Orangist revolution

The Orangist revolution of 1747 brought William IV, Prince of Orange to the Stadtholder office, finishing the Second Stadtholderless Period.

Unfortunately, the fact that it maintained garrisons in a number of fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands implied that it implicitly defended that country against France, though that was not the Republic's intent.

The Austrian Netherlands now lay open for the French, especially as the Jacobite rising of 1745 opened a second front in the British homeland, which necessitated the urgent recall of Cumberland with most of his troops, soon followed by an expeditionary force of 6,000 Dutch troops (which could be hardly spared), which the Dutch owed due to their guarantee of the Hanoverian regime in Great Britain.

Then, in April 1747, apparently as an exercise in armed diplomacy, a relatively small French army occupied States Flanders.

[3] This relatively innocuous invasion fully exposed the rottenness of the Dutch defenses, as if the French had driven a pen knife into a rotting windowsill.

William IV, who had been waiting in the wings impatiently since he got his vaunted title of Prince of Orange back in 1732, was no great military genius, as he proved at the Battle of Lauffeld, where he led the Dutch contingent shortly after his elevation in May 1747 to stadtholder in all provinces, and to captain-general of the Union.

The war itself was brought to a not-too-devastating end for the Republic with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), and the French retreated of their own accord from the Dutch frontier.

The city of Rotterdam was soon engulfed in orange banners and cockades and the vroedschap was forced to propose the restoration of the stadtholderate in Holland, too.

The Holland States begged the Prince's representatives, Willem Bentinck van Rhoon, a son of William III's faithful retainer William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, and Willem van Haren, grietman of Het Bildt to calm the mob that was milling outside their windows.

The people started to express their fury at the representatives of this regime, and incidentally at Catholics, whose toleration apparently still enraged the Calvinist followers of the Orangist ideology, just as the revolution of 1672 had been accompanied by agitation against minority Protestant sects.

Bentinck, who had a keen political mind, saw farther and advised the purge of the leaders of the States Party: Grand Pensionary Jacob Gilles (who had succeeded Van der Heim in 1746), secretary of the Council of State Adriaen van der Hoop, and sundry regents and the leaders of the ridderschappen in Holland and Overijssel.

The advantages of this were demonstrated when in November 1747 the city of Amsterdam alone opposed making the stadtholderate hereditary in both the male and female lines of William IV (who had only a daughter at the time).

Raap, and another agitator, Jean Rousset de Missy, now orchestrated more mob violence in Amsterdam in support of the proposal, which duly passed.

Even Groningen and Friesland, William's "own" provinces, who had traditionally allowed their stadtholder very limited powers, were put under pressure to give him greatly extended prerogatives.

Only then did the Groningen States make far-reaching concessions that gave William powers comparable to those in Utrecht, Overijssel and Gelderland.

Equally, after mob violence in May 1748 in Friesland the States were forced to request a Government Regulation on the model of the Utrecht one, depriving them of their ancient privileges.

[11] Such ideas, anathema to both the clique around the stadtholder and the old States Party regents, were en vogue with a broad popular movement under the middle strata of the population, that aimed to make the government answerable to the people.

The States of Holland, now thoroughly alarmed by these "radical" developments, asked the stadtholder to go to Amsterdam in person to restore order by whatever means necessary.

People like Bentinck hoped that gathering the reins of power in the hands of a single "eminent head" would soon help restore the state of the Dutch economy and finances.