First Salute (12 page)

Political voice was confined to the upper class. Because commoners without property qualification had no franchise, there could be no popular vote. Policy was decided by vote of the States General depending upon an authorizing vote in the provincial states, which were headed by burgomasters of the town councils and made up of two councilors, two burgomasters, two
schepens
or judges and the Pensionary of the province. Though an important person, the Pensionary was under the authority of the burgomasters.

The political system reached an extremity of nominal democracy. Decisions of policy by the States General had to be referred back to the provincial states for a positive or negative vote, and by them to the town councils and by them forwarded back to the States General, with the result that a decision might have to be discussed by some 2,000 people representing fifty cities. As has been said of the Polish Diet, “They created chaos and called it a constitution.” The result in delay and subdivision of authority was another sacrifice of efficiency to fear of dictatorship—sometimes, in cases of crisis, with serious consequences. In a petty case the problem was epitomized when the Grand Pensionary in an interview with the French Ambassador on an urgent matter was asked for an early answer to report back to the King. He replied, in despair and almost in tears, “You know I cannot get an answer in three weeks.”

Though a tight and narrow company representing only one economic and social section of the population, Dutch government was so restricted by its method of policymaking as to be as impotent as Gulliver tied down by the strings of the Lilliputians. The system, as Adams, disenchanted,
soon found out when he had to work with it, was a “complicated and perplexed constitution.” In the first place, where was sovereignty? For nationals no less than for foreigners it was hard to locate. Nominally it resided in the Prince-Stadtholder, but did the last word lie with him or with their High Mightinesses of the States General representing the union of the seven United Provinces? The presidency of the States General rotated weekly among the deputies, hardly an effective method of functioning, but the Dutch seemed so afraid of any ruler gaining dictatorial control that they preferred an almost ridiculous precaution to the dangers of efficiency. Americans, too, in designing their constitution dreaded any whiff of monarchy, but they managed simply to write it out of bounds rather than put the chief of their deliberative body in a condition of helpless desuetude. In general, the Americans, facing many of the same decisions of statehood as the Dutch, came to more sensible solutions, no doubt because they were fortunate in the sensible and sophisticated political thinkers to whom their constitution is owed.

The chief of state was the Stadtholder, formerly the representative or viceroy for the Emperor Charles V in his capacity as King of Spain, grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, who had come into possession of the Low Countries or Netherlands by inheritance from Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, son of the King of France, and from the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian through a convoluted set of relationships and dynastic marriages which we may ignore. Possession passed, when Charles V abdicated in 1555, to his son Philip II.

In 1579, year of the Union of Utrecht, the office of Stadtholder, then held by William the Silent, was made hereditary, though not royal. At independence it was occupied by his grandson William II. A young man with the Orange family truculence, he opposed the terms of independence at the Treaty of Münster because he believed there should be no dealing with Spain but only war to the bitter end. More significantly, he married the eldest daughter of Charles I of England, starting the succession by the Oranges of marriages to princesses of England that forged the connection with the English royal family in spite of past wars and future quarrels. Their son, William III of Orange, made the most noticeable of these alliances when he married Mary, daughter of James II of England. When her father was ousted in the overthrow called the Glorious Revolution of 1688, his Dutch son-in-law was invited to succeed him. Fitting neatly into the English numerical line, William accepted
the invitation and became King of England as William III, ruling jointly with his consort as William and Mary. As England’s King and, in his Dutch capacity, as ally, William was the centerpiece and driving force of the European coalition to stem the advance of Louis XIV for the control of Europe. Louis, seeing him as his chief European enemy, hated him vengefully and set his mind to destroy him and regain the former French Netherlands along the frontier. In his insatiable lust for extending French territory, Louis XIV was the prime generator of the epidemic of wars that afflicted Europe during his mature reign (c. 1660–1715). His drive for supremacy, and the determination of his fellow-nations to contain him, was the source of ceaseless conflicts at every border, most famously represented by the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, and by its chief captain, the Duke of Marlborough. “But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out,” says the old grandfather in answer to the child’s question in Southey’s poem. With a greater perspective, we can suggest the answer. What they fought for was that bodiless yet weighty matter called the balance of power—essentially, that France should not gain supremacy in Europe by absorbing the dominions of the Hapsburg or Spanish empires.

