Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: British and French Relations with the Netherlands, 1785-1815 Graeme Edward Callister PhD University of York Department of History September 2013 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the interplay of public opinion, national identity and foreign policy during the period 1785-1815, focusing on three consistently interconnected countries: the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. The Netherlands provides the centrepiece to the study, which considers how the Dutch were perceived as a nation, a people and as a political entity, at both governmental and popular levels, in the three countries throughout the period. Public opinion is theorised as a two-part phenomenon. Active public opinion represents the collated thoughts and responses of a certain public to an event or set of circumstances. Latent public opinion represents the sum of generally-accepted underlying social norms, stereotypes or preconceptions; the perceptions and representations latently present in unconscious mentalités. The thesis examines how perceptions and representations of the Netherlands in all three countries fed into public opinion and, ultimately, into national identity either of the self or the ‘other’. It then investigates the extent to which the triangular policies of Britain, France and the various incarnations of the Dutch state were shaped by popular perceptions, identities and opinion. While active opinion is shown to have generally been of negligible importance to the policy-making process, it is argued that the underlying themes of latent opinion often provided the conceptual background that politicians from all three countries used to make policy. The influence of latent opinion was often as much unconscious as deliberate. Latent opinion was rarely the inspiration for foreign policy, but it frequently provided the boundaries of expectation within which policy was formed. 2 CONTENTS Abstract 2 Contents 3 List of Maps and Illustrations 4 Acknowledgements 5 Author’s Declaration 6 Introduction: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, 1785-1815 8 Chapter One: France, Britain and the Netherlands, 1785-1815 49 Chapter Two: Public Opinion and National Identity in the Netherlands 80 Chapter Three: Defending the Nation: Public Opinion and National Identity 109 in Dutch Foreign Policy Chapter Four: ‘Canaux, Canards, Canaille’? French Public Opinion and the 148 Netherlands Chapter Five: Aristocrats, Democrats, Autocrats: Public Opinion, National Identity 173 and French Foreign Policy Chapter Six: Another ‘Other’: British Public Opinion, National Identity and the 209 Netherlands Chapter Seven: Behind Britannia’s Trident: Public Opinion and National Identity 235 in British Foreign Policy Conclusion 272 List of Abbreviations 286 Bibliography 287 3 LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS William Faden, A Map of the Seven United Provinces (1789) 7 William Dent, French Liberality, or, an Attempt to Conquer the 8 World by Being too Civil by Half (1792) Philip James de Loutherbourg, The Battle of Camperdown (1799) 49 Anon., Dumouriez and the Hollander (1793) 80 J. A. le Campion, Action Entre les Patriotes et les Prussiens (c.1788) 109 Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Entrée des Français dans la Hollande, 148 le 21 Janvier 1795 (1802) J. Kuyper, Feest der Alliantie/ Fête de l’Alliance (1796) 173 Isaac Cruikshank, A New Dutch Exercise (1793) 209 Isaac Cruikshank, The Coalition, a Scene on the Continent (1795) 233 Isaac Cruikshank, The First Articles in Requisition at Amsterdam or the 233 Sans Culotts become Touts Culotts (1795) William Holland, Dutch Embarkation, or, Needs Must When the Devil Drives!! (1804) 234 James Hill, The Dutch in the Dumps (1805) 234 Thomas Rowlandson, A Long Pull A Strong Pull and a Pull Together (1813) 235 The United Kingdom of the Netherlands, France and Britain, 1815-30 272 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my gratitude to the many people who helped with the research and writing of this thesis. First I would like to thank my supervisor, Alan Forrest, for all his help, suggestions, input and insight throughout the research and writing process. Many an idea was formulated and many an argument honed during a gentle chat over a cup of tea or coffee. I am extremely grateful for all of his assistance. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis advisory panel, Henrice Altink and Geoff Cubitt, for their useful feedback, advice and constructive criticism, which has been invaluable to this work. This PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, without whom this thesis would not have been written. They have my thanks. I would also like to record my appreciation for the help that I received from the staff of the many libraries and archives that I visited for this project in Britain, France and the Netherlands. Many people have had to sit through presentations or papers culled from this thesis that I have given at conferences and seminars over the past few years; although I cannot thank everybody individually, I am deeply appreciative for the suggestions, comments and critiques that people have offered to me. I thank you all. I would equally like to show my gratitude to various friends, colleagues, peers and academics who have chatted over aspects of my thesis with me, and helped me see some of the issues with greater clarity. I am also grateful to my friend and fellow Revolutionist Amy Milka, whose research seemed to turn up more sources for my thesis than it did for her own. Finally I would like to thank my family, friends and Rach for their support over the past few years. 