510 Chapter XXI
much from the French Revolution; some, like Conradus Kock, had died in it. But
disappointed Patriots who stayed discreetly at home also underwent a change of
mind. In the Patriot movement, before 1787, the dominant feeling had been for
“restoration” of an older and freer Dutch constitution. A few years later, thanks
both to unpleasant experiences at home and to the spectacle of the French Revolu-
tion, the restless elements took a more forward- looking and comprehensive view.
As with the Americans in the 1770’s their focus changed from the Ancient Con-
stitution to the Rights of Man.
The Dutch revolutionaries were therefore a composite group, hardly to be un-
derstood in terms of socio- economic classes, except that neither the very poor, nor
the most self- consciously aristocratic, were to be found among them. Since they
reflected a wide social spectrum, from Catholic to Calvinist, and from journeymen
barrel- makers to modern- minded individuals of the old families, contrary reports
could both be true. Thus an Englishman could see them as tavern loungers, and a
Frenchman as disaffected financiers. Sometimes the class- consciousness of their
enemies could make absurd mistakes.^6 For example, the British secret agent, Rob-
ert Barclay, reporting to George Canning on conditions in Holland shortly after
the revolution, commented on the appointment of the new Batavian minister to
Denmark. He was, said Barclay, “the son of a shopkeeper and clerk to a parish
church of the town,” who certainly would “not be received as a person agreeable to
his Danish Majesty.” Actually the man in question, one Christiaan Huygens, was
the son and grandson of East India Company officials, had been in the foreign
service before 1795, was received by the Majesty of Denmark, and ennobled by
King William I of the Netherlands after 1814.
It is well to take note of these later careers in understanding the revolutionaries
of 1795. They show that the Dutch “Jacobins” (like many of the French Jacobins in
the true sense of the word) were by no means revolutionaries merely by tempera-
ment, nor by lifelong commitment, nor as a permanent occupation or concern, but
might be men of substantial abilities and position who turned temporarily very
radical in dealing with real problems and real events. Some took part in, and were
accepted by, every regime for over thirty years. The career of Isaac J. A. Gogel is
illuminating in this respect. Born in 1765, the son of a German officer in the
Dutch service, and hence not of old regent background, Gogel was employed be-
fore the Revolution in one of the Amsterdam commercial houses. He was a true
subversive in 1794. With his government at war with the French, he wrote to the
French, at the height of the Terror in France, to urge them to invade Holland, to
bring in a ready- made constitution, abolishing the privileges, gilds, provinces, cor-
porations, monopolies, magistracies, and law courts of the existing Dutch regime,
and enforced by a temporary gouvernement révolutionnaire, a revolutionary tribunal
and guillotine. In 1795, after the Dutch Revolution, Gogel became president of
the radical club in Amsterdam, the Een- en Ondeelbarheid or One and Indivisible
Club. He wanted the Batavian Republic to assume and consolidate the various
provincial debts, and indeed to wipe out the provinces themselves. (One is re-
6 Above, pp. 434–35; and for Barclay’s letter, Colenbrander, II, 368, with Colenbrander’s note on
Huygens.