First Stadtholderless Period - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The First Stadtholderless Period or Era (1650–72; ) is the period in the history of the Dutch Republic

Dutch Republic

The Dutch Republic — officially known as the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands , the Republic of the United Netherlands, or the Republic of the Seven United Provinces — was a republic in Europe existing from 1581 to 1795, preceding the Batavian Republic and ultimately...

in which the office of a Stadtholder

Stadtholder

A Stadtholder A Stadtholder A Stadtholder (Dutch: stadhouder [], "steward" or "lieutenant", literally place holder, holding someones place, possibly a calque of German Statthalter, French lieutenant, or Middle Latin locum tenens...

was absent in five of the seven Dutch provinces (the provinces of Friesland

Friesland

Friesland is a province in the north of the Netherlands and part of the ancient region of Frisia.Until the end of 1996, the province bore Friesland as its official name. In 1997 this Dutch name lost its official status to the Frisian Fryslân...

and Groningen

Groningen (province)

Groningen [] is the northeasternmost province of the Netherlands. In the east it borders the German state of Niedersachsen , in the south Drenthe, in the west Friesland and in the north the Wadden Sea...

, however, retained their customary stadtholder from the cadet branch of the House of Orange). It happened to coincide with the period when it reached the zenith of its economic, military and political Golden Age

Dutch Golden Age

The Golden Age was a period in Dutch history, roughly spanning the 17th century, in which Dutch trade, science, military and art were among the most acclaimed in the world. The first half is characterised by the Eighty Years' War till 1648...

. The term has acquired a negative connotation in 19th-century Orangist Dutch historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

, because of its stadtholderness. Whether such a negative view is justified is debatable, however. The republicans argue that the Dutch state functioned very well under the regime of Grand Pensionary

Grand Pensionary

The Grand Pensionary was the most important Dutch official during the time of the United Provinces. In theory he was only a civil servant of the Estates of the dominant province among the Seven United Provinces: the county of Holland...

Johan de Witt

Johan de Witt, heer van Zuid- en Noord-Linschoten, Snelrewaard, Hekendorp and IJsselveere was a key figure in Dutch politics in the mid 17th century, when its flourishing sea trade in a period of globalization made the United Provinces a leading European power during the Dutch Golden Age...

, despite the fact that it was forced to fight two major wars with England, and several minor wars with other European powers. Thanks to the temporary relative weakness of other European Great Powers, like France, and the Holy Roman Empire

Holy Roman Empire

The Holy Roman Empire was a realm that existed from 962 to 1806 in Central Europe.It was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor. Its character changed during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, when the power of the emperor gradually weakened in favour of the princes...

, the Republic for a while was able to dominate the "European Concert" of nations, even imposing a pax neerlandica in the Scandinavian area. A convenient war with Portugal enabled the Dutch East India Company

Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

to take over the remnants of the Portuguese empire in Ceylon and South India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. After the end of the war with Spain in 1648, and the attendant end of the Spanish embargo on trade with the Republic that had favored the English, Dutch commerce swept everything before it, in the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean and the Levant, as well as in the Baltic. Dutch industry, especially textiles, was as yet not hindered by protectionism. As a consequence, the Republic's economy enjoyed its last great economic boom.

Politically, the Staatsgezinde (Republican) faction of the ruling Dutch Regents

Regenten

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the regenten were the rulers of the Dutch Republic, the leaders of the Dutch cities or the heads of organisations . Though not formally a hereditary "class", they were de facto "patricians", comparable to that ancient Roman class...

such as Cornelis de Graeff

Cornelis de Graeff

Cornelis de Graeff, also Cornelis de Graeff van Polsbroek was the most illustrious member of the De Graeff family. He was a mayor of Amsterdam from the Dutch Golden Age and a powerful Amsterdam regent after the sudden death of stadholder William II of Orange...

and Andries Bicker

Andries Bicker

Andries Bicker was a wealthy merchant on Moscovia, a member of the vroedschap, the leader of the Arminians, an administrator of the VOC, representative of the States-General of the Netherlands and colonel in the Civic guard...

reigned supreme, even thinking up an ideological justification of republicanism (the "True Freedom") that went against the contemporary European trend of monarchical absolutism

Absolutism (European history)

Absolutism or The Age of Absolutism is a historiographical term used to describe a form of monarchical power that is unrestrained by all other institutions, such as churches, legislatures, or social elites...

, but previewed "modern" political ideas that eventually found their fullest expression in the American and French constitutions of the 18th century. There was a "monarchical" opposing undertow, however, from the adherents of the House of Orange that wanted to restore the young Prince of Orange

Prince of Orange

Prince of Orange is a title of nobility, originally associated with the Principality of Orange, in what is now southern France. In French it is la Principauté d'Orange....

to the position of Stadtholder that his father, grandfather, great-uncle, and great-grandfather had held. The republicans attempted to rule this out by constitutional prohibitions, like the Act of Seclusion

Act of Seclusion

The Act of Seclusion is a secret annex in the Treaty of Westminster between the United Provinces and the Commonwealth of England in which William III, Prince of Orange, was excluded from the office of Stadtholder...

, but were eventually unsuccessful in the crisis of the Rampjaar

Rampjaar

The rampjaar was the year 1672 in Dutch history. In that year,the Republic of the Seven United Provinces was after the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War and the Third Anglo-Dutch War attacked by England, France, and the prince-electors Bernhard von Galen, bishop of Münster and Maximilian Henry of...

(Year of Disaster) of 1672, that brought about the fall of the De Witt-regime.

Prequel: The Stadtholderate of William II

The office of Stadtholder of a province predated the Republic. In the Habsburg Netherlands

Habsburg Netherlands

The Habsburg Netherlands was a geo-political entity covering the whole of the Low Countries from 1482 to 1556/1581 and solely the Southern Netherlands from 1581 to 1794...

the Stadtholders were the representatives of the Sovereign (lately Philip II of Spain

Philip II of Spain

Philip II was King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and, while married to Mary I, King of England and Ireland. He was lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories such as duke or count....

in his capacity of duke or count), who performed important constitutional functions, like appointing city magistrates (usually from double lists, drawn up by the vroedschap

Vroedschap

The vroedschap was the name for the city council in the early modern Netherlands; the member of such a council was called a vroedman, literally a "wise man"...

), and in times of war acting as provincial commander-in-chief. William the Silent

William the Silent

William I, Prince of Orange , also widely known as William the Silent , or simply William of Orange , was the main leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that set off the Eighty Years' War and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces in 1648. He was born in the House of...

had been such a stadtholder in Holland and Zeeland under the Habsburg regime, until he was removed from office in 1567. After the Dutch Revolt

Dutch Revolt

The Dutch Revolt or the Revolt of the Netherlands This article adopts 1568 as the starting date of the war, as this was the year of the first battles between armies. However, since there is a long period of Protestant vs...

broke out, he simply reassumed that office in 1572 with the connivance of the rebel States of Holland

States of Holland

The States of Holland and West Frisia were the representation of the two Estates to the court of the Count of Holland...

, but still pretended to act in the name of the king. When the rebel provinces formed their defensive Union of Utrecht

Union of Utrecht

The Union of Utrecht was a treaty signed on 23 January 1579 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, unifying the northern provinces of the Netherlands, until then under the control of Habsburg Spain....

, whose treaty was to become the "constitution" of the Republic, they built upon the Habsburg constitutional framework, including the office of stadtholder. Even when independence from the King of Spain was declared with the Act of Abjuration there was no reason to change anything: the act simply declared that henceforth the magistrates, amongst whom the stadtholders, would hold their commissions from the from now on sovereign provincial states (there was no stadtholder on the federal level).

Still, when after the death of William in 1584, and subsequently the end of the search for a new sovereign after the departure of Leicester

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, KG was an English nobleman and the favourite and close friend of Elizabeth I from her first year on the throne until his death...

the States General

States-General of the Netherlands

The States-General of the Netherlands is the bicameral legislature of the Netherlands, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The parliament meets in at the Binnenhof in The Hague. The archaic Dutch word "staten" originally related to the feudal classes in which medieval...

reluctantly accepted that they had to be sovereign in 1588, the office took on a vestigial character. Had it not been that the stadtholder of Holland was usually also elected to the confederal office of Captain general

Captain General

Captain general is a high military rank and a gubernatorial title.-History:This term Captain General started to appear in the 14th century, with the meaning of commander in chief of an army in the field, probably the first usage of the term General in military settings...

of the Union, which was an important office in time of war, one would have expected that the office might have been left vacant much earlier than eventually happened. However, in the circumstances of the ongoing war with Spain, the Captain-general was indispensable. And the office of stadtholder remained an important power-base, enabling its holder to exert an influence far beyond its formal powers.

Prince Maurice

Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange

Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange was sovereign Prince of Orange from 1618, on the death of his eldest half brother, Philip William, Prince of Orange,...

demonstrated this in the constitutional crisis of 1618, when the States of Holland

States of Holland

The States of Holland and West Frisia were the representation of the two Estates to the court of the Count of Holland...

under Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, asserting supreme provincial sovereignty, tried to hire provincial troops rather than federal troops under Maurice's command. Maurice stopped this with a coup d'état and subsequently asserted (with the assent of the other provinces) a federal sovereignty that superseded the provincial one. He also purged the Holland regents that supported the provincial-sovereignty pretensions of Oldenbarnevelt and so managed to acquire a political dominance in the government of the Republic that assumed almost monarchical proportions. His brother, and successor as stadtholder, Frederick Henry

Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange

Frederick Henry, or Frederik Hendrik in Dutch , was the sovereign Prince of Orange and stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel from 1625 to 1647.-Early life:...

held on to this ascendancy, due to a deft policy of divide-and conquer, playing off the regent factions against each other.

When Frederick Henry died in March, 1647, his son William II

William II, Prince of Orange

William II, Prince of Orange was sovereign Prince of Orange and stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands from 14 March 1647 until his death three years later.-Biography:...

was appointed stadtholder in Holland, Zeeland

Zeeland

Zeeland , also called Zealand in English, is the westernmost province of the Netherlands. The province, located in the south-west of the country, consists of a number of islands and a strip bordering Belgium. Its capital is Middelburg. With a population of about 380,000, its area is about...

, Utrecht

Utrecht (province)

Utrecht is the smallest province of the Netherlands in terms of area, and is located in the centre of the country. It is bordered by the Eemmeer in the north, Gelderland in the east, the river Rhine in the south, South Holland in the west, and North Holland in the northwest...

, Overijssel

Overijssel

Overijssel is a province of the Netherlands in the central eastern part of the country. The region has a NUTS classification of NL21. The province's name means "Lands across river IJssel". The capital city of Overijssel is Zwolle and the largest city is Enschede...

, and Gelderland

Gelderland

Gelderland is the largest province of the Netherlands, located in the central eastern part of the country. The capital city is Arnhem. The two other major cities, Nijmegen and Apeldoorn have more inhabitants. Other major regional centers in Gelderland are Ede, Doetinchem, Zutphen, Tiel, Wijchen,...

(the office was only to become hereditary in 1747). But he did not have the stature of his father, also because Frederick Henry did not think highly of his capabilities and had refused to allow him to lead troops in the field during the war against Spain that was then in its last stages. William was opposed to the peace with Spain, but he was largely ignored by the politicians in the States General, especially the representatives of the city of Amsterdam. The Peace of Münster

Peace of Münster

The Peace of Münster was a treaty between the Dutch Republic and Spain signed in 1648. It was a landmark treaty for the Dutch republic and one of the key events in Dutch history; with it, the United Netherlands finally became independent from the Spanish Crown...

was duly concluded in 1648, in spite of the opposition of the province of Zeeland and William, the latter deliberately absenting himself from the discussions to masque his impotence.

In the years directly following the peace a number of conflicts erupted between the stadtholder and especially the States of Holland about policy. William (though a lax Calvinist himself, like his father) keenly supported the Calvinist die-hards in their attempts to force the Protestant religion on the Catholic inhabitants of the recently acquired Generality Lands

Generality Lands

The Generality Lands, Lands of the Generality or Common Lands were about one fifth of the territories of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, that were directly governed by the States-General...

(though his father had been far more tolerant of Catholic freedom of conscience). William managed to gain much popularity by this hard-line policy among the more orthodox lower classes in the Republic-proper, but especially the Holland regents thwarted the policy, because they were aware of the needless resentment it caused.

This was, however, just political posturing on William's part, cynically exploiting certain prejudices in an attempt to gain ascendancy over the regents. More important as a matter of principle was the conflict over the reduction of the standing army that arose during 1649 and 1650. The regents understandably did not quite see the need for an expensive, large, mercenary standing army when peace had broken out. Holland demanded a reduction of the army to 26,000 (from a level of 35,000 in 1648), whereas William argued that the personnel needs were now appreciably larger, because the territory to be protected by garrisoned fortresses was now a great deal larger. Though the parties came close to an agreement on a total of about 29,000 men, the final difference of a few hundred men proved to be insurmountable.

The policy conflict had become a test of wills. And it soon grew into a constitutional conflict, reminiscent of the crisis of 1618. The majority in the States of Holland now revived the old constitutional theory of Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius , also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law...

, stating that the provinces' sovereignty, and not that of the federal state, was supreme, and that Holland was entitled to disband troops that were paid out of its contribution to the federal war budget, without the consent of the other provinces. The implication of this was, of course, that the dissolution of the Union was a possibility, with a probability of civil war.

Like his uncle Maurice, William now felt he needed to save the Union, if need be by force. In collusion with his colleague-stadtholder of Friesland

Friesland

and Groningen

Groningen (province)

, Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz

Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz

Willem Frederik , Count of Nassau-Dietz, Stadtholder of Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe.-Family Life:...

(a cousin in the cadet branch

Cadet branch

Cadet branch is a term in genealogy to describe the lineage of the descendants of the younger sons of a monarch or patriarch. In the ruling dynasties and noble families of much of Europe and Asia, the family's major assets – titles, realms, fiefs, property and income – have...

of the House of Orange-Nassau), he embarked on a campaign of intimidation of the Holland regents that would ultimately lead to the use of force. On July 30, 1650, William had six leading Holland regents arrested in The Hague (where the States General met), while Willem Frederik attempted to take the city of Amsterdam by surprise with federal troops. Though this coup de main failed and Amsterdam managed to keep the troops outside the gates, the city was sufficiently intimidated to give in to William's demands to purge his opponents from the Amsterdam city council. The States of Holland then capitulated and rescinded its order to disband the troops. The theory of provincial supremacy was disavowed also.

However, William was stricken with smallpox in his hour of triumph. He died suddenly in November 1650. His wife Mary Stuart

Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange

Mary, Princess Royal, Princess of Orange and Countess of Nassau was the eldest daughter of King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland and his queen, Henrietta Maria of France...

was pregnant and gave birth to his only legitimate son William III

William III of England

William III & II was a sovereign Prince of Orange of the House of Orange-Nassau by birth. From 1672 he governed as Stadtholder William III of Orange over Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel of the Dutch Republic. From 1689 he reigned as William III over England and Ireland...

a week after his death. The office of stadtholder had become vacant in five of the provinces.

The Republican Regime and Johan de Witt

If the Republic had been a Monarchy, or if the office of stadtholder had already been hereditary (as it was to become after the Orangist amendments of 1747) the posthumous child would no doubt have been acclaimed stadtholder automatically, and a Regency

Regent

A regent, from the Latin regens "one who reigns", is a person selected to act as head of state because the ruler is a minor, not present, or debilitated. Currently there are only two ruling Regencies in the world, sovereign Liechtenstein and the Malaysian constitutive state of Terengganu...

would have been put into place, as happened in 1751, when three year old William V

William V, Prince of Orange

William V , Prince of Orange-Nassau was the last Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and between 1795 and 1806 he led the Government of the Dutch Republic in Exile in London. He was succeeded by his son William I...

succeeded his deceased father in office in all seven provinces. As a matter of fact, this was proposed by the Orangist faction in the Republic, and especially by Willem Frederik, who proposed himself in the role of Lieutenant-Stadtholder in the five provinces in which he was not already stadtholder in his own right, until baby William would come of age. But this proposal elicited little enthusiasm from the Holland regents, who still vividly remembered his role in the recent coup.

