page_title: Patriottentijd
section_title: Foreign interference
hierarchical_section_title: Patriottentijd / The Patriot Revolt / Foreign interference
context_page_description: The Patriottentijd was a period of political instability in the Dutch Republic between approximately 1780 and 1787. Its name derives from the Patriots faction who opposed the rule of the stadtholder, William V, Prince of Orange, and his supporters who were known as Orangists
  In 1781 one of the leaders of the Patriots, Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol anonymously published a pamphlet, entitled Aan het Volk van Nederland, in which he advocated the formation of civic militias on the Swiss and American model to help restore the republican constitution. Such militias were subsequently organised in many localities and formed, together with Patriot political clubs, the core of the Patriot movement. From 1785 on, the Patriots managed to gain power in a number of Dutch cities, where they replaced the old system of co-option of regenten with a system of democratically elected representatives. This enabled them to replace the representatives of these cities in the States of several provinces, gaining Patriot majorities in the States of Holland, Groningen and Utrecht, and frequently also in the States General.
context_section_description: 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.
  One person who observed this thaw in Franco-Dutch diplomatic relations with great alarm was the new British ambassador to The Hague, accredited since 1784, Sir James Harris. Harris had a tendency to see French conspiracies everywhere, and in the Dutch case he may have been right. Because the French saw the discomfiture of the Dutch stadtholder with great pleasure, although their enthusiasm was limited to the advance of their old friends, the Amsterdam States Party regenten; they were far less enthusiastic about the democratic designs of the other wing of the Patriot party. With the support of the Cabinet of William Pitt the Younger Harris set about to reclaim the Republic for British influence, and he did not always limit himself to diplomatic means. One important task was to shore up the morale of the dispirited stadtholder after his departure from The Hague in September 1785. William at that time had two options: either to give in to the Patriot demands and accept some kind of compromise as to the Government Regulations, or to hold on to his "due rights" at any cost. The latter was his favorite option (he was wont to quote the maxim Aut Caesar, aut nihil) and Harris, in concert with William's wife Wilhelmina of Prussia, encouraged him to take this option. But Harris did far more: he was supplied with ample funds from the British Secret Service fund and he used that money to buy influence left and right, beginning with a generous pension-with-strings-attached of £4,000 per annum for the stadtholder himself. Ably assisted by "confidential agents", of which baron Hendrik August van Kinckel is the best known, he used these funds to subsidize the establishment of Orangist Free Corps in provinces like Zeeland and Friesland where the Orangists were in the majority, which were used to intimidate the Patriot minorities in these provinces. He tried to lure the conservative regenten in Amsterdam away from their anti-Orangist stance with promises of trade concessions by Britain, and promises of concessions from the stadtholder that would safeguard their own privileges, but avoid any "democratic" experiments.
  But Harris' most important ploy was an attempt to engineer an alliance with Prussia that would thwart the "French designs". This would kill two birds with one stone: it would keep the stadtholder in power, and it would renew the Anglo-Prussian alliance that had briefly existed during the Seven Years' War. To that end he visited the aging king Frederick the Great of Prussia, Wilhelmina's uncle, in August 1785 in Berlin. But Frederick was loath to endanger good relations with  France, and refused to take the bait. "The pear is not ripe," the old king remarked cryptically.
  Instead Prussia in concert with 
caption: Sir James Harris, British Ambassador to The Hague
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.4.7", "Image DateTime": "2012:06:10 13:28:48", "Image Artist": "National Portrait Gallery London", "Image ExifOffset": "192", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "149", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "200", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "499", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "738"}