21 - An Orangist revolution

Summary

How successful were the English at achieving their war aims? Was there any evidence that English pressure, either external or internal, succeeded in destabilizing the Dutch republican regime? While Dutch political culture was fluid, its ebbs and flows frequently responding to the most recent battle news from the North Sea, there can be no doubting the ubiquity of popular political criticism throughout the United Provinces in the first two years of the war.

Almost as soon as Parliament resoundingly signaled its support of the war, the usually booming Dutch economy began to wilt. The United Provinces “is in an uproar for want of trade,” Gilbert Talbot informed his fellow ambassador Henry Coventry during the war's first spring, the Dutch navy “must be forced to fight us or their leaders will be torn in pieces.” In letter after letter George Downing reported that “the people here are weary of the war” not so much for what they had already lost “but because they see no probability of an end thereof, and (say they) how is it possible for us to hold out and have no trade.” So discontented were the people that “many poor artists daily quit this country for want of employment, and many merchants speak of removing this spring if the peace be not made before.”

Not only had the war severed Dutch trade routes, but the astronomically high taxes necessitated by the war were crushing the domestic economy.