On the other hand, if the office of stadtholder was indispensable, the States of the five provinces with a vacancy could and would have appointed a successor, though not necessarily someone from the Nassau families. As a matter of fact, there were the precedents of Willem IV van den Bergh

Willem IV van den Bergh

Willem IV, Count van den Bergh was Stadtholder of Guelders and Zutphen from 1581 until his arrest for suspected treason in 1583.-Biography:...

and Adolf van Nieuwenaar

Adolf van Nieuwenaar

Adolf van Nieuwenaar, Count of Limburg and Meurs was a statesman and soldier, who was stadtholder of Gelderland and Utrecht for the States-General of the Netherlands during the initial stages of the Eighty Years' War.-Early life:Nieuwenaar was the son of Count Gumprecht II von...

in Gelderland in early Republican times. But the Holland regents did not feel a pressing need to appoint anyone, especially in view of recent events. They acted very quickly to undo the effects of William's coup, freeing the captive regents and reinstating them in their offices. The Gecommitteerde Raden (executive committee) of the States of Holland moved immediately to reassert their authority over the army and convened a plenary session of the States. Next Holland proposed in the States General that a so-called Great Assembly (a kind of constitutional convention) should be convened at short notice, to amend the Union of Utrecht.

The States of Holland did not await this Assembly, however, but for their own province immediately started to make constitutional alterations. On December 8, 1650, the States formally took over their Stadtholders' powers. The eighteen voting towns in the States were given the option to apply for a charter that enabled them to henceforth elect their own vroedschap members and magistrates, under ultimate supervision of the States, but otherwise without the usual drawing up of double lists, for outsiders to choose from. This did not apply to the non-voting towns, however, that still had to present double lists, but now to the States, instead of the Stadtholder. The States also assumed the power to appoint magistrates in the unincorporated countryside, like drosten

Schout

In Dutch-speaking areas, a schout was a local official appointed to carry out administrative, law enforcement and prosecutorial tasks. The office was abolished with the introduction of administrative reforms during the Napoleonic period.- Functions:...

and baljuws.

This did imply a significant change in the power structure in the province. The position of the city regents was improved, while the ridderschap (the oligarchical representative body of the nobility in the States, that had one vote, equal to one city) lost influence, especially in the countryside. The change also diminished the power of the representative bodies of the guilds in the cities, that had often acted as a check on the power of the vroedschap with the help of the stadtholder. The change therefore did not go unopposed, and caused some rioting by the groups being disenfranchised.

Holland meanwhile encouraged other provinces to follow its example. In Zeeland a majority of the States voted to also leave the office of stadtholder vacant, and assume its powers. For good measure, the vote of the First Noble in the States of Zeeland (which was usually exercised by the Prince of Orange as Marquess of Veere

Veere

Veere is a municipality and a city in the southwestern Netherlands, on Walcheren island in the province of Zeeland.-Population centres :Aagtekerke , Biggekerke , Domburg , Gapinge , Grijpskerke , Koudekerke , Meliskerke , Oostkapelle , Serooskerke , Veere , Vrouwenpolder , Westkapelle...

and Flushing) was abolished, and the request of the Zeeland ridderschap to sit in his place was denied. In other provinces, the results were mixed. Holland sent a delegation to Gelderland (where the divided States voted to postpone a decision). Willem Frederik, meanwhile, with the help of the States of Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe

Drenthe

Drenthe is a province of the Netherlands, located in the north-east of the country. The capital city is Assen. It is bordered by Overijssel to the south, Friesland to the west, Groningen to the north, and Germany to the east.-History:Drenthe, unlike many other parts of the Netherlands, has been a...

(where he was stadtholder) exhorted the States of Overijssel and Utrecht to appoint baby William (with him as lieutenant), but to no avail. These provinces decided to await the Great Assembly.

The Great Assembly that was held between January and August, 1651, addressed a number of important issues. The first one was that of the stadholderate. Friesland and Groningen led the opposition to Holland, arguing that the Union of Utrecht required the appointment of provincial stadtholders by implication, as the articles 9 and 21 of the treaty stipulated mediation by stadtholders in case of conflicts between provinces. In their interpretation the office of stadtholder thereby acquired a federal aspect. But the other provinces were not convinced. They decided to leave the office vacant indefinitely. It should be noted, however, that the office was not abolished, not even in Holland and Zeeland.

A second important topic was the reorganization of the command structure of army and navy. The office of captain general and admiral general was a federal office. In the absence of the usual occupant of that office, the stadtholder of Holland, the question was who would now fill it. A possibility would have been to appoint Willem Frederik, who was after all a stadtholder, but in view of his role in the coup of the previous year, he did not have the confidence of Holland. It was therefore decided to leave this office also vacant, and to divide its functions between the States General and the Raad van State jointly (as far as appointments and promotions of officers was concerned) and the Holland nobleman Jan Wolfert van Brederode as commander-in-chief of the army with the rank of Field Marshal. The latter was only a temporary solution, however, as Brederode soon after died, which caused another round of intrigues to keep Willem Frederik from the top job in the army. As the function of admiral general had usually been only symbolic, the actual command of the fleets having been left in the hands of the lieutenant-admirals of the five Admiralties, this office did not pose a similar political problem.

The Great Assembly also addressed the problem of the Public Church in the country, but left the results of the Synod of Dort

Synod of Dort

The Synod of Dort was a National Synod held in Dordrecht in 1618-1619, by the Dutch Reformed Church, to settle a divisive controversy initiated by the rise of Arminianism. The first meeting was on November 13, 1618, and the final meeting, the 154th, was on May 9, 1619...

in place. It rejected the requests of the provinces of Brabant and Drenthe for representation on the States General. Seemingly, the results of the attempt at constitutional reform were meagre therefore. But appearances were not what they seemed. There had been a sea change in the political balance within the union by the elimination of the person who held five stadtholderships in his hand. The position of Holland became unassailable, on the one hand, because the other provinces were internally divided, and because there was not one leader (like the stadtholder had been) to lead them in opposition to Holland.

On the other hand, there was the fortuitous factor that soon in the province of Holland the office of Raadpensionaris

Grand Pensionary

was taken over by the young regent from Dordrecht

Dordrecht

Dordrecht , colloquially Dordt, historically in English named Dort, is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, located in the province of South Holland. It is the fourth largest city of the province, having a population of 118,601 in 2009...

, Johan de Witt

Johan de Witt

. After the execution of the capable Oldenbarnevelt, this office had usually been filled by men of questionable competency, who in any case were compliant to the will of the Stadtholder, like Jacob Cats

Jacob Cats

Jacob Cats was a Dutch poet, humorist, jurist and politician. He is most famous for his emblem books.-Early years:...

. First Adriaan Pauw

Adriaan Pauw

Adriaan Pauw, knight, heer van Heemstede, Bennebroek, Nieuwerkerk etc. was Grand Pensionary of Holland from 1631 to 1636 and from 1651 to 1653.-Life:...

and Andries Bicker

Andries Bicker

and then De Witt and his uncles Cornelis de Graeff

Cornelis de Graeff

and Andries de Graeff

Andries de Graeff

Free Imperial Knight Andries de Graeff was a very powerful member of the Amsterdam branch of the De Graeff - family during the Dutch Golden Age. He became a mayor of Amsterdam and a powerful Amsterdam regent after the death of his older brother Cornelis de Graeff...

were highly capable men, however, who took an active leading role, not only in the States of Holland, but also as leader of the delegation of Holland in the States General. Holland's potential as leader of the Union was therefore fully employed when De Witt gave direction to its policies. In other words, though formally only the "salaried official" (which is what pensionaris means) of one of the provinces, De Witt fulfilled in practice the leading role that previously had been fulfilled by the successive stadtholders of Holland. The stadtholder was truly not missed.

But this was not the only thing that changed. The constitutional conflict about the supremacy of the sovereignty of the Generality over provincial sovereignty, that seemed to be settled by the coup of William II, became "unsettled" again after his death. De Witt of course met opposition from other provinces from time to time, and sometimes Holland was even outvoted in the States General. This posed an unenviable dilemma for De Witt. Although decisions were supposed to be unanimous in the States General, this would in practice be unworkable. The principle of majority voting was therefore accepted by all provinces. On the other hand, Holland could not allow the other provinces to go against its wishes, as the major contributor to the Generality's budget. De Witt was therefore only prepared to accept a majority decision if Holland was in the majority. But how to justify this? The solution was to push the old doctrine of the supremacy of provincial sovereignty (as long as it was Holland's sovereignty). And this became the basic constitutional theory of the Republic during the Stadtholderless Era, at least of De Witt's States Party.
Students of modern Dutch politics will recognize in this characterization of De Witt's statecraft the outlines of the venerable Dutch Polder Model

Polder Model

The polder model is a term with uncertain origin that was first used to describe the internationally acclaimed Dutch version of consensus policy in economics, specifically in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the term was quickly adopted for a much wider meaning, for similar cases of consensus...

The First Anglo-Dutch War and the Act of Seclusion

De Witt's genius as a statesman came first to the fore during the First Anglo-Dutch War. Due to certain strategic disadvantages of the Dutch and to a neglect of the Dutch navy after the end of the Eighty Years War

Dutch Revolt

, the war went badly for the Dutch, at least in the theatre of war closest to both countries (elsewhere, the Dutch managed to achieve a strategic victory). The consequence was that Dutch economic interests were severely damaged; about 1200 ships were captured by the English; the herring fishery was paralyzed; Dutch Brazil was definitively lost to the Portuguese, because no reinforcements could be sent; a large part of the long-distance trade had to be suspended. Because of all this, the economy suffered a severe slump.

The ruling regent class was blamed for these losses by its Orangist opponents, especially the Frisian Stadtholder William Frederick. A veritable deluge of anonymous pamphlets excoriated the regime, and many Calvinist preachers tried to foment public unrest against the regents. This intimidated the States Party in the province of Zeeland sufficiently, bringing it to the brink of submitting to the demand that the three year old Prince of Orange should be appointed stadtholder of Zeeland. Their backs had to be stiffened by a delegation of the States of Holland, in which De Witt (not yet Grand Pensionary) played a leading role. Other provinces were wavering also. But the danger the country was in also helped restrain the Orangists from doing their worst. For the moment, therefore, William Frederick did not achieve his objective.

The "republican system" of the States Party (faced with the pressure from the English without, and the Orangist Party within) was saved by the cohesion of Hollands regents (who now closed ranks), the dissension in the other provinces, and the vulnerability of the English to strategic attack anywhere outside the "Narrow Seas

English Channel

The English Channel , often referred to simply as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North Sea to the Atlantic. It is about long and varies in width from at its widest to in the Strait of Dover...

". As long as the Dutch were not definitively defeated, and were rebuilding their fleets, the English were forced to concentrate their own navy in home waters, so that they could not break the hold of the Dutch on sea-lanes farther away. As a consequence, English commerce was paralyzed to an even greater extent than Dutch commerce. Dutch ally Denmark closed the Sound to English shipping, aided by a Dutch blockade fleet, stopping all English trade with the Baltic. In the Mediterranean the English Levant fleet was trapped at Leghorn

Livorno

Livorno , traditionally Leghorn , is a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the Province of Livorno, having a population of approximately 160,000 residents in 2009.- History :...

, and an English relief fleet was destroyed by admiral Johan van Galen

Johan van Galen

Johan van Galen was a Commodore of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces of the Netherlands.He was born in Essen. He fought in the Eighty Years' War against Spain, becoming a captain in 1630 and a regular captain in 1635, mostly fighting the Dunkirkers...

in the Battle of Leghorn

Battle of Leghorn

The naval Battle of Leghorn took place on 14 March 1653, during the First Anglo-Dutch War, near Leghorn , Italy. It was a victory of a Dutch fleet under Commodore Johan van Galen over an English squadron under Captain Henry Appleton...

. In the East Indies the EIC was swept from the seas by the Dutch East India Company

Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

. Even in the North Sea

North Sea

In the southwest, beyond the Straits of Dover, the North Sea becomes the English Channel connecting to the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, it connects to the Baltic Sea via the Skagerrak and Kattegat, narrow straits that separate Denmark from Norway and Sweden respectively...

Dutch privateers equaled the captures of their English colleagues.

The Commonwealth

Commonwealth of England

The Commonwealth of England was the republic which ruled first England, and then Ireland and Scotland from 1649 to 1660. Between 1653–1659 it was known as the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland...

and its leader Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell

Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....

were therefore ready to come to terms by November, 1653. While the war dragged on, and English economic losses mounted, the English dropped most of their demands. By the Spring of 1654 only the demand that the Republic should never again appoint a Prince of Orange (who also happened to be a grandson of Charles I of England

Charles I of England

Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...

) to high office, remained. This demand (which may very well have originated with the wily De Witt, though Cromwell later officially denied this) caused an uproar under the Orangists in the Republic. This was an obstacle to the peace both parties by now heartily yearned for, as the other provinces would never ratify it. De Witt broke this impasse by officially taking this item off the table (though it was non-negotiable to the English, ratification by Parliament depending on it), but secretly agreeing to the Act of Seclusion

Act of Seclusion

as a secret annexe to the official treaty. The trick here was that this Act would only bind the province of Holland. The States General ratified the treaty without the secret annexe, not knowing of its existence, and Parliament awaited ratification of the Act by the States of Holland, before itself ratifying the entire treaty. Only the two plenipotentiaries of the province of Holland (Hieronymus van Beverningh

Hieronymus van Beverningh

Hieronymus van Beverningh was a prominent Dutch regent, diplomat, amateur botanist, and maecenas, who lived during the Dutch Golden Age.-Early life:...

and Willem Nieuwpoort) knew of the ruse. The Frisian representative was left in the dark. The main "victims" of De Witt's duplicity were therefore his colleagues in the Dutch government.

To save the peace, De Witt first had to ram the Act through the States of Holland. Despite the opposition of a large minority of the voting cities he succeeded in getting the Act approved on May 4, 1654. Of course, this caused vehement argument among the Orangists in the province of Holland and elsewhere. Friesland in particular was outraged. The Delegated States of Friesland even went so far as to demand an inquiry by the States General into the conduct of the Dutch treaty negotiators. The other provinces were again too much internally divided, however, to offer a coherent opposition. Their paralysis prevented taking any action by the States General. Only Zeeland could have joined Friesland, but only uttered a verbal protest, because this province was well aware that an abrogation of the Act would mean an abrogation of the peace treaty, and Zeeland could not afford a resumption of the war.

The suspicion that De Witt was not unhappy with the Act was reinforced by the justification he had published (after having it adopted first by the States of Holland) in July 1654. In it he repeated the constitutional claims of the provincial-sovereignty doctrine as a justification for blocking young William's ascent to high office. He held that the Union of Utrecht

Union of Utrecht

The Union of Utrecht was a treaty signed on 23 January 1579 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, unifying the northern provinces of the Netherlands, until then under the control of Habsburg Spain....

was just an alliance of seven sovereign states, leaving each of those states free to make its own constitutional and political arrangements. Each could refrain from appointing anyone to any of its offices, and was not constrained to consider any particular person for any office, provincial or federal, or to refer to other provinces in these matters. He furthermore fulminated against the "hereditary principle" for filling offices, as experience in other republics (both in antiquity and in contemporary Italy) had proved this a "peril to freedom.".

Though De Witt had achieved a diplomatic triumph by making peace with England without making any concession to England's commercial, colonial, and maritime interests (and introducing the principle of arbitration into international treaties for the first time, as the Treaty of Westminster

Treaty of Westminster (1654)

The Treaty of Westminster was signed on 8 May 1654, which ended the First Anglo-Dutch War . Based on the terms of the accord, the United Provinces recognized Oliver Cromwell's Navigation Acts, which required that imports to the Commonwealth of England must be carried in English ships, or ships from...

left a number of conflicts to be resolved by international arbitration) this came with a heavy political price. Holland reigned supreme within the Republic for the moment, and Holland's commerce was not really damaged by the fact that England maintained its Navigation Acts

Navigation Acts

The English Navigation Acts were a series of laws that restricted the use of foreign shipping for trade between England and its colonies, a process which had started in 1651. Their goal was to force colonial development into lines favorable to England, and stop direct colonial trade with the...

