[2] The general gist of the narrative was that as long as the stadtholders led the country, all was well, whereas when such heroic figures were replaced with the humdrum regents, the ship of state inexorably drifted to the cliffs of history.

[citation needed] Apart from the fact that long-persisting use in common parlance has established such a right to exist, that question may be answered in the affirmative, because as it turns out, the absence of a stadtholder was indeed a (positively perceived) principle of the constitution of the Republic in these historical periods.

[3][page needed] The popular revolt in reaction to the French invasion of 1672, during the Franco-Dutch War, had overturned the States-Party regime of Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt (ending the First Stadtholderless Period) and swept William III of Orange into power.

This was demonstrated for instance in the summer months of 1688 when Amsterdam was persuaded to support the invasion of England, which later led to the Glorious Revolution and William and Mary's accession to the British thrones.

All these claims and counter-claims set the stage for vigorous litigation, especially between Frederick of Prussia and Henriëtte Amalia van Anhalt-Dessau, the mother of John Wiliam Friso, as the latter was still a minor in 1702.

He already was stadtholder of Friesland and Groningen, as this office had been made hereditary in 1675 and he had succeeded his father Henry Casimir II, Prince of Nassau-Dietz in 1696, be it under the regency of his mother, as he was only nine at the time.

A new conflict with the France of Louis XIV was about to break out (William III indeed had spent the last days of his life finalizing the preparations) and this was no time to experiment with a fifteen-year-old boy in such important offices as that of stadtholder and captain-general of the Dutch States Army.

Besides, the States-General did not want to offend an important ally like Frederick I of Prussia, who had already in March 1702, occupied the counties of Lingen and Moers (which belonged to William's patrimony) and was not too subtly threatening to defect to the French side in the coming war if he were thwarted in his quest for his "rightful" inheritance.

William spent his last year of life feverishly rebuilding the coalition with Austria, his nephew Frederick I of Prussia, and a host of smaller German princes to support the claim to the Spanish throne of Charles III, as a means of preventing a union of the power of Spain and France, which might overwhelm the rest of Europe.

This would prove to be a source of constant friction in the campaigns to come, as these politicians tended to emphasize the risks to the Dutch troops of Marlborough's decisions over their evident strategic brilliance.

Like Portugal for Britain, the Southern Netherlands were now transformed into a captive market for the Dutch, by restoring the favorable Spanish tariff list of 1680 to replace the recent French mercantilist measures.

[13] The Dutch also hoped to limit the prospective Habsburg control of the Southern Netherlands and to transform it into an Austro-Dutch codominion by a new, improved form of the Barrier provisions of the Treaty of Ryswick.

Heinsius now offered Great Britain (as it had become through the Acts of Union 1707) a guarantee of the Protestant Succession in exchange for British support for a Dutch right to garrison whichever, and as many towns and fortresses in the Austrian Netherlands, as the States General wished for.

Under an iron discipline the veteran regiments and battalions, whose names had hitherto been held in so much honour in the camps of Europe, marched off with downcast eyes, while their comrades of the long war gazed upon them in mute reproach.

But when they reached the end of the march and the ranks were broken terrible scenes were witnessed of humble men breaking their muskets, tearing their hair, and pouring out terrible blasphemies and curses against the Queen and the Ministry who could subject them to that ordeal[18]The rest of the Allies felt likewise, especially after the Battle of Denain which Prince Eugene lost as a consequence of the weakening of the Allied force, due to the withdrawal of the British troops, with great loss of life to the Dutch and Austrian troops.

[25] On the initiative of the States of Overijssel the States-General were convened in a number of extraordinary sessions, collectively known as the Tweede Grote Vergadering (Second Great Assembly, a kind of Constitutional Convention) of the years 1716–7 to discuss his proposals.

One of the criticisms Van Slingelandt made, was that unlike in the early years of the Republic (which he held up as a positive example) majority-voting was far less common, leading to debilitating deadlock in the decisionmaking.

As a matter of fact, one of the arguments of the defenders of the stadtholderate was that article 7 of the Union of Utrecht had charged the stadtholders of the several provinces (there was still supposed to be more than one at that time) with breaking such deadlocks in the States-General through arbitration.

Though the States-General viewed the acquisitive policies of Frederick William I of Prussia on the eastern frontier of the Republic with some trepidation this as yet did not form a reason to seek safety in defensive alliances.

One consequence of the settlement was that the Prussian king removed his objections to the assumption by William IV of the dignity of First Noble in the States of Zeeland, on the basis of his ownership of the Marquisates of Veere and Vlissingen.

To block such a move the States of Zeeland (who did not want him in their midst) first offered to buy the two marquisates, and when he refused, compulsorily bought them, depositing the purchase price in an escrow account.

George II of Great Britain was not very secure in his hold on his throne and hoped to strengthen it by offering his daughter Anne in marriage to what he mistook for an influential politician of the Republic, with which, after all old ties existed, reaching back to the Glorious Revolution.

At first Van Slingelandt reacted negatively to the proposal with such vehemence that the project was held in abeyance for a few years, but eventually he ran out of excuses and William and Anne were married at St. James's Palace in London in March 1734.

The riches its merchants, bankers and industrialists accumulated enabled the Dutch state to erect a system of public finance that was unsurpassed for early modern Europe.

The VOC for a while dominated the Malabar and Coromandel coasts in India, successfully keeping its English, French, and Danish competitors at bay, but by 1720 it became clear that the financial outlay for the military presence it had to maintain, outweighed the profits.

Likewise, though the VOC followed the example of its competitors in changing its "business model" in favor of wholesale trade in textiles, Chinaware, tea and coffee, from the old emphasis of the high-profit spices (in which it had a near-monopoly), and grew to double its old size, becoming the largest company in the world, this was mainly "profitless growth."

The consequence was what amounted to unilateral disarmament (though fortunately this was only dimly perceived by predatory foreign powers, who for a long time remained duly deterred by the fierce reputation the Republic had acquired under the stadtholderate of William III).

In it the defenders of the stadtholderless regime reminded their readers that the stadtholders had always acted like enemies of the "true freedom" of the Republic, and that William III had usurped an unacceptable amount of power.

The fact that giving dictatorial powers to a "strong man" is often bad politics, and usually leads to severe disappointment, was once again demonstrated in the aftermath of William IV's short stadtholderate.

The mishandling of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War by the stadtholderate caused a political and economic crisis in the Republic, with resulted in the Patriot Revolution of 1785–87, which in turn was suppressed by Prussian intervention.