The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘where so vast a trade has been managed, as in the ... four maritime provinces of this commonwealth: nay, it is generally esteemed, that they have more shipping belongs to them, than there does to all the rest of Europe.’6

  This explosion of trade had brought with it a revolution in business methods. English writers like Josiah Child made long lists of the practices they would like to import: quality control in manufacture, better education in accounting, lower customs, more businessmen involved in government, and effective commercial law in place of ‘a heap of nonsense compiled by a few ignorant country gentlemen, who hardly knew how to make laws for the guidance of their own private families much less for the regulating of companies and foreign commerce’.7 In particular, Amsterdam had developed commercial sophistication far beyond any other market in Europe. Child envied above all Dutch banks, ‘which are of so immense advantage to them, that some ... have estimated the profit of them to the public, to amount to at least one million of pounds sterling per ann.’ William Temple visited the great bank in Amsterdam ‘which is the greatest treasure ... that is known anywhere in the world ... bars of gold and silver, plate and infinite bags of metal, which are supposed to be all gold and silver’. He also learned, though, that in Amsterdam, those vaults of treasure were no longer counted the full measure of wealth, useful though they were to impress visitors. The real power of Amsterdam lay not in ‘bags of metal’ but ‘in the credit of the whole town or state of Amsterdam, whose stock and revenue is equal to that of some kingdoms’.8

  Credit allowed trade to move more freely and payments to be made more easily; it allowed interest rates to be quoted in Amsterdam at 3–3.5 per cent, a third of what Nicholas Barbon paid for his money. Dutch fortunes were more likely to be invested in trade than in ancestral acres. Security in Holland was less onerous. The financial infrastructure, indeed, was high on the list of reasons William Temple gave for the Dutch economic miracle, alongside good communications, free markets and an urbanised, liberal population (his list would not surprise a modern economist). It was these which had set in motion the yearly convoys from the Levant, the great barges surging along the Rhine, the din of hammers in a hundred shipyards around the Dutch coast, and the clatter of deal-making on the Dam. This was the ‘great concurrence of circumstances ... which never before met in the world to such a degree, or with so prodigious a success’.9

  Dutchmen assured him, though, that there was one prime cause, a sine qua non, which underlay all Dutch success: freedom.

  The United Provinces were famous for their religious toleration. They had a large Catholic minority, along with flourishing communities of Portuguese and Spanish Jews, who enjoyed freedoms seen nowhere else in Europe. Economic and religious migrants flooded in, bringing with them both money and expertise. In the words of the Dutch business writer Pieter de la Court, ‘next to a liberty of serving God follows the liberty of gaining a livelihood’. In every other country in Europe it was assumed that a plethora of faiths could only lead to anarchy. Here, as in so many other spheres, the United Provinces defied assumptions. There was no anarchy in Holland. Dutch orderliness was renowned – even comic – despite their lack of shared faith and lack of obvious social hierarchy. The press was free, the population markedly urbanised and literate. Dutch universities were world-famous, although Nicholas Barbon had perhaps learned more business than medicine at Leiden. As for politics, it was John Locke’s contention in his Second Treatise of Government that political systems required greater sophistication as property became more complex. Nowhere was property more complex than in the United Provinces, and without following his theoretical arguments, Dutch writers came to very much the same conclusions. ‘The inhabitants under [a] free government’, wrote Pieter de la Court, ‘may sit down peaceably, and use their wealth as they please, without dreading that any indigent or wasteful Prince ... should on any pretence whatever, seize on the wealth of the subject.’10 It was a maxim in Holland that economic expansion was impossible under an absolute monarch. Kings loved wars; merchants thrived on peace. The bank of Amsterdam could never command such credit if it was vulnerable to the predations of a King. Free republics depended on great trading cities; monarchs feared them as rivals – much as England’s Stuart Kings feared London. Send a monarch to Holland, William Temple was often told, and he would

