Eighteenth-Century Naval Officers by Evan Wilson & AnnaSara Hammar & Jakob Seerup

Author:Evan Wilson & AnnaSara Hammar & Jakob Seerup
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030257002
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Case 2: Glory as the Benchmark (1779–81)

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a particularly turbulent period in Dutch history. Economic stagnation, social petrification, and political oligarchization led to an ideologically charged partisan struggle between the new reformist Patriot Movement and the Stadholderly Orangist Party. Cutting across the borders of all seven provinces, and formulating an ambitious programme of political renewal, the Patriot Movement came to display some of the characteristics of a modern political party. Drawing its support from the urban middle classes and from progressive young regents, the Patriots set up local armed militias that together represented a significant military force. At the same time, Stadholder William V and his entourage drew strength from his position as Captain-General of the States’ Army and from the broad support the House of Orange received from the lower classes and from conservative Calvinist preachers. In 1785–86 the increasingly menacing and dramatic political strife escalated into civil war, with armed confrontations taking place in the provinces of Gelderland, Utrecht, and Friesland. In 1787, following the seizing of William V’s wife, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, by a local unit of the Patriots near Gouda, the Prussian army intervened on behalf of the Stadholderly Party, making short work of Patriot resistance. The Patriots fled to exile in France, where they remained while waiting for their fortune to turn. Their patience was rewarded in 1795, when they formed the légion étrangère of the French Revolutionary Army that occupied and delivered the coup de grâce to the Republic as an independent state.32

The immediate cause of the Patriot-Orangist partisan struggle was the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, which made all too clear the economic and military weakness of the Republic and the total inability of the governing elites to initiate and implement structural reform. British-Dutch relations had begun seriously to deteriorate in 1776, when the governor of the colony of St. Eustatius ordered a formal counter-salute to the American ship Andrew Doria and to the new Grand Union Flag it was flying. Dubbed the ‘Golden Rock’, Dutch merchants used this Caribbean free port as a hub for their weapons trade to the American revolutionaries . Even more problematic was the tension resulting from the outbreak of the Franco-British War in 1778. The Republic did not meet its obligations of military assistance to Great Britain, while Amsterdam merchants made handsome profits shipping timber, weapons, and munitions to France. Britain responded by ordering the Royal Navy to search Dutch vessels for contraband and impound them when prohibited goods were detected. There was little the Republic’s fleet could do to prevent this; in December 1779, Lieutenant-Admiral Lodewijk, Count Bylandt’s squadron could only follow helplessly as a British force took as prizes to Portsmouth the merchantmen it had been escorting.33

The fleet’s passivity caused a great outcry in the Republic against both Britain and the Stadholderate. Bylandt’s critics accused him of Anglophilia and suspected that he had not wanted to jeopardize the Stadholder’s pro-British course. Seventeenth-century naval glory was employed as the benchmark to rate his actions.

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