The Batavian Republic 509
trolled the Amsterdam delegation in the Estates of Holland, and, through Hol-
land, influenced the Estates General of the Union.
The Union meant the Union of Utrecht, formed in 1572 during the war of in-
dependence against Spain, and consisting of a league of the pre- existing towns,
provinces, and miscellaneous districts that had taken shape in the Middle Ages,
and whose medieval liberties, privileges, and autonomies persisted in the eigh-
teenth century as inherited rights. The Estates General, though supposedly sover-
eign, had little power, could act on most matters only if the seven provinces were
unanimous, and had to operate through a network of boards, colleges, councils,
and committees among which authority had purposely been divided. A “stadt-
holder,” or chief executive and military commander, had the task of making all this
complex machinery function. The stadtholderate had become hereditary in the
House of Orange, which had repeatedly intermarried with the British royal family,
so that the old Dutch republic had the next thing to a king. The House of Orange,
like all good monarchies, enjoyed much traditional support among the lower
classes and had long seen the aristocratic regents as its chief political rivals. But
William V in 1788, like Louis XVI in 1789, had become fatally identified with the
cause of the privileged orders.
The system left a good many people in the position of outsiders. Persons not
regents were referred to as “burghers” or “inhabitants,” and were expected to have
nothing to do with public or great affairs. There was no Dutch citizenship, and ac-
cording to Colenbrander hardly any Dutch nation in a political sense before 1795.
The lowest classes, their levels of expectation not yet raised, had little sense of ex-
clusion, and generally felt a continuing warmth to the Orange regime. But the
United Provinces, though small in size (with a population of only two million),
were the wealthiest country in Europe, probably even more so than England, so
that persons above the “lowest” classes were exceedingly numerous. Those of the
shopkeeping and artisan levels had become very restless. Many of the outsiders
were established merchants and bankers. Some were actually rich. In addition, de-
fining the in- and out- groups in another dimension, was the difference of religion,
which was the more significant since the Dutch were less homogeneous in their
churchmanship than almost any other European political community. About forty
percent were not Reformed, Most of these were Roman Catholic, but there were
many Mennonites and other Protestant dissenters, and the Amsterdam Jewish
group was the most important in Western Europe. All these people had long been
peaceably tolerated, and many were affluent, but they possessed, and had come to
feel, an inferior status.
It was the memory of 1787 that made the difference in the 1790’s. The Patriots
had been suppressed with no pretence of tact or conciliation. There was much re-
sentment against England, by whose exertions the Patriot movement had been so
recently crushed, and which also annoyed some of the mercantile interests by its
old habit of appropriating the Dutch overseas possessions. As recently as the treaty
of 1783, concluding the War of American Independence, in which Amsterdam
and the Patriots had befriended the Americans, the British had taken the Dutch
post of Negapatam in India. The callous restoration of 1787 had also had the effect
of making many of the Dutch more radical. Those who emigrated had learned