War with Spain (1621–48)

The war resumed in 1621 under Maurice’s leadership. But his victory touch was gone, and the republic appeared to be in danger when the great fortress of Breda, on the southern frontier, fell to the Spaniards in 1625. Only a few weeks before, Maurice had died. The danger was all the greater because the Austrian Habsburgs, in alliance with their Spanish cousins, were waging a successful struggle against their Protestant foes in Germany in the first stages of the Thirty Years’ War. But Maurice’s half brother, Frederick Henry, who succeeded him as prince of Orange, stadtholder, and commander in chief, resumed the course of victory. He completed the recapture of the towns recently gained by the Spaniards and extended the territory under the States General to the key fortress of Maastricht on the Maas (Meuse), well to the south. At the same time, the Dutch navy won a series of victories over the Spaniards, including Piet Heyn’s celebrated capture of their silver fleet off the coast of Cuba (1628) and the destruction of a Spanish fleet in the Downs, off the English coast, by Maarten Tromp in 1639.

Frederick Henry turned out to be a more subtle and purposeful politician than Maurice. On the one hand, he ended the suppression of the Remonstrants, with whose religious views he sympathized, without exasperating the Contra-Remonstrants beyond repair. On the other hand, he established a firm grip over the policies of the republic, notably by establishing a close alliance with France aimed at the joint conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. Frederick Henry’s political predominance within the republic was based upon his control of the lesser provinces, which had a majority in the States General and which could outweigh the influence of Holland.

Gradually Holland turned against him, especially after he arranged the marriage of his young son William (later William II) to Princess Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I of England, on the eve of the English Civil War (1642–51). This fateful dynastic bond tied the interests of the house of Orange to the royal families of England—first to the Stuarts and later to the Hanoverians. The position of the house of Orange, however, was elevated by the connection; the French monarchy granted Frederick Henry the honorary address of “His Highness,” normally restricted to royalty; and the debate over the function of the princes of Orange in Dutch politics began to be conducted as a controversy over monarchy. A quasi-royal court rose up around Frederick Henry, and this in turn only clarified and strengthened the republicanism of his opponents, especially in Holland, who feared that the political leadership of the princes of Orange would be turned into an explicit monarchy.

During the 1640s, however, Frederick Henry lost his physical and intellectual powers and was unable to prevent Holland from reasserting its predominance over the republic’s policies. The States General entered into peace negotiations with Spain at Münster in Westphalia. Frederick Henry died in 1647 before the conclusion of the talks, and his son, William II, could not prevent the signing and ratification of the treaty in January 1648. Spain now formally acknowledged the independence of the Dutch and indeed even urged its friendship upon the United Provinces, warning of the threat to both the Dutch and the Spanish from the rising power of France.

Prince William was not ready to accept a permanent peace, and he negotiated secretly with the French for a resumption of the war, not only against Spain but also against republican England, which had executed his father-in-law, King Charles I, in January 1649. Needing a powerful army to wage the anticipated war, William bitterly fought the efforts of Holland to reduce the standing army and thereby to permit more rapid payment of the huge debt accumulated over the 80 years’ struggle for independence. Efforts at compromise broke down during the spring of 1650 as the Hollanders and William each sought to compel the other to concede political inferiority.

William decided to make use of his preponderance in the States General, and he led a delegation from that body to the towns of Holland to seek a change of their vote in the States of Holland. Such a delegation was a direct violation of what Holland saw as its provincial sovereignty. Rebuffed by a number of town governments, most importantly by those of Amsterdam and Dordrecht, William decided to cut through the resistance by force. At The Hague, on July 30, 1650, he arrested six of the States’ deputies from the recalcitrant towns and sent them to the castle of Loevestein (where Grotius had been imprisoned) on charges of having resisted lawful orders of the States General. At the same time, he sent an army to seize Amsterdam, but it was thwarted by delays on its march and by the determined resistance of the municipal authorities, supported by the common people. Amsterdam, however, faced a siege that might gravely imperil its trade, while the besiegers themselves ran the danger of being drowned should Amsterdam open the dikes. A compromise was soon worked out whereby William’s opponents were released but were required to withdraw from government. William had cleared the way for his policies but at the price of arousing deep fears among the Dutch people—most of all in the powerful province of Holland—of military dictatorship, monarchical rule, and renewed involvement of the country in war. But before he could carry out his plans, William II died of smallpox in early November. A posthumous son, William III, was born a week later.

