Democrats and Aristocrats 253
turn. “Our salvation can come only from foreign powers,” the Orangist Van Goens
had prophetically observed to the Duke of Portland in 1783.^18 In 1787 his proph-
ecy came to pass.
From the beginning the French government had favored the Patriots, and lent
them a secret assistance which was willingly accepted. A Patriot victory in Dutch
internal affairs might result in a more or less permanent Franco- Dutch alliance;
and the combination of French and Dutch maritime and economic strength was a
contingency that British policy must at all costs seek to avoid. The British, how-
ever, had a good deal of anti- British feeling in the Netherlands to contend with. It
was the Fourth English War that had touched off the Patriot explosion; and when
the British not only captured 80,000,000 guilders’ worth of Dutch shipping during
the war, but insisted at the peace table on keeping the Dutch post at Negapatam in
India, and on obtaining certain rights in the East Indian archipelago, they did not
further endear themselves in Dutch commercial circles. Frederick the Great ad-
vised his niece, the Princess of Orange, to avoid dependency on the “pirates of the
channel.” His advice was no more heeded than that of Leopold II to his sister,
Marie Antoinette, a few years later. The Princess of Orange, and the Orange party
in general, continued to believe that true Dutch interests were the same as those of
Great Britain. They urged the British to use financial inducements with anti-
Orange regents (£100,000 might win over the province of Friesland); and there
were some in Zeeland who even proposed, rather than submit to the Patriots, to
withdraw the province from the Dutch union, put it under British protection, give
the British fleet a base at Flushing, and annex the Zeeland share in the Dutch East
India Company to that of England. National feeling was not yet highly developed,
and especially not among the cosmopolitan upper classes. The Princess of Orange,
however, and her followers, aware that an open association of the Prince with the
British would only damage him still further in Dutch opinion, strongly advised
that the British work behind the scenes.^19
This is precisely what began to happen when Sir James Harris arrived as British
minister at the Hague in December 1784. There ensued a long series of intrigues
and counterintrigues between Harris and the French agents, each backing and
backed by their partisans among the Dutch, as recently recounted in detail by Pro-
fessor Alfred Cobban of the University of London. In 1787 the Free Corps came
to open blows with the Prince’s troops, and civil war began in the Netherlands. The
French government, now in serious financial and even revolutionary difficulties
itself, seems to have spent 115,000 guilders to arm the Free Corps. How much
Harris distributed on the Orange side is not clear, but it was at least £70,000 or
over 800,000 guilders.^20
18 Brieven aan R. M. van Goens... , III, 220.
19 On British captures and demands, Manger, Recherches, 17; Van Goens, Brieven, III, 209, 230,- Frederick II’s letter to the Princess of Orange is printed by H. T. Colenbrander, De Pairiottentijd,
Bijlage V. On secession of Zeeland, Colenbrander, op.cit., Bijlage VII; Geyl, 133; A. Cobban, Ambas-
sadors and Secret Agents: the Diplomacy of the First Earl of Malmesbury at the Hague (London, 1954),
82–83. On the Orangist desire for the British to intervene, while keeping their activity as invisible as
possible, see Van Goens, 212, 239, 241, and the memorandum of the Princess of Orange published by
Colenbrander, Bijlage XIII.
20 Cobban, op.cit., 133–35, 177.