Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (5 page)

Both we ourselves, and our dearest and most entirely beloved Consort, the Princess [Mary Stuart], have endeavoured to signify, in terms full of respect to the King, the deep and just regret which all these proceedings have given us … But those evil counsellors have put such ill constructions on those our good intentions, that they have endeavoured to alienate the King more and more from us, as if we had designed to disturb the quiet and happiness of this Kingdome.
⁹

It was, then, with the greatest reluctance and humility that the Prince felt he had no alternative but to come to the assistance of a country he felt so closely bound to by bonds of lineage and obligation:

Since [we] have so great an interest in this matter, and such a right, as all the world knows, to the succession of the Crown; since also the English did in the year 1672, when the States General of the United Provinces were invaded in a most unjust war, use their utmost endeavours to put an end to that war…; and since the English nation has ever testified a most particular affection and esteem, both to our dearest Consort, the Princess, and to ourself, we cannot excuse ourself from espousing their interest in a matter of so high consequence, and from contributing all that lies in us for the maintaining both of the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of these Kingdoms.

No wonder this version of the intellectual underpinning of the Glorious Revolution has been embraced by all except specialist historians of the period ever since. Here is a worthy political manifesto for the dawn of the Age of Reason – the English Enlightenment. William’s assault on English sovereignty is represented as an entirely reasonable intervention by one well-intentioned party in support of the fundamental rights of the English people. It has seemed convenient to overlook the fact that within only weeks of his arrival in Britain, William had abandoned all pretence that he was intervening altruistically and claimed the throne for himself and his wife. Even before their coronation, the invasion had begun to look more like simple opportunism, with the outcome directly contrary to the expressed aims of the
Declaration
.

There is something seductive and reassuringly familiar about the comfortable commitment to reasonableness, order and integrity the manifesto voiced. The
Declaration
is closely compatible with John Locke’s
Tw o Treatises on Government
– one of the intellectual cornerstones of late seventeenth-century political thought, first published in England in 1690. Hence, perhaps, the strong temptation for us retrospectively to line up William’s declared intention of restoring consensual rule to England, and political ‘modernity’ of a kind we still recognise. And indeed, Locke is quick to associate his treatise, arguing that the population of any nation was entitled to consent rationally to be ruled by a sovereign power which agreed to serve their interests, with the political upheavals in England of two years earlier. His preface announces:

Thou hast here the Beginning and End of a Discourse concerning Government … These [papers] I hope are sufficient to establish the Throne of our Great Restorer, Our present King William, to make good his Title, in the Consent of the People, which being the only one of all lawful Governments, he has more fully and clearly than any Prince in Christendom: And to justifie to the World, the People of England, whose love of their Just and Natural Rights, with their Resolution to preserve them, saved the Nation when it was on the very brink of Slavery and Ruine.
¹⁰

Locke’s
Two Treatises
were written during his own exile in the United Provinces. Indeed, all his political writings date from the period between his flight from England to the Low Countries in 1683 and his return home in 1689. Prior to that his professional reputation was that of a distinguished medical man with republican leanings. Men like Burnet and Locke were moulded by the Dutch Republic and its mores into political thinkers who harnessed the eloquence and lucidity of the English language to the levelheaded pragmatism of the Dutch.

Moreover, it is not just the
Declaration
of reasons – so heavily influenced by the temperament and literary style of Gilbert Burnet – that has permanently shaped the telling of the story of the invasion which led to the Glorious Revolution. Burnet’s monumental, six-volume
History of his own Times
, written towards the end of his long and eventful life, has also seen to it that a version of the Dutch intervention as driven exclusively by religious and ethical ideals has persisted down to the present day. The motto for the invasion proclaimed its purpose (’
pro religione et liberate
’), and that Burnet-style justification has remained the legitimising slogan for the Dutch intervention ever since.

In fact, however plausibly contemporaries pointed to Princess Mary’s claim on the English crown and her husband’s entitlement to try to secure a reliably Protestant succession, there were strong, entirely Dutch political reasons for William of Orange’s invasion. The strategic planning which culminated in the great fleet leaving harbour on 1 November 1688 appears in a different light when looked at squarely from the point of view of its Dutch participants. In the eyes of the Dutch States General, as well as those of key players like Prince William himself and his close advisers, it was driven by the urgent need to get the English King, in spite of his Catholicism, to commit to a ‘defensive alliance’ with the Dutch Republic, against the increasingly alarming expansionist moves of forces of the French King on the Republic’s borders.

James II’s accession to the throne in 1685 had raised immediate anxieties with the Dutch States General. The Dutch were deeply concerned, not only that James was strengthening the position of practising Catholics inside his own country, but also that he was reinforcing the English army. ‘The King makes large-scale preparations, equips, fills his storehouses, ambassador Skelton is sent to Paris, has ambitions in the East Indies – everything highly suspect,’ a Dutch agent reported. The fear was that a Catholic, expansionist Anglo–French coalition was about to form again, recalling the nightmare of 1672, when Louis XIV had been stopped from overrunning the Low Countries with English backing. Then, the French King’s aggression and expansionist ambitions had brought down the republican regime of the brothers De Witt, as William of Orange emerged as the only leader capable of marshalling and focusing the support of politicians and the military. Now, once again, it was to be William, as the nominated Orange ruler or Stadholder, who proved capable of leading a robust Dutch response against renewed French military aggression.

William sent Dijkvelt to London as ambassador, charged with winning over James to form an alliance with the Dutch, rather than with France. When this initiative failed (largely because James was too preoccupied with internal English politics), William introduced a number of special envoys, acting on his behalf, charged with forging closer relations with the English King who was both his uncle and his father-in-law. This too met with little support, so Bentinck, who oversaw this network of contacts on the Stadholder’s behalf, developed it as an efficient machine for collecting detailed intelligence on the English political situation.