(England not being an essential market for the Amsterdam Entrepôt

Amsterdam Entrepôt

The Amsterdam Entrepôt is the short-hand term that English-language economic historiographers use to refer to the trade system that helped the Dutch Republic achieve primacy in world trade during the 17th century.-The entrepôt system:...

). But the resentment of the Orangists, especially at being outsmarted, would later exact a heavy price.

Commercial Primacy

The main cause for the war with the Commonwealth had been English resentment against the rapid inroads the Dutch made after the Peace of Münster on the English trade with the Iberian peninsula, the Mediterranean and the Levant. During the resumption of the war with Spain between 1621 and 1647 the latter had instituted an effective trade embargo against the Dutch. Not only were Spanish and Portuguese ports closed to Dutch shipping, but Spain also was very successful in hindering Dutch trade in neutral bottoms, like Hanseatic ships, chartered at exorbitant rates by Dutch merchants. In 1624 a special inspectorate, the Almirantazgo was instituted to suppress this kind of "contraband" trade, that efficiently intercepted such shipments. This partial disruption of direct trade with the Iberian lands made Dutch trade in the Mediterranean more difficult, because during the Twelve Year Truce the Dutch had captured a large slice of the trade in Spanish exports (wool, bullion) with Italy, which they lost after 1621. Most of this trade had been taken over by the English after the end of the Anglo-Spanish war in 1630, after which Spain and England cooperated amicably, including in the enforcement of the Spanish embargo on Dutch cargoes.

More importantly, the depredations of the Dunkirk privateers

Dunkirkers

During the Dutch Revolt the Dunkirkers or Dunkirk Privateers, were commerce raiders in the service of the Spanish Monarchy. They were also part of the Dunkirk fleet, which consequently was a part of the Spanish Monarchy's Flemish fleet ...

on Dutch shipping caused maritime insurance premiums for Dutch voyages to rise appreciably, also in trade that was not related to Southern Europe. This partly negated the Dutch competitive advantage in shipping rates, helping other European nations to overcome the disadvantage of the higher rates they had to charge because of their inefficiency. The Dutch would normally be able to charge far lower rates, because they needed far smaller crews to man their more efficient ships.

All this changed after the embargo was lifted in 1647 (during the final peace negotiations). Dutch trade to Spain and Portugal, Italy and the Levant not only immediately rebounded to prewar levels, aided by the way the Spanish authorities facilitated the resumption of trade, but Dutch shipping rates and insurance premiums also fell to permanently lower levels. This stimulated Dutch carrying trade in the rest of Europe, causing a fundamental restructuring of Dutch trade in the years 1647-51 that went at the expense of the Republic's commercial rivals, especially (but not exclusively) England.
England could no longer compete in the carrying trade to Spain and Portugal; the Dover entrepot that had competed successfully with the Amsterdam one in the 1640s as far as the Mediterranean was concerned, completely collapsed; the transmission of silver to Flanders was switched by the Spanish bankers to Amsterdam from London. But England lost not just the carrying trade. Far more important was that the ascendancy of English textile exports to Spain was now lost, that had been total in the 1640s, as had been the English role in Spanish wool exports. Within a year or two this was completely reversed by the Dutch who in 1650 handled 80 percent of this trade. Dutch lakens and camlets took over the Spanish textile market, whereas Holland also took over the entrepot for Ibero-American dye

Dye

A dye is a colored substance that has an affinity to the substrate to which it is being applied. The dye is generally applied in an aqueous solution, and requires a mordant to improve the fastness of the dye on the fiber....

stuffs.

These gains were not just a matter of renewed access on favorable terms to the Iberian market, or greater efficiency. Equally important were other commercial advantages the Dutch had over their competitors, like fundamentally lower interest rates, and the productivity and profitably of the Dutch textile industry (due to technological innovations). The combination of these factors enticed Iberian wool exporters to opt for the Dutch market, and allowed Dutch merchants to prefinance Spanish dyestuff exports (like they also prefinanced Baltic grain exports and French wine exports).

These changes had also ramifications in other theatres of trade, like the Baltic and the Levant, because the access of Dutch weavers to high-quality Spanish wool made Dutch textiles more attractive in the Baltic and the Levant than the previously ascendant English textiles. The consequence was a disastrous slump in the English textile industry after 1648. As the English were more dependent in their trade with the Baltic and Russia on their textile exports, their share in these trades therefore also declined.

Likewise, the English had dominated the trade in spices and textiles with Italy and Turkey. England consumed most of the olive oil and currants exported from those lands. However, after 1648 here too occurred a complete reversal in favor of the Dutch. The Genoese shifted their purchases to the Dutch entrepot and started to use Dutch shipping for their carrying trade predominantly. This was mostly due to the far-lower shipping rates the Dutch charged. But other factors in the sudden rise of the share the Dutch obtained in the intra-Mediterranean trade were the grip they obtained on the trade in Spanish bullion (often reminted as Dutch trade coins of high quality) to the Levant, and the progress the Dutch fine-cloth industry made with their products that were of a higher quality than the English. As a result, the English were thrown on the defensive in this area, too. To add insult to injury more and more imports that had reached England directly before, were from now on re-exported from the Amsterdam entrepot in Dutch ships.

The sudden Dutch ascendancy also extended to the Americas, and especially the Caribbean. During the war with Spain, the Dutch had been successfully excluded from Spanish America. However, after the peace (though the Spanish still managed to boycott Dutch trade in the colonies effectively) the Dutch resumed their trade with certain colonies, like Puerto Rico, that they had already had a lively contraband trade with. Such a trade now also flared up with the English colonies that still were in Royalist hands in the early 1650s, particularly Barbados and Surinam. The sugar trade with these colonies for a large part compensated for the loss of the sugar production after the loss of Dutch Brazil in 1645. This disaster for the Dutch caused a spike in European sugar prices. But this had as a positive result that sugar production in French and English Caribbean islands was now stimulated, often with Dutch investment. The Dutch were, of course, happy to buy the sugar and provide the necessary slaves from their trading forts in West-Africa.

Of course, the English were not the only "victims." The French, Scandinavian, and North-German merchants were also hit hard by the sudden resurgence of the Dutch in world markets. But the English were especially hit hard. This caused tremendous resentment, also because the English were not inclined to seek the fault with themselves, but suspected the Dutch of conspiring to engross world trade with means that could not be other than foul. However, this may be, the Commonwealth felt they could not take this Dutch "insolence" lying down. Unfortunately, unlike the Scandinavians and the Hanseatics, they were in a military position to do something about it. The Commonwealth government first tried peaceful means, like a haughty attempt to renew the English protectorate from Elizabethan and Jacobean days (based on the Treaty of Nonsuch

Treaty of Nonsuch

The Treaty of Nonsuch was signed by Elizabeth I of England and the Netherlands on 10 August 1585 at Nonsuch Palace in Surrey.-Background:The treaty was provoked by the signing of the Treaty of Joinville in 1584 between Philip II of Spain and the Catholic League in France in which Philip II promised...

) over the Republic, but this was politely rejected. Then Parliament passed the Navigation Act, which was intended to break the hold of the Dutch entrepot by prohibiting its re-exports to English markets, and also reserving the carrying trade to and from England to English bottoms. Of course, these blatantly protectionist measures most of all hurt the English economy and that of the English colonies. After all, the Dutch did not hold a pistol to the heads of their customers, but had achieved their ascendancy by offering better deals. English importers and consumers were now deprived of these benefits.

Though a setback, these protectionist measures were not as devastating to the Dutch trade system as the English had intended. The English market in itself was not very important to the Dutch, compared to the French, Iberian, and American markets. The Commonwealth' writ did not yet run in the latter, so these markets were not immediately lost. The fact that England was able to continue this protectionist policy after the First Anglo-Dutch War had ended, was therefore not a severe blow to the Dutch. The damage from the war itself was severe for a while, but English commercial interests were damaged at least at much, if not more. The Dutch trade primacy was therefore not permanently damaged by the war, and neither did the English manage to regain their prewar position with force of arms. The only major consequence of the English policy was, that it gave ideas to first the Scandinavians, and later the French about the possibilities to use military and protectionist means, that later caused great difficulties to the Republic.

Such problems started in the Baltic, where Denmark and Sweden in turn took steps that for a while damaged Dutch trade interests. The Dutch managed to counter these measures by military and diplomatic means, rolling back Danish increases of the Sound toll

Sound Dues

The Sound Dues were a toll on the use of the Sound which constituted up to two thirds of Denmark's state income in the 16th and 17th centuries...

in 1649, and forcing the Swedes to retract mercantilist measures in the 1650s, but still the 1650s were a time of decline in the Dutch Baltic carrying trade, though this decline should not be exaggerated, as is often done. Before 1650 the Dutch had a share of 70 percent of total shipping movements; after 1650 this declined to 60 percent.

In the Mediterranean a kind of division of labor between the English and Dutch came into being after the war: the English were the main customers for olive oil and currants, and the Navigation Act therefore helped them to monopolize this trade. On the other hand the Dutch monopolized the trade in spices and fine-cloth (the English being left with the trade in lower-value textiles). The English were the major buyers of Italian raw silk, whereas this trade was for the Dutch marginal in comparison with their Asian and Persian silk trade. Generally, the Dutch had a favorable balance of trade with this area (and the English a negative one), because the Dutch dominated more trades (like that in Baltic naval stores and salt) and more profitable ones. As a matter of fact, the total value of the Mediterranean and Levant trade to the Dutch was about equal to that of the Far-Eastern trade of the VOC, both bringing in about 20 million guilders annually.

The fact that both France and England were at war with Spain between 1655 and 1659 (the French since 1635) helped reserve the Spanish trade to the Dutch in this period, as the Spanish embargo now was aimed at these competitors. When France was at peace with Spain, however, this country tended to dominate the Spanish trade, due to the strength of its linen exports both to Spain and its colonies.
Though this influence may be exaggerated also: the French at this time had practically no part in the carrying trade, and the Dutch dominated the export of Spain's main export, raw wool. For political reasons (Portugal was at war with the Dutch in the same period over the aftermath of the reconquest of Dutch Brazil) the English predominated in the Portuguese trade. The Dutch dominated the salt trade with Portugal, however, also because the 1661 peace treaty stipulated that the war indemnity imposed on Portugal to compensate the WIC for the loss of Brazil, would be paid in that commodity. This was important, because Portuguese salt was better suited than high-magnesium French salt for the preservation of herring.

The dominance of the Dutch in the Far East also reached its zenith in these years, though not everything went the way of the VOC

Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company was a chartered company established in 1602, when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia...

. The lucrative China-Japan trade, which the company had managed to monopolize for a while came to an end as the new Qing-regime finally managed to tighten its grip on the last remnants of the Ming

Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...

in South China, and first reverse the terms of trade with the Dutch, before eventually completely closing the Chinese market to them. The VOC forts on Taiwan were lost to an adherent of the Ming, Koxinga

Koxinga

Koxinga is the customary Western spelling of the popular appellation of Zheng Chenggong , a military leader who was born in 1624 in Hirado, Japan to Zheng Zhilong, a Chinese merchant/pirate, and his Japanese wife and died in 1662 on the island of Formosa .A Ming loyalist and the arch commander of...

, who in a move foreshadowing Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....

's flight to Taiwan in 1949, tried to make that island his base, but these forts had been mostly important in the silk trade with Japan, and that trade was now being taken over by the Chinese themselves anyway. The Japan trade lost most of its importance for the VOC, when in 1668 the Shogun

Shogun

A was one of the hereditary military dictators of Japan from 1192 to 1867. In this period, the shoguns, or their shikken regents , were the de facto rulers of Japan though they were nominally appointed by the emperor...

embargoed the export of silver, which the VOC had been using to finance most of its spice trade

Spice trade

Civilizations of Asia were involved in spice trade from the ancient times, and the Greco-Roman world soon followed by trading along the Incense route and the Roman-India routes...

with. But because Spanish bullion was now again easily obtainable for the Dutch, this did not cramp the style of the VOC too much.

On a more positive note for the Dutch, the war with Portugal over compensation of the sister-company, the WIC, for her losses in Brazil to Portuguese insurgents, now provided the VOC with a convenient pretext to do away with the last remnants of the Portuguese trading empire in Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of India. Portuguese forts in these areas were conquered all the way to Goa

Goa

Goa , a former Portuguese colony, is India's smallest state by area and the fourth smallest by population. Located in South West India in the region known as the Konkan, it is bounded by the state of Maharashtra to the north, and by Karnataka to the east and south, while the Arabian Sea forms its...

; the local rulers were pressed to sign "exclusive-marketing contracts" with the VOC, conveniently excluding the English and Danes at the same time; and the VOC obtained the monopolies on Ceylonese cinnamon

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several trees from the genus Cinnamomum that is used in both sweet and savoury foods...

and elephants (useful in the trade with India).

The Anglo-Dutch conflicts were useful for the VOC for driving out its competitors, the EIC, from the Indonesian archipelago, by force of arms. In 1665 first the only English factory in the Spice Islands, Pulo Run

Run (island)

Run is one of the smallest islands of the Banda Islands, which are a part of Indonesia...

was definitively conquered, excluding the English from the clove

Clove

Cloves are the aromatic dried flower buds of a tree in the family Myrtaceae. Cloves are native to the Maluku islands in Indonesia and used as a spice in cuisines all over the world...

trade. More importantly, the VOC subsequently conquered the sultanates in Makassar

Makassar

Makassar, is the provincial capital of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the largest city on Sulawesi Island. From 1971 to 1999, the city was named Ujung Pandang, after a precolonial fort in the city, and the two names are often used interchangeably...

, Jambi, and Palembang

Palembang

Palembang is the capital city of the South Sumatra province in Indonesia. Palembang is one of the oldest cities in Indonesia, and has a history of being a capital of a maritime empire. Located on the Musi River banks on the east coast of southern Sumatra island, it has an area of 400.61 square...

, forcing the sultans to exclude the English and Danes (who had previously maintained factories there) from the pepper trade.

Though the end of the war with Spain in 1648 enabled the VOC to greatly expand its empire by military means, and to hold European competitors at bay in the same manner (a fortress was built at the strategic Cape of Good Hope

Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula, South Africa.There is a misconception that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa, because it was once believed to be the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In fact, the...

in 1653), it did not completely rely on force of arms for its commercial dominance. In Bengal, and the intra-Indian trade, for instance, the Dutch dominated at first by commercial means, consistently out-trading the English in commodities such as silk, rice, and opium, destined for other Asian markets. In these years the scale of the Dutch intra-Asian trade went unrivalled.

This worldwide primacy in trade would not have been possible if it only rested on Dutch primacy in the carrying trade. After all, one has to trade something. Even where the counterparty is primarily interested in gold and silver as means of exchange, as in South-East Asia, that specie must be earned by a surplus on the balance of payments with other trading partners. A surplus in "invisibles", like shipping services, would not suffice to cover the enormous financing requirement of the spice trade. At first, the Dutch had little indigenous to offer, beyond herring and dairy products. But the industrial revolution of the early 17th century brought an industry into being that by the 1640s had matured enough to play an important part in Dutch exports. This industrial growth was partly innovation driven, stimulating all kinds of heretofore not seen mechanization, that greatly enhanced labor productivity, thereby driving down prices for Dutch products, even while nominal wages rose steeply at the same time. But the commerce-engendered Dutch control of many raw-material markets (like Spanish and Turkish raw wool, Swedish iron and copper, Ibero-American dyestuffs, Portuguese salt, French wine, Baltic grain, Scandinavian tar and wood, Caribbean sugar, American tobacco etc.) was an important factor in stimulating the booms of the industries that used those materials: textiles, guns, vinegar, shipbuilding, sugar and salt refining, tobacco blending, to name only a few. The Dutch entrepot was therefore supplied by an important domestic industrial sector, and not limited to reexporting wares obtained abroad. Industry and commerce were in this period closely integrated (though in later stages of the Dutch economy they would become disaggregated again, when foreign protection and a structurally high real-wage level forced the decline of the Dutch industrial sector).

