Democrats and Aristocrats 255
gold, or half a million guilders, as a “free gift” from the rejoicing city of Amster-
dam. It must be admitted that the French charged much more in 1795 for saving
the democrats.^22
Sir James Harris continued to be very active during the first months of the re-
stored government. It was with his advice that various offices were filled with reli-
able men; and, since Dutch bankers would not lend to the Orange regime, he dis-
tributed more money, in the form of British loans to the federal and local bodies,
than he had previously done to bring the restoration about. The Princess of Or-
ange demanded a good many arrests, so that a “rod of terror,” as Harris said, should
threaten “the heads of factious leaders.”^23 The press was put under severe restraint,
and an oath was required of regents, councillors, gildsmen, clergymen, and militia,
in which they swore to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Estates and the heredi-
tary stadtholdership of the Prince of Orange. The beginning of legal investigations
frightened thousands of Patriots, with their families, into exile.^24 Van der Kemp
emigrated to the United States, where he lived until 1829. Van der Capellen had
died. Thousands, including Ondaatje, took refuge in France, where the King
granted them a small subsidy and allowed them to congregate at St. Omer. Other
thousands crossed into the Austrian Netherlands, where they soon became in-
volved in the Belgian revolution. Most of these émigrés returned only in 1795, in
the wake of the French republican army.
The Orange regime had made enemies of the most vital elements of its popula-
tion. It represented the Prince’s own followers, the more hardshelled people of the
Reformed Church, and the amorphous populace who would still shout Oranje
boven, “up Orange,” in the streets. The chief federal executive from 1787 to 1795,
the Zeelander Van de Spiegel, was the man who had offered Zeeland to the Brit-
ish. Able enough, he saw the need for modernization in the ancient fabric of the
republic; but he could accomplish nothing, since the Prince and his favorites really
22 Ibid., 200–5. Cobban’s book is a detailed and almost purely diplomatic history in which he
gives little attention to internal Dutch affairs; but he concludes, or at least states at the close of the
book, that the Dutch Patriot movement was “part of an international current of democracy which had
already manifested itself in England, America, and Geneva.... It exhibited for the first time the
strength of a revolutionary democracy possessed of organization, leadership and an ideology.” He
speaks also of “the uncompromising nature of the new ideology.” Dutch writers on whom I have de-
pended all judge the Orangists to have been far more uncompromising than the democrats. They
would agree also, I think, with my own view that the Patriot movement was characterized by its lack
of a developed “ideology”; it did not formulate its demands in terms of any universal ethical affirma-
tions or any theory of world history. It will be obvious to the reader that I consider the Patriot move-
ment to have been part of “an international current of democracy,” but I would think the American
Revolution to have had a far more effective “organization, leadership and ideology.” Professor Cobban,
in apparently turning against all revolution, seems like others to wish to spare the Americans from this
“disgraceful imputation,” as J. Q. Adams put it. On the other hand, even Thomas Jefferson, then in
Paris, thought the Dutch democrats too extreme. See my article “The Dubious Democrat: Thomas
Jefferson in Bourbon France,” in Political Science Quarterly, LX XII (Sept. 1957), 388–404. John
Adams, in London, while admiring the Patriots and regretting their failure, thought that it had been
their weakness “to be too inattentive to the sense of the common people of their own country” and too
willing to rely on France. Work s, VIII, 462.
23 Blok, History, V, 253; Harris, Diaries and Correspondence (London, 1845), II, 357.
24 Blok, V, 254. The traditional figure of 40,000 Patriot émigrés, given by Blok and others, is
thought by later writers to be exaggerated.