[2] William the Silent, prince of Orange, who would become the leader of the Dutch Revolt, had received his military education in the service of Charles V (he raised his own landsknecht regiment in 1552) and he followed the Habsburg example when he himself organised his invasion of the Netherlands in 1568.

His experiences with the German mercenaries he raised were not encouraging: they had a predilection for mutiny before a battle and his invasion was easily defeated by the better-trained and disciplined forces of the duke of Alba.

After his short excursion to France, to fight on the Huguenot side in 1569–1571, he apparently came away with a favorable impression of French military organisation and tactics, which prompted him to implement a number of reforms when he started raising mercenary troops on behalf of the rebellious States of Holland after 1572.

[3] Except for the preponderance of firearms, these reforms remained in place throughout the history of the mercenary troops, first of the States of Holland, and later of the States-General (though they are often ascribed to Orange's son Maurice of Nassau).

[7] Having withdrawn his Spanish and Italian troops as required by the Union of Arras, Parma had replaced his foreign personnel with German or 'native' (Low Countries) soldiers for a total of 93 infantry companies, 57 of which were necessary for garrisoning strategic points.

Though every participating province retained certain prerogatives (like reserving the supreme command of its forces for its own stadtholder), in practice they agreed to pool their resources and pay a fixed quota of the cost of the army establishment.

The Duke of Marlborough was especially caustic about them, when he commanded the States Army during the War of Spanish Succession, but a deputy like Sicco van Goslinga sometimes rendered useful services during that campaign.

After the death of William III and the beginning of the Second Stadtholderless Period the States-General appointed the Duke of Marlborough as Captain-General of the States Army (though they pointedly gave him the title of lieutenant-captain-general to avoid hurting sensibilities in Orangist circles).

After the British government dismissed the Duke of Marlborough and concluded a separate armistice with France, in 1712, Prince Eugene of Savoy was appointed lieutenant-captain-general of the Union for the remainder of the War of the Spanish Succession.

During this transport they were housed and fed for the account of the company captains, who received a fixed loopgeld (literally: "marching money") for the infantry or the equivalent Anrittgelt for the cavalry.

To protect his financial interests he therefore had to make sure that the money streams to his company passed through his hands, if only because he often advanced the irregularly paid monthly wages on a daily basis in the form of "loans" to his men.

The Republic therefore was able to obtain large numbers of recruits from Scotland, England, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and later also the Protestant Swiss Cantons (with whom special treaties were made for this purpose).

[36] The Republic usually used military entrepreneurs only on the level of regiments, not entire armies, if only to keep control of the drilling of the soldiers and the high command of the troops.

Most curious was the employment on a temporary basis of a tercio of Spanish mutineers, who provisionally entered the service of the States-General in 1602–1604, pending the resolution of their dispute with the government in Brussels.

One trick was to include so-called passe-volants (the French term for this practice; in English they were called "faggots"): civilians that passed themselves of as soldiers during the muster in exchange for a small bribe.

The problem they tried to solve was that the lack of uniformity in armaments and tactical skills of the mercenary formations they hired on the open market made coordinated fighting difficult.

To counter this problem the important tactical invention of volley fire by ranks was introduced, combined with the ancient concept of the counter-march, already used by the Roman legions.

This tactic enabled the unit to sustain a relatively rapid rate of fire of sufficient "density" to discourage a charge by the pike men of the opposing square.

[48] These methods were promoted by William Louis' brother John VII, Count of Nassau-Siegen, who wrote several works about the techniques that received wide distribution in military circles in Europe.

The most direct threat to the survival of the States Army in the months after the lightning advance of the French into the Dutch heartland was a financial one: the three occupied provinces Gelderland, Overijssel, and Utrecht no longer paid the troops that were on their "repartition," which would soon have resulted in the loss of these regiments.

The French Secretary of State for War Louvois had developed a system of forward supply bases, well-stocked with fodder for the horses and bread grain for the soldiers before the start of the annual campaign season.

This logistical support enabled William III to make his daring sortie to capture the strategic fortress of Bonn in 1673, which forced the French to evacuate the occupied Dutch provinces, because their supply lines were cut.

[58] Nevertheless, military-technical constraints of the day prevented the States Army to achieve a strategic breakthrough in the war in the Spanish Netherlands, even when the Dutch Republic entered into an offensive alliance with France in 1635.

An invasion from the north would require the patience destruction of the line of fortifications and water obstacles that the Spaniards had constructed opposite the equivalent Dutch defensive belt.

[59] The strain on the public finances caused by the need to support large troop levels formed a continuous motivation for the Dutch Regents to limit the resources for the army.

In 1650 this tension led to a coup d'état by the then captain-general William II, one of the three times (1618, 1650 and 1787) in the history of the Republic that the States Army was used by its leader to intervene in the politics of the day.

[60] After his death in 1702 the Regents again declined to appoint a new stadtholder (and the Second Stadtholderless Period began), but their natural inclination to again curtail the army had to be postponed till after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.

Despite the fact that at the beginning of this war the Republic had almost been obliterated, it did not have to make concessions to the French at the Peace, unlike Spain that lost appreciable territory in the Southern Netherlands.

Basically the same Coalition, again led by the Republic and what now became Great Britain, soon fought France again in the War of the Spanish Succession, in which the States Army reached its greatest power and size: 119,000 men in 1712.

It therefore formed the backbone of the Anglo-Dutch forces in the Southern Netherlands, led by the Duke of Marlborough (while the Republic also paid for many of the troops supplied by the allied German princes and Denmark, by way of subsidies); the British contribution to most of the battles fought during this conflict were larger than they had been in previous wars.