250 Chapter XI
Catholics. Van der Kemp, the Mennonite pastor, once delivered a sermon in uni-
form. They were mainly middle class, for the citizen soldiers usually though not
always had to furnish their own weapons and uniforms; nor did they wish to stir
up the multitude, which in any case showed little inclination to join. Nevertheless,
it was in these Free Corps that the democratic wing of the Patriots came to have
an organized existence. With the first meeting of a National Assembly of Free
Corps, held at Utrecht in December 1784, Dutch burghers outside the regent class
met and discussed political action for the first time.^12
The situation at Utrecht, though complicated, is worth special attention, as a
concrete example of the kind of questions at stake, throughout the United Prov-
inces and indeed throughout Europe, and to illustrate the groping and ad hoc way
in which a democratic doctrine was formulated. The province had originated as a
medieval bishopric in the Holy Roman Empire, though there had been no bishop
in residence since the Reformation. Its highest body was the assembly of three
orders or estates—technically the clergy, the nobility, and the Third. Certain lay
appointees of the stadtholder now functioned as the “clergy.” The stadtholder in-
fluenced the second estate, the nobility, by his power to increase the number of its
deputies at will. The third estate consisted of deputies from the city of Utrecht and
four other towns; actually, by his “influence,” the stadtholder had the town councils
depute the men he named. The city of Utrecht was governed by its council and
burgomasters. It was the custom for the council, on filling vacancies in its own
body or selecting the burgomasters, to select men, within the regent group, whose
names were notified to it by the Prince.
During the disturbances of 1783 a petition of 700 burghers urged the council to
fill a recent vacancy without recourse to the Prince’s recommendation. The coun-
cillors agreed, and made their own appointment. William V protested. The council,
to gain support against William V and his partisans, invited the burghers to make
a further statement of their desires. The Free Corps of the city, led by a student at
the University named Ondaatje, thereupon proposed that the Prince’s power to
name members of the provincial estates be done away with. This also coincided
with the wishes of a majority of the council. But the Free Corps and the burghers
made further proposals. They wished to elect spokesmen to sit with the council,
discuss taxation and appointments along with the regents, and share in defense of
the liberties of Utrecht against the Prince. By an act signed with 1,215 names, 24
geconstitueerden, “constituted persons,” were elected, 2 from each company in the
municipal Free Corps plus 8 burghers. The names of the 1,215 have been pre-
served. They were of the middling ranks of a small eighteenth- century city: shop-
keepers, carpenters, master shoemakers, and the like. Since there were less than
30,000 inhabitants in the city, 1,215 adult males would in effect be about a fifth of
the population. The council, with mounting reluctance, accepted the existence of
these “constituted persons” at its side. More was to come, for Ondaatje and the
Free Corps, recalling how burgomasters had been chosen by guilds in the Middle
12 For the Free Corps see the works cited in note 2 above, and in particular Mrs. Davies, Ondaatje,
for a concrete picture of the Free Corps of Utrecht; for the levée en masse in Holland, see the Gazette
de Leyde, November 1784 to January 1785.