Democrats and Aristocrats 245
people of any consequence in the country. Their class standing could not really be
defined economically. It was more readily defined by the permanent exclusion
from state affairs of persons like themselves, including their fathers and presum-
ably their children, either because they did not belong to the families that con-
trolled the town councils, or because they were not members of the Dutch Re-
formed Church. In the United Provinces, as in England, despite liberal toleration
and economic prosperity for dissenters, only members of the official church could
take part in government, military command, or the Bank of Amsterdam and the
East India Company. More were excluded than in England on this ground, since a
third of the population was Catholic, and another ten per cent either Jews or Prot-
estant sectaries. Capellen’s group included the Mennonite pastor Van der Kemp, J.
Luzac, editor of the famous French- language Gazette de Leide; and P. Paulus, P.
Vreede, R. Schimmelpenninck, and others who were to be prominent in the Pa-
triot movement, and again in the revolutionary Batavian Republic after 1795.
These, too, were the men with whom John Adams most easily associated on reach-
ing Holland in 1780, and from whom he was first able to borrow money for the
American Congress.
The American war also aroused many of the old in- group, who were called the
“regents,” in distinction from ordinary “burghers” or mere “inhabitants.” The regent
families filled the town councils, such as the council of thirty- six which governed
Amsterdam; and these town oligarchies in turn, working with the stadtholder or
against him, controlled the provincial estates and the Estates General. The Estates
of Holland, for example, consisted of eighteen votes for eighteen towns, plus one
member, with one vote, for all the nobility of the province. The Dutch regents were
a hereditary aristocracy, but an unusual one in that they drew their large incomes
from finance and trade.^4 For two hundred years a strong party within the regents
had quarreled with the House of Orange, and had twice dispensed with it alto-
gether, in a kind of perpetual opposition which the Dutch called Loevestein, a sort
of Whiggery in which the people had no concern. The old anti- Orangism became
again acute during the War of American Independence, because William V re-
mained firmly committed to England, while many of the regents sought to break
their connections with, and dependency on, the British economic and naval power.
The Orange party of William V, in the complex disputes that followed, drew its
strength from the Prince’s court and retainers, from men who owed their offices
and position to him, from the church- minded people of the Reformed Church,
and indirectly from the mass of the people, who had no political interest or orga-
nization, cared little for the problems of their social superiors, and by a kind of
popular royalist predilection looked on the Prince of Orange as if he really were
their King. In the showdown, the Orange party was rebuilt by Great Britain.
4 J. E. Elias, Geschiedenis van het amsterdamsche Regentenpatriciaat (The Hague, 1923), a work
written with an Orangist animus against the old regents, found (p. 238) that all 37 Amsterdam bur-
gomasters from 1752 to 1795 had commercial connections, in contrast to only 2 out of 24 for the pe-
riod 1718–1748. In the stadtholderless period before 1748 the regents seem to have lived rather from
the income of office and government. Virtually all known leaders of the Patriot movement, says Elias,
had traded “illicitly” with France and America after 1775.