page_title: Prussian invasion of Holland
section_title: Diplomatic preliminaries
hierarchical_section_title: Prussian invasion of Holland / Diplomatic preliminaries
context_page_description: The Prussian invasion of Holland was a Prussian military campaign in September–October 1787 to restore the Orange stadtholderate in the Dutch Republic against the rise of the democratic Patriot movement.
context_section_description: Meanwhile, Harris in The Hague was worried about the lack of news about the Princess. He was playing cards with the French envoy Vérac that evening, and was so off his game that he lost a lot of money. As soon as he received news about the interception, he regained his composure, and started to take advantage of the situation, thereby supporting the suspicion on the part of the French and the Patriots that he had all the time conspired to bring the event about, and that it was no more than a provocation. And this was more or less the consensus in diplomatic circles in The Hague, though hypotheses about who actually conspired with whom varied.
  In any case, the Princess, back in Nijmegen,  on 29 June wrote letters of complaint to her husband's nephew, king George III of the United Kingdom, and her brother king Frederick William II of Prussia. Her husband was little help: he wrote to his daughter, Princess Louise: "The misfortune which I foresaw has happened ... I was always against this journey and in my misfortune it is a great consolation that I did what was in my power to stop it and to dissuade your Mother from such a risky venture."
  Though the Princess did not expect much from her brother at first, her message fell onto fertile ground. Since the death of his predecessor Frederick the Great the previous year, the new king had given new hope to the pro-British court party around minister Hertzberg, and lessened the influence of the pro-French party of Hertzberg's rival, minister Finckenstein. Hertzberg was opposed to the alliance between France and Austria which at the time held the upper hand on the European Continent, and the détente the old Prussian king had maintained with France, and which had previously held Prussia back from all too aggressive interventions in the Dutch Republic that might offend France. The incident with the Princess played into his hands. Fredrick William's first impulse was rage; he instructed the Prussian envoy in The Hague, Thulemeyer to protest to the States General of the Netherlands about the insult to his sister, and to demand from the States of Holland that they would give her satisfaction, though this protest did not yet take the form of an ultimatum.
  The Princess saw the possibilities immediately: she wrote a letter to her brother on 13 July in which she proposed that he would use the situation to bring about the restoration of her husband to his office of Captain-General and to liberate the Republic from the Patriots. But she overplayed her hand, because at this time Frederick was only interested in an apology, and did not conflate this with something that might frustrate the attempts at mediation France and Prussia had previously made. Stamford, who had conveyed the Princess's letter by hand, heard the king exclaim: "The b... wants to draw me into a war, but I'll show her that she doesn't lead me." Envoy Thulemeyer also played a moderating role, be it with questionable means, as he lied both to the Dutch politicians and his own government about what either had actually said, so as to calm tempers on both sides. When the Princess became aware of this double play, she started to work for Thulemeyer's recall. Thulemeyer also tried to cool the Prussian ardor by exaggerating the rumors about French preparations for war in case of a Prussian intervention in the form of establishing an armed camp in Givet on the border between France and the neutral Prince-Bishopric of Liège, that provided a theoretical route for a French army to the Netherlands, that circumvented the Austrian Netherlands.
  The camp in Givet was not entirely a figment of people's imaginations, as the first response of the French government to the threatening language of the Prussian king (and the movements to the Dutch border at Wesel of Prussian troops) had indeed been to erect such a camp, and to garrison it with a formidable military force (15,000 men). But these rumors had on 29 June elicited a threatening diplomatic note from the British government that had given France pause. For the moment the French pretended that t
caption: Sir James Harris, British envoy to The Hague, by Caroline Watson
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