First Stadtholderless Period - Aftermath

Aftermath

The question whether William had a hand in the murder of the De-Witt brothers will always remain unanswered, like his exact role in the later Massacre of Glencoe. The fact that he ordered the withdrawal of a federal cavalry detachment, that otherwise might have prevented the lynching, has always raised eyebrows, however, like the fact that he did not prosecute the well-known ringleaders like Cornelis Tromp and his relative, Johan Kievit, the Buat conspirator, who now was appointed pensionary of Rotterdam, and even advanced their careers. But maybe firm measures against the conspirators were not feasible in the political climate of those fraught days in the Fall of 1672.

In any case, the political turmoil did not enable the allies an opportunity to finish the Republic off. The French were effectively stymied by the water defenses. Only when the inundations froze over in the following winter was there, briefly, a chance for Marshal Luxembourg, who had taken over command of the invading army from Louis, to make an incursion with 10,000 troops on skates. This almost ended in disaster, when they were ambushed. Meanwhile the States General managed to conclude alliances with the German emperor and Brandenburg, which helped relieve the French pressure in the East.

The war at sea went badly from the start for the allies because of the genius of Lieutenant-Admiral De Ruyter, whose exploits at this time earned him the admiration of admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan who in his seminal work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 points out the tactical advantage the Dutch admiral derived from the "local terrain" (if one may speak of "terrain" at sea) when battling the combined Anglo-French fleets in the shallow waters off the Dutch coast, and later his strategic use of the "fleet-in-being" to checkmate the numerically superior allied fleets. De Ruyter's successes, both defensively and offensively, combined with the successes of other Dutch admirals (New York was retaken by a Zeeland fleet, for instance) and Dutch privateers, again severely damaged English commerce. After Parliament refused to vote him a war budget in 1674, threatening a repeat of 1667, Charles was driven from the war thanks to Spanish mediation. The Peace of Westminster was a condition of the Spanish to enter the war against France on the Dutch side, because they did not want to fight both England and France simultaneously. The Dutch were therefore compelled to relinquish New York again. The peace brought England no net gains at all, however. Hopes of territorial gains in the Netherlands proper, that Charles had entertained before the war, were dashed. The Dutch did, however, replace the subsidies from Louis that the latter now no longer paid. Those had been a waste of money, anyway.

Soon after, France's German allies were driven from the war, in an equally humiliating way. Dutch troops reconquered all lands lost to Munster. A strategic thrust to the fortress of Bonn in late 1673 forced the French to evacuate the areas she occupied in the Republic, except for Maastricht and Grave. By then the reconstituted Dutch army had again become a formidable force, as in the 1640s, its strength rising to 100,000 men, almost as large as the French army (France had a population ten times as large in these days as that of the Republic). This was accomplished by great financial outlay in the hiring of mercenary troops. But the Republic had the financial wherewithal to bear this burden, despite French hopes that it would break the Republic. The war went on till the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678. Here the Dutch finally obtained the retraction of Colbert's tariff of 1667, that had set off the economic war. However, the handling of the peace negotiations, in which Louis managed to divide his enemies, and entice the Dutch (against the wishes of William, who perceived the diplomatic cost) to conclude a separate peace, cost the Republic dearly in reputation and good will with its allies.

The Peace solved nothing. Louis continued his aggressive policies for the rest of his life, and William spent the rest of his life as the great frustrator of Louis' ambitions. This led to the epic conflicts between France and its allies on the one hand, and the Republic and its allies on the other, around the turn of the 18th century. England was brought into the Dutch camp by the preventive invasion (brought about by Dutch fears of a repeat of the combined Anglo-French attack of 1672) of 1688, later known as the Glorious Revolution. This brought William to the English throne, but (as his new subjects complained) he always remained a Dutch patriot, preferring the interests of his country of birth.

When William died on the eve of the War of Spanish Succession in 1702, the regents that had been his faithful ministers in the Republic immediately reverted to De Witt's "True Freedom", refusing to appoint the Frisian stadtholder John William Friso, Prince of Orange (designated as his heir in his will) stadtholder in the other provinces, despite the fact that the stadtholderate had been declared hereditary in Holland in 1674. This implied that the Second Stadtholderless Period had started. The new regime, however, continued the policies of William, and the alliance with England, at least up to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.