  ‘endanger the property of private men, and shake the credits and safety of the government ... [so] industry would faint, banks would dissolve, and trade would decay ... [until] the very digues [dykes] would no longer be maintained ... but the sea would break in upon their land, and leave their chiefest cities to be fisher towns as they were of old.’11

  Having said all that, the Dutch political system did not look much like a model for other nations – even to those few who managed to penetrate its mysteries. William Temple decided their constitution could best be described as ‘a sort of oligarchy’.12 The Dutch had no King. They had neither ancient constitution, nor landowning aristocracy to compare with England or France. The House of Orange was the leading family. William the Silent had first led the Provinces to freedom, and his successors had inherited great popularity, military command, and the title of Stadholder. But the Stadholder was no monarch. Sovereignty resided not in him, but in the seven separate provinces, and in any matter of importance the States-General, an overarching authority, could act only with the assent of all seven provinces. Since each province itself needed unanimity among its several towns and councils, the whole state could end up being blocked by, say, a village in Overijssel. So far as any outsider could understand it, the system seemed to operate not by assigning power but by limiting it.

  At the time of William Temple’s visit, indeed, the Dutch not only lacked a King, they did not even have a Stadholder. The Provinces had experienced their own rebellion against authority in the 1650s. When William II died unexpectedly at the height of a feud with Amsterdam in 1650, the ‘Regents’ of Holland, led by Jan de Witt, effectively seized power in the Republic. The infant Prince of Orange, who had never seen his father, was made a ‘child of the state’, and a ‘perpetual edict’ was passed to abolish the powers of the Stadholder. When William Temple was introduced in 1668 to the eighteen-year-old William, Prince of Orange – the man Dartmouth would one day single out as James II’s most dangerous enemy – he had no formal powers in the United Provinces at all. He was wealthy; he was well-born; he was royal, thanks to his possession of the tiny principality of Orange, far away in southern France. Beyond that he had nothing – except, as William Temple noticed, a ‘strong ambition to grow great’.13

  VI

  ‘A MORE CONSIDERABLE AND DANGEROUS ENEMY’

  William Temple did not notice that ambition at their first meeting. In appearance the young Prince was unprepossessing. He was small and stooped, narrow-shouldered and without presence. His forehead was pale and wide; he had a hooked beak of a nose and nervy eyes. Conversation did not flow. The Prince liked hunting and was interested in military affairs – perhaps to compensate for his exceptionally unmilitary physique. Otherwise he did not seem to enjoy anything that young men were supposed to enjoy. He was a loner. He was rumoured to have furious rages – but only in private. The French ambassador, the Marquis de Pomponne, thought he ‘habitually concealed his feelings by a dissimulation which was natural to him’.1 Perhaps there were reasons for that: William’s childhood had been a tug-of-war between his mother and de Witt (and within the Orange party, between his mother and grandmother). But he did take to William Temple; he was ‘fond of speaking English, and of [our] plain way of eating, [and] constantly dined and supped once or twice a week at [our] house’.2 For his part, William Temple had good reason to encourage the Prince’s visits. The House of Orange was still held in great affection in the Provinces and was the obvious focus of any future opposition to the Government. As important, the young man at William Temple’s table might one day come into the reckoning in the English succession, for his mother was Mary Stuart, sister to
Charles II and the Duke of York, which put William of Orange fourth in line to the throne – as matters stood in 1668 – after James Duke of York and James’s two daughters by his first marriage, Mary and Anne.

  That was one possible outlet for the ambition William Temple sensed in the Prince. What no one could foresee was how soon the Prince would have a chance to realise his ambitions closer to home. When Temple returned home to write his Observations, he was full of Dutch innovation, Dutch orderliness and Dutch wealth. By the time he was ready for the press, all of that had been swept away. ‘As this state,’ he wrote in ending, ‘in the course and progress of its greatness for so many years past, has shined like a comet; so, in the revolutions of this last summer, it seemed to fall like a meteor.’3 Within a matter of months, the Dutch republic had collapsed.

