Following a defeat at Castricum, the Duke of York, the British supreme commander, decided upon a strategic retreat to the original bridgehead in the extreme north of the peninsula.

In the 1780s, a pro-French Patriot rebellion failed to establish a democratic Dutch republic without the House of Orange-Nassau, when the latter's power was restored following the 1787 Prussian invasion of Holland.

[4] This programme soon brought the Batavian navy up to sufficient strength that Great Britain had to worry about its potential contribution to a threatened French invasion of England or Ireland.

The Batavian Republic seemed an opportune target for such an attack, with the Prince of Orange lobbying hard for just such a full military effort to reinstate him, and with Orangist agents leading the British to believe that France's hold over the Batavian Republic was weak and that a determined strike by the British towards Amsterdam would lead to a massive uprising against the French.

According to the British historian Simon Schama: "Once the Orange standard had been raised, he seems to have believed that the Batavian army would go over to the forces of the Coalition to the last man and that its Republic would collapse under the barest pressure.

Many strategists preferred either the mouth of the Meuse river, or the vicinity of Scheveningen, both of which offered an opportunity to quickly deploy the attacking forces and threaten the supply lines of the French army of occupation in the Batavian Republic.

The depleted Dutch fleet, under Rear-Admiral Samuel Story, evaded battle, leaving the disembarkation of the British troops near Callantsoog on 27 August 1799, unopposed.

A motley band of Orangist émigrés at the Westervoortsche Bridge near Arnhem, was easily put to flight on September 4 by a small detachment of the Batavian National Guard, proving that the invaders had to do the work themselves.

Nevertheless, the Uitvoerend Bewind of the Batavian Republic declared martial law and under these emergency measures an aristocratic partisan of the stadtholder, the freule (baroness) Judith Van Dorth tot Holthuizen was convicted of sedition and executed.

This defeat was partly due to sloppy staffwork that allocated one narrow road to the columns of both Batavian divisions that were supposed to converge on the hamlet of Krabbendam.

[26] With Britain having naval superiority, both on the North Sea and the Zuider Zee, British reinforcements under the Duke of York (who assumed supreme command) and Russian troops under general Ivan Ivanovitch Hermann von Fersen could easily be landed at Den Helder.

The North Holland peninsula is bordered on the North-Sea side by a beach and a broad band of dunes (except for a short stretch south of Petten, where only a large dike defends the hinterland against flooding).

Finally, the fourth column, 9,000 infantry and 160 cavalry under Lieutenant-General Abercromby, was intended to turn the Franco-Batavian right flank, by first attaining Hoorn and then thrusting southward to Purmerend.

[29] The column of General Dundas (accompanied by the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York) made only slow progress after it started its advance at dawn, because of the watercourses it encountered that were difficult to cross, as the defenders had removed the bridges.

The road led to the village of Oudkarspel where the 1st Batavian division of General Daendels had built some fieldworks (the Dutch complained that Brune had prohibited the full development of fortifications, which made the defence more difficult).

The first attack on this strongpoint by Pulteney ended in disaster with the British fleeing in panic until they could be rallied behind another dike that gave some cover against the Dutch artillery fire.

Daendels finally personally led a counter-attack with only one battalion of grenadiers, but by then the debacle on the British right wing had been communicated to Pulteney, who therefore was already withdrawing to his starting position.

Remarkably, the British had not made use of this advantage (and of the psychological consequences of the surrender for Batavian morale) to force the issue, for instance by making an amphibious landing near Amsterdam.

The main effect of these defensive preparations was, that the low-lying eastern part of the peninsula became impassable to the expeditionary force and that henceforth operations would be limited to the relatively narrow band, consisting of the beach, dunes and the plain directly adjacent to them, roughly the area between Alkmaar and the sea.

[37] The plan of attack could now be characterized as one of "single envelopment," with Abercromby's column intended to turn the French left wing by marching along the beach.

This cavalry attack was eventually repulsed by a counter-attack led by Lord Paget, who drove the French all the way back to Egmond aan Zee.

Large parts of the country, the former lakes of the Beemster, Schermer, and Wormer, had been flooded, depriving the British of their rich farmland and the supplies that might have been obtained there.

Beside the troops, the hungry mouths of about 3,000 deserters and mutineers that the Hereditary Prince hoped to form into a Dutch Brigade, but that were not employed by the British,[42] had to be fed.

On the morning of 6 October these were attacked by the now-familiar three columns: Abercromby along the beach, Essen in the middle and Dundas on the left, while Pulteney still rather uselessly masked Daendels.

The Duke of York appears to have had nothing more in mind than an armed reconnaissance, but their early success tempted the Russians to attack Castricum in force and this village was tenaciously defended by Pacthod.

They were pursued in the direction of Bakkum by French cavalry under General Barbou and a rout might have ensued had not the light dragoons of Lord Paget intervened in a surprise charge from a hidden dune valley.

They drew along the exhausted Franco-Batavian troops that had only shortly before retaken Castricum and a disorderly retreat was about to start[47] The advance of the British was broken by a counter-attack of the Batavian hussars under Colonel Quaita.

The outcome of this conference was that the Anglo-Russian army withdrew completely to the original bridgehead of the Zijpe polder, relinquishing all terrain that had been gained since 19 September.

[53] The strategic withdrawal was completed on 8 October, though Prince William of Gloucester, retreating from Hoorn, fought a rearguard action against Daendels in the following days.

Though General Krayenhoff was not impressed by this threat (after all, he had spent the previous weeks flooding most of the peninsula himself, and knew that the process could be reversed without too much difficulty) and so advised Brune, the latter was more easily impressed (or feigned this; Krayenhoff also darkly mentions a gift of a number of "magnificent horses" by the Duke to Brune as a possible deal-clincher) and soon agreed to a convention that was very favourable to the Anglo-Russians.