The Story of Nations - Holland/Chapter 34

As far as the words of treaties went, the position of Holland after the War of the Spanish Succession was over was rendered satisfactory. The Dutch were guaranteed the full liberty of trading with Spain which they had enjoyed before the war was undertaken, and were permitted to enjoy the privileges of French subjects, especially in the Mediterranean ports of France. The Dutch were a little alarmed at the cession of a part of the frontier to the new King of Prussia in exchange for the principality of Orange, near Avignon, which Frederic William claimed as the representative of the house of Orange.

There were, however, serious results from the war. This struggle had been costly beyond experience, and the wealth of Holland had been seriously lessened, and its future industry pledged by the subsidies which it had granted, the expenses it had incurred, and the loans which it had raised. Dutch credit was, and remained, good long after the period of which I am writing. The State could borrow from its thrifty citizens on better terms than other governments could, and though the interest laid on Dutch stock was low, foreigners invested in a security the dividends of which were always punctually paid. But the prosperity of Holland depended on its supremacy in trade, and here the rivalry of England, a country with far greater resources, and in a far more safe position, was sure to affect the activity of the Republic. Besides, the English were beginning to secure that place in manufacturing industry which they have long and successfully occupied, and to supplant the Hollander. Not many years after the War of the Spanish Succession was over, the rate of interest in England was nearly as low as it was in Holland.

The debt of Holland was very heavy for the times. The State of Holland alone, the largest of the United Provinces, had a debt of nineteen millions of guilders, and the collective debt of the United Provinces was nearly ten times that amount. At the beginning of the eighteenth century such a debt filled statesmen with alarm, and not only in Holland, but in England, the state of the finances made people fear that a collapse of public credit was inevitable. To obviate such alarms, redoubled efforts were needed, and more energetic rivalry practised, in which it was hard for the weaker nation to make head against the stronger, even if the relations between the two countries, Holland and England, had been maintained with perfect fairness. But, in truth, the English Government used Holland very ill, dictating to the United Provinces what should be their form of government, forcing on the reluctant Republic monarchical or quasi-monarchical forms, entrapping Holland into taking part in the continental policy of England, and encouraging its own merchants to supplant the Dutch in their own domain of trade.

The Dutch indeed welcomed the accession of the house of Hanover with enthusiasm. They saw that the party which had thwarted them in the late war was driven from power and discredited, and they felt assured that George, the new English king, would be their friend. They even lamented that the life of Anne was prolonged, so that the surrender, as they deemed it, of Utrecht had been effected, and that they reaped but little advantage from their sacrifices. They gave considerable assistance to George at the Scottish insurrection of 1715, which perhaps prevented a renewal of hostilities on the Continent.

The long reign of Louis XIV. came to an end in September, 1715. His successor was a child of six years old, and the regency was in the hands of the Duke of Orleans. Now this person, a very scandalous and profligate man, was strongly convinced that his own interests and the interests of France required that the relations between France and England should be as amicable as possible. Hence as the same counsels prevailed in England, peace was maintained in Europe for a considerable time, and there seemed every prospect that there would be nothing but peaceful rivalry among the nations.

They who have studied the history of Holland trace the decline of the nation to the events which followed on the War of the Spanish Succession. The Old spirit had, they say, been exhausted in the Republic. The Dutch were no longer disposed to emulate the military endurance of their forefathers, such as it had been during the greater part of the seventeenth century, or the heroism on sea of Heemskerk, Tromp, and De Ruyter. A nation of heroes had been turned, it was alleged, into a nation of pedlars. The general assembly of the States in 1716, they allege, proved that Dutch courage and enterprise had wofully declined, and that Holland was soon to forfeit the exalted reputation she had acquired. And yet for two generations and more after this event, commercial Holland was the envy and admiration of other European nations, and the causes of Dutch prosperity were care fully and perhaps invidiously examined.