The first stadtholderless period

Fate thus intervened to give Holland’s leaders, now intensely distrustful of Orangist influence, a chance to take over the country from the leaderless party of their antagonists. They governed the country for a little more than two decades, during what is known as the “first stadtholderless period” (1650–72) because the five leading provinces did not appoint a successor to William II. (It should be noted, however, that William II’s cousin, William Frederick, of the junior branch of Orange-Nassau, continued to govern Friesland as well as Groningen, which also elected him stadtholder.) During the early months of 1651, a Great Assembly of the States General, with expanded delegations from all the provinces, met at The Hague to consider the new situation. Holland was satisfied to consolidate the leadership it had so unexpectedly regained and conciliated the lesser provinces by leaving undisturbed the religious settlement of 1619 and by granting amnesty to those who had supported William II in 1650. But Holland’s fears of the increased powers of the central government had been so stiffened that it depended upon its own preponderance, rather than upon constitutional reforms, to achieve effective government.

Yet efficiency of rule, so difficult to obtain when the powers to make and apply policy were so widely scattered, became all the more necessary when the republic became embroiled in war with the English Commonwealth in 1652. Nonetheless, the system was surprisingly efficient. The conflict with England arose out of a medley of causes: first, the English republicans, after their successes against the royalists, took up the cause of defending English commercial interests against the Dutch and passed the Navigation Act of 1651, forbidding Dutch shippers from acting as middlemen in English trade both in Europe and overseas; second, the English sought to bring the Dutch into a political union directed primarily against the Stuarts and their cousins of the house of Orange. But the Dutch, whatever resentment the Hollanders bore against the Orange dynasty, were unwilling either to court civil war or to abandon their dearly won independence in a union that would make them junior partners to the English. An accidental clash between the Dutch and English fleets led to full-scale war in which a greatly improved English navy won the upper hand. By 1654 the Dutch were compelled to accept peace on English terms, including a secret promise by Holland (“Act of Seclusion”) to exclude forever the prince of Orange from the stadtholderate and the supreme command.

The decision to accept a humiliating peace as the only way to terminate a disastrous war had been taken at the insistence of the young Johan de Witt, who had taken office in 1653 as councillor pensionary of Holland (the same office once held by Oldenbarnevelt). With the return of peace, he became the brilliant leader of the republic’s foreign and domestic policy. He rebuilt the Dutch navy, reduced indebtedness, improved the financial condition of both the States General and the States of Holland, and restored the republic’s prestige in Europe. Carefully averting any renewal of strife with England, he was able not only to compel France to back down in a naval dispute but also to send a powerful Dutch fleet to save Denmark from Swedish conquest in the First Northern War (1657–60).

When the exiled English king, Charles II, was restored to his throne in 1660, de Witt continued his policy of staying on good terms with England no matter who ruled there. This policy, however, foundered on the same two issues—commercial rivalry and the status of the house of Orange—that had brought about the war of 1652–54. Charles not only accepted the renewal of the Navigation Act of 1651 but intensified the rivalry with the Dutch by demanding forcefully that they acknowledge his sovereignty over the adjacent seas, pay tribute for the right to fish in the North Sea, and open the Dutch East Indies to English traders. When naval warfare resumed in 1664 off Africa, followed by war in Europe the next year, Charles took up the cause of the young prince of Orange. By persuading the Orangists that his price for peace was restoration of William III to the offices of his forefathers, the English monarch built up a friendly party in the United Provinces that urged acceptance of his terms and even fostered a conspiracy to overthrow the government of de Witt and his friends. But de Witt managed to meet the new threat. An Orangist plot in Holland was uncovered and put down in 1666.

When Charles had demanded too high a price for Dutch friendship in 1660–62, de Witt had negotiated an alliance with the French, who feared that the restoration of the prince of Orange would create a hostile Anglo-Dutch coalition. Furthermore, success in the fighting at sea increasingly went to the newly rebuilt Dutch navy. In 1667 the Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames and the Medway to Chatham, destroying the English shipyards and burning the fleet at its moorings. In that same year, however, the French, under Louis XIV, who had only belatedly sent naval and land forces to aid the Dutch, began an invasion of the Spanish (southern) Netherlands (present-day Belgium) in the War of Devolution. As French conquest of the southern Low Countries constituted a threat to both the Dutch Republic and England, those states came to terms in the standoff Peace of Breda (July 31, 1667), followed in January by an Anglo-Dutch alliance compelling France to make peace with Spain.

