Regenten - Developments Under The Republic

Developments Under The Republic

Formally, little changed in the constitutional arrangements of the republic, compared to those of the preceding Habsburg Netherlands. For instance, though there was no more scope for the stadtholders to represent a deposed king, the new republic found a new role for them, though they now received their commissions from the sovereign provincial states. Equally, the same 18 cities made up the states that held the vote before. What changed after the revolt was the political makeup of these institutions. In most cities the old regenten were purged, and replaced with adherents to the new political order. In general, Catholic regenten were replaced with supporters of the "New Religion" (as were the Catholic members of the ridderschappen, the groups of nobles that represented the countryside in the States).

The new groups of regenten turned out to be representatives of a new economic elite that soon managed to bring about a rapid economic rise of the Netherlands, as described in Economic History of the Netherlands (1500 - 1815). In these early days access to political office was still relatively open. The new power holders belonged to the newly-rich classes, but they did not represent them, nor was membership in these classes a prerequisite for office. If one speaks of a "regent class" the word "class" is therefore used in a loose sense.

The practice of co-option tended to perpetuate the same people in office in normal times. However, political upheavals could cause a wholesale replacement of the regent-elites, as had happened in the revolt years 1572-1578. Such upheavals were:

• the purge of the Remonstrant regents after the coup d'état of stadtholder Maurice of Nassau in 1618
• the replacement of the Orangist regents after the death of stadtholder William II, issuing into the First Stadtholderless Period
• the substitution of the followers of Johan de Witt for Orangist regents in the Rampjaar 1672
• the replacement of Orangist regents by their opponents after the death of stadtholder William III, issuing in the Second Stadtholderless Period
• the restoration of the Stadtholderate in 1747, which brought the Orangists to power again
• the Patriot revolt of 1785 and
• the suppression of that revolt in 1787 by Prussian intervention
• the overthrow of the Stadtholderate in 1795, which brought the Patriot regents, ousted in 1787, to power again.

To consolidate his own position, Stadtholder William III encouraged the regenten who were in power during his regime, to make mutual arrangements, in which they promised to reserve government positions for scions of allied families, the so-called contracten van correspondentie ("contracts of correspondence"). Such arrangements were also used by their opponents when those reverted to power. Such arrangements helped to close the oligarchy even more in the 18th century, which explained the increasing intensity of the partisanship between the Orangist and Republican (under various names) factions during that era.

During that century the regenten (of both factions) became more and more removed from the merchant classes, from which their forebears had come. They instead became representatives of the rentier class that came into being because of the enormous growth of the Dutch public debt as a consequence of the turn-of-the-century conflicts with France. This economic interest militated against forceful political reforms, and reforms in public finance, that would have been necessary to successfully withstand the political and economic crises that confronted the republic after 1780.

This perceived lack of capacity for reform helped to bring about the attempted revolution of 1785 and the successful revolution of 1795 that eventually helped replace the regent-oligarchy with a short-lived democracy in the first years of the Batavian Republic.