5 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION This thesis is entirely my own work. It has not been submitted for examination elsewhere and all references to work by any other author are clearly cited. Some of the research from this thesis has already appeared in a different form in the following article: Graeme Callister, ‘The City and the Revolutionary Dutch Nation, 1780-1800’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, Volume 36, No. 3 (November 2012), 228-43. 6 William Faden, A Map of the Seven United Provinces (1789) (Image courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal) 7 INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC OPINION AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1785-1815 William Dent, French Liberality (1792) (British Museum Satires 8136: © Trustees of the British Museum) 8 The history of the Netherlands in the eighteenth century is tightly bound to that of France and Great Britain. The three near-neighbours had long been connected through diplomacy, trade, continental and colonial rivalries, and even through governments, a situation perhaps most clearly outlined in 1688 when a Dutchman bearing a French title ascended the throne of England.1 A tripartite relationship that came close to equality at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 evolved until the Netherlands ranked far below the other powers in terms of international influence as the eighteenth century drew to a close. The final year of the century saw the armies of Britain and France come to blows on the territory of their weakened neighbour. The Netherlands had long held a place in Anglo-French rivalry. Annie Jourdan asserted that it had been the ‘pomme de discorde’ between France and Britain for over 150 years.2 Both powers saw the Netherlands as key to their security and prosperity, and both liked to think of it metaphorically as their own. Edmund Burke called the Netherlands ‘as necessary a part of this country as Kent’;3 Napoleon famously announced that it was no more than ‘an emanation’ of France.4 The fate of the Netherlands was one of the major issues in the contest between Britain and France in the period 1785-1815. Britain remained committed to freeing the Netherlands from French influence, while France continued to see her presence in the Netherlands as the only way of keeping the Dutch from the British yoke. The fate of the Netherlands was among the principal causes of war in 1793 and 1803, and the settlement of the Netherlands in 1814 was a top priority to London. Britain committed substantial forces to fight in the Netherlands five times between France’s declaration of war in 1793 and Battle of Waterloo in 1815. For France, the period of war with Britain was bookended by two failed invasions of the Netherlands, sandwiching the conquest of 1795 and subsequent almost continuous military occupation until the collapse of French control in 1813. The Netherlands itself has received little attention in international histories of this period. Many narrative histories portray the Dutch as passive actors, and some barely mention the 1 The Principality of Orange, from which the Princes of Orange got their title, is in southern France. Herbert H. Rowen, The Princes of Orange, the Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge, 1988), p.8. Also James Jones, ‘French Intervention in English and Dutch Politics, 1677-88’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Knights Errant and True Englishmen: British Foreign Policy, 1660-1800 (Edinburgh, 1989), 1-23. 2 Annie Jourdan, ‘Les Gaulois en Batavie: des Relations Diplomatiques Machiavéliques’, in Annie Jourdan & Joep Leerssen (eds.), Remous Révolutionnaires: République Batave, Armée Française (Amsterdam, 1996), p.92. 3 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford, 2006), p.67. 4 Journal de l’Empire, 18 June 1811. 9 Netherlands at all.5 The major characters in the drama of north-western Europe and its colonial outposts are Britain and France; the Netherlands is explored only as a backdrop, context to the situation, or a conduit for the rivalry between the two greater powers. Even the Patriot upheavals of the 1780s were for a long time interpreted as a proxy conflict between French-backed Patriots and Anglo-Prussian-backed Orangists.6 Although the idea of primary Dutch agency in the Patriot years has been somewhat rehabilitated,7 the latter two decades of this period are widely accepted as having been a time of the French, with the Dutch relegated further to a small part of a much larger whole.