Composite Revolutions and State Power

In the context of the French Fronde and the multiple revolutions in Iberia and the British Isles, R. B. Merriman’s inclusion of the “Revolution” in the northern Netherlands in his list of contemporaneous revolutions may seem curious, if not fundamentally mistaken. In fact, Herbert H. Rowen (1972) has aptly termed it “the revolution that wasn’t.” ^[33] For our purposes, Merriman’s apparent mistake may be a particularly creative one because it encourages us to clarify what was distinctive—or at least not revolutionary—about political conflict in the Dutch Republic at the end of its long war of independence. This will allow us, in turn, a useful perspective from which to reflect more generally on the nature of composite revolutions and their relationship to the consolidation of sovereign authority over ordinary political subjects.

For the Dutch Republic the ratification of a permanent peace with Spain in 1648 was a moment of general relief and celebration, but it also opened up many of the political wounds that had been so inflamed during the temporary truce with Spain some forty years earlier. As in 1609, the political leaders of the province of Holland, and the city of Amsterdam in particular, had been the most forceful advocates of peace negotiations, while the Prince of Orange, William II, who succeeded Frederik Hendrik in 1647, was intent on pursuing the war with Spain in concert with France and with an eye toward the division of the southern Netherlands between the republic and France. After he failed to sidetrack the peace, William’s conflict with the powerful regents of Holland only escalated as the regents pushed hard to scale back the size of the army—their specific proposal was to eliminate the foreign contingents most loyal to the prince—and by extension to reduce the burdensome taxes that were required to support a large standing army.^[34] In 1650 this fundamental disagreement over defense policy, which was pregnant with constitutional implications for the republic as a whole, culminated in an attempted coup d’état by William II, which proved, in the end, to be “the revolution that wasn’t.”

For young William II, who was deeply concerned about establishing his “glory” as a military leader, peace with Spain came at an inopportune time, and his attempted coup was in many ways a defensive move to prevent further erosion of his leadership position (Rowen 1988). As political appointees, the princes of Orange had only indirect “influence” in the formal structures of republican governance: as captains-general, they commanded the Union’s army and dispensed commissions to subordinate officers; as members of the Council of State, which advised the Estates General, they influenced defense and foreign policy; as provincial stadhouders, they mediated internal disputes and presided over a political patronage network that had been expanded by Maurits and Frederik Hendrik.^[35] In the Dutch republican system, then, the princes of Orange were generals, advisers, and patrons, but not sovereigns; they may be considered national claimants to power only to the extent that they were the brokers of broader political alliances, which might include both regents and ordinary political subjects. More obviously resourceful militarily than politically, William undertook a series of extraordinary moves in the early summer of 1650 that appear to have been carefully planned some time in advance and were intended not simply to resolve the immediate issue of troop levels in his favor but to wrest decision-making authority over defense and foreign policy away from the individually “sovereign” provinces.^[36] First he used the failure of negotiations with the province of Holland over troop levels as the occasion to undertake a series of official visits to the most intransigent cities in Holland—whose narrow majority in the Estates of Holland stood in the way of compromise—to compel them to change their positions. Then, when these well-orchestrated confrontations produced no significant result and the province of Holland took unilateral action to dismiss troops in its pay, he openly countermanded their orders and obtained a vague instruction from the Estates General, over Holland’s objection, to take unspecified measures to ensure public order. Finally, armed with this mandate, at the end of July he simultaneously arrested six prominent regents from the cities of Holland and secretly deployed more than ten thousand troops to the gates of Amsterdam.

Thus the disagreement over troop levels quickly escalated into a military confrontation with Amsterdam, the symbolic center of political opposition to the stadhouder/captain-general. Given the numbers and the apparent loyalty of the troops at his disposal, it is perhaps surprising that William’s bold actions—the combination of symbolic visitations, arrests, and military confrontations are clearly reminiscent of the tactics that Maurits used so successfully against Oldenbarnevelt in the 1610s—produced so little result. When the city mobilized massively in its own defense, William agreed to further negotiations and settled for the resignation of two powerful Amsterdam regents and a vague promise to work out the policy issues peacefully. Though it is conventional to suggest that William’s political failure was accidental—first, because the troops he secretly sent to Amsterdam were reported to the authorities by a post courier who happened to witness their movement, thereby compromising the element of surprise; second, because of the accident of his untimely death a few months later—William more fundamentally failed to re-create the political coalition that his uncle, Maurits, had used to such great advantage.

To be sure, on the policy issues William appears to have enjoyed a fairly solid base of support among the regent elite of all the provinces except Holland, but even in Holland he was supported by nearly half of the enfranchised towns. Rather, the principal difference was his own lack of popular support, which stands in sharp contrast to the robust popular defense of Amsterdam in the face of William’s military challenge. By comparison with Maurits, who built on the prior politicization and mobilization of orthodox Calvinists within religiously divided communities to make “extraordinary” changes in municipal councils (wetsverzettingen), William was unable to generate the kind of popular support necessary to dislodge his opponents at the municipal level—this despite his strenuous assertion that he, too, was defending both the Union and the “true religion.” Thus his monthlong series of theatrical official visits to the most recalcitrant cities of Holland failed to turn any votes in his favor at the provincial Estates, and lacking the authority to make decisions in his own name or to force majority decisions at the Estates General over the objections of Holland especially, he could do little in the face of Amsterdam’s apparently four-square defense but return to the bargaining table.