The constitution of the Republic was, and always had been, one of the most unmanageable conceivable. The several States constituting the United Provinces were all free and all equal. The theory of what Americans call, or used to call, State rights was pushed to extreme lengths, and nothing but a common interest in resisting a common danger could have preserved unity of action among the separate members. The Republic was, in fact, a loosely united association, the several contingents of which acted separately for many purposes, and in common for two objects only political safety and trade. The contribution which each should make to the common expenses of government was a matter of arrangement, but the several States were not always ready to abide by the compact, and often threatened to stand aloof at a crisis. It is remarkable that so flimsy a union should have held together at all, and it is not strange that the most vigorous and successful of the stadtholders desired nothing so much as the opportunity of arresting these tendencies to disintegration which were always vexatious and sometimes threatening.

Generally the progress of the Stadtholder was from the influence which he acquired in the lesser States to the maintenance of his authority over the larger, especially Holland, and he often found it or thought it necessary to put down popular institutions in the smaller States in order to prepare himself for a struggle with the elements of resistance in the larger. For during the struggle between the monarchical influence of the Stadtholder and the distrust and resistance of the republicans, the mass of the people were generally on the side of the house of Orange, while the principal burghers and merchants formed the strength of the Republican party. Unlike what has happened in other countries, the populace was on the side of monarchy, that which was practically the aristocracy, on that of democratic government.

By far the largest part of the wealth and power of the United Provinces was centred in the State of Holland, and in the city of Amsterdam. Important as the success of the movement would be to the fortunes of the Republic, William found the greatest difficulty in winning the assent of the Amsterdam burghers to the expedition of 1688. After the death of William, and the re-establishment of the Republic without a Stadtholder, the State of Holland took the lead in the conduct of affairs; and till 1720, when he died, Heinsius, the friend of William, and the Pensionary, was practically the ruler of the Provinces from 1689. But though the State of Holland had made great sacrifices, the smaller States were jealous of it, and were untiring in their efforts to break down its supremacy. The best way in which this could be done was to restore the Stadtholder.

Now at William's death he recognized as his heir one John William Friso, the Stadtholder of Friesland and Groningen, and these two States proposed that their Stadtholder should be appointed general of the infantry in 1704, though he was still very young. But his claims to represent the house of Orange was contested by the Brandenburg family, who afterwards became kings of Prussia, and though the Provinces at last agreed that John William should be a general of the Dutch army, the State of Holland proposed, and apparently succeeded in their contention, that all the provinces should take oath that they would preserve the union without a Stadtholder. In 1711 John William was drowned, and a posthumous son of his, William Charles Henry, was born. Under these circumstances, the rights of this branch of the house of Orange being disputed, and one of the competitors being an infant, the question of the stadtholderate slept. The claims of the king of Prussia were indirectly, but practically, surrendered at the treaty of Utrecht.

In 1722 the partisans of the boy, now eleven years old, urged that he should be elected Stadtholder of the United Provinces, with the object, as I have suggested, of breaking down the supremacy of Holland, and especially of Amsterdam. But the attempt was premature, and William was for some time merely Stadtholder of Guelderland, and with very limited powers. There was, however, no doubt that most of the European monarchs were sincerely anxious that the Dutch Republic should have an hereditary chief. The success and opulence of free institutions was distasteful in their eyes, and it was pretty obvious that if Holland could have a monarch thrust on them, and be entangled in the European system, the menace of a free government wedged in between two absolute monarchies would soon cease to be a danger.

Shortly after the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt, by which what had formerly been the Spanish Netherlands came into the possession of the house of Austria, the emperor, Charles VI., once the pretender to the Spanish crown, granted commissions to Ostend traders, empowering them to carry on commerce with the East Indies. These commissions were eagerly accepted by private individuals, both in England and Holland, who under the name of interlopers, strove to appropriate a portion of the trade which had hitherto been the monopoly under State guarantees of the Dutch and English companies. These companies had, at great expense, built factories, established relations with native powers, and acquired a trade, and it seemed not a little unjust that traders who had incurred no such expense, should reap the fruits of other people's labours. Remonstrances addressed to Charles were of no avail, the grievance and the loss continued, the English Government forbade. English subjects from accepting commissions from a foreign Power for trading to the East Indies, and the Dutch adopted similar measures. In 1722 Charles of Austria went further. He granted a charter of incorporation to the Ostend East India Company, with a capital of six million florins, and the trade of Holland and England is said to have been seriously compromised.

