flag of the Netherlands

In the 16th century William I, prince of Orange, became a leader of the Dutch independence movement against Spain. Based on the arms of his ancestral territory of Orange, William used livery colours of orange, white, and blue. At the siege of Leiden in 1574, soldiers wore those colours on their uniforms, and the popularity of the colours among Dutch nationalists subsequently spread. The province of Zealand had similar colours: its flag showed a red lion arising out of blue and white stripes representing the sea. The Dutch flag at sea after 1577 was an orange-white-blue horizontal tricolour, although it was never officially adopted. Likewise, there was never any official recognition given to the replacement of the orange by red, a transformation completed by 1660. It was an appropriate time to omit orange from the flag, because in 1654 a defense treaty between the Dutch and the English permanently excluded members of the house of Orange from being heads of state in the Netherlands. (In the 20th century many right-wing Dutch supported orange-white-blue as the “authentic flag” of the Netherlands, but the national flag was not changed.)

After their revolution in 1789 the French recognized red, white, and blue as the “colours of liberty” and honoured the Netherlands for first having used these in a flag (see France, flag of). Pro-French “Patriots” in the Netherlands took the first step regarding an official Dutch national flag when their Batavian Republic legalized the red-white-blue tricolour on Feb. 14, 1796. When Napoleon’s brother, Louis, became ruler of the Kingdom of Holland in 1806, no change was made in the national flag. The Netherlands was annexed by France from 1810 to 1813, but, after independence was regained, the new Kingdom of the Netherlands again recognized the red-white-blue flag. The flag, most recently reaffirmed by a royal decree on Feb. 19, 1937, has inspired the use of the same colours in the national flags of other countries. Despite the visual similarity between the Dutch flag and the flag of Luxembourg, there is no documented relationship between the two designs.