A PRUSSIAN CAMPAIGN IN HOLLAND.[1]
You are happy in going to be settled in a country where you will find all the pleasures of royalty with none of its inconveniences." With these words the great Frederick in the peaceful days of his later reign dismissed the niece whom the young Prince of Orange had come to Berlin to claim as his bride. For at that time (1766) the political horizon in the United Provinces was fair. The struggles against Spanish bigotry and French ambition, in which prince and people had nobly responded to each other's call, were not so long past that the benefits of the compact could be forgotten under which a few scattered trading communities had won a place in the councils of Europe. The Dutch were grateful to the line of rulers whose energy and tact had preserved the nation against external foes whilst maintaining its internal liberties. On their part the Princes of Orange had little of kingly honour or power wanting to their position. Commanding by hereditary right all land and sea forces, and holding all the chief executive powers these functions confirmed and renewed in the elder branch of the house of Orange first, by the five chief provinces; then extended to the junior, so adding the two others it had separately administered; then granted to successors by the female line; and finally to heirs adopted in default of any born: it might well seem that the Stadtholders of the Netherlands, though professedly only the first servants of a free State, held dignities as honourable and as sure of continuance as those of any royalty in the world.
Such was, no doubt, Frederick's view when he parted from his niece. The Prussian reigning house was the natural marriage mart for princes in those days. Princesses had abounded in it when Frederick was young, and had been disposed of freely to the first fitting suitor by the thrifty court. And there is small reason to believe that this young lady was despatched from Berlin with any special view to extending Prussian influence over a neighbouring State, much less with the far-seeing design of making her treatment by the Dutch a pretext for entering the land to overrun it with a Prussian army. If any such thought entered Frederick's subtle mind, it gained no utterance. And it was after he had passed away that events occurred which brought about the event then unforeseen, the invasion of Holland by Prussia, the excuse being mainly the ill-treatment of the Stadtholderess by Dutch officers, successors of those who had welcomed her with every demonstration of loyalty twenty years before.[2]
To tell how this change came about would be to write the internal history of the Netherlands during the eventful epoch that preceded the great turning-point in modern history, the French Revolution. Such a task would be altogether beyond our scope. It is sufficient here to indicate, as one main cause of the unpopularity that in 1780 had begun to attach itself to the Stadtholder, the connection of Dutch affairs with our own unhappy war with America. Long jealous of our growing maritime supremacy, Holland was not a whit less ready than France to aid the new foes of our own kindred, whom an obstinate ministry and bigoted king had forced into rebellion. The time had
- ↑ Der Preussische Feldzug in Holland, 1787. Von Freiherr von Troschke. Berlin: 1875.
- ↑ The political details of these transactions are related with inimitable vivacity in the despatches of Sir James Harris, then British minister at the Hague, which were published in 1844 by his grandson in the second volume of the "Malmesbury Correspondence." In fact, Sir James Harris had been throughout the moving spirit whose energy and courage kept life in the Stadtholder's party, and eventually defeated the cabal of the patriots and the French. The Prussian court refused to act without the support of England, which was extorted with considerable difficulty from Mr. Pitt. But in August 1787 the two governments of St. James and Potsdam agreed on six preliminary points: to act as mediators by mutual consent; to resist all foreign interference; to disarm and dissolve the Free Corps, and restore the Prince of Orange to all his rights as Stadtholder; to march a Prussian army into Holland, England agreeing to prepare forty ships of the line to support it; and finally, in the event of any power disapproving of this intervention, to defend each other and accomplish it by force of arms. A secret convention embodying these articles was signed between Prussia and England on the 2nd October, 1787. But the whole operation was no more than the fulfilment of the policy of which Sir James Harris was the real author.