Now this proceeding was denounced by the United Provinces as a plain infraction of the provisions contained in the treaty of Munster, under which the King of Spain bound himself that none of his subjects should sail from Europe to India, and that as the emperor had succeeded to the King of Spain in the Netherlands and Southern Italy, he was bound by the conditions under which his predecessor was limited. The English argued, that by the treaty of Madrid in 1670, their merchants were admitted to all the advantages which the Dutch enjoyed under the treaty of Munster, and that the English Government was justified in suppressing this trade. They followed up their remonstrance by an Act of Parliament, under which serious pecuniary penalties were to be levied on all British subjects who subscribed to the Ostend Company, and such persons as were detected in India without the license of the English Company were made liable to imprisonment and corporal chastisement at the discretion of the East India Company's authorities.

These severe restraints of trade in the interests of a monopoly granted by the state are interesting as they indicate what was, in the opinion of the age, the safest and most continuous source of national wealth. But, in the end, the English' East India Company paid its dividends out of its conquests and lost by its trade, and the ruin of the Bank of Amsterdam was effected by the loans which it made to the Dutch East India Company, whose trade was conducted on even more vicious and costly principles than that of its English rival was. The Dutch conquests and the administration of its territory in the last did indeed supply Holland a revenue and does so still. The career of the two companies has been similar.

After an existence of nine years the Ostend Company was abolished, not because Charles acknowledged that in creating it he had violated the treaty law of Europe, but because he wished to get the assent of the various European Powers to the Pragmatic Sanction, under which the inheritance of his German dominions was to be secured to his only daughter, Maria Theresa, and, as he fondly hoped, the German Empire to her husband. The historian of Holland is forced to admit that in their eagerness to get rid of a rival, the Dutch allowed themselves to be again involved in European dynastic complications in which they had no interest, and that the gain was not worth the risk.

Between 1718 and 1720 France and England were the scene of the wildest speculation, and the unaccountable madness of the trading classes in the two kingdoms has been the natural object of comment by all those who have treated of the facts. The proximate cause of this speculation was the attempts of the several governments to relieve themselves in part from the annual burden caused by the dynastic wars in which Europe had been engaged. The Dutch had laid a tax of the hundredth penny on their own public funds (although it was alleged that this was only a disguised repudiation) for three years. The Regent of France began by debasing the currency, then commenced the issue of paper money, then intrusted his bank to Law, who became a Papist in order to secure the public confidence, and finally issued unlimited paper on the security of the Mississipi project The collapse and ruin of this project did not deter Englishmen from a similar madness. The South Sea Company had procured the contract for the importation of negroes into America, and had guaranteed the conversion of certain 6 per cent. Government stocks into a 5 per cent. The success of this expedient, in which the Company's intervention was found unnecessary, induced the Government to attempt the conversion of all the public stock into joint stock capital. The directors of the Company took it, puffed it, profited by it, and the thing collapsed. There was no public frenzy in Holland, but many Dutchmen ventured on Law's scheme and the South Sea project, and suffered accordingly.

In 1729, after a vain attempt two years before to capture Gibraltar, the treaty of Madrid was concluded between Great Britain, France, and Spain as considerable Powers, with the object of maintaining, by force if necessary, the provisions of the treaty of Utrecht. To this treaty the States-General were invited to give their assent, to which they agreed. Under the stipulations of the treaty, the States-General were to keep on foot a very moderate force for the guarantee, were to obtain the entire abolition of the Ostend Company, full compensation for all their losses and grievances, and commercial privileges on the most favoured nation principle. In the same year the Dutch East India Company was continued for twenty-one years, on payment of three and a half million guilders to the States treasury.

Amsterdam was still the centre of European trade and exchange, and its bank was still the object of admiration and envy. The growth of the English mercantile marine necessitated the payment of large sums through Amsterdam. The corn trade was by the tradition of Dutch commerce centered, in Amsterdam. Dealings in public funds had become a recognized branch of investment and speculation, and transactions in these securities were generally carried out at Amsterdam, to whose bank remittances due for interest were sent. The English Government of the day, whose policy was vigorously attacked, though later times have borne testimony to the financial abilities and pacific policy of Walpole, was obliged to give its reasons for the fact that the exchange was generally against England and in favour of Holland. It was still the great trading mart of the world.