Monarch since the age of five, Louis XIV had fed so long on autocratic command that his appetite grew by what it fed on and needed to be satisfied by continual increase. The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive. When exercised for the seizure of territory or suppression of liberties, it cannot be said to add to the welfare or happiness or improve the quality of life of those it rules, nor bring content to the ruler. What is it good for? As an inveterate activity of our species, it is largely a waste of time. Between Genghis Khan and Hitler, Louis XIV was its primary exponent, reflecting his era which, as Lord Acton, who had more than one thing to say about power, declared, was one of “abject idolatry of power, when laws both human and divine were made to yield to the intoxication of authority and the reign of will.” As the wars spread to the world outside Europe, Macaulay finds a different candidate for blame in Frederick the Great and his endless quarrels with Maria Theresa of Austria for possession of Silesia. A place that few could identify or locate, Silesia was like a magic stone that if rubbed, would cause wars to spring up. Frederick’s greed and deceit, wrote Macaulay, who teaches history through a gift for language, was “felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown,” where “in order that he [Frederick] might rob a neighbour … black
men fought on the coast of Coromandel [India] and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.”

William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not. William was succeeded in England by his wife’s sister Queen Anne, and in the Netherlands by a collateral cousin of the Nassau family designated William IV. Not an adventurer, William IV dutifully followed the path of English marriage, taking as his wife, Anne, daughter of George II. A genuine Hanover—who were not an easygoing family—Anne or Anna was left a widow with a three-year-old son, William V, who was to be Stadtholder in the years that concern us. As Regent of the Netherlands during his minority, she is called the Governess Anna by English-speaking historians, an ill-chosen term meaning merely the female of governor.

Ruling with stern authority, the Governess Anna left as her legacy the choice as adviser for her son of yet another strong character, who was to dominate the Prince and take hold as the real governor of affairs during the period of this narrative. He was the Duke of Brunswick, Louis Ernest Wilhelm of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to distinguish him from many other Brunswicks of his family. He was a brother of the more famous Karl Wilhelm, reigning Duke of the German principality adjoining Prussia, an admired warrior, considered to be the very pattern of “an enlightened despot.” This ruler fell rather short of the attributes that might be expected of such a figure in the episode for which history remembers him—his proclamation of the notorious Brunswick Manifesto, which exemplifies in a single case the nature of the ruling princes of the old regime—and their fall. In time to come, in 1792, the Duke was to command the Austrian and Prussian armies in the allied campaign to crush the French Revolution. Marching on Paris, he announced as his forces approached the French frontier that the allies proposed to restore Louis XVI to the throne and that the French people who dared to oppose his armies “shall be punished” according to the most stringent laws of war, and that “their houses shall be burned. If any harm was done to the King and Queen, the allies would inflict an ever-to-be-remembered vengeance by delivering the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction.” This fire-eating pronouncement naturally convinced the French public that the King in whose behalf it was issued was a traitor to France, in league with the Prussians and Austrians.
The
Brunswick Manifesto, rather than accomplishing Louis XVI’s rescue, paved his way to the guillotine, which could have been foreseen if Karl Wilhelm had given the matter any forethought, but thinking ahead is given to chess players, not to autocrats.

We must not allow Louis Ernest of Brunswick to suffer from folly by association with his brother, for he seems to have been a reasonable man. He was a nephew and favorite of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, who called him “fat Louis” with reason—for the Duke was indeed obese—if not with politeness. Are Kings polite? Perhaps not at the Prussian court.

Formerly Field Marshal of the Austrian Army, Louis of Brunswick had been brought to the Netherlands by William IV of Orange, who made his acquaintance in the course of one of the European wars, and was impressed by the abilities of the large Duke. Not an Orange by blood, William IV had no great military talents but enough to recognize the ill condition of the Dutch Army. He invited the Duke home to manage the reform of the army with the promise of a salary of 60,000 guilders and retention of his title of Field Marshal and a territorial estate of his own. After declining three times, the Duke accepted and was named Commander-in-Chief. The Regent Anna also formed a high opinion of him and gave him charge of the six-year-old Prince, the future William V, whom the Duke persuaded to sign a
Secret Act of Advisership conferring governing powers on a personal Cabinet consisting of Duke Louis, the Grand Pensionary, the veteran
greffier
Fagel and the aged secretary of the Cabinet, De Larrey.