This Triple Alliance (so called because Sweden became a third partner) proved to be de Witt’s undoing, although he had no effective diplomatic strategy to put in its place. Louis XIV, balked in his aim of conquest, considered that the Dutch had betrayed their alliance and turned to Charles II with proposals for a joint war against the United Provinces. Charles, bitterly resentful over his humiliating defeat at Chatham, accepted the French offer of a richly subsidized alliance. Even as the threat from France emerged more clearly, the Orangists imagined that the Dutch could still win over Charles by the restoration of William III, but they were able to obtain only the prince’s appointment as commander in chief early in 1672. Charles joined the French in open war in the spring of 1672, counting upon William to accept rule of a rump Dutch Republic after France and Britain had taken away important territories for themselves. But William, who was given full power, including the stadtholdership, during a storm of riots and near rebellion that swept the country in June and July after the French invasion penetrated to its heart, took over the leadership of the Dutch defense from de Witt, who was lynched by a mob in The Hague in August. With William’s support, the States General rejected the Anglo-French terms.

William III

The tide of war now turned against the aggressors. The Dutch navy under Adm. Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter repeatedly defeated the allied fleets off the coast of the republic, while the Dutch armies held on behind the flooded polders of the “water line.” When other powers—Spain, at first as an auxiliary and then as a full participant, the German emperor, and Brandenburg—joined the Dutch side, the French armies withdrew from the republic. During six years of bitter war, William III was able to bring about the withdrawal of England (1674) and the defeat of all French war aims against the Dutch, yet his Grand Alliance was unable to bring Louis XIV to his knees. Indeed, it was Spain that paid the price of a peace negotiated at Nijmegen in 1678.

During these years in which his political control of the republic, while strong, was not absolute, William was no more interested in constitutional reform than de Witt, his predecessor in the leadership of the country, had been. He was satisfied to expel adversaries from office and dominate the decisions taken by men who represented the same groups and the same social principles as those whom they replaced. But Holland, whose wealth ultimately was the basis for all Dutch power, political and military, slipped from under his thumb and asserted its autonomy of judgment and decision. The transformation of the republic, which had been from its origins an aristocracy dominated by mercantile wealth, into an oligarchy of inherited power, continued unimpeded by William. He had used the violence of the urban citizenry during the crisis of 1672 to unseat his opponents, including de Witt, but he was no more sympathetic than they had been to the vague democratic aspirations that were expressed here and there.

During the decade after the conclusion of the Peace of Nijmegen, the tension between William and Holland (particularly Amsterdam) worsened, because the prince was fixed upon a policy of renewed resistance to Louis XIV, while the Hollanders preferred peace at any reasonable price. But the upsurge of the threat from France in the late 1680s—the French incursions into western Germany and the threat of French domination of England under James II, a stalwart Roman Catholic and a pensioner of Louis XIV—brought William and Holland into agreement upon the need to support the prince’s expedition to England in 1688. This resulted in his acceptance of the English throne, jointly with his wife, Mary Stuart, early the next year. William, as king-stadtholder, had to give primacy to English interests because England was the more powerful partner in the alliance. He therefore approved the arrangement whereby England concentrated its efforts against France on the sea while the Dutch did so on land; the result was neglect of the Dutch navy. Ironically, the final triumph of the English over the Dutch in their commercial rivalry was a consequence of their alliance, not their enmity.

The war begun in 1689 ended with a stalemate peace in 1697, followed by two treaties between the maritime powers and France for partition of the Spanish monarchy. In 1700, however, Louis XIV accepted the bequest of the Spanish throne for his grandson, Philippe d’Anjou (Philip V of Spain), and war was resumed the next year.

William died, childless, in 1702. When Holland again took the initiative for government without a stadtholder, it was followed by the other provinces with much greater alacrity than had been the case in 1650–51. Resentment had built up against William, who had been preoccupied with foreign affairs and had done little to improve domestic politics, and the absence of an adult heir meant that there was no effective opposition to the new course. Leadership of the Dutch state for the next 45 years came from the councillor pensionaries of Holland, who were often able men but either unwilling or unable to do more than conduct current business without attempting the delicate and explosive task of restructuring the government. On the contrary, constitutional rigidity became the credo not only of Dutch republicans but also of the Orangist party, with the only point in contention between them being whether the prince of Orange-Nassau, who was stadtholder of Friesland, should be elected to the same office in the other provinces. William IV, who followed his father in Friesland in 1711, was chosen stadtholder in Groningen in 1718 and in Gelderland (and the district of Drenthe) in 1722. Even without a stadtholder in the principal provinces, Dutch subordination to English interests remained intact during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) and the succeeding years of peace.

