514 Chapter XXI
tance of office would disappear. Nowhere did the middle extend more widely or
moderation run deeper than among the Dutch. There were important patricians
who saw the need of change. Some favored simply a modernization of the Union of
Utrecht. Others, of whom G. K. van Hogendorp became the most important, had
firmly believed, since long before the revolution of 1795, that political life should be
opened up and broader elements in the population be admitted to a liberalized citi-
zenship. One of the most intelligent conservatives in the Europe of his generation,
Hogendorp had detected a conflict between “aristocrats” and “democrats” in his own
country as early as 1786. He had then advised the House of Orange to lean to the
“democrats.” He had seen the same conflict agitating “all nations” in 1791.^15 He
knew that revolutionary discontent in the Dutch Netherlands was no mere conta-
gion from France. Ejected from office in 1795 (he was of a long line of Rotterdam
regents), he neither emigrated, nor took to arms, nor secluded himself on his estates,
as a French nobleman might have done. As an aristocratic “bourgeois,” he turned to
private business to build up the family fortunes. In 1814 he became the chief author
of the constitution of the Netherlands monarchy.
The party of conciliation was strengthened by another fact unusual at the time.
The Heir Apparent was himself a conciliator. The Hereditary Prince, as he was
called, the son of the stadtholder William V, was a young man of twenty- three in
1795, and in 1814, accepting Hogendorp’s constitution, he became the first King
of the Netherlands as William I. In the 1790’s, Hogendorp and the Hereditary
Prince resembled in their ideas the circle of liberal or liberally conservative French
émigrés that gathered about Malouet in London. In both cases it was their pro-
gram, more than any one else’s, that was to be embodied in the settlement of 1814.
Meanwhile, however, they met only with frustration.
William V, after leaving Holland at the time of the Batavian Revolution, lived
in England until his death. Hardly had he reached England when he began to re-
ceive approaches from certain moderates, men who had accepted the revolution
but soon became alarmed by the radicalism of the clubs or annoyed by the de-
mands of the French. Some of these men were old regents and Patriots of 1787. To
their overtures William V responded with delight. He would now, eight years later,
compromise with those whom he had found intolerable in 1787. But there could
be no compromise with the Batavian Revolution. “The present day democrats and
their whole faction can never receive any consideration from us.”^16
Other loyal Orangists approached the Hereditary Prince. They believed that
there was a genuine Dutch revolution with which an understanding must be made.
They were not democrats; what they wanted was an accommodation between the
Orangists and the former Patriots of 1787 against “the unfortunate system of de-
mocracy that prevails today.” Yet action was necessary. As an émigré named d’Yvoy
wrote to the prince from Hamburg: “I believe it impossible for things to remain on
their old footing.... What we need is not the triumph of a party, but a means of
uniting parties, which we shall not have until the different sovereignties in the
15 On Hogendorp see above, 509 and 513, and the Nieuw nederlandsch biografish woordenboek, II,
587–93.
16 Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken, II, 831.