An important factor in this industrial boom (as in the development of the fisheries) was, remarkably, the regulating role of the Dutch government: guaranteeing product quality gave Dutch products a reputation in foreign markets, that justified slightly higher prices, if need be. Other forms of market regulation, like the monopolies given to the VOC and WIC, but also the semi-official industry bodies that regulated the trade on Russia and the Levant, and the herring industry, helped stabilize market fluctuations. Patent protection helped stimulate industrial innovation. The sophisticated Dutch capital market was stabilized by regulated institutions like the Amsterdam Bank and Exchange, and the regulator of the insurance market. And maybe most importantly, the close connection of the Dutch regents to commercial interests in this period helped shield Dutch industry and commerce from excessive taxation or tariffs. Also, the Dutch government did not hesitate to put its not inconsiderable diplomatic and military might behind Dutch commercial interests, if the need arose to protect them against foreign protectionist measures.

Diplomatic supremacy

Though the Republic was only a small country, with a small population (about two million inhabitants when England had five million, and France already 20 million), these strategic drawbacks were more than compensated for by the economic and financial might of the Republic. Uniquely in Europe in this age, the Dutch state was able to tap the already sophisticated Dutch capital market, without having to go through banking intermediaries, to finance emergency military spending by borrowing. At the same time the taxing capacity was sufficient to service the still-manageable public debt this engendered. In case of need, the Republic could therefore rapidly expand its standing army by hiring mercenaries in "congenial" markets, like Scotland, the Protestant Swiss Cantons, and sundry Protestant German principalities, foremost Prussia. This was most spectacularly demonstrated in the months leading up to the Dutch invasion of England in 1688, when the standing army was simply doubled in size by hiring Prussian troops. But it also applied during most of the period under consideration (though it failed miserably in 1672, as we will see).

However, in this period military threats did not come primarily from the land side, so there was little need for a large standing army, as there had been during the war with Spain. The Spanish Army of Flanders, with 70,000 men one of the largest standing armies in Europe at the time, was fully engaged in defending the Southern Netherlands

Southern Netherlands

Southern Netherlands were a part of the Low Countries controlled by Spain , Austria and annexed by France...

against France up to the Peace of the Pyrenees

Treaty of the Pyrenees

The Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed to end the 1635 to 1659 war between France and Spain, a war that was initially a part of the wider Thirty Years' War. It was signed on Pheasant Island, a river island on the border between the two countries...

in 1659. Spain would never again be a threat to the Republic from this quarter, actually hoping to conclude a defensive alliance against France. Though the Republic in these first years after the war with Spain was loth "to shore up a neighboring ruin" as De Witt remarked to the Spanish ambassador, the latter's reply that he would be wise to do so, "if he didn't want that ruin to fall on his head," later proved all too true. From 1667 on, the Republic was continually engaged in chasing the French out of the Spanish lands, and probably could have taken the Spanish Netherlands for itself, any time it wanted, but it preferred the Spanish Netherlands as a buffer state

Buffer state

A buffer state is a country lying between two rival or potentially hostile greater powers, which by its sheer existence is thought to prevent conflict between them. Buffer states, when authentically independent, typically pursue a neutralist foreign policy, which distinguishes them from satellite...

.

After the conflict with William II over the size of the army, which ended at his premature death, the now victorious regents lost little time in further reducing the size of the army. Unfortunately, they displayed the same parsimony to the navy, allowing the independent admiralties to sell off a large part of the fleet that had defeated the second Spanish Armada so resoundingly in neutral English waters in the Battle of the Downs

Battle of the Downs

The naval Battle of the Downs took place on 31 October 1639 , during the Eighty Years' War, and was a decisive defeat of the Spanish, commanded by Admiral Antonio de Oquendo, by the United Provinces, commanded by Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp.- Background :The entry of France in the Thirty...

of 1639. The foolishness of this policy was amply demonstrated in the First Anglo-Dutch War, when at least initially the Dutch navy did not stand a chance against the English fleet, at least in home waters, due to its qualitative and quantitative inferiority. While the war was still raging, the De-Witt regime therefore embarked on an ambitious program of naval construction and naval reform. The "new navy" was born that would become the pre-eminent instrument to project Dutch power abroad. The main innovation was that now sixty captains would be permanently employed by the navy, greatly increasing its professionalism. Due to the shallowness of Dutch home waters the size of the largest Dutch ships could still not be equal to that of the English first-rate

First-rate

First rate was the designation used by the Royal Navy for its largest ships of the line. While the size and establishment of guns and men changed over the 250 years that the rating system held sway, from the early years of the eighteenth century the first rates comprised those ships mounting 100...

s, but the gap in weight of guns was narrowed.

This new navy would only be truly tested in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, as England was the Republic's only naval rival in these years, and neither country was keen to test the other so soon after the first war, that had been so costly to both sides. Besides, the Commonwealth was soon embroiled in a war with Spain, joining the Franco-Spanish War (1635) on the French side, in which the Republic remained neutral, content to reap the commercial benefits from the new-won Spanish friendship. However, the new navy proved useful in the smaller conflicts in which the Republic became soon engaged in Scandinavia and Portugal.

Due to the importance of the Dutch Baltic trade for Amsterdam and the northern Holland port cities, the Dutch were always keenly interested in what happened around the Sound. Already in the 1640s the Republic had intervened in the Torstenson War of king Christian IV of Denmark

Christian IV of Denmark

Christian IV was the king of Denmark-Norway from 1588 until his death. With a reign of more than 59 years, he is the longest-reigning monarch of Denmark, and he is frequently remembered as one of the most popular, ambitious and proactive Danish kings, having initiated many reforms and projects...

with Sweden, putting its thumb in the scales, both by military intervention in favor of the Swedes, and by favoring that country in the subsequent peace mediation that resulted in the Treaty of Brömsebro

Treaty of Brömsebro

The Second Treaty of Brömsebro was signed on 13 August 1645, and ended the Torstenson War, a local conflict that began in 1643 and was part of the larger Thirty Years' War) between Sweden and Denmark-Norway...

. Denmark had made itself unpopular in Dutch eyes by siding with Spain in the war and by unilaterally increasing the toll on Dutch shipping. At first there was little the Dutch could do, but when Christian provoked the Swedes to invade Jutland

Jutland

Jutland , historically also called Cimbria, is the name of the peninsula that juts out in Northern Europe toward the rest of Scandinavia, forming the mainland part of Denmark. It has the North Sea to its west, Kattegat and Skagerrak to its north, the Baltic Sea to its east, and the Danish–German...

in 1643, the Dutch applauded, but did little more than offer diplomatic support, because the Zeeland and Rotterdam interests were loth to spent good money to defend the Amsterdam interests (the Orangists still being in the ascendant in this period). When the Swedes in consequence showed little enthusiasm to help lower tolls for the Dutch in the peace negotiations of 1644, the States General were finally forced to put their money where their mouth was. A Dutch fleet of 48 warships was assembled that in July, 1645, escorted three hundred Dutch merchant vessels through the Sound, making a show of not paying any toll at all. The Danish monarch watched the imposing spectacle in person from the ramparts of the castle of Helsingør, being politely saluted by the Dutch. The king made no response. A few months later a treaty was signed with the Dutch that formed the basis for their commercial ascendancy throughout the 17th century in the Baltic trade. Tolls for the Dutch were lowered; Dutch shipping would be exempt from visitation by Danish officials; Dutch shipping would be totally exempt from the toll at Glückstadt

Glückstadt

Glückstadt is a town in the Steinburg district of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is located on the right bank of the Lower Elbe at the confluence of the small Rhin river, about northwest of Altona...

.
But soon the Dutch would have occasion to come to the aid of the Danes in a conflict with Sweden. In 1654 Charles X Gustav of Sweden

Charles X Gustav of Sweden

Charles X Gustav also Carl Gustav, was King of Sweden from 1654 until his death. He was the son of John Casimir, Count Palatine of Zweibrücken-Kleeburg and Catherine of Sweden. After his father's death he also succeeded him as Pfalzgraf. He was married to Hedwig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp, who...

ascended the Swedish throne and he embarked on an aggressive policy, in the process harming Dutch interests in several ways. He blockaded the port of Danzig

Gdansk

Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...

during the Polish part of the Northern Wars

Northern Wars

Northern Wars is a term used for a series of wars fought in northern and northeastern Europe in the 16th and 17th century. An internationally agreed nomenclature for these wars has not yet been devised...

, hindering Dutch commerce. In July, 1656 Cornelis de Graeff

Cornelis de Graeff

sent a fleet under Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam

Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam

Jacob, Banner Lord of Wassenaer, Lord Obdam, Hensbroek, Spanbroek, Opmeer, Zuidwijk and Kernhem was a Dutch Lieutenant-Admiral, and supreme commander of the confederate Dutch navy. The name Obdam was then also spelled as Opdam...

of the new Dutch navy. The fleet was dispatched to Danzig which helped persuade the Swedes to lift this blockade. Obdam was the commander-in-chief of the Dutch navy in these years, a political appointment by De Witt, who preferred an officer of the right political color to be in charge, in preference to more competent, but politically undesirable Orangists, when Witte Corneliszoon de With

Witte Corneliszoon de With

Witte Corneliszoon de With was a famous Dutch naval officer of the 17th century.- Early life and childhood :...

and Michiel de Ruyter

Michiel de Ruyter

Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter is the most famous and one of the most skilled admirals in Dutch history. De Ruyter is most famous for his role in the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century. He fought the English and French and scored several major victories against them, the best known probably...

(both States-Party men) were unavailable for different reasons. As Obdam was basically a landlubber, this was not an ideal solution, but in this context he proved up to the job.

Unfortunately, the Danish king Frederick III of Denmark

Frederick III of Denmark

Frederick III was king of Denmark and Norway from 1648 until his death. He instituted absolute monarchy in Denmark and Norway in 1660, confirmed by law in 1665 as the first in western historiography. He was born the second-eldest son of Christian IV of Denmark and Anne Catherine of Brandenburg...

(who had been a staunch ally of the Dutch in the war with the Commonwealth, despite his father's humiliation in 1645), now declared war on Charles. Charles proved himself to be an astute military tactician by soon overrunning the Danish isles, threatening to dominate both sides of the Sound. This the Dutch could not allow, and (though Zeeland and the South Holland regents again at first obstructed action, because they myopically did not see the Dutch interest in intervention) Obdam was again dispatched with a fleet to the scene of the crime. This time he defeated the Swedes in the Battle of the Sound

Battle of the Sound

The naval Battle of the Sound took place on 8 November 1658 during the Second Northern War, near the Sound or Oresund, just north of the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Sweden had defeated Denmark and an army under Charles X of Sweden had Copenhagen itself under siege...

and relieved besieged Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

.

The English now decided that the Dutch had gone too far, and intervened in their turn by sending a fleet to oppose the Dutch, and shore up Swedish determination. Reluctantly (because they did not relish another hot war with the Commonwealth) the States General called this bluff, by sending a second fleet, under the command of De Ruyter, in the Summer of 1659. The combined Dutch fleets, 78 ships and 17,000 men, anchored provocatively in the Sound close to the combined Anglo-Swedish fleet. After some brooding staring from both sides, the English decided to go home again. The Dutch then proceeded by ejecting the Swedes from Nyborg

Nyborg

Nyborg is a city in central Denmark, located in Nyborg Municipality on the island of Funen and with a population of 16,492 . Nyborg is one of the 14 large municipalities created on 1 January 2007...

, making the Swedish position untenable. Charles now sued for peace. He agreed to give up his conquests in Denmark, and to retract a number of protectionist measures against Dutch shipping.

The Dutch had thus in fact imposed a pax neerlandica on the Baltic region. They leaned then to the Danes, then to the Swedes, but never forgot Dutch interests in the process. This was, of course, highly resented by all parties involved, not least the English, and also France, which now began to revive from its weak diplomatic position during the minority of Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

and the subsequent ministry of Cardinal Mazarin. During the early 1660s English diplomats were highly successful in fomenting all kinds of trouble for the Dutch in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Denmark, in particular, seemed amenable to a reversal of alliances in the events leading up to the Second Anglo-Dutch War. However, when that war broke out, the Danes decided that they simply could not afford to go against Dutch wishes, and they again sided with the Republic by closing the Sound to English commerce.

The point here is that the Dutch did not have to press the Danes by obvious military means; diplomacy sufficed.The English envoy to Denmark, Sir Gilbert Talbot, regretfully remarked (quoting the reply of the Danish government to his protest):
Dutch economic might was sufficient to sway not just the Danes, but other European powers also. The Dutch economic primacy might be resented, but most Europeans preferred it to the English' and French'. If someone had to have hegemony, it better be the relatively "safe" Dutch who lacked the manpower and political ambition to translate their economic might into political domination. In this case of the 1665 war with England, Sweden, that usually did the opposite of Denmark, also calculated that they were better off with a Dutch win. This applied all over Europe (except in Portugal, that was still hurting from the recent war with the Republic). Hamburg (a keen competitor of the Dutch) helped the Dutch stop the supply of naval stores to England and provided the "neutral" ships to carry Dutch trade through the English blockade. In Italy, public opinion showed itself quite pro-Dutch after the Four Days Battle

Four Days Battle

The Four Days Battle was a naval battle of the Second Anglo–Dutch War. Fought from 1 June to 4 June 1666 in the Julian or Old Style calendar then used in England off the Flemish and English coast, it remains one of the longest naval engagements in history.In June 1665 the English had soundly...

of June, 1666, which ended arguably in a draw, but was claimed by the propagandists of both sides as a victory. In Leghorn the dock-workers rioted against the English, and the English flag was run up on the steeple of the main basilica upside down under the Dutch flag. Spain allowed Dutch privateers to auction English prizes at Corunna.

The Dutch States-Party regents were no pacifists. When Portugal refused to make amends for its reconquest of the colonies in Africa (Angola

Angola

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

) and America (Dutch Brazil

Dutch Brazil

Dutch Brazil, also known as New Holland, was the northern portion of Brazil, ruled by the Dutch during the Dutch colonization of the Americas between 1630 and 1654...

) from the WIC

Dutch West India Company

Dutch West India Company was a chartered company of Dutch merchants. Among its founding fathers was Willem Usselincx...

in 1648, the shareholders of that company who were heavily represented in Zeeland and in the land provinces (Overijssel

Overijssel

and Guelders

Guelders

Guelders or Gueldres is the name of a historical county, later duchy of the Holy Roman Empire, located in the Low Countries.-Geography:...

), convinced the States General to declare war on Portugal in 1657 (though the company had expressly been given sovereign powers to take care of its own affairs). Though this stretched Dutch naval resources rather thin, just at the time the business with Sweden in the Sound had to be dealt with, the Dutch blockaded Lisbon

Lisbon

Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...

for a while, and Dutch privateers hampered Portuguese shipping. The Dutch did most of their damage in Ceylon and India, however, as we have seen above. These Dutch successes stimulated England (that had been sabotaging the Luso-Dutch peace negotiations, because the war helped reserve Portuguese trade to themselves) to drop their objections to the Treaty of The Hague (1661)

Treaty of The Hague (1661)

The Treaty of The Hague was signed in 1661 between representatives of the Dutch Empire and the Portuguese Empire...

. In this treaty, De Witt's conviction that trade was more important than colonial possessions, and that the war had been a mistake, got the upper hand. The Republic dropped its demands for restitution of the lost colonies in exchange for a handsome indemnity. But the damage to Luso-Dutch relations had already been done, and the Republic was never again able to replace England in Portuguese trade.

The example of the relations with Portugal illustrated that De Witt's diplomatic gifts were necessary as much within the Republic, as without. He always had to make internal deals to accompany the external deals he made with foreign powers. In the case of the Hague treaty, Zeeland at first refused to ratify (and the requirement of unanimity in cases of peace and war in the Union of Utrecht made its position strong). De Witt persuaded the Zeeland States to acquiesce by giving the Zeeland salt-refiners the best part of the business of refining the salt that Portugal paid as its indemnity.

But bribery played a big part in foreign relations also. A good example is the Dutch Gift

Dutch Gift

The Dutch Gift of 1660 was a collection of 28 mostly Italian Renaissance paintings and 12 classical sculptures, along with a yacht, the Mary, and furniture, which was presented to King Charles II of England by the States-General of the Netherlands in 1660...

the States General gave to Charles II of England

Charles II of England

Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...

in 1660 to get back in the good graces of that Worthy after the coolness of the mutual relations that reigned during Charles' years of exile in France. The bribe consisted of a number of precious paintings worth the not inconsiderable sum of 80,000 guilders, and the yacht HMY Mary

HMY Mary

HMY Mary was the first Royal Yacht of the Royal Navy. She was built in 1660 by the Dutch East India Company. Then she was purchased by the City of Amsterdam and given to King Charles II, on the restoration of the monarchy, as part of the Dutch Gift. She struck rocks off Anglesey in thick fog on...