  The Dutch would afterwards speak of 1672 as het rampjaar, the year of disaster. The French attacked in strength across the Spanish Netherlands. Under the Treaty of Dover – a treaty which repudiated the alliance William Temple had gone to the Netherlands to negotiate – England declared war on them as well, as did their neighbours in Münster and Cologne. The French were then at their military peak under the generalship of Turenne and the Prince de Condé. Town after town fell to the meticulous siegecraft of Sébastien de Vauban, the greatest military engineer of the age. By midsummer the majority of the United Provinces was under French occupation. To make matters worse, the collapse was moral as well as military. Years of military underspending saw defensive positions abandoned without a fight. A furious population turned on the Regents whom they blamed for the catastrophe. Mobs rioted under the immaculate lime trees. On 20 August Jan de Witt and his brother Cornelius were dragged from the Gevangenpoort and lynched, then dismembered and cannibalised. Holland, the citadel of cleanliness and good order, had descended into anarchy.

  In this crisis the Dutch again turned to the family who had always rescued them in the past, the House of Orange. At the age of twenty-two, William was asked to save his country from disaster. Somehow he rose to the challenge. At the battle of Seneffe the Comte de Souches ascribed to him ‘the conduct of an old experienced commander and the valour of a Caesar’.4 The Dutch had flooded the fields around Holland and that flooded ‘waterline’ held. At sea, the fight at Sole Bay (claimed as a victory by Admiral de Ruyter as well as by James Duke of York) staved off invasion. On the diplomatic front the French over-played their hand, while Stuart England caved in, as always, and withdrew from the conflict. William refused Louis’s bribe of the Dutch throne; taunted by the Duke of Buckingham that this was Holland’s only chance of survival, he replied, heroically, ‘he had one way still not to see its ruin completed; which was to lie in the last dike’.5 By the end of 1674, when William Temple returned to the Hague, all the Dutch homelands had been recovered, and the Prince, now twenty-four, was hailed as ‘redeemer of the Fatherland’.

  Suddenly William of Orange was a major character in European politics. Nevertheless, William Temple was delighted to find that the Stadholder still saw him as something of a father-figure, as he discovered when the Prince awkwardly requested a private interview in his garden at Honslaerdyck in summer 1676. The Prince wanted advice but ‘would not ask [it],’ Temple remembered, ‘unless I promised to answer him as a friend ... and not as the King’s Ambassador’.6 William’s thoughts had turned to England.

  By then England was already sliding towards the Exclusion Crisis, and William had been approached by several ‘considerable’ persons there to lead the opposition to the King. On the other hand, he was thinking of a political marriage, and was considering his English cousin, the Duke of York’s daughter, Mary. The English opposition was against it because it would bind the Prince too close to the court; for his part, he wanted to know what William Temple thought. Temple was unable to give the Prince much information about Mary, but his reply said much for the implications of the whole conversation: ‘It was a great step,’ he told him, ‘to be one degree nearer the crown.’7

  The marriage between William of Orange and Mary Stuart would be William Temple’s proudest diplomatic achievement. It hardly proceeded along an easy course, however. When William arrived in England, peace negotiations were dragging on at Nijmegen and the English seemed intent on using the marriage as a bargaining counter. Temple finally witnessed one of William’s rages in which

  ‘he told me he repented he had ever come into England, and resolved he would stay but two days longer, and then be gone ... [that] the King must choose how they should live hereafter, for he was sure it must be either like the greatest friends, or the greatest enemies.’8

  At the wedding itself, on 4 November 1677, the bride’s sister, Anne, was absent with smallpox, while Queen Catharine of Braganza and James’s second wife, Mary of Modena, both Catholics, stayed at home.

  Charles’s avuncular encouragement as he drew the curtains on the new couple’s bed – ‘Now, nephew, to your work! Hey! St George for England!’9 – presumably stifled all passion between a fifteen-year-old virgin and a repressed young man who may well have had homosexual tendencies. Halfway to Dover, on the way home, William ran out of money and had to ask the Dean of Canterbury, John Tillotson, to pay his inn bill.

