The Return of Rationalism

chapter 7 The Return of Rationalism

1 The Restoration of the Stadholderate

In the Dutch Republic by the middle of the century a political revolution oc- curred which was simultaneously deeply conservative and democratically inspired.1 In 1702, after the passing away of William III, the stadholderate of the House of Orange had come to an end in Holland and Zeeland. Only in Friesland and Groningen did a branch of the Nassau-Dietz family, cousins to William III, continue to serve as stadholders. During the 1730s the young heir to this branch, William IV, who was born in 1711 and who had added the stadhol- derates of Drenthe and Gelderland to his offices, gradually started to strength- en his position. First, he married Anne of Hannover (1707–1759), daughter of King George II (1683–1760). Thus, he copied the example set by William II (1626–1650), who in 1641 had married Mary Stuart (1631–1660), daughter of Charles I (1600–1649). Next, he made a bid for the office of captain-general of the army. But just as in 1672, when it had taken a national crisis involving a French military invasion to elevate William III to this office as well as to the stadholderate, in 1747 William IV was offered these offices too, finally turning him into the stadholder of all the United Provinces. Again, the Orangists capi- talised on growing indignation among the wider population over the increasingly corrupt and self-serving policies of the regenten elites ruling the major cities and the States General. Again, a Prince of Orange was called for to pro- tect the common man from the ‘aristocrats’. And again, a French invasion had served as the occasion for Orangist activists to silence the Staatsgezinden. This invasion, which turned out far less dangerous than the one led seven- ty-five years previously by the prince de Condé (1621–1686) and was never in- tended to occupy the territory of the Republic, was part of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), in which the Dutch Republic had joined Great Britain and the Habsburg monarchy facing France, Prussia and Spain. Unlike his distant cousin, however, who was to emerge from 1672 as the saviour of the Republic and ended up on the British throne, William IV soon died, in 1751, without having achieved much besides securing the stadholderate for the

1 Fruin, Geschiedenis der staatsinstellingen, 321 ff; Rowen, The Princes of Orange; Kossmann, ‘The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century’; De Jongste, ‘The Restoration of the Orangist Regime’; Israel, The Dutch Republic, Chapter 40.

House of Orange. It should be borne in mind of course that he was simply not given the time to rejuvenate the Republic, but he did produce an heir. In 1766 his eighteen-year-old son William V was able to succeed his father, but very much his father’s son, until his flight in 1795 to England he refused to consider major reforms in the running of the Dutch Republic, which was subject to an ever increasing loss of power and status. By the early 1780s the Fourth Anglo- Dutch War humiliated the Dutch Republic and left it in a state of domestic chaos, ultimately leading to civil war. When in April 1747 a French army crossed the borders of Zeeland, it entered a country suffering from declining employment and rising prices. The Dutch overseas trading system had collapsed and Dutch investors massively trans- ported their fortunes abroad. The Dutch fishery industry dwindled.2 Especially during the second quarter of the century, cities had been struggling financially, while the countryside was hit by the cattle plague, wiping out hundreds of thousands of cattle. For the first time in the history of the Republic, population figures of cities such as Leiden, Gouda, Rotterdam, and Haarlem started to drop. Under these circumstances the financial demands put on the Republic by its involvement in the Austrian War of Succession resulted in tax measures that seriously undermined the credibility of the ruling elites, which during the first half of the eighteenth century had grown into an increasingly aristocratic oligarchy. The number of families involved in running the cities, the provinces, and ultimately the Republic itself decreased, while complaints about abuse of power by those in office abounded.3 Willem Munter (1682–1759), who between 1726 and 1748 was elected ten times to the Amsterdam vroedschap, by the end of his last term managed to appoint two grandsons aged four and one one year old as postmasters, ensuring them of an annual income of some 5,000 guilders. As early as 1730 burgomaster Jan Six II (1668–1750) had donated a postmasters post worth nearly 12,000 guilders a year to his newborn son Jan III (1730–1778).4 Other patrician families from Amsterdam such as the Hoofts and the Van de

2 Van Dillen, Van rijkdom en regenten, Chapters 16–23; Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, Chapters 9 and 10, and The Dutch Republic, Chapter 37; De Vries and Van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, Chapter 13. 3 During the 1980s a remarkable series of in-depth analyses of the eighteenth-century elites of Holland (in Hoorn, Haarlem, Gouda, and Leiden) appeared: Kooijmans, Onder regenten; De Jongste, Onrust aan het Spaarne; De Jong, Met goed fatsoen; Prak, Gezeten burgers. 4 Elias, De vroedschap van Amsterdam, I, cxl-cxlv; Van Dillen, Van rijkdom en regenten, 470. Van Dillen argues that eighteenth-century corruption among the regents was nothing new, as their Golden Age ancestors had resorted to similar practices. Growing pressure on the middle classes and the emergence of poverty on a new scale rendered these practices more con- spicuous, according to Van Dillen.