Dutch civilization in the Golden Age (1609–1713)

The century from the conclusion of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1609 until either the death of Prince William III in 1702 or the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 is known in Dutch history as the “Golden Age.” It was a unique era of political, economic, and cultural greatness during which the little nation on the North Sea ranked among the most powerful and influential in Europe and the world.

The economy

It was a grandeur that rested upon the economic expansion that continued with scarcely an interruption until 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. The half century that followed was marked by consolidation rather than continued expansion, under the impact of the revived competition from the other nations, notably England and France, whose policies of mercantilism were to a large degree directed against the near monopoly of the Dutch over the trade and shipping of Europe. Although the Dutch tenaciously resisted the new competition, the long-distance trading system of Europe was transformed from one largely conducted through the Netherlands, the Dutch acting as universal buyer-seller and shipper, to one of multiple routes and fierce competitiveness. Nonetheless, the wealth earned during a long century of prosperity made the United Provinces a land of great riches, with more capital by far than could find outlet in domestic investment. Yet the economic burden of repeated wars caused the Dutch to become one of the most heavily taxed peoples in Europe. Taxes were imposed on the transit trade in and out of the country. But as mercantile competition became stiffer, the rate of such taxation could not be safely increased, and the burden therefore fell increasingly on the consumer. Excise and other indirect taxes made the Dutch cost of living one of the highest in Europe, although there was considerable variance between the different areas of the republic.

Dutch prosperity was built not only upon the “mother trades”—to the Baltic and to France and the Iberian lands—but also upon the overseas trades with Africa, Asia, and America. The attempt of the Spanish monarchs (who also ruled Portugal and its possessions from 1580 to 1640) to exclude Dutch merchants and shippers from the lucrative colonial commerce with East Asia led the Dutch to trade directly with the East Indies. Individual companies were organized for each venture, but the companies were united by command of the States General in 1602 in order to reduce the costs and increase the security of such perilous and complex undertakings. The resulting United East India Company, better known as the Dutch East India Company, established bases throughout the Indian Ocean, notably in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), mainland India, and the Indonesian archipelago. The Dutch East India Company, like its rival English counterpart, the East India Company, was a trading company granted quasi-sovereign powers in the lands under its dominion. The East India fleets that returned annually with cargoes of spices and other valuables provided huge profits for the shareholders. However, the East India trade of the 17th and 18th centuries never provided more than a modest fraction of the Dutch earnings from European trade. The Dutch West India Company, established in 1621, was built upon shakier economic foundations; trade in commodities was less important than the trade in enslaved people, in which the Dutch were preeminent in the 17th century, and privateering, which operated primarily out of Zeeland ports and preyed upon Spanish (and other) shipping. The West India Company had to be reorganized several times during its precarious existence, while the East India Company survived until the end of the 18th century.

Society

The social structure that evolved with the economic transformation of Dutch life was complex and was marked by the predominance of the business classes that later centuries called the bourgeoisie, although with some significant differences. The social “betters” of Dutch aristocracy were only to a limited extent landed nobles, most of whom lived in the economically less advanced inland provinces. Most of the Dutch elite were wealthy townspeople whose fortunes were made as merchants and financiers, but they frequently shifted their activities to government, becoming what the Dutch called regents, members of the ruling bodies of town and province, and drawing most of their incomes from these posts and from investments in government bonds and real estate.

The common people comprised both a numerous class of artisans and small businesspeople, whose prosperity provided the base for the generally high Dutch standard of living, and a very large class of sailors, shipbuilders, fishermen, and other workers. Dutch workers were in general well paid, but they were also burdened by unusually high taxes. The farmers, producing chiefly cash crops, prospered in a country that needed large amounts of food and raw materials for its urban (and seagoing) population. The quality of life was marked by less disparity between classes than prevailed elsewhere, although the difference between a great merchant’s home on the Herengracht in Amsterdam and a dockworker’s hovel was all too obvious. What was striking was the comparative simplicity even of the wealthy classes and the sense of status and dignity among the ordinary people, although the exuberance that had earlier marked the society was toned down or even eliminated by the strict Calvinist morality preached and to some extent enforced by the official church. There was, too, a good deal of mingling between the burgher regents who possessed great wealth and political power and the landed gentry and lesser nobility who formed the traditional elite.