When the immediate crisis had passed and the troops had been sent away from Amsterdam, William did enjoy some modest success in the promised negotiations over military policy. But his more fundamental inability to transform the structures of sovereign decision-making authority in the Dutch republican state was obvious. Thus, immediately following William’s death from smallpox in October, the regents of Holland summoned an extraordinary Grand Assembly of all the provincial Estates to take measures to prevent similar political crises in the future. Though the Grand Assembly did not agree to Holland’s proposal that henceforth the offices of stadhouder and captain-general should not be united in a single person, it did unequivocally affirm the sovereignty of the constituent provinces—even with regard to troops in their employ—and inaugurate the first stadhouderless period in Dutch republican history.^[37] In this sense, the nonrevolution in the northern Netherlands both highlighted and reinforced the general direction of Dutch political development since the 1580s: the permanent elimination of the dynastic prince and the consequent consolidation of alternative sovereignties, at the provincial and even the municipal level.

All in all, the distinctiveness of the political and constitutional crisis in the Dutch Republic does appear to defy R. B. Merriman’s inclusion of it in his list of contemporaneous revolutions. Still, it can be useful in our broader assessment of the political dynamics of seventeenth-century revolutions. First, it underscores obliquely the sense in which the mid-seventeenth-century political crisis was a crisis of princely power, a crisis brought on by concerted attempts to consolidate the authority—especially fiscal and cultural authority—of dynastic princes within composite states. If nothing else, the crisis in the Dutch Republic, where the dynastic prince had been replaced by a loose condominium of oligarchic regents, suggests a simple proposition: no princely consolidation, no composite revolution.^[38] This is not to say, of course, that in the absence of aggressive princes there will be no political conflict; on the contrary, I want only to suggest that where the dynastic prince had actually been eliminated, where the princely authority had previously been limited, or where the prince had merely been chastened by previous experience, we should expect that political conflict will take different form from that which we have called composite or multiple revolutions. At the same time, to the extent that the Dutch Republic remained a composite of previously constituted political units, William’s failed coup underscores a more general observation that in a composite state military intimidation alone was more likely to awaken local alliances in defense of the self-regulation of the local community than to encourage massive shifts of popular allegiance in favor of a territorial consolidation of power.^[39] In addition, this account of the Dutch crisis reinforces the more general argument of this book that in early modern composite states, popular political actors are essential to any attempt to describe and account for the divergent paths of European political development over the longue durée; the specific corollary suggested by the Dutch “revolution that wasn’t” might read: no popular mobilization, no revolutionary seizure of power.

To return finally to the cluster of composite revolutions we have examined here, we can say once again that ordinary political subjects—far from being hapless victims or passive observers—were active participants in the creation of the new complex of European states that emerged from the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. At the beginning of these revolutionary processes, the stubborn resistance, defiant demonstrations, and occasionally violent insurrections of ordinary political subjects invariably disrupted the relations between local rulers and national claimants to power and thereby occasioned a variety of more general crises of state power. In the middle of these processes, their more massive mobilization through community networks and militia companies, often (though not always) in alliance with a segment of the political elite, opened up a variety of revolutionary situations in which the dynastic prince’s claim to sovereignty was fundamentally shaken—by the threat of either secession at the periphery or replacement by alternative claimants to national power at the center. And at the end of these revolutionary processes, even when the dynastic princes eventually prevailed or their authority was later revived, it was invariably under informal conditions and/or constitutional regulations that betrayed the potency of the comprehensive revolutionary coalitions that were rooted in the intentional engagement and deliberate mobilization of ordinary political subjects.

As in the clusters of Reformation era contention for power we examined in previous chapters, these composite revolutions were far too complex and their outcomes far too ambiguous and transient to be susceptible to a simple tabulation of winners and losers. It is especially important to recognize, however, that the variations we have attempted to describe and account for were not only those that obviously distinguished the composites from one another but also those that were evident within these larger constructs. Indeed, the microgeography of composite state formation remained a defining feature of the new European political landscape for the simple reason that the most obvious cost of princely “survival”—not only in the German-Roman Empire in central Europe but also in the resurgent kingdoms in the west—was some form of agreement on the part of the dynastic prince to accept or even to guarantee the internal boundaries of their composite states. This meant that both the proximity of princely power and the viability of broad political alliances in opposition to them varied considerably while ordinary political subjects remained a salient feature of the complex political relations between local rulers and national claimants to power. In the concluding chapter we will turn our attention to a more global comparison of the variant trajectories of state formation that were the accumulated residue of some one hundred fifty years of religious and political struggle in Europe.