  The marriage may have been a positive step closer to the throne of England – distant as that prospect seemed – but for the moment it alienated William from the English opposition. When the constitutional crisis broke, they fastened their hopes on the Duke of Monmouth. Back in the United Provinces, meanwhile, William soon discovered that the status of ‘redeemer of the Fatherland’ bought very little credit in Amsterdam. His marriage into the royal family of a recent enemy was taken to prove his ambition, and the Regents of Amsterdam would always resist Orange ambition. Worse, they would always favour peace, while William sought to fight on. In 1678, ignoring the Stadholder, the States-General agreed to the treaty negotiated at Nijmegen. Five years later, when Louis again massed troops on the borders of the Spanish Netherlands, William called for rearmament but Amsterdam blocked funding, and when the Prince tried to exert pressure on them the delegates of Holland walked out of the States-General. A year after that, at Ratisbon, the French proposed a European treaty to secure all their gains for twenty years. William opposed it. Given a peremptory twelve days to make up their minds, the States-General ignored the Stadholder and accepted.

  All these were bruising snubs for a man who had risen so fast in public esteem, but they also taught William some valuable lessons for the future. He learned that in a country of competing interests there was no direct route to his goals. He learned the political arts of patience and of deceit. He learned to play opponents off against one another.

  When James came to the throne, William of Orange kept his views to himself. His relations with his uncle and father-in-law remained cordial enough – at least on the surface. James wrote to his nephew and son-in-law as to a military subordinate. What he felt in private was another matter. He told Barillon soon after coming to the throne that he ‘was obliged to preserve appearances with the Prince of Orange, in order to prevent the popular party from finding a head’10 – but a year later, Bonrepaus, another French envoy, thought ‘the King of England can scarcely hide his hatred for, and jealousy of, the Prince of Orange’.11

  When Monmouth was getting ready to sail, the English ambassador, Sir Bevil Skelton, asked William to prevent it. William regretted that the complexities of the Dutch constitution made it impossible for him to help. Monmouth had been the Prince’s honoured guest throughout the previous summer. Soon afterwards, however, he offered James II the six English and Scottish regiments in the United Provinces to help put down the rebellion. That William both encouraged Monmouth to sail and then helped James crush him was quite possible. By 1685 the awkward young man at William Temple’s table had developed, in the opinion of at least one contemporary, into ‘le plus fin politique qui ait jamais été’.12

  By 1685 William had also developed a vision to accompany his political skill
s. It was a vision created in the terrible year he saw his country face ruin. ‘The depression of France’, Gilbert Burnet later wrote, ‘was the governing passion of his whole life.’13 Everything William did was governed by the need to find a European balance to French power.

  The French King might almost have been trying to drive that lesson home in 1685 when, for the second time, he ordered dragoons to cross the border into the Principality of Orange. William could do nothing to prevent it. The attack was brutal, provocative and deliberate. It was entirely characteristic, in other words, of William’s rival and enemy, monarch of France since the age of five and sole ruler since 1661, the Sun King, Louis XIV.

  VII

  ‘SUCH A MONARCHY AS OTHER MONARCHS HAVE NOT EVEN CONSIDERED’

  John Locke visited France in June 1677, not long before the Exclusion Crisis. While he was in Paris he hired a coach to visit the new palace on which the French King was said to be lavishing unprecedented sums of money. It was built around a former hunting lodge at Versailles.

  ‘The château there a fine house & a much finer garden’, Locke wrote. A miraculous garden, in fact, for in a waterless valley the King had created a vista filled with fountains and canals. ‘More jet d’eaus & water works than are to be seen anywhere, & looking out from the King’s apartment, one sees almost nothing but water for a whole league forwards.’ There can be few more intriguing encounters in history than the meeting which took place that day at Versailles between John Locke and Louis XIV.

  ‘We had the honour to see [the gardens] with the King, who walked about with Madame Montespan from one to another ... The King seems to be mightily well pleased with his water works and several changes were made then to which he himself gave sign with his cane.’1