Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/542

 534 DUTCH MISSIONS TO ENGLAND IN 1689 October countries, Holland included, rather than that of France, and that it was meant by William to draw the remains of Dutch trade to England.^ The impression made by these pamphlets is that i^ was by no means certain how the alliance would turn out or whether there would be a stable and effective alliance at all. The optimism or pessimism of the different types of opinion seems to depend partly on their more or less favourable view of the house of Orange and its enterprises, but, apart from this distinction, the more practical and well-informed the writer is, the more diffi- culties he sees in the way of a good understanding and a common policy. A contemporary who had nothing but these pamphlets to inform him would hardly have foreseen that the alliance, though accompanied from its first day to its last by friction and distrust, would be long-lived and would give a new turn to many branches of the policy of each of its members. No more would a contem- porary in England whose reading was limited in the same way to pamphlets, the nearest equivalents of the time for the leaders in the modern newspapers. In the flood of pamphlets on the many questions of the revolution, the prospect of a Dutch alliance got scanty attention. William's help had been called in for British purposes, and it was on the British advantages and disadvantages of his coming that men wanted to make up their minds. One supporter of James interpreted the expedition as a result of jealousies fostered amongst the Dutch by English and Scotch exiles, the special fear of the Dutch at the moment being that, if once James could set up liberty of conscience in England, that country would become as attractive to industrious immi- grants as their own.^ But this was no more than a far-fetched attempt to work up feeling against the ' butter-boxes ', and it needed no argument of friendliness for the Dutch to refute it. For the English the Dutch alliance came as a by-product of home affairs. How it was to be arranged, for what aims and with what sacrifices, were open questions. The work of settling these open questions, or at least those of them for which a solution had to be found and could not be postponed, was done by a series of special diplomatic missions to London during the year 1689. During the whole time there was a resident Dutch ambassador in London, Aemout van Citters,^ who had represented the republic not > Aanmerkinge op de Oorlogs-Declaratie (Bibliotheca Thysiana, no. 5003). of the Intended Invasion (1688) and the Letter to the Author of the Dutch Design Anato- mized, dated 8/18 November 1688. the Bijks-Archief at The Hague (Brieven EIngeland, Stat. Gen. 6930 S., and Secrete
 * The Dutch Design Anatomized or a Discovery of the Wickedness and Unjustice
 * See his life in Nieuw Nederlandseh Biogr. Woordenboek. His dispatches are in