, like the yacht on which he was comfortably transported home to England during the Restoration

English Restoration

The Restoration of the English monarchy began in 1660 when the English, Scottish and Irish monarchies were all restored under Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the Wars of the Three Kingdoms...

. The gift was mostly paid for by the Amsterdam vroedschap, who came to regret their unaccustomed generosity when Charles unfolded his anti-Dutch policy. Fortunately, most of the paintings were repatriated to the Netherlands by William III of England

William III of England

after he had become king, so the financial outlay had not been a complete waste.

Usually generous gifts had their intended effects, however. Bribery has long been an acknowledged means of diplomacy. During the stadtholderate Dutch officials in their turn had been the happy recipients of diplomatic largesse themselves. However, the De-Witt regime was unusually impervious to corruption itself, as the French ambassador complained in 1653, because the power was so diffused that one did no longer know whom to bribe, with the consequence that "...cette dépense serait infinie et infructueuse.

The "True Freedom"

That dispersion of power, though seen by many, then and later, as a major weakness of the Republic, was actually the foundation stone of De Witt's political system, that he called de Ware Vrijheid (the "True Freedom"). We have already seen that De Witt primarily defended Oldenbarnevelt's and Grotius' claim to supremacy of (Holland's) provincial sovereignty over the sovereignty of the Generality under this moniker. But the doctrine went further. "True Freedom" implied the rejection of an "eminent head", not only of the federal state (where it would have conflicted with provincial sovereignty), but also of the provincial political system. De Witt considered Princes and Potentates as such, as detrimental to the public good, because of their inherent tendency to waste tax payer's money on military adventures in search of glory and useless territorial aggrandizement. As the province of Holland only abutted friendly territory, the Holland regents had no territorial designs themselves, and they looked askance at such designs by the other provinces, because they knew they were likely to have to foot the bill anyway. The Republic therefore from time to time threw its weight around in the German principalities to the East, but always to protect strategic interests, not for territorial gain. Likewise, after the dispute over the Overmaas territory (which still had been left over from the Munster treaty) was settled with the partition treaty of 1661 with Spain, there were no further territorial claims in the Southern Netherlands, till after the War of Spanish Succession fundamentally changed the strategic situation.

The rejection of the dynastic claims of the House of Orange therefore was not just a matter of defending the political patronage

Patronage

Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings or popes have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors...

of one particular political faction, against the aspirations to lucrative political office of another faction. It was a matter of principle to the States Party: they were against the notion of any "eminent head" of the Dutch state, not just the Prince of Orange. The absence of such an "eminent head" was to them a mark of superiority of the Dutch political system over other forms of government. The fact that compromise was a constant feature of the Dutch political landscape, and that often the pace of decision-making was glacial, was also viewed in a not necessarily negative light. (Besides, as was abundantly proved during the reign of William III, when he had obtained the stadtholdership after 1672, an "eminent head" did not necessarily eliminate the need for compromise, or speed up decision-making). Like his contemporaries as statesmen, such as Mazarin, De Witt was a raison d'état

National interest

The national interest, often referred to by the French expression raison d'État , is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural. The concept is an important one in international relations where pursuit of the national interest is the foundation of the realist...

statesman, but his raison d'état had a different content. Unlike the princely version, his disdained territorial aggrandizement, military capability for its own sake, and concentration of power in the central state. Instead, he strove to ensure security of the Dutch state, its independence from outside interference, and advancement of its trade and industry, all elements being intended to benefit the society of which the regent class were the proper representatives. The Republic, in De Witt's view, sought to attain goals which were commensurate with the interests of its citizens, not in conflict with them, as the goals of absolutist

Absolute monarchy

Absolute monarchy is a monarchical form of government in which the monarch exercises ultimate governing authority as head of state and head of government, his or her power not being limited by a constitution or by the law. An absolute monarch thus wields unrestricted political power over the...

rulers often were.

Needless to say, the Orangist party saw things differently. Their adherence to the Prince of Orange's dynastic interest was partly a matter of personal advancement, as many Orangist regents resented being ousted from the offices they had monopolized under the Stadtholderate. But many people also had a genuine ideological attachment to the "monarchical

Monarchy

A monarchy is a form of government in which the office of head of state is usually held until death or abdication and is often hereditary and includes a royal house. In some cases, the monarch is elected...

" principle. Calvinism felt theological unease with a political system that did not have a Prince

Prince

Prince is a general term for a ruler, monarch or member of a monarch's or former monarch's family, and is a hereditary title in the nobility of some European states. The feminine equivalent is a princess...

at its head, as such a system did not seem to be justifiable in biblical terms (at least if one overlooked the Book of Judges

Book of Judges

The Book of Judges is the seventh book of the Hebrew bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its title describes its contents: it contains the history of Biblical judges, divinely inspired prophets whose direct knowledge of Yahweh allows them to act as decision-makers for the Israelites, as...

in preference to Books of Kings

Books of Kings

The Book of Kings presents a narrative history of ancient Israel and Judah from the death of David to the release of his successor Jehoiachin from imprisonment in Babylon, a period of some 400 years...

). As the analogy of the Dutch Republic with the biblical People of Israel was never far from people's minds, this helped to give an important underpinning for the Orangist claims in the mind of the common people, who were greatly influenced from the pulpit. Of course, the Public Church thought its interests best served by the Stadtholder, as the Erastianism

Thomas Erastus

Thomas Erastus was a Swiss physician and theologian best known for a posthumously published work in which he argued that the sins of Christians should be punished by the state, and not by the church withholding the sacraments...

of the Holland regents was seen as a constant threat to its independence. An example of what this threat might entail was the controversy about the formulary the States of Holland imposed in 1663 for prayers in favor of the government. Such prayers were said as a matter of routine in Dutch Reformed churches throughout the life of the Republic; it was an uncontested obligation following from its status as the Public Church

State religion

A state religion is a religious body or creed officially endorsed by the state...

. The problem in the view of the Holland regents, however, was first that the "wrong" sequence was observed: the States General were given precedence over the provincial states, and secondly that prayers were also said for that "private citizen", the Prince of Orange. The States therefore now prescribed that prayers for the States General should be said last, and those for the States of Holland first, and that the Prince of Orange (13 years at the time) should be omitted. Though this formulary only applied to the province of Holland, and the clergy (mindful of their livings

Benefice

A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...

) complied with discreetly gnashing teeth, the other provinces erupted in a furore. The States of Friesland took this opportunity to challenge the doctrine of provincial sovereignty head-on, and claimed that the formulary went contrary to the Acts of the Dort Synod, that had settled the church in 1619. Zeeland almost supported Friesland, but De Witt managed to get the Zeeland States (who always had to mind their volatile Calvinist base) to prevaricate.

This incident illustrates that in the Republic the relationship between Church and State always remained problematic, even though it had seemed to be settled in favor of the church in 1619. Though the regents knew better than to interfere in matters of doctrine (as they were accused of doing in 1618), they thought they had certain rights of oversight in return for the privileged status of the Reformed Church. The clergy, on the other hand, had never reconciled itself to such oversight, and on the contrary was of the opinion that the Church had a right to oversee public policy. As the regents would never concede such a right there was a constant tension between the two, not least in the matter of tolerance, or rather, Toleration

Religious toleration

Toleration is "the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves. One can meaningfully speak of tolerating, ie of allowing or permitting, only if one is in a position to disallow”. It has also been defined as "to bear or endure" or "to nourish, sustain or preserve"...

.

The Union of Utrecht had guaranteed freedom of conscience

Freedom of thought

Freedom of thought is the freedom of an individual to hold or consider a fact, viewpoint, or thought, independent of others' viewpoints....

, but this did not imply freedom of worship

Freedom of religion

Freedom of religion is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance; the concept is generally recognized also to include the freedom to change religion or not to follow any...

. Except for the Dutch Reformed Church

Dutch Reformed Church

The Dutch Reformed Church was a Reformed Christian denomination in the Netherlands. It existed from the 1570s to 2004, the year it merged with the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Kingdom of the Netherlands to form the Protestant Church in the...

, public worship by other denominations was usually restricted with more or less severity, and membership of the privileged church was supposed to be a prerequisite for holding public office (though this rule was often honored in the breach, even as far as Catholic office holders in the Generality Lands were concerned). This policy of supremacy of the Public Church was, however, never enforced consistently, either in the different parts of the country, or over time. In general, a policy of de facto toleration predominated, even when legal prohibitions were in force. This went against the grain of the Calvinist diehards, who constantly insisted on official suppression of competing faiths, going back to the Contra-Remonstrant

Franciscus Gomarus

Franciscus Gomarus , was a Dutch theologian, a strict Calvinist and opponent of the teaching of Jacobus Arminius , which was formally judged at the Synod of Dort .-Life:His parents, having embraced the principles of the Reformation, emigrated to the Palatinate in 1578, in order...

controversy of 1618. Their Remonstrant

Remonstrants

The Remonstrants are the Dutch Protestants who, after the death of Jacobus Arminius, maintained the views associated with his name. In 1610 they presented to the States of Holland and Friesland a remonstrance in five articles formulating their points of disagreement from Calvinism.-History:The five...

opponents had come to defend religious toleration after their own suppression, and though Remonstrant regents had been ousted at the time, this political point of view remained in favor with the Holland regents, unlike their colleagues in most other provinces. The debate continued to flare up from time to time. The flap over the Holland public prayers was just one of many instances. What makes it interesting is that such debates were usually not over doctrinal matters, but in a sense about "public order." Also, they tended quickly to widen to debates over unsettled constitutional matters, like the provincial-supremacy claim of the Holland regents.

Because of this intermingling of matters that at first view would not seem to be directly related, one discernes a peculiar line-up in the ideological debate of the times, that is contrary to many myths that have arisen in later historiography. Though privately they might be as intolerant as any person, the Holland regents for political reasons were often in favor of religious toleration, and freedom of thought, because their political opponents were in alliance with the forces of religious intolerance in the Calvinist church. On the other hand, the Orangist faction often supported intolerance, because they craved the support of the preachers. As toleration did not have the favorable press it has in our times, this was actually a weak point in the armor of the De-Witt regime. There was a need for ideological justification of these policies against accusations of allowing abominations as "atheism" and "libertinism" from the side of the Consistory

Consistory

-Antiquity:Originally, the Latin word consistorium meant simply 'sitting together', just as the Greek synedrion ....

.

There was therefore a healthy public debate in the form of pamphlets published by both sides. Most of these have only an interest as curiosities, but some have exercised lasting influence, also outside the Republic. In the controversy about the Holland formulary a cousin and almost namesake of De Witt, Johan de Wit (with one t), published one pseudonymously in 1663-4, under the title Public Gebedt. This asserted that the form of government of the Republic (as preferred by the Holland regents) was the "most excellent" and chosen by God himself, while he quoted Tacitus

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...

to say that prayers for any but the sovereign power in public ceremonies weaken the state. This heavy tome would be unremarkable if it were not for the fact that De Witt is believed to have vetted the book himself, and thus given it his tacit imprimatur

Imprimatur

An imprimatur is, in the proper sense, a declaration authorizing publication of a book. The term is also applied loosely to any mark of approval or endorsement.-Catholic Church:...

.

In the same way, De Witt is thought to have lent a hand in revising a major work by Pieter de la Court

Pieter de la Court

Pieter de la Court was a Dutch economist and businessman. He pioneered modern thinking about the economic importance of free competition and was an uncompromising advocate of the republican form of government.-Biography:...

, published in 1662: Interest van Hollandt. The disparaging remarks about the stadtholderate in this work, which amounted to the assertion that princes (and by implication stadtholders) have an interest in keeping the world in perpetual conflict, because they wield more influence in such circumstances, incensed the Orangist public.

Another work by De la Court, Political Discourses caused even more of a furore. In it he denounces all (quasi-)monarchy as harming the true interest of the citizen (which he distinguishes from the subjects of monarchies), because hereditary power subordinates the public good to dynastic concerns. For good measure he added that it was necessary for the public good to curb the influence of the Public Church outside its proper sphere in the spiritual domain. This, of course, earned him the enmity of the leadership of his Leyden church that barred him from the Lord's Supper in retaliation.

This anticlericalism was not left unanswered. The leader of the conservative Calvinists, Gisbertus Voetius

Gisbertus Voetius

Gisbertus Voetius was a Dutch Calvinist theologian.-Life:...

, published the first volume of his Politica Ecclesiastica in 1663, in which he attacked (in Latin) De Witt and the Erastian policies of the regents. Possibly by Voetius also, but in any case by someone close to him, was the Resurrected Barnevelt, in which the anonymous writer, writing in Dutch, attacked the provincial-supremacy doctrine and the prayer formulary as an insidious attempt to make the other six provinces subservient to Holland. To which possibly De Witt himself replied with a scalding pamphlet, entitled Schotschen Duyvel in which he denounced Voetius by name as a master-mutineer.

The great Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel

Joost van den Vondel

Joost van den Vondel was a Dutch writer and playwright. He is considered the most prominent Dutch poet and playwright of the 17th century. His plays are the ones from that period that are still most frequently performed, and his epic Joannes de Boetgezant , on the life of John the Baptist, has...

, a partisan of Oldenbarnevelt, reissued his play Palamedes that in a veiled way deplored the execution of Oldenbarnevelt, in these years (it had been suppressed under the Stadtholderate before 1650). It was performed in Rotterdam in 1663 and elicited a forgettable Orangist counterblast in the form of the tragedy Wilhem, of gequetste vryheit by the rector of the Dordrecht Latin school, Lambert van de Bosch. Vondel felt sufficiently provoked to write Batavische gebroeders of Onderdruckte vryheit (1663), his last political play, in which he explicitly defended the "True Freedom" against Orangism.

Though these contributions to Dutch literature were a happy byproduct of the controversy, more important from the standpoint of enduring political science were the key publications by the democratic republican theorists around Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza

Baruch de Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza was a Dutch Jewish philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death...

that were published at the end of the 1660s. Franciscus van den Enden

Franciscus van den Enden

Franciscus van den Enden was a former Jesuit, Neo-Latin poet, physician, art dealer, philosopher and plotter against Louis XIV of France and is mainly known as the teacher of Baruch de Spinoza . His name is also written as 'Van den Ende', 'Van den Eijnde', 'Van den Eijnden', etc...

, Spinoza's mentor, went beyond the De la Court brothers in his espousal of political democracy in his Free Political Propositions, published in 1665, which is one of the first systematic statements of democratic republicanism in the western world. Van den Enden argued that government should not only be in the interest of the citizens (as De la Court had proposed), but should create equality of opportunity and be controlled by the people, not the regent oligarchy. Van den Ende acknowledged only two writers that had preceded him with such ideas to his knowledge: Johan de la Court (Pieter's brother with his Consideratiën van Staat of 1660), and Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy

Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy

Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy (also Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy van Zierikzee or Peter Cornelius van Zurick-zee, born c. 1625, possibly in Zierikzee, Netherlands, died c...

, whose English-language pamphlet A way propounded to make the poor in these and other nations happy (published in London in 1659) also took aristocrats and priests to task. Plockhoy and Van den Ende first tried to implement their ideas in New Netherland

New Netherland

New Netherland, or Nieuw-Nederland in Dutch, was the 17th-century colonial province of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on the East Coast of North America. The claimed territories were the lands from the Delmarva Peninsula to extreme southwestern Cape Cod...

in the early 1660s.

Spinoza, in his Tractatus theologico-politicus, tried to give Van den Enden's political ideas a foundation in his own philosophy, by pointing out that demcocracy is the best form of government "approaching most closely to that freedom which nature grants to every man". Other than Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...

, Spinoza posited that Man does not give up the rights he possesses in the state of Nature to the State, when he enters the social contract. To him therefore leaving Man as close as possible to that state of Nature is important, and he thinks that democracy accomplishes this best, as it is "the most natural" and "rational" form of government. This theme runs through most Dutch republican doctrine of the 17th century, before resurfacing in the work of the mid-18th century French republican philosophers, and ultimately in the French Revolution.

Like the De la Court brothers, and Van den Enden, Spinoza stressed the importance of unlimited toleration and freedom of expression. They went much farther in this respect than John Locke

John Locke

John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...

, whose Epistola de tolerantia was published in Latin and Dutch in Gouda

Gouda

Gouda is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. Gouda, which was granted city rights in 1272, is famous for its Gouda cheese, smoking pipes, and 15th-century city hall....

in 1689, after having been written during Locke's exile in the Republic. Locke did not go further than the Dutch Remonstrants, like Simon Episcopius

Simon Episcopius

Simon Episcopius was a Dutch theologian and Remonstrant who played a significant role at the Synod of Dort in 1618...

, in their 1620s polemics about toleration. His was a basically conservative, limited conception of toleration, that was acceptable to "main-stream" thinking of the time, though he denied toleration to atheists and non-monotheist religions. (One has to take into account that Locke was an Englishman, writing for an English public that was scarcely ready for notions of toleration, as William III - no flaming liberal himself - was to discover from the wall of opposition that his attempts to convey toleration on English Catholics encountered later that year).

The Spinozists clothed their demands for toleration in a virulent anticlericalism, because experience had taught them that if the Church was left with autonomy in the state, its prestige would allow it to mobilize the masses against anyone of whose ideas the clergy would disapprove. They insisted consequently on completely eliminating the autonomy, privileges, property, dominance of education, and censorship functions of the clergy. Lodewijk Meyer

Lodewijk Meyer

Lodewijk Meyer was a Dutch physician, classical scholar, translator, lexicographer, and playwright. He was an Enlightenment radical who was one of the more prominent members of the circle around the philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza.He published an anonymous work, the Philosophia S. Scripturae...

, a friend of Spinoza, formulated this in his De jure ecclesiaticorum, as did Pieter de la Court in his Aanwijsing der Heilsame Politieke Gronden (a reformulation of his Interest van Holland, that he published in 1669). It was this anticlericalism that made them vulnerable to attacks by the clergy, leading to the suppression of the Aanwijsing by the States of Holland at the request of the South-Holland Synod in 1669. Spinoza published his Tractatus exclusively in Latin (and objected against attempts to publish translations in French and Dutch), because he hoped in that way to cause as little provocation as possible to the regents.

Nevertheless, such censorship was the exception rather than the rule. As long as one took care to be discreet, and did not cross the boundaries of "blasphemy" as Adriaan Koerbagh

Adriaan Koerbagh

Adriaan Koerbagh was a Dutch scholar and writer best known as a critic of religion and conventional morality.-Life:...

was accused of having done in 1669, the authorities were prepared to turn a blind eye to this kind of radical publications (though freedom of the press did not exist de jure). The "True Freedom" as a political concept was accompanied by intellectual freedom in practice, and this practical freedom engendered the formulation of philosophical justifications thereof, that would resound in the later Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

The Second Anglo-Dutch War

If the Dutch Republicans wanted an example of a Prince, who fomented trouble by foreign military adventures to the detriment of the common good, they only had to point across the English Channel to the uncle of the Prince of Orange, Charles II of England

Charles II of England

. Charles had been restored to the throne of his father in 1660, after first apparently making his peace with the Dutch regents, who had so scornfully treated him after 1654. The end of the Protectorate

The Protectorate

In British history, the Protectorate was the period 1653–1659 during which the Commonwealth of England was governed by a Lord Protector.-Background:...

had given the Dutch regents hope that the new English regime might be less bellicose than the Commonwealth. To insure the good graces of Charles he was extensively fêted during his stay in the Netherlands before his triumphant return to England. It was hoped that the Dutch Gift

Dutch Gift

would further mellow his feelings toward the Dutch, maybe even persuade him to rescind the Navigation Acts. Charles took the opportunity to further the interests of his sister Mary and nephew William (now ten years old) by emphasizing his great affection for both. The Orangists, of course, needed little encouragement to add this to their quiver of arguments in favor of dynastic preferment. But also many opportunistic States-Party regents, discerning a change in the wind, started to make pro-Orange noises, especially in the Amsterdam vroedschap. This disturbed De Witt no end, as he feared that this would undermine the position of his party.

Amsterdam now started pushing a special embassy to England that was to negotiate a treaty of friendship, and a defensive alliance against third-party aggression, with Charles. They hoped to persuade the king to formally rescind the Navigation Acts, and to agree to the principle of "Free Ship, Free Goods" (by which they meant an immunity of neutral ships from visitation and confiscation of contraband

Contraband

The word contraband, reported in English since 1529, from Medieval French contrebande "a smuggling," denotes any item which, relating to its nature, is illegal to be possessed or sold....

in time of war), the latter to prevent a recurrence of the English capture of neutral Dutch shipping in the recent English war with Spain. The very generous gift to Charles at first seemed to have the desired effect.

However, soon the hopes of the Dutch peacemongers were dashed with the reappointment of Sir George Downing

Sir George Downing, 1st Baronet

Sir George Downing, 1st Baronet was an Anglo-Irish soldier, statesman, and diplomat. Downing Street in London is named after him. As Treasury Secretary he is credited with instituting major reforms in public finance. His influence was substantial on the passage and substance of the mercantilist...

as English ambassador in The Hague. Downing had also represented the Commonwealth since 1657, but made his turn to the new regime in time. He was not a friend of the Dutch, as they were well aware. On his return he immediately started meddling in Dutch internal affairs by stoking up the Orangist sentiment and undermining De Witt, where possible. The situation was ripe for this, as the Princess Mary had made great advances since August, 1660, convincing Zeeland and Friesland to come out in favor of promising a future stadtholdership for William. The Act of Exclusion was not recognized by the other provinces, as we have seen, and even Holland started to have second thoughts. Leiden and Haarlem proposed that the Prince would be designated stadtholder in future, and De Witt deflected this with some difficulty, at the same time making financial concessions to William's mother, promising to pay for his education as "Child of State." To further mollify her (in hopes of her influencing her brother in favor of the Dutch), the Act of Exclusion was formally revoked in September, 1660 (the Commonwealth having expired as a state, this could be excused as not being a breach of treaty).

However, the improvement of De Witt's personal relations with the Prince and his mother was brought to nought when she suddenly died, like her late husband also of smallpox, in January 1661. She appointed her brother Charles William's guardian in her will. This gave him formal stature to interfere in his nephew's education, and Dutch affairs of state. At the same time, the negotiations about the treaty were not going well. Not only did Charles refuse to retract the Navigation Acts, but he even reissued them in his own name. A further protectionist measure was the bill before the Cavalier Parliament

Cavalier Parliament

The Cavalier Parliament of England lasted from 8 May 1661 until 24 January 1679. It was the longest English Parliament, enduring for nearly 18 years of the quarter century reign of Charles II of England...

to restrict fishing in a zone of ten miles from the English coast (though in those days territorial waters were supposed to go no further than three miles). This the Dutch would not recognize.

However, the English obstructionism, also in the matter of the peace with Portugal (which Downing helped to frustrate for a long time) actually helped to unify the Dutch politicians in the end behind De Witt. The Amsterdam regents, seeing that they did not get anywhere with Charles, lost their interest in the cause of the Prince. Holland therefore reunited, and the recalcitrant provinces had no chance against a united Holland. Zeeland was brought back in the fold by the aggressive behavior of the new Royal African Company

Royal African Company

The Royal African Company was a slaving company set up by the Stuart family and London merchants once the former retook the English throne in the English Restoration of 1660...

against the WIC (in which Zeeland traditionally had an important interest) in West Africa. This threat to its own interests by the English (and especially William's royal uncles) helped cool Zeeland's fervor for the Orangist cause in 1661.

This left only Friesland to support a pro-English course. At Frisian insistence during 1662 the Republic made a concerted effort to conclude the sought for treaty with England, even if it meant making concessions in the case of trumped up English demands for compensation for alleged damages in the East Indies. Meanwhile, however, De Witt managed to conclude a treaty of alliance with France in April, 1662, among other things guaranteeing the threatened Dutch fisheries. De Witt now felt strengthened enough to start demanding recall of the Dutch plenipotentiaries in England, if no progress with the English treaty could be made. Downing, however, calculated that Friesland, and the land provinces, could be counted upon to keep the Dutch position weak, as he thought they would refuse to pay their share of the cost of a war with England. This was in itself not improbable, if only because the land provinces felt threatened by Bernhard von Galen

Bernhard von Galen

Christoph Bernhard Freiherr von Galen was prince-bishop of Münster. He was born into a noble Westphalian family....

, the prince-bishop of Münster, who made territorial demands on parts of Overijssel in the early 1660s. They, not unreasonably, demanded military protection against this aggressor from the Generality. However, Downing miscalculated. De Witt managed to strengthen his position, and start a program of naval rearmament in the Summer of 1662. Nevertheless, in the Fall of the same year a treaty of alliance with England was actually signed. But the relations between the two countries had become so strained, that it probably was not worth the parchment it was written on.

Relations continued to deteriorate during 1663 and early 1664. Charles' problem was that with his kingdom also the financial arrangements that had kept his father short of money were restored. Parliament had voted him a seemingly generous grant from the customs and excise duties for life, but his financial needs were greater, and he consequently was constantly looking for additional sources of income. The chartered companies, like the EIC and the RAC, looked promising in this respect, but their profitability depended on a rather predatory method of doing business, that brought them in conflict with especially their Dutch competitors, the VOC and the WIC. The EIC was no match for the VOC, but the WIC was in its turn weaker than the RAC. The latter company managed in 1664 to conquer most of the trading posts of the WIC in West Africa, while in the same year the WIC colony of New Netherland was captured by an English expedition, outfitted by the Duke of York

James II of England

James II & VII was King of England and King of Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from 6 February 1685. He was the last Catholic monarch to reign over the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland...

, Charles' brother. These acts of war happened in peace time. The English were confident that the Dutch, because of their supposed internal divisions, would not react forcefully. Again this was a miscalculation. De Witt ordered Vice-Admiral De Ruyter, who was at the time cruising in the Mediterranean, to retake the WIC forts (even though the WIC was supposed to handle its own affairs; in a way by involving the Dutch navy, De Witt was therefore raising the stakes in the conflict).

Charles declared war in March, 1665. Most European courts considered the Dutch the weaker party because (other than the Dutch republican theorists, as we have seen) they considered the Dutch system of government inferior to the English absolute monarchy. Downing predicted that the Dutch would capitulate without a fight. Even if they would fight, they would be hopelessly divided. He expected the land provinces to refuse to pay for the war, or contribute in other ways to the war. In this he was to be disappointed. Even though the war went badly at first for the Dutch (mainly due to the inferiority of their ships and to lacking quality of command), things soon started to pick up, when the Dutch naval construction program started to bear fruit, and De Ruyter was put in overall command. Patriotic fervor among the population helped to subdue Orangist dissension for the duration of the war. The inland provinces not only paid their share, but even did this with alacrity. Friesland even raised special loans for its increased share. The fact that bishop Von Galen, in alliance with England, invaded the eastern provinces in 1665, and even threatened Friesland, after having overrun Drenthe, probably concentrated Frisian minds wonderfully in this respect.

The initial military debacle this provoked for the Dutch army did cause trouble for the De Witt regime. De Witt's brother Cornelis

Cornelis de Witt

Cornelis de Witt was a Dutch politician.-Biography:Cornelis de Witt was a member of the old Dutch patrician family De Witt. He was born on 15 June 1623 in Dordrecht, Holland, Dutch Republic...

, who acted as deputy-in-the-field (a kind of political commissar

Political commissar

The political commissar is the supervisory political officer responsible for the political education and organisation, and loyalty to the government of the military...

) to the army's commander-in-chief John Maurice, Prince of Nassau-Siegen (a cousin twice-removed of the Prince of Orange, who however, was acceptable to the States Party) was implicated in the initial panicky retreat behind the IJssel

IJssel

River IJssel , sometimes called Gelderse IJssel to avoid confusion with its Hollandse IJssel namesake in the west of the Netherlands, is a branch of the Rhine in the Dutch provinces of Gelderland and Overijssel...

, that left the eastern provinces unprotected. However, now the French intervened, thanks to De Witt's treaty of alliance of 1662. French forces helped stabilize the Dutch front, and when promised English subsidies failed to materialize, Von Galen was forced to retreat ignominiously. He concluded a humiliating peace in early 1666.

Things started to look up for the Dutch in the naval war also. It is important to understand that both countries had each other in a strategic death-grip. The English might be stronger in their home waters, but like in the first conflict, the Dutch were able to close down English communications farther afield. This time also, the Danes joined the war on the Dutch side, shored up by a Dutch fleet, and closed the Sound to English shipping and trade. The Hanseatics on the other hand, ostensibly neutral, helped the Dutch circumvent any English blockades. In the Mediterranean, the parties made trade impossible for each other. In the East Indies, the VOC swept the EIC from the seas, and took this opportunity to help itself to the last remaining English toeholds in the Indonesian archipelago. In other words, English trade was devastated, with predictable results for the economy, and Charles' finances. This was the crucial factor. The English might arguably win a few more naval battles, and even inflict appreciable damage, as in the raid

Holmes's Bonfire

Holmes's Bonfire was a raid on the Vlie estuary in the Netherlands, executed by the Royal Navy during the Second Anglo-Dutch War on 19 and 20 August 1666 . The attack, named after the commander of the landing force, Rear-Admiral Robert Holmes, was successful in destroying by fire a large merchant...

by admiral Holmes in August, 1666, but the end was never in doubt. The strangulating grip of the Dutch blockade got worse by the day, even preventing coal from Newcastle reaching cold Londoners during the Winter of 1666.

By 1667 Charles had run out of money. He was forced to lay up his fleet, giving free rein to the Dutch blockade. In June, 1667, De Ruyter, now ably assisted by Cornelis de Witt, again as deputy-in-the-field, performed his daring Raid on the Medway

Raid on the Medway

The Raid on the Medway, sometimes called the Battle of the Medway, Raid on Chatham or the Battle of Chatham, was a successful Dutch attack on the largest English naval ships, laid up in the dockyards of their main naval base Chatham, that took place in June 1667 during the Second Anglo-Dutch War...

, a day that went down in English infamy. But it was less a feat of Dutch arms than one of Dutch finance, as it would not have been possible without the Dutch government simply outspending the English, till the latter was exhausted.

The end came soon thereafter. Charles sued for peace and most Dutch war aims were met at the Treaty of Breda (1667). The Dutch declined to take back New Amsterdam in exchange for Surinam, a decision that may seem unconscionable in modern American eyes, but which in the circumstances of the time must be deemed completely rational: the sugar plantations of Surinam were certainly more valuable than the already hard-pressed fur traders in their environment of hostile New-Englanders. In any case, the next time round, in 1673, the Dutch effortlessly retook "New York" (as it was then styled), renaming it "New Orange", but they again relinquished it to the English, because other things were more valuable.

More important in the long run was that Charles had to recognize the Dutch doctrine of "Free Ship, Free Goods" in the treaty (a concession that was confirmed at the Treaty of Westminster (1674)

Treaty of Westminster (1674)

The Treaty of Westminster of 1674 was the peace treaty that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War. Signed by the Netherlands and England, it provided for the return of the colony of New Netherland to England and renewed the Treaty of Breda of 1667...

).
This protected neutral Dutch shipping during the many English wars of the 18th century in which the Dutch did not take part, up to the American Revolutionary War

American Revolutionary War

The American Revolutionary War , the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers.The war was the result of the...

. Also, the Navigation Acts were modified in the sense that the German hinterland was recognized as a legitimate place of origin for Dutch commerce, appreciably softening the protectionist bite of those Acts . The territorial concessions of the English were insignificant in comparison.

An intriguing internal political accompaniment to the war was the affair that has become known as the "Buat Conspiracy." Henri Buat

Henri de Fleury de Coulan

Henri de Fleury de Coulan, Sieur de Buat, St Sire et La Forest de Gay was a captain of horse in the army of the Dutch Republic, who became embroiled in a celebrated conspiracy during the First Stadtholderless Period to overthrow the regime of Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt in favor of future...

was a French officer in the Dutch States Army

Dutch States Army

The Dutch States Army was the army of the Dutch Republic. It was usually called this, because it was formally the army of the States-General of the Netherlands, the sovereign power of that federal republic...