“
I have rarely seen,” wrote the visiting English diarist, Sir William Wraxall, speaking of Brunswick, “a man of more enormous bodily dimensions … but this prodigious mass of flesh, which it was natural to suppose, would enervate or enfeeble the powers of his mind, seemed neither to have rendered him indolent or inactive.” Attached as he was, of course, to the pro-British party of his patron, Brunswick not unnaturally received kindly notices from a British observer. “The strength of his character,” continued Wraxall, “and the solidity of his talents, while they supplied in some measure the defects of the Prince of Orange, animated and impelled the vast machine that he inhabited.… On the parade, and in his military capacity,” Wraxall added, “Brunswick displayed equal animation and professional knowledge.… He manifested no somnolency when in company; nor was he ever betrayed at table, into excesses injurious to his reputation.” These were delicate allusions
to the Prince-Stadtholder, who himself tended to fall asleep at table and in the Council chamber because of what Wraxall diagnosed as a “
constitutional somnolency … too frequently accompanied by excesses of the table particularly of wine.”

Under the governance of a Hanoverian mother and a Prussian tutor, the meager share of Orange vigor that might have slipped through collateral inheritance into William’s blood did not flourish, even less so when after his marriage yet another strong-minded character entered the domestic circle. His wife was Frederika Sophia Wilhelmina, a niece of Frederick the Great. Described as “
well-educated, intelligent, energetic and amiable,” she was well equipped to join mother and tutor in doing the Prince’s thinking for him, leaving her husband all too aware of her effect.

“He is so jealous, not of her virtue but of her sense and power,” wrote Malmesbury, “that he would
not even go to paradise by her influence; and she has so mean an opinion of his capacity and in general that kind of contempt a high-spirited woman feels for an inferior male being, that I see no hopes of bringing them into cohesion.”

In physical appearance, with the same bulging eyes and thick lips and pudgy body, William V resembled his cousin of Hanover blood, George III of England, while he lacked George’s emphatic temperament. “His understanding,” reported Wraxall, “was cultivated, his conversation … entertaining and even instructive, abounding with historical information that displayed extensive acquaintance with polite letters.”

Suffering from the same sense of inadequacy felt by many of his English contemporaries who gained important governing positions from rank, rather than from merit and experience, William felt convinced that he was unequipped for the responsibility he held, a feeling that disabled him from acting with firmness or conviction. He tried to make up for the lack by conscientious attention to duty, rising at six and often working till midnight, filling his day with court levees and military reviews interspersed with prayers and meals. But keeping busy failed to dispel his anxieties or his belief that all his military training had fitted him for no higher rank than corporal. In one hard moment he exclaimed that he wished his father had never become Stadtholder and added, in so many words, “
I wish I were dead.” This was the unhappy man who was Sovereign of the Netherlands.

In this situation, weak and irresolute government began at the top. The Prince’s advisers provided no one of reliable strength and consistency
on whom to lean. Duke Louis of Brunswick was strong but unpopular, because his efforts to stay friendly with every faction made him distrusted by all and because he was resented for his influence with the Prince. Princess Wilhelmina, who might have formed a useful partnership with him in support of the insecure sovereign, resented his sway over her husband. Influenced by the pro-French sympathies of her uncle Frederick II, she took the opposite side from Brunswick of the great divide between the pro-British and pro-French parties. Consequently, William’s two closest associates could give him only divided counsel in place of firm guidance. Engelbert François Van Berckel, Pensionary of the city of Amsterdam, with its dominant influence as the major mercantile center and largest taxpayer, was too firmly attached to the commercial and therefore anti-British interests to give any but one-sided advice or to put into the balance of policy anything but the direct interests of his city. The jealous friction of geographical regions and major cities had become the curse of the Netherlands. In their old struggle against the King of Spain and the Duke of Alva, counties and duchies and bishoprics had fought each other for advantage, laying the foundations of the deep and habitual rivalries that cut rifts through the country.