Culture

The economic prosperity of the Dutch Republic in this “golden century” was matched by an extraordinary flowering of cultural achievement, which drew from the country’s prosperity not only the direct resources of financial nourishment but also a driving and sustaining sense of purpose and vigour. This was reflected in the first instance by a notable series of historical works: the contemporary chronicles of the revolt, by Pieter Bor and Emanuel van Meteren; the highly polished account by Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, a masterpiece of narration and judgment in the spirit of Tacitus; the heavily factual chronicle of Lieuwe van Aitzema, with its interspersed commentary of skeptical wisdom; Abraham de Wicquefort’s history of the republic (principally under the first stadtholderless administration); and the histories and biographies by Geeraert Brandt. These were works in which a proud new nation took account of its birth pangs and its growth to greatness. Only in the latter part of the century did Dutch historians begin to express a sense that political grandeur might be transient.

Political theorists shared the same concerns, although the effort to fit new experience and ideas into the traditional categories derived from Aristotle and Roman law created an air of unreality about their work, perhaps even more than was true of political thinkers elsewhere in Europe. Theorists such as the Gouda official Vrancken in the days of the foundation of the republic and Grotius in the early 17th century portrayed the republic as essentially unchanged since the early Middle Ages or even since antiquity—a country where sovereignty resided in provincial and town assemblies, which had partly lost their control to counts and kings before regaining it in the revolt against Philip II. The next surge of political debate came after mid-century, when for a little more than two decades the country was governed without a prince of Orange as stadtholder.

The controversy over whether the young Prince William had any right by birth to the offices of his forefathers probed the fundamental character of the republic, for even a quasi-hereditary stadtholdership created an incipient monarchy within the traditional structure of aristocratic republicanism. The debate involved the issue not so much of centralization versus provincialism as of where the leadership of the republic properly lay, whether in the house of Orange or in the province of Holland and notably its greatest city, Amsterdam. Only the celebrated philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, an outsider by origin and character (a Jew by birth and upbringing), elevated these political questions to the level of universality.

Another great philosopher of the 17th century who resided in the Dutch Republic was the Frenchman René Descartes. Though an outsider, Descartes found in the Netherlands a freedom from intellectual inquisitions and personal involvements. He lived there for two decades while engaged in studies that would help transform modern thought.

Scientific activity in the United Provinces also reached a high level. The physicist Christiaan Huygens approached Isaac Newton himself in power of mind and importance of scientific contribution. The engineer and mathematician Simon Stevin and the microscopists Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam rank in the front of their fields.

Dutch literature, which knew great creativity during the Golden Age, remained the possession of the relatively small number of those who spoke and read Dutch. Figures such as the dramatist, poet, and historian P.C. Hooft and the poets Constantijn Huygens and Joost van den Vondel (the last of whom was also a distinguished playwright) wrote with a power and a purity worthy of the best that France and England produced at that time. Music was hampered by the Calvinists’ antipathy to what they saw as frivolity. Organ music was barred from services in Reformed churches, although town authorities frequently continued its performance at other times. The great organist-composer J.P. Sweelinck was more influential in encouraging the creative wave in Germany than among his own people.

The art whose achievements rank at the very top was painting, which rested upon the broad patronage of a prosperous population. Group portraits of regents and other influential citizens adorned town halls and charitable establishments, while still lifes and anecdotal paintings of popular life hung in profusion in private homes. Some of the greatest work, from the brushes of such painters as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, and Johannes Vermeer, were painted for these markets, but the greatest of Dutch painters, Rembrandt van Rijn, broke through the boundaries of the group portrait to create works with his own extraordinary mood and inward meaning. Landscape painters, notably Jacob van Ruisdael, captured the distinctive Dutch flatland, broad skies with massed clouds, and muted light. Architecture remained at a lesser level, merging with some success the native traditions of brick buildings and gable roofs and fashionable Renaissance styles. Sculpture remained a largely foreign art.