page_title: Brest Affair
section_title: The scandal
hierarchical_section_title: Brest Affair / The scandal
caption_attribution_description: 75 Pieter Paulus, Secretaris van de Admiraliteit der Maas, 1754-1796. Vaderlandse Historie 2 (1926)
context_page_description: The Brest Affair, also known as the Expedition to Brest is the historiographical designation of a scandal during the Patriottentijd that was exploited by the Patriot faction to politically undermine the regime of stadtholder William V. It followed the refusal of the leadership of the navy of the Dutch Republic to obey a direct order to send a flotilla to the French naval base of Brest before 8 October 1787. The refusal caused a scandal that forced the States General to institute a formal inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the refusal, and this inquiry eventually led to a prosecution before a special admiralty court of the parties responsible, led by Pieter Paulus. However, the prosecution took so much time that meanwhile the Patriot faction was suppressed by Prussian military intervention, so that eventually the case was shelved without coming to a resolution.
context_section_description: The refusal to sail caused a furor in the Republic. The Patriot press in the first place doubted if the lack of readiness of the ships was indeed the true reason for the refusal to depart, but even if this was true, this opened the more important question: why was the fleet not ready, and who was responsible? The first to pose these questions was the Personnel Commission of the States of Holland, who approached the stadtholder a few days after the non-event. He at first refused point blank to give the required information, and when the full States forced him to reply, he was very terse in the information he provided. Then the States of Friesland demanded in impolite terms to get Answers from "their" Admiral General (which he wasn't in a formal sense), which he did in a brief statement, that did not satisfy the Frisian States. They therefore approached all other provincial States with the proposal to convene a conference, outside the States General, to discuss the state of the country's defense. Meanwhile, the admiralty colleges of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, not without reason afraid that they would be held at least partially responsible for the derelict state of the fleet, came with a public defense of their conduct in the matter of the fleet's logistics. In the general clamor for an inquest into the causes of the fleet's failure to comply with direct orders, the States of Holland took the initiative to require from the States General that that august body would indeed institute such an inquest. Pensionary Cornelis de Gijselaar of the city of Dordrecht demanded on 4 January 1783 that the committee of naval affairs of the States General would convene to make a report on the matter. The committee reported that they felt that an inquiry should be left to the competent admiralty courts of the three admiralties whose officers were involved in the matter: Amsterdam, Zeeland and Rotterdam (the two other admiralties, North Holland and Friesland, had no ships in the planned expedition) to decide on the question whether criminal charges should be preferred against any officers. But the States of Holland rejected this proposal, firstly because it seemed to cast doubt on the question whether anyone could be blameworthy (a question the States had already answered to their own satisfaction), and because the three admiralties mentioned could already themselves be at fault in the matter, and would therefore have a clear conflict of interest. The States therefore wanted the States General to appoint a commission of inquiry that should report as soon as possible, and if necessary, if it found certain people to be culpable, to refer those to a criminal prosecution before the competent courts.
  It took a while to convince the other provinces, but eventually the committee of naval affairs itself started an inquiry by asking the Admiralty Colleges of the three Admiralties to justify their behavior. It was no surprise that they managed to clear their reputations, so the Committee repeated its proposal to leave the inquest to the Admiralty courts, which five provinces accepted, but Holland and Groningen opposed. It illustrates the true power relations within the States General that Holland eventually prevailed and that on 23 December 1783 (so almost a year after de Gijselaar had made his initial demand) a resolution was passed to form a special commission of the States General to hold the inquest, as Holland had always wanted. The composition of the commission was two members for Holland, and one for each of  the other provinces. 
  The members appointed were the pensionaries of Haarlem, Adriaan van Zeebergh, and Amsterdam, Engelbert François van Berckel for Holland (both leaders of the Patriot faction); W.A. van Beveren for Zeeland; E. van Haften tot Ophemert for Gelderland; W.E. de Perponcher de Sedlnitsky for Utrecht; R.L. van Andringa de Kempenaer for Friesland; L.G. Rouse for Overijssel; and J.H. Siccama for Groningen. The commission started its work on 30 March 1784. Its inquest lasted no less than 15 months, and when it reported on 24 June 17
caption: Pieter Paulus, the fiscaal who led the prosecution in the admiralty court
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa", "Image ExifOffset": "46", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "282", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4154", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1225", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1968", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "1480", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "2160", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "146", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "2bca87e132ec4827763ab92bb4ed9dfc"}