The Patriot Revolt did not take place in a diplomatic vacuum. The Dutch Republic had from its inception been a battlefield of Great Power diplomacy in which the Holland "regenten" (lately in the guise of the States Party) had been sympathetic to France, and the Orangists usually favored England and later Great Britain. Since the days of the 1688 invasion of England followed by the 1689 naval treaty with England, the Dutch had been in nominal alliance with the British, and the diplomatic relations with France had been cool since the end of the War of the Spanish Succession and the latest French invasion in 1747, but they had markedly improved during the era of the American Revolutionary War, when the Dutch at first profited from their "neutral-flag" trade of contraband goods with the French and Americans, and later were the victims of British aggression in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, that had so recently ended. Franco-Dutch relations became even better when France offered its good offices, both to obtain the 1784 treaty of Paris with Great Britain that ended the war, and subsequently to obtain peace with emperor Joseph II, that ended the "Kettle War" with the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Shortly after that, special envoy Gerard Brantsen, a moderate Patriot, crowned this with the treaty of amity and commerce with France of October 1785.