262 Chapter XI
Resistance to the Austrians concentrated about two men, H. Van der Noot and
J. F. Vonck. Both were lawyers of the Brussels bar, but Van der Noot was wealthy
and related to the nobility; Vonck was the son of a farmer in easy circumstances.
Van der Noot preferred dramatic action, and looked to the large stage of interna-
tional affairs. Vonck, who was always in poor health, preferred to work behind the
scenes. In 1788 Van der Noot, after publishing a ringing pamphlet, escaped the
Austrian authorities by leaving the country. Vonck at the same time, after an ill-
ness, returned to his home in Brussels. Two very different lines of political action
were thus initiated.
Van der Noot, setting up at Breda across the Dutch frontier, began overtures
with the restored Orange government and with Great Britain and Prussia. He
counted on the intervention of one or all of these powers to support the Belgians
against the Emperor. We have the record of his secret conversations with the
Dutch Van de Spiegel. He told Van de Spiegel that he represented “important
men” in the Austrian Netherlands, that their aim was to set up an independent
republic like that of the Dutch, and that they would favor having the second son of
the Prince of Orange as a stadtholder, to which the difference of religion need be
no bar. We know, too, that Van de Spiegel, the Princess of Orange, and the Am-
sterdam merchants were all cool to this idea. The Princess wanted no such rickety
establishment for her Calvinist son, and Amsterdam wanted no union or affiliation
with Belgium, no opening of the Scheldt, and no Antwerp or Ostend merchants
turning up in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch wanted Belgium to remain as it had
been—and the French to keep out. British interests were the same. Van der Noot’s
program was in fact hopeless, though he continued to pursue it.^37
Vonck meanwhile, from February 1789, was holding secret meetings in his
house in Brussels, at first among his friends. He knew of Van der Noot’s plan, since
the two were working in the same cause, but he had no faith in it, in view of what
had happened in the Dutch Netherlands, and of the roles of Britain and Prussia in
suppressing the Dutch Patriots, of whom there were at one time thought to be
17,000 in Antwerp alone. Vonck’s group therefore counted on action by the Bel-
gians themselves. Their plan, since the Austrians were still in power, was to have a
certain number of young men cross the frontier, form military units, arm, and drill;
and meanwhile to create a clandestine organization in the Belgian villages and
towns, so that return of the armed companies would coincide with an uprising
throughout the country, and the Austrians thereby be driven out. Vonck thus cre-
ated the society Pro Aris et Focis—for Hearth and Altar—a name which had al-
ready been used by some of the Dutch Free Corps. It was a secret society, using
false names, invisible ink, cyphers, double talk, and a system by which each mem-
ber knew the identity only of the member who had enrolled him. The Belgian
Revolution was the only one of the period brought about by conspiratorial meth-
ods. These methods, however, revealed a serious weakness. When the uprising
came, even the members of Vonck’s own society did not know of his part in it.
37 Van de Spiegel’s notes and other documents in H. T. Colenbrander, Gedenkstukken der algemeene
Geschiedenis van Nederland van 1795 tot 1840, I (The Hague, 1905), 137–49.