Democrats and Aristocrats 251
Ages, now demanded that the burghers take part in election of these officials. The
council demurred, observing that there had been no such popular choice of burgo-
masters since the days of the Emperor Charles V—long before the independence
of Utrecht or the formation of the federal republic.
The Patriot coalition now began to fall apart. The regents of Utrecht, secure
hitherto in the town council, had not intended, in liberating themselves from the
Prince of Orange, to fall into the hands of burghers of the city. Like the upholders
in England of the House of Commons, they believed the public good to require
their “independence.” The town council, backed by the Provincial Estates, where
the fear of democracy also pushed aside the fear of Orange, decided to put
Ondaatje under arrest, though to do so would be an affront to the 1,215 who had
signed the burgher electoral act, plus several hundred more in the Free Corps, and
so constitute a declaration of war on virtually the entire politically conscious popu-
lation of the city. At this time the first meeting of the National Assembly of Free
Corps from all the United Provinces took place in Utrecht. The delegates were
loud in Ondaatje’s defense. They denounced the “aristocratic cabal.” Ondaatje re-
ceived honors in all parts of the country, including a doctorate at the University of
Leiden. He made a bold speech to the Utrecht council. “Have we, in making you
independent of the stadtholder, made you also independent of ourselves?... Is the
council house yours, or ours?”^13
Two years of confusion followed, in Utrecht and elsewhere. While many ini-
tially anti- Orange regents backed away, the Patriot movement nevertheless gath-
ered strength. The educated, the professional people, the large religious minorities,
wished it well. The French government promised it support, seeing it as anti-
British. The fact that the spring of 1785 was the period of heaviest selling of Brit-
ish securities, and hence of Dutch investment in France and America, suggests
that there were a good many men of means in the movement, that it was no flurry
among the young, the impressionable, and the idealistic. There was something with
which William V could have allied against the regent oligarchs. He could, in prin-
ciple (had he been a different man), have raised the standard of an Orange democ-
racy, and begun to lay foundations for a more broadly based political state in the
Netherlands. Perhaps this lost chance has always seemed more real to historians
than it did to contemporaries.^14 Yet there were some who saw it then, including
the young G. K. van Hogendorp, who years later, in 1814, was to become a na-
tional hero by his role in restoring the House of Orange as a true national monar-
chy, with a relatively liberal constitution. Hogendorp was no democrat. He did not
believe that people could govern themselves. Just returned from America, he
thought of the Americans as rustics from whom nothing in politics could be
learned. He was of a Rotterdam regent family whose social position gave him the
ear of William V. A young and self- confident patrician, he observed that the times
were times of widespread disturbance, unlike anything since the Reformation, that
13 For these events at Utrecht see Davies, Ondaatje, 1–89; Geyl, Patriottenbeweging, 101–12; Vijl-
brief, 150. There is a longer study by Vijlbrief, with an all too short summary in English: Van Anti-
Aristocratie tot Democratie: Een bijdrage tot de politieke en sociale Geschiedenis der Stad Utrecht (Amster-
dam, 1950).
14 On William V’s “lost chance,” Geyl, 115–17; Vijlbrief, 132.