, who was part of the retinue of the young Prince of Orange. He was engaged, at a low level, in an English conspiracy to bring about an Orangist coup d'état in August, 1666, to overthrow the De Witt regime, end the war, and restore the stadtholderate. Buat, who handled English diplomatic correspondence with the knowledge and consent of De Witt, handed over the wrong letter to the Dutch pensionary in a moment of confusion. This letter exposed the plot and the main plotters. One of them was Johan Kievit

Johan Kievit

Johan Kievit was an Orangist Rotterdam Regent, who may have been one of the instigators of the murder of former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, of the Dutch Republic, and his brother Cornelis de Witt on 20 August 1672, together with his brother-in-law, Cornelis Tromp.- Early life :Johan Kievit...

, the corrupt Rotterdam regent who would play an ignominious role in the murder of the De Witt brother's in 1672. Though the whole affair was rather farcical, it strengthened De Witt's hand appreciably against his Orangist opponents. De Witt was able to tighten his hold on the "Child of State," among others by having the Prince's beloved governor, his illegitimate uncle, Frederick Nassau de Zuylestein

Frederick Nassau de Zuylestein

Frederick Nassau de Zuylestein was an illegitimate son of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange.-Life:In 1640 his father gave him the castle and title Heer van Zuylestein and made him captain of infantry for the state. In 1659, he was made governor of the household of his nephew, William III of Orange...

, removed from the Prince's entourage. Apparently, this earned him the enduring enmity of the impressionable boy, who loved the older man dearly. The episode also for the moment put paid to attempts to appoint the Prince to the Raad van State.

Mounting tensions with France

Meanwhile, relations with France started to deteriorate, also. France had always, since the days of Henry IV of France

Henry IV of France

Henry IV , Henri-Quatre, was King of France from 1589 to 1610 and King of Navarre from 1572 to 1610. He was the first monarch of the Bourbon branch of the Capetian dynasty in France....

, been an important ally of the Republic. In 1635 during the Republic's war with Spain, Cardinal Richelieu, king Louis XIII of France

Louis XIII of France

Louis XIII was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1610 to 1643.Louis was only eight years old when he succeeded his father. His mother, Marie de Medici, acted as regent during Louis' minority...

's chief minister, concluded a treaty with the Republic, in which the parties agreed to attack the Spanish Netherlands on two fronts in that year. Those provinces were to be granted the status of free Cantons

Cantons of Switzerland

The 26 cantons of Switzerland are the member states of the federal state of Switzerland. Each canton was a fully sovereign state with its own borders, army and currency from the Treaty of Westphalia until the establishment of the Swiss federal state in 1848...

on the Swiss model, if they cooperated, but in case of resistance there was to be a partition of the country in which the French would receive the French-speaking provinces and western Flanders, and the Dutch Antwerp, the Scheldt Estuary, and Ghent

Ghent

Ghent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...

, Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....

, and Mechelen

Mechelen

Mechelen Footnote: Mechelen became known in English as 'Mechlin' from which the adjective 'Mechlinian' is derived...

. The States Party of the time was not happy with this arrangement, because the reintegration of Antwerp in the Republic would upset the cosy arrangement that kept Antwerp's trade bridled in favor of Amsterdam's. However, this partition treaty was pushed through by stadtholder Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange

Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange

Frederick Henry, or Frederik Hendrik in Dutch , was the sovereign Prince of Orange and stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel from 1625 to 1647.-Early life:...

, and the Orangist regents, many of whom were generously bribed by Richelieu. Nothing much came of these plans. The formidable Spanish Army of Flanders

Army of Flanders

The Army of Flanders was a Spanish Habsburg army based in the Netherlands during the 16th to 18th centuries. It was notable for being the longest standing army of the period, being in continuous service from 1567 until its disestablishment in 1706...

checked the attack by putting up a strategic defense against France, and vigorously attacking the Dutch. The offensive of 1635 almost turned into a disaster for the Dutch, after their invasion was repelled, and the Spaniards successfully counterattacked. The French were too weak to make a large impression.

Though the treaty prohibited conclusion of a separate peace with Spain, the Republic nevertheless concluded such a peace in 1648, leaving France to face Spain alone till the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. This caused a decided coolness in the relations between the countries up to the time Louis XIV personally took up the reins in 1661. However, at this time the partition treaty was still formally in force between the two countries, something to be held in reserve in case the need arose. Of course, the Dutch now being on very good terms with the Spanish, did not for a moment intend to join Louis in any designs against the Spanish Netherlands, and such designs were for the moment in abeyance, as Louis had just married Maria Theresa of Spain

Maria Theresa of Spain

Maria Theresa of Austria was the daughter of Philip IV, King of Spain and Elizabeth of France. Maria Theresa was Queen of France as wife of King Louis XIV and mother of the Grand Dauphin, an ancestor of the last four Bourbon kings of France.-Early life:Born as Infanta María Teresa of Spain at the...

, the daughter of king Philip IV of Spain

Philip IV of Spain

Philip IV was King of Spain between 1621 and 1665, sovereign of the Spanish Netherlands, and King of Portugal until 1640...

, as a guarantee of good relations between France and Spain. One of the conditions of the marriage contract, on which other conditions were contingent, was a large dowry that Spain would pay to France. Philip IV died, however, in 1665 without the dowry having been properly paid. Louis then (declaring the conditions in the marriage treaty in which his wife renounced her rights to the Spanish Crown and its possessions void, because of non-compliance with the dowry condition) construed a claim of his wife on the Duchy of Brabant

Duchy of Brabant

The Duchy of Brabant was a historical region in the Low Countries. Its territory consisted essentially of the three modern-day Belgian provinces of Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant and Antwerp, the Brussels-Capital Region and most of the present-day Dutch province of North Brabant.The Flag of...

. The new Spanish government rejected this, but its position was weakened, because its forces were fully committed at the time in the Portuguese Restoration War

Portuguese Restoration War

Portuguese Restoration War was the name given by nineteenth-century 'romantic' historians to the war between Portugal and Spain that began with the Portuguese revolution of 1640 and ended with the Treaty of Lisbon . The revolution of 1640 ended the sixty-year period of dual monarchy in Portugal...

that was still raging. Its once formidable Army of Flanders had been almost disbanded by this time.

The diplomatic unrest around this question disturbed De Witt no end. His initial relations with Louis had been very amicable. In 1662 he renewed the old alliance with France, as we have seen, and this alliance was helpful in the conflict with England and Munster, when the French sent auxiliary troops to help shore up the Dutch eastern defenses in 1665. Except for the Caribbean, France did not take part in the war with England. As a matter of fact the new French West India Company

French West India Company

In the history of French trade, the French West India Company was a chartered company established in 1664. Their charter gave them the property and seignory of Canada, Acadia, the Antilles, Cayenne, and the terra firma of South America, from the Amazon to the Orinoco...

, formed in 1664, took Cayenne

Cayenne

Cayenne is the capital of French Guiana, an overseas region and department of France located in South America. The city stands on a former island at the mouth of the Cayenne River on the Atlantic coast. The city's motto is "Ferit Aurum Industria" which means "Work brings wealth"...

by force away from the WIC in 1665, but the Dutch were forced to grin and bear this, because of the ongoing war with England at the time. But the way Louis was acting in the matter of the Spanish Netherlands made De Witt anxious that the old partition treaty should not become operational. It offered a number of equally unpalatable prospects for the Dutch: unwanted incorporation of Antwerp (the blockade of which was now enshrined in the peace treaty of 1648 with Spain) would open up that city's trade; and a resurgent France as an immediate neighbor would necessitate the building up of the standing army, an expense the regents wanted to avoid at all costs.

For the moment De Witt rejected Spanish feelers for a defensive alliance against France, even when the Spanish envoy made an unauthorized threat that Spain would abandon the Southern Netherlands to France, in exchange for Roussillon

Roussillon

Roussillon is one of the historical counties of the former Principality of Catalonia, corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrénées-Orientales...

and Navarre

Navarre

Navarre , officially the Chartered Community of Navarre is an autonomous community in northern Spain, bordering the Basque Country, La Rioja, and Aragon in Spain and Aquitaine in France...

. De Witt recognized this as an empty bluff. As France invaded the Spanish Netherlands in 1667, starting the War of Devolution

War of Devolution

The War of Devolution saw Louis XIV's French armies overrun the Habsburg-controlled Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté, but forced to give most of it back by a Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.-Background:Louis's claims to the...

, De Witt started discussions with Spain, however, in hope of deterring France, and staking out a claim in case Spanish resistance would collapse. Spain received a large Dutch loan, with a number of Flemish cities as collateral, and De Witt now pointedly obtained permission to occupy these pawns as a guarantee of repayment.

As the French made slow, but inexorable progress, De Witt, though very reluctant to intervene, thought up a solution for his dilemma that would stop the French advance, without necessitating Dutch military intervention, or even (as he hoped) forcing a break with France. He now concluded the Triple Alliance (1668) with England and Sweden. This was an armed coalition of the three countries that forced their mediation on France and Spain. France was to be appeased with all territorial gains it had up to then achieved by military means in the Southern Netherlands (among which the cities of Lille

Lille

Lille is a city in northern France . It is the principal city of the Lille Métropole, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the country behind those of Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Lille is situated on the Deûle River, near France's border with Belgium...

and Cambrai

Cambrai

Cambrai is a commune in the Nord department in northern France. It is a sub-prefecture of the department.Cambrai is the seat of an archdiocese whose jurisdiction was immense during the Middle Ages. The territory of the Bishopric of Cambrai, roughly coinciding with the shire of Brabant, included...

), and Spain was further called upon to cede either Luxembourg

Luxembourg

Luxembourg , officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg , is a landlocked country in western Europe, bordered by Belgium, France, and Germany. It has two principal regions: the Oesling in the North as part of the Ardennes massif, and the Gutland in the south...

, or the Franche-Comté

Franche-Comté

Franche-Comté the former "Free County" of Burgundy, as distinct from the neighbouring Duchy, is an administrative region and a traditional province of eastern France...

. The only thing that was required of Louis was that he halt his advance. This lopsided award was designed to placate Louis, without spoiling the relations with the Republic. The not-so-secret sting in the deal was that the three would intervene militarily if Louis rejected this generous award. Louis therefore complied at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668)

Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668)

The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle was the first of three treaties signed at Aachen which ended the War of Devolution...

with the demands of the allies, but he took the humiliation very hard. After this he started to plot with Charles II of England and the prince-bishop of Munster (who had his own revenge needs after 1666) and the Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Henry of Bavaria

Maximilian Henry of Bavaria

thumb|154 px|Maximilian Heinrich of BavariaMaximilian Henry of Bavaria was the third son and fourth child of Albert VI, landgrave of Leuchtenberg and his wife, Mechthilde von Leuchtenberg. In 1650, he was named Archbishop of Cologne, Bishop of Hildesheim and Bishop of Liège succeeding his uncle,...

, who resented Dutch interference with his attempts to subdue the Free City of Cologne

Cologne

Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

. This resulted in a number of secret arrangements, among which the Secret treaty of Dover

Secret treaty of Dover

The Treaty of Dover, also known as the Secret Treaty of Dover, was a treaty between England and France signed at Dover on June 1 in 1670. It required France to assist England in the king's aim that it would rejoin the Roman Catholic Church and England to assist France in her war of conquest...

, designed to start a war of aggression against the Dutch Republic in 1672, and to divide that country among the participants.

Before that hot war started, France and the Republic already became engaged in an economic war, however. France had always been a very important trading partner with the Republic, especially since the 1640s. Sales of Dutch textiles, spices and other colonial wares, herring, whale products, Delftware

Delftware

Delftware, or Delft pottery, denotes blue and white pottery made in and around Delft in the Netherlands and the tin-glazed pottery made in the Netherlands from the 16th century....

and Gouda pipes, Baltic naval stores, tobacco products, and refined sugar (for a large part of raw sugar from French-Caribbean plantations) had greatly expanded in France. On the other hand, the Republic was a very large importer of French wine, brandy, salt, silk, paper, vinegar and Breton sail-canvas (often for reexport from its entrepot). In other words, the two economies complemented each other to a large extent (other than the Dutch and English economies, that mainly competed in the same markets). This complementarity would in modern eyes be seen as a happy opportunity for exploiting comparative advantage

Comparative advantage

In economics, the law of comparative advantage says that two countries will both gain from trade if, in the absence of trade, they have different relative costs for producing the same goods...

by specialization

Division of labour

Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...

, which it indeed became in the years up to the mid-1650s. Unfortunately, in those days trade was seen as a zero-sum game

Zero-sum

In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant's gain of utility is exactly balanced by the losses of the utility of other participant. If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are...

(also by the Dutch incidentally); both parties suspected being exploited by the other.

Not being an economist, Louis resented the preponderant share in the French market, taken by the Dutch, on basically emotional grounds, but his new Superintendent of Finances

Superintendent of Finances

The Superintendent of Finances was the name of the minister in charge of finances in France from 1561 to 1661. The position was abolished in 1661 with the downfall of Nicolas Fouquet, and a new position was created, the Controller-General of Finances....

, Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French politician who served as the Minister of Finances of France from 1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His relentless hard work and thrift made him an esteemed minister. He achieved a reputation for his work of improving the state of French manufacturing...

, gave focused impetus to this resentment by a well-organised complex of economic policies, of a mercantilist

Mercantilism

Mercantilism is the economic doctrine in which government control of foreign trade is of paramount importance for ensuring the prosperity and security of the state. In particular, it demands a positive balance of trade. Mercantilism dominated Western European economic policy and discourse from...

nature. The first of these was his tariff

Tariff

A tariff may be either tax on imports or exports , or a list or schedule of prices for such things as rail service, bus routes, and electrical usage ....

list of 1664, which was calculated to just wrest away important French markets from the Dutch, without completely closing down trade (except for the trade in refined sugar, which was hit with a prohibitive tariff). However, in 1667 this was followed with a much more draconian list that doubled tariffs on Dutch fine cloth, linen, and Delftware; quadrupled them on whale products (for which France was Holland's biggest customer); and raised them sevenfold for tobacco products.

Another measure, directed directly at the Dutch trade system outside the direct Franco-Dutch relations, was the founding of a number of chartered trading companies that were intended to compete with the Dutch VOC and WIC, but also make inroads on the Dutch Baltic trade, like the already mentioned West India Company and the French East India Company

French East India Company

The French East India Company was a commercial enterprise, founded in 1664 to compete with the British and Dutch East India companies in colonial India....

, both formed in 1664, and given monopolies in France. These caused the Dutch some anxiety, but proved eventually not very successful. The same applied to the Compagnie du Nord that Colbert set up in 1669 to compete with the Dutch in Scandinavia. This was supposed to engross the Dutch salt trade with especially Norway, and replace it with French salt. Unfortunately, the French salt with a high magnesium content proved unfit for preserving herring (as the Dutch could have told Colbert, because they had tried to sell it to the Norwegians themselves, when the Iberian salt trade was closed to them). France therefore had to subsidise these exports, and also the otherwise uncompetitive French shipping rates. Despite government pressure the Bordeaux wine merchants were unwilling to shift their exports away from Dutch carriers, or do without Dutch prefinancing of their operations. The unprofitability of its operations, combined with Dutch dumping

Dumping (pricing policy)

In economics, "dumping" is any kind of predatory pricing, especially in the context of international trade. It occurs when manufacturers export a product to another country at a price either below the price charged in its home market, or in quantities that cannot be explained through normal market...

policies in the trade of Baltic naval stores, forced the winding up of the company in 1675.

Nevertheless, thanks to the importance of the French market to the Dutch, and the fact that the Dutch had less possibilities of imposing counter-pressure than they had in their conflicts with the English, the Dutch government at first tried to ignore the hostile policies of Colbert. Its inaction was also caused by differences of opinion about how best to proceed within the States Party. Amsterdam, and especially the Amsterdam diplomat Coenraad van Beuningen

Coenraad van Beuningen

Coenraad van Beuningen was the Dutch Republic's most experienced diplomat, burgemeester of Amsterdam in 1669, 1672, 1680, 1681, 1683 and 1684, and from 1681 a VOC director...

