but rapidly preparing for their country.

Maria Theresa, reduced to widowhood by the death of her husband, whom she had elevated to the imperial dignity by the title of Francis I., continued for a while to rule singly her vast possessions; and had profited so little by the sufferings of her own early reign that she joined in the iniquitous dismemberment of Poland, which has left an indelible stain on her memory, and on that of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. In her own dominions she was adored; and her name is to this day cherished in Belgium among the dearest recollections of the people.

The impulsion given to the political mind of Europe by the revolution in North America was soon felt in the Netherlands. The wish for reform was not merely confirmed to the people. A memorable instance was offered by Joseph II., son and successor of Maria Theresa, that sovereigns were not only susceptible of rational notions of change, but that the infection of radical extravagance could penetrate even to the imperial crown. Disgusted by the despotism exercised by the clergy of Belgium, Joseph commenced his reign by measures that at once roused a desperate spirit of hostility in the priesthood, and soon spread among the bigoted mass of the people, who were wholly subservient to their will. Miscalculating his own power, and undervaluing that of the priests, the emperor issued decrees and edicts with a sweeping violence that shocked every prejudice and roused every passion perilous to the country. Toleration to the Protestants, emancipation of the clergy from the papal yoke, reformation in the system of theological instruction, were among the wholesale measures of the emperor's enthusiasm, so imprudently attempted and so virulently opposed.

But ere the deep-sown seeds of bigotry ripened to revolt, or produced the fruit of active resistance in Belgium, Holland had to endure the mortification of another war with England. The republic resolved on a futile imitation of the northern powers, who had adopted the difficult and anomalous system of an armed neutrality, for the prevention of English domination on the seas. The right of search, so proudly established by this power, was not likely to be wrenched from it by manifestoes or remonstrances; and Holland was not capable of a more effectual warfare. In the year 1781, St. Eustache, Surinam, Essequibo, and Demerara, were taken by British valor; and in the following year several of the Dutch colonies in the East, well fortified but ill defended, also fell into the hands of England. Almost the whole of those colonies, the remnants of prodigious power acquired by such incalculable instances of enterprise and courage, were one by one assailed and taken. But this did not suffice for the satisfaction of English objects in the prosecution of the war. It was also resolved to deprive Holland of the Baltic trade. A squadron of seven vessels, commanded by Sir Hyde Parker, was encountered on the Dogher Bank by a squadron of Dutch ships of the same force under Admiral Zoutman. An action of four hours was maintained with all the ancient courage which made so many of the memorable sea-fights between Tromp, De Ruyter, Blake, and Monk drawn battles. A storm separated the combatants, and saved the honor of each; for both had suffered alike, and victory had belonged to neither. The peace of 1784 terminated this short, but, to Holland, fatal war; the two latter years of which had been, in the petty warfare of privateering, most disastrous to the commerce of the republic. Negapatam, on the coast of Coromandel, and the free navigation of the Indian seas, were ceded to England, who occupied the other various colonies taken during the war.

Opinion was now rapidly opening out to that spirit of intense inquiry which arose in France, and threatened to sweep before it not only all that was corrupt, but everything that tended to corruption. It is in the very essence of all kinds of power to have that tendency, and, if not checked by salutary means, to reach that end. But the reformers of the last century, new in the desperate practice of revolutions, seeing its necessity, but ignorant of its nature, neither did nor could place bounds to the careering whirlwind that they raised. The well-meaning but intemperate changes essayed by Joseph II. in Belgium had a considerable share in the development of free principles, although they at first seemed only to excite the resistance of bigotry and strengthen the growth of superstition. Holland was always alive to those feelings of resistance, to established authority which characterize republican opinions; and the general discontent at the result of the war with England gave a good excuse to the pretended patriotism which only wanted change, while it professed reform. The stadtholder saw clearly the storm which was gathering, and which menaced his power. Anxious for the present, and uncertain for the future, he listened to the suggestions of England, and resolved to secure and extend by foreign force the rights of which he risked the loss from domestic faction.

In the divisions which were now loudly proclaimed among the states in favor of or opposed to the House of Orange, the people, despising all new theories which they did not comprehend, took open part with the family so closely connected with every practical feeling of good which their country had yet known. The states of Holland soon proceeded to measures of violence. Resolved to limit the power of the stadtholder, they deprived him of the command of the garrison of The Hague, and of all the other troops of the province; and, shortly afterward, declared him removed from all his employments. The violent disputes and vehement discussions consequent upon this measure throughout the republic announced an inevitable commotion. The advance of a Prussian army toward the frontiers inflamed the passions of one party and strengthened the confidence of the other. An incident which now happened brought about the crisis even sooner than was expected. The Princess of Orange left her palace at Loo to repair to The Hague; and travelling with great simplicity and slightly attended, she was arrested and detained by a military post on the frontiers of the province of Holland. The neighboring magistrates of the town of Woesden refused her permission to continue her journey, and forced her to return to Loo under such surveillance as was usual with a prisoner of state. The stadtholder and the English ambassador loudly complained of this outrage. The complaint was answered by the immediate advance of the duke of Brunswick with twenty thousand Prussian soldiers. Some demonstrations of resistance were made by the astonished party whose outrageous conduct had provoked the measure; but in three weeks' time the whole of the republic was in perfect obedience to the authority of the stadtholder, who resumed all his functions of chief magistrate, with the additional influence which was sure to result from a vain and unjustifiable attempt to reduce his former power. We regret to be beyond the reach of Mr. Ellis's interesting but unpublished work, detailing the particulars of this revolution. The former persual of a copy of it only leaves a recollection of its admirable style and the leading facts, but not of the details with sufficient accuracy to justify more than a general reference to the work itself.

By this time the discontent and agitation in Belgium had attained a most formidable height. The attempted reformation in religion and judicial abuses persisted in by the emperor were represented, by a party whose existence was compromised by reform, as nothing less than sacrilege and tyranny, and blindly rejected by a people still totally unfitted for rational enlightenment in points of faith, or practices of civilization. Remonstrances and strong complaints were soon succeeded by tumultuous assemblages and open insurrection. A lawyer of Brussels, named Vander Noot, put himself at the head of the malcontents. The states-general of Brabant declared the new measures of the emperor to be in opposition to the constitution and privileges of the country. The other Belgian provinces soon followed this example. The prince Albert of Saxe-Teschen, and the archduchess Maria Theresa, his wife, were at this period joint governors-general of the Austrian Netherlands. At the burst of rebellion they attempted to temporize; but this only strengthened the revolutionary party, while the emperor wholly disapproved their measures and recalled them to Vienna.