The fire of religious persecution was not yet extinct. The Protestants of Savoy were still being harried, and the Archbishop of Salzburg, one of the German prince bishops, was enforcing the gospel by fire and sword against his subjects and spiritual sons. Secure in his castle built on the great rock which dominates the whole valley in which this town lies, the prince prelate enforced his spiritual counsel by occasional cannonades, and by a torture chamber duly furnished in the stronghold. Naturally enough, the Savoyards and Salzburgers fled, and Holland welcomed them. The former could not, however, like most people of the mountains, bear the flats, the canals, and dykes of Holland, and returned, preferring the risks of persecution. Meantime, Benedict XIII. put out a service in honour of Gregory VII., and his excommunication of Henry IV., Emperor of Germany. The Dutch now entirely tolerant, forbade the reading of this service within the States, and in order to check Jesuit intrigues, to which the rite was undoubtedly due, encouraged the settlement of a Jansenist archbishop at Utrecht. This church still subsists.

But a greater danger than the Jesuits and the Bull unigenitus, which they had got from the Pope, was threatening Holland. In 1732 it was found that the ships from the East had carried with them a curious shell fish, which has a habit of boring into wood and even into stone of moderate hardness. The Pholas has a shell which is armed with a saw, by which it is able to carve out a habitation for itself, and effectually destroy the timber or stone in which it carves. It had attacked the timbers on which the dykes of Amsterdam, and indeed of Holland, depended for their very existence, and threatened to do what Alva, and Parma, and Spinola, and Louis could not effect. It was discovered in good time, and the dykes were strengthened with flint and granite, materials too hard for the jaws or the shells of the Pholas. But the consternation which Holland experienced in 1732, was as great as that of sixty years before, and was as happily averted, though not at such a cost.

The Republic had to fight against the constant risks of the angry sea, against shell fish which its own trade had unwittingly imported, against the greedy monarchs of Spain and France, against the jealous merchants of England, against the intrigues of the kings with whom the Orange family had allied itself, kings who had strong family feelings against the people who have permitted them to rule. For the European kings have never scrupled to despoil each other, and are always ready to unite together, in order to oppress those who would keep them in check, or resent their tyranny. And now came the beginning of the end. Holland, despite its heroic efforts after freedom, despite the wise self-denial of William the Silent, and the hesitation of Maurice, was to be handed over to hereditary monarchy, and the vulgarities it implies.

In earlier days the sympathy of the poorer Dutchmen with the house of Orange was partly hereditary gratitude, partly disgust at the arrogance of the mercantile and manufacturing oligarchy of the towns. It is an inherent vice with most of those who raise themselves in life, that they are more harsh and severe to the class from which they have sprung than those are who have been born and brought up in more affluent circumstances. Set a capitalist who has been a labourer over workmen, and he is the most intolerant of employers, as a rule. And it is plain that Dutchmen, who had become rich out of nothing, became sharp to the ordinary burgher. The evidence is clear enough, though I cannot tell it here, for lack of space.

In 1733 the Prince of Orange married Anne, the eldest daughter of George the Second of England. There was no doubt that there was many an honest Dutchwoman who said on this occasion, as a Scotchwoman of Argyleshire is reported to have said not long ago, on the occasion of a similar marriage - “Ah! the Queen of England must be a proud woman to day when she has married her daughter to our prince.” The States-General remonstrated, hinted that they ought to be consulted when one of their principal subjects marries into a foreign royal house, were snubbed for their pains, were assured that the English monarch would protect the integrity of Holland, and had to acquiesce. They foresaw that they would be entangled in those German interests which, with the English King George the Second, were far more important than those of the country which had adopted him, and had raised him from a petty German potentate to one of the first thrones in Europe. If George cared very little for England when Hanover was concerned, he was pretty sure to care even less r Holland. But the Republic which had committed the error of giving a guarantee, in order to get rid of the Ostend Company, soon found they had gone too far to recede.