, argued in favor of firm economic counter-measures against the French economic policies, paired with the forming of a defensive alliance with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire

Holy Roman Empire

. De Witt, however, preferred avoiding such foreign entanglements, and a conciliatory approach in the economic sphere. As their economic interests were severely damaged by the French protectionism, the industrial cities of Leiden and Haarlem, however, teamed up with Amsterdam to support a more belligerent diplomacy. After the Rotterdam regents were promised compensation for the damage to their wine trade, to get their assent, the States of Holland decided in 1671 on severe retaliatory measures against French imports, in effect banning French wine, vinegar, paper, and sail-canvas. The stage was now set for war.

The end of the De-Witt regime

The war started in March, 1672. An English fleet attacked the Dutch Smyrna convoy in the Channel, as in the previous two conflicts without a declaration of war. That was to follow only after France had declared war on April 6. The French army was the largest in Europe at the time. Louis assembled 118,000 infantry and 12,500 cavalry against a regular Dutch army that numbered at most 30,000. That Dutch army, long neglected by the De-Witt regime, was also qualitatively inferior. The regents belatedly tried to reinforce it with contingents of the citizen militias, but it was all too little, too late. The Dutch enclaves in present-day Germany, Cleves

Duchy of Cleves

The Duchy of Cleves was a State of the Holy Roman Empire. It was situated in the northern Rhineland on both sides of the Lower Rhine, around its capital Cleves and the town of Wesel, bordering the lands of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster in the east and the Duchy of Brabant in the west...

and Lingen

Lingen

Lingen is a town in Lower Saxony, Germany. In 2008 the population was 52,353, and in addition there are about 5,000 people who have registered the city as their secondary residence...

, were quickly overrun by the Elector of Cologne, the Munsterites, and the French, a long list of venerable fortresses being taken almost without a shot fired. Then the French stormed across the Rhine at Lobith

Lobith

Lobith is a village in the Dutch province of Gelderland. It is located in the municipality of Rijnwaarden. Traditionally, it is said that the Rhine enters the Netherlands at Lobith, although in reality, this happens about 4 km further upstream, near Spijk....

on June 12, outflanking the main Dutch eastern line of defense at the IJssel. The Dutch now hastily retreated to the Hollandse Waterlinie

Dutch Water Line

The Dutch Water Line was a series of water based defences conceived by Maurice of Nassau in the early 17th century, and realised by his half brother Frederick Henry...

, thereby abandoning all but the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht to the enemy. The French followed at their leisure, experiencing little resistance, as the citizens of first Arnhem

Arnhem

Arnhem is a city and municipality, situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands. It is the capital of the province of Gelderland and located near the river Nederrijn as well as near the St. Jansbeek, which was the source of the city's development. Arnhem has 146,095 residents as one of the...

, and then Utrecht

Utrecht (city)

Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...

rioted, and forced their city governments to capitulate without a fight.

But there the advance halted. The waterline defense was filling up, despite the summer drought, inundating vast tracts of land across the path of the advancing French, which effectively blocked them. Louis did not mind, as he expected the Dutch to know they were beaten, allowing him to await their peace offers in his headquarters in Utrecht. He did not have long to wait. The Dutch government was in a complete funk. Defeatism among the regents was rife. Against the advice of De Witt, the States of Holland already before the fall of Utrecht on June 23, had sent the Rotterdam Pensionary, Pieter de Groot

Pieter de Groot

Pieter de Groot was a Dutch regent and diplomat during the First Stadtholderless Period of the Dutch Republic...

(the son of Grotius) to parley with the king's envoys Louvois

François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois

François Michel Le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois was the French Secretary of State for War for a significant part of the reign of Louis XIV. Louvois and his father, Michel le Tellier, would increase the French Army to 400,000 soldiers, an army that would fight four wars between 1667 and 1713...

and Pomponne. He returned to the Hague with the bleak message that capitulation was the only option. The States concurred, hoping to save the Republic proper, and the free exercise of the Reformed religion (Louis had already had the Utrecht cathedral reconsecrated to Catholic worship), but being prepared to sign away the Generality Lands.

But now the remarkable popular insurrection began that would save the Republic, and overturn the States-Party regime. Protests began in De Witt's hometown, Dordrecht

Dordrecht

, and soon spread to Rotterdam, Schiedam, Leiden and Amsterdam. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam the militias forced the vroedschap to vote against the capitulation. Nevertheless, on June 26 the States General voted four to three (Holland, and the three already occupied provinces Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel, against the rest) to send De Groot with a mandate to sign away the Generality Lands and offer a large war indemnity to Louis. Louis thought the offer insufficient, and sent De Groot back empty-handed. It was the last offer he would get.

To understand what happened next we have to digress about the position of the Prince of Orange. During the war with England, and the Buat Conspiracy, the Orangists had to lie low, as we have seen. However, under the gathering clouds of the conflict with France, and because the Prince finally got to the age where he could plausibly be proposed for actual public office in his own right (his cousin Willem Frederick died in 1664, taking the cadet branch of the family temporarily out of the running as the Frisian stadtholdership was now taken by an infant). The pressure on De Witt to allow a role for William therefore started to mount inexorably, putting him on the defensive. However, he celebrated one final triumph of the "True Freedom", when in 1667 he managed to engineer the final abolition of the stadtholderate, not only in Holland, but also in Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel. These provinces signed the so-called Perpetual Edict (1667)

Perpetual Edict (1667)

The Perpetual Edict of August 5, 1667 was a resolution of the States of Holland in which they abolished the office of Stadtholder in the province of Holland...

which abolished the office of stadtholder in these provinces "forever" (the Act of Seclusion had only stated that no Prince of Orange could hold that office), separating the captaincy-general of the Union from the stadtholderate of any of the provinces (to close the door to the Frisian stadtholder), and transferring the functions of the stadtholder permanently to the States in Holland.

The triumph was short-lived, and somewhat pyrrhic, however. It actually made the elevation of William to the office of captain-general in February, 1672, more difficult to deflect, as the danger of a combination of the functions of stadtholder and commander-in-chief no longer threatened. The 21-year old Prince was therefore duly given the command of the army (with De Witt's grudging assent), just before the war started, making him share in the responsibility for the military debacle, which he, of course, in the circumstances could not avoid. De Witt hoped to control him with the deputies-in-the-field, an institution that Marlborough

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough

John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, Prince of Mindelheim, KG, PC , was an English soldier and statesman whose career spanned the reigns of five monarchs through the late 17th and early 18th centuries...

would come heartily to detest when he in turn was appointed lieutenant-captain-general of the Union in 1702. But circumstances now allowed him to wrest free from political control.

At first the Prince was swept along in the political turmoil. As head of the federal army he felt a responsibility to maintain public order where it had broken down, often because the city militias had come out against the city governments. An interesting political development started to take shape, in which the Orangist mob (against which normally both the States Party and the Orangist regents would have formed a common front) injected a decidedly "democratic" element into Dutch politics. The mob, incited by the Calvinist preachers as usual, demanded not only a purge of the States Party regents, but also an alteration of detested policies, like toleration of dissenting Protestants. The main demand, of course, was the abolition of the Perpetual Edict, and the appointment of William to the restored stadtholdership. He was therefore, in effect, put in power by the people in July, 1672. The Orangist regents (hoping this would be a one-off aberration) legitimized this "unconstitutional" interference of the common people in what they, too, considered "their" affairs, after the fact as a "patriotic" and necessary check on regent presumption, which was justified by the emergency. It is nevertheless remarkable, and somewhat ironic, that now Orangist ideology also had a "democratic" variant.

William was appointed stadtholder of Zeeland on July 2; the States of Holland followed suit the next day. Of course, the old prerogatives of the stadtholder, like appointing the city governments, even in the voting cities, abolished in December, 1650, were also restored. At first William did not move against the States Party, but the mob unrest continued apace, despite the fact that the Orangist demand had been met. In city after city the States Party regents were now molested. Rotterdam Pensionary De Groot, the would-be signer of the capitulation, had to flee to Antwerp. In Amsterdam the transfer of power had an orderly character, but elsewhere violence was used. In Rotterdam the militia forced the vroedschap to oust the remaining States Party regents, as in Dordrecht.

In the Hague events took a particularly ugly turn. De Witt was severely wounded by a knife-wielding assassin on June 21. He resigned as Grand Pensionary on August 4, but this was not enough for his enemies. His brother Cornelis (De Ruyter's deputy-in-the-field at the Raid on the Medway), particularly hated by the Orangists, was arrested on trumped up charges of treason. He was tortured (as was usual under the Roman-Dutch system of law, that required a confession before a conviction was possible) but refused to confess. Nevertheless he was sentenced to exile. When his brother went over to the jail (which was only a few steps from his house) to help him get started on his journey, both were attacked by members of the Hague civic militia in a clearly orchestrated assassination. The brothers were shot and then left to the mob. Their naked, mutilated bodies were strung up on the nearby public gibbet, while the Orangist mob partook of their roasted livers in a cannibalistic frenzy. Throughout it all, a remarkable discipline was maintained by the mob, according to contemporary observers, making one doubt the spontaneity of the event.

Thus ended the life of Johan de Witt, who had in effect ruled the Republic for almost twenty years. His regime outlasted him only a few more days. Though no more people were killed, the lynching of De Witts lent renewed impetus to the mob attacks, and to help restore public order the States of Holland empowered William on August 27 to purge the city councils in any way he would see fit to restore public order. The following purges in the early days of September were accompanied by large, but peaceful, Orangist demonstrations, that had a remarkable political character. The demonstrations delivered petitions that demanded certain additional reforms with a, in a sense, "reactionary" flavor: the "ancient" privileges of the guilds and civic militias (who were traditionally seen as mouthpieces of the citizenry as a whole) to curb the regent's powers were to be recognized again (as in pre-Burgundian times). The demonstrators also demanded more influence of the Calvinist preachers on the content of government policies and a roll-back of the toleration of Catholics and other dissenting denominations. The purges of the city governments were not everywhere equally thoroughgoing (and, of course, there was little mention of popular influence later on, as the new regents shared the abhorrence of the old ones of real democratic reforms). But as a whole, the new Orangist regime of the Stadtholder was well-entrenched during his following reign.

Aftermath

The question whether William had a hand in the murder of the De-Witt brothers will always remain unanswered, like his exact role in the later Massacre of Glencoe

Massacre of Glencoe

Early in the morning of 13 February 1692, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite uprising of 1689 led by John Graham of Claverhouse, an infamous massacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This incident is referred to as the Massacre of Glencoe, or in...

. The fact that he ordered the withdrawal of a federal cavalry detachment, that otherwise might have prevented the lynching, has always raised eyebrows, however, like the fact that he did not prosecute the well-known ringleaders like Cornelis Tromp

Cornelis Tromp

Sir Cornelis Maartenszoon Tromp, 1st Baronet was a Dutch naval officer. He was the son of Lieutenant Admiral Maarten Tromp. He became Lieutenant Admiral General in the Dutch Navy and briefly Admiral General in the Danish Navy...

and his relative, Johan Kievit, the Buat conspirator, who now was appointed pensionary of Rotterdam, and even advanced their careers. But maybe firm measures against the conspirators were not feasible in the political climate of those fraught days in the Fall of 1672.

In any case, the political turmoil did not enable the allies an opportunity to finish the Republic off. The French were effectively stymied by the water defenses. Only when the inundations froze over in the following winter was there, briefly, a chance for Marshal Luxembourg, who had taken over command of the invading army from Louis, to make an incursion with 10,000 troops on skates. This almost ended in disaster, when they were ambushed. Meanwhile the States General managed to conclude alliances with the German emperor and Brandenburg

Brandenburg

Brandenburg is one of the sixteen federal-states of Germany. It lies in the east of the country and is one of the new federal states that were re-created in 1990 upon the reunification of the former West Germany and East Germany. The capital is Potsdam...

, which helped relieve the French pressure in the East.

The war at sea went badly from the start for the allies because of the genius of Lieutenant-Admiral De Ruyter, whose exploits at this time earned him the admiration of admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan

Alfred Thayer Mahan

Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States Navy flag officer, geostrategist, and historian, who has been called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century." His concept of "sea power" was based on the idea that countries with greater naval power will have greater worldwide...

who in his seminal work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 points out the tactical advantage the Dutch admiral derived from the "local terrain" (if one may speak of "terrain" at sea) when battling the combined Anglo-French fleets in the shallow waters off the Dutch coast, and later his strategic use of the "fleet-in-being" to checkmate the numerically superior allied fleets. De Ruyter's successes, both defensively and offensively, combined with the successes of other Dutch admirals (New York was retaken by a Zeeland fleet, for instance) and Dutch privateers, again severely damaged English commerce. After Parliament refused to vote him a war budget in 1674, threatening a repeat of 1667, Charles was driven from the war thanks to Spanish mediation. The Peace of Westminster

Treaty of Westminster (1674)

was a condition of the Spanish to enter the war against France on the Dutch side, because they did not want to fight both England and France simultaneously. The Dutch were therefore compelled to relinquish New York again. The peace brought England no net gains at all, however. Hopes of territorial gains in the Netherlands proper, that Charles had entertained before the war, were dashed. The Dutch did, however, replace the subsidies from Louis that the latter now no longer paid. Those had been a waste of money, anyway.

Soon after, France's German allies were driven from the war, in an equally humiliating way. Dutch troops reconquered all lands lost to Munster. A strategic thrust to the fortress of Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

in late 1673 forced the French to evacuate the areas she occupied in the Republic, except for Maastricht and Grave. By then the reconstituted Dutch army had again become a formidable force, as in the 1640s, its strength rising to 100,000 men, almost as large as the French army (France had a population ten times as large in these days as that of the Republic). This was accomplished by great financial outlay in the hiring of mercenary troops. But the Republic had the financial wherewithal to bear this burden, despite French hopes that it would break the Republic. The war went on till the Peace of Nijmegen

Treaties of Nijmegen

The Treaties of Peace of Nijmegen were a series of treaties signed in the Dutch city of Nijmegen between August 1678 and December 1679...

in 1678. Here the Dutch finally obtained the retraction of Colbert's tariff of 1667, that had set off the economic war. However, the handling of the peace negotiations, in which Louis managed to divide his enemies, and entice the Dutch (against the wishes of William, who perceived the diplomatic cost) to conclude a separate peace, cost the Republic dearly in reputation and good will with its allies.

The Peace solved nothing. Louis continued his aggressive policies for the rest of his life, and William spent the rest of his life as the great frustrator of Louis' ambitions. This led to the epic conflicts between France and its allies on the one hand, and the Republic and its allies on the other, around the turn of the 18th century. England was brought into the Dutch camp by the preventive invasion (brought about by Dutch fears of a repeat of the combined Anglo-French attack of 1672) of 1688, later known as the Glorious Revolution

Glorious Revolution

The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, is the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau...

. This brought William to the English throne, but (as his new subjects complained) he always remained a Dutch patriot, preferring the interests of his country of birth.

When William died on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession in 1702, the regents that had been his faithful ministers in the Republic immediately reverted to De Witt's "True Freedom", refusing to appoint the Frisian stadtholder John William Friso, Prince of Orange (designated as his heir in his will) stadtholder in the other provinces, despite the fact that the stadtholderate had been declared hereditary in Holland in 1674. This implied that the Second Stadtholderless Period

Second Stadtholderless Period

The Second Stadtholderless Period or Era is the designation in Dutch historiography of the period between the death of stadtholder William III on March 19, 1702 and the appointment of William IV, Prince of Orange as stadtholder and captain general in all provinces of the Dutch Republic on May 2,...

had started. The new regime, however, continued the policies of William, and the alliance with England, at least up to the Peace of Utrecht

Treaty of Utrecht

The Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, comprises a series of individual peace treaties, rather than a single document, signed by the belligerents in the War of Spanish Succession, in the Dutch city of Utrecht in March and April 1713...

in 1713.

Sources

(1989), Dutch Primacy in World Trade 1585-1740, Clarendon Press Oxford, ISBN 0-19-821139-2 (1995), The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806, Oxford University Press,ISBN 0-19-873072-1 hardback, ISBN 0-19-820734-4 paperback

External links

Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims, of the Republic of Holland (1662) Declaration of War by Louis XIV against the States General, 1672 Pamphlet against the De-Witt brothers, pretending to be the sentence of the court against both

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