Democrats and Aristocrats 243
had passed to Aus- tria in 1714. They were loosely attached to the Hapsburg sys-
tem, and in firm possession of local liberties, until the reign of Joseph II. Political
interest, both Dutch and Belgian, was highly particularistic, provincial, and even
municipal, especially for the town magistrates and the members of provincial es-
tates. It was the “democrats” in both countries who, having less concern for the old
vested bodies, developed a somewhat more national all- Dutch or all- Belgian feel-
ing. Both countries were wealthy, the Dutch extraordinarily so. Beyond that, the
parallel ceases. The Dutch had long been independent, the Belgians long depen-
dent on a foreign crown. The Dutch government was a republic, the Belgians be-
longed to an international monarchy. The Dutch Estates General, their High
Mightinesses, were deemed to be sovereign, and the Prince of Orange was a semi-
royal official, “stadt- holder” in each of the provinces, and captain- general of the
union. The Belgian Estates General, like the French, no longer really existed; it
assembled under revolutionary conditions in January 1790. The chief executive in
Belgium was the Governor- General, an Austrian.
The Dutch Patriot Movement
The United Provinces was a small country, much of which could be seen from the
top of Utrecht cathedral, at least according to a traveling Englishman who claimed
to distinguish fifty- one towns from that elevated point. With fewer than two mil-
lion people it had less than half the population of Ireland. Its interests and impor-
tance, however, were universal. Dutch shipping and trade were on every sea. There
were Dutch colonies in the West Indies, at the Cape of Good Hope, in Ceylon,
and in Java, and Dutch merchants were the only Europeans allowed to trade in
Japan. The Dutch were the great international capitalists. In 1777 they owned
forty per cent of the British national debt, and by 1796 the entire foreign- held
national debt of the United States was in their hands.
Dutch affairs had become closely entwined with those of England. Both the
political successes and the commercial growth of Great Britain in the eighteenth-
century were heavily financed by Dutch investors. In international politics the
Dutch had followed the British lead since the days of William III. William V,
stadtholder from 1751 to 1795, was himself married to a Prussian princess, but his
mother was English, and in fact William II, William III, and William IV had all
married the daughters of English kings. The House of Orange was the next thing
to royalty, and the unfortunate William V, whose stadtholderate was to be termi-
nated by revolution in 1795, bore a dismaying resemblance to Louis XVI. He was
quite unable to make a decision, cope with events, or undertake any new line of
policy. “I wish I were dead,” he wrote in 1781, “that my father had never been
stadtholder.... I feel I have no ability to be at the head of so many affairs.” To the
painter’s eye of Sir Joshua Reynolds he looked “very like King George, but not so
handsome; he has a heavy look... with somewhat a round belly.”^1
1 P. G e y l , De Patriottenbeweging (Amsterdam, 1947), 47; letter of Sir J. Reynolds to Edmund
Burke, August 14, 1781, in the Wentworth- Woodhouse collection at the Central Library, Sheffield.