It was through this network of informants that Bentinck laid the groundwork for the eventual invasion. When it became known that James II’s second wife – none of whose pregnancies had resulted in the birth of a healthy child who survived beyond babyhood – was well-advanced with a pregnancy which promised to be without complications (an event about which we will hear more in the
next chapter
), it was this intelligence service which provided vital information about the growing opposition to James’s regime.

There were a number of factors which contributed, in the end, to the Dutch taking the extraordinary risk of a military assault on the British Isles. In the first place, strategic reasons directly related to Louis XIV’s continuing aggression on the European mainland pushed the Dutch Republic towards an intervention which would prevent England lending military support to French aggression against them. In 1678, the Dutch Republic had extricated itself from war against France by agreeing to sign the Treaty of Nijmegen, under the terms of which the Dutch gained trading concessions, while the French gained territory. In the period running up to the invasion the policy of the States General (somewhat to the annoyance of the more belligerent Prince William) tried to distance the Republic from the European territorial conflict wherever possible, to protect Dutch commercial interests – the northern Netherlands were, after all, ‘a Republic of Commerce’, which could not afford to be drawn into a defensive war with France.

This policy of non-involvement in any kind of anti-French action became increasingly difficult to sustain, as events conspired further to disturb the uneasy balance of power in mainland Europe. In May 1688 the Elector of Brandenburg, a long-standing heroic defender of the Protestant cause in Europe, who had been married to William’s aunt (his father’s sister) Louise Henriette, died leaving no direct heir. William immediately sent Bentinck to Berlin to negotiate a continuing alliance with the new Elector, who was considered less reliable than the ‘Great Elector’ as a supporter of any kind of Protestant alliance against France. He managed to secure a commitment on the part of the Elector to give troop support to the Dutch venture, which Bentinck and William were by now clear would be a full-scale invasion of the British Isles. After several months of shuttle diplomacy, made more complicated by the fact that his wife was seriously ill at The Hague, Bentinck was able to tell William that he had secured a sizeable army of German troops to defend the Rhine and Dutch borders against French aggression while the Dutch forces were otherwise occupied – a decisive step in the decision-making leading up to the invasion.
¹¹

But what eventually made up the minds of the Dutch States General and Stadholder William of Orange that an invasion of England was inevitable was an escalating trade war with France which struck at the heart of the Dutch economy. In August 1687 Louis XIV banned the importing of Dutch herring into France, unless it could be shown to have been salted with French salt. In September he doubled the import duties on fine Dutch cloth and a whole list of other Dutch products. By December, Dutch factors (trade officials) at Paris, Lyons and Lille were reporting that it had become impossible to sell Dutch textiles because of their high price. Similarly, with France the biggest market for herring and whale products, Dutch herring exports dropped by a third in the year following the ban. The French ambassador to The Hague reported that Louis’s punitive tariffs ‘have managed to sour the spirits of the people and officials here and have raised them to a peak of fury, such that burgomasters and the rabble alike talk of nothing else but fighting to the death rather than remain in the present state’.
¹²

By June 1688 tension was running sufficiently high for William confidently to urge the States General that there was no alternative but to prepare for war with France. He also began secret negotiations with members of the Amsterdam administration, hitherto opposed to war, to discuss a pre-emptive strike against England. These complex negotiations were almost entirely concerned with the logistics of anticipating an attack by the French. Louis’s absolute refusal to back down over the punitive tariffs eventually produced an unusual measure of agreement among the various Dutch political factions. As the French ambassador reported despairingly, ‘there can be no negotiating, even with the most sympathetic of them, unless they are given some satisfaction concerning the commercial matters’.

Some members of the Dutch administration continued to waver. Then, in September, as Bordeaux, Nantes and other west coast French ports began to fill up with Dutch ships, there to take on board the year’s output of wine earmarked for export, the French King suddenly announced that all Dutch ships in French waters were to be impounded – a total of some three hundred vessels. ‘The Dutch believe a war with France is unavoidable,’ the English consul at Amsterdam wrote, unaware that the first strike was actually to be directed against his own country.

The reasons, laid before the States General by William’s trusted representative Gaspar Fagel, were plain: France had badly damaged Dutch trade, shipping and fisheries; a French declaration of war on some pretext was now inevitable; if France was allowed to enter into an alliance with England, their combined forces would be bound to overwhelm the Republic. The only way, in these circumstances, that the Republic could be made secure was to bring about the downfall of the Catholic, pro-French regime of James II, and to turn around England against France. ‘There can be no doubt whatever that the Dutch State invaded Britain … to crush late Stuart absolutism thoroughly, turn England into a parliamentary monarchy and, by so doing, transform Britain into an effective counterweight to the then overmighty power of France.’
¹³

As a clear indication of public assessment of the scale of the risk: on the eve of the invasion, the Amsterdam stock exchange crashed, wiping millions of guilders off government stocks and stocks in the East and West India Company.
¹⁴

Religious considerations did play their part. The revocation by France of the Edict de Nantes (which entitled Protestants to worship freely) in 1685 produced a mass exodus of Huguenots, thousands of whom flooded as refugees into the Dutch Republic. There they spread alarm at the severity of Louis XIV’s measures against Protestants. But the sceptical pamphleteer who wrote, on the eve of the Dutch invasion, that ‘none that know the religion of an Hollander would judge the Prince or States [General] would be at the charge of a dozen fly-boats or herring-busses to propagate it, or especially the Church of England’ was expressing a widely held view of the lack of doctrinal harmony between Dutch Calvinism and Anglicanism: