First Stadtholderless Period - Mounting Tensions With France

Mounting Tensions With France

Meanwhile, relations with France started to deteriorate, also. France had always, since the days of Henry IV of France, been an important ally of the Republic. In 1635 during the Republic's war with Spain, Cardinal Richelieu, king Louis XIII of France's chief minister, concluded a treaty with the Republic, in which the parties agreed to attack the Spanish Netherlands on two fronts in that year. Those provinces were to be granted the status of free Cantons on the Swiss model, if they cooperated, but in case of resistance there was to be a partition of the country in which the French would receive the French-speaking provinces and western Flanders, and the Dutch Antwerp, the Scheldt Estuary, and Ghent, Bruges, and Mechelen. The States Party of the time was not happy with this arrangement, because the reintegration of Antwerp in the Republic would upset the cosy arrangement that kept Antwerp's trade bridled in favor of Amsterdam's. However, this partition treaty was pushed through by stadtholder Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and the Orangist regents, many of whom were generously bribed by Richelieu. Nothing much came of these plans. The formidable Spanish Army of Flanders checked the attack by putting up a strategic defense against France, and vigorously attacking the Dutch. The offensive of 1635 almost turned into a disaster for the Dutch, after their invasion was repelled, and the Spaniards successfully counterattacked. The French were too weak to make a large impression.

Though the treaty prohibited conclusion of a separate peace with Spain, the Republic nevertheless concluded such a peace in 1648, leaving France to face Spain alone till the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. This caused a decided coolness in the relations between the countries up to the time Louis XIV personally took up the reins in 1661. However, at this time the partition treaty was still formally in force between the two countries, something to be held in reserve in case the need arose. Of course, the Dutch now being on very good terms with the Spanish, did not for a moment intend to join Louis in any designs against the Spanish Netherlands, and such designs were for the moment in abeyance, as Louis had just married Maria Theresa of Spain, the daughter of king Philip IV of Spain, as a guarantee of good relations between France and Spain. One of the conditions of the marriage contract, on which other conditions were contingent, was a large dowry that Spain would pay to France. Philip IV died, however, in 1665 without the dowry having been properly paid. Louis then (declaring the conditions in the marriage treaty in which his wife renounced her rights to the Spanish Crown and its possessions void, because of non-compliance with the dowry condition) construed a claim of his wife on the Duchy of Brabant. The new Spanish government rejected this, but its position was weakened, because its forces were fully committed at the time in the Portuguese Restoration War that was still raging. Its once formidable Army of Flanders had been almost disbanded by this time.

The diplomatic unrest around this question disturbed De Witt no end. His initial relations with Louis had been very amicable. In 1662 he renewed the old alliance with France, as we have seen, and this alliance was helpful in the conflict with England and Munster, when the French sent auxiliary troops to help shore up the Dutch eastern defenses in 1665. Except for the Caribbean, France did not take part in the war with England. As a matter of fact the new French West India Company, formed in 1664, took Cayenne by force away from the WIC in 1665, but the Dutch were forced to grin and bear this, because of the ongoing war with England at the time. But the way Louis was acting in the matter of the Spanish Netherlands made De Witt anxious that the old partition treaty should not become operational. It offered a number of equally unpalatable prospects for the Dutch: unwanted incorporation of Antwerp (the blockade of which was now enshrined in the peace treaty of 1648 with Spain) would open up that city's trade; and a resurgent France as an immediate neighbor would necessitate the building up of the standing army, an expense the regents wanted to avoid at all costs.

For the moment De Witt rejected Spanish feelers for a defensive alliance against France, even when the Spanish envoy made an unauthorized threat that Spain would abandon the Southern Netherlands to France, in exchange for Roussillon and Navarre. De Witt recognized this as an empty bluff. As France invaded the Spanish Netherlands in 1667, starting the War of Devolution, De Witt started discussions with Spain, however, in hope of deterring France, and staking out a claim in case Spanish resistance would collapse. Spain received a large Dutch loan, with a number of Flemish cities as collateral, and De Witt now pointedly obtained permission to occupy these pawns as a guarantee of repayment.

As the French made slow, but inexorable progress, De Witt, though very reluctant to intervene, thought up a solution for his dilemma that would stop the French advance, without necessitating Dutch military intervention, or even (as he hoped) forcing a break with France. He now concluded the Triple Alliance (1668) with England and Sweden. This was an armed coalition of the three countries that forced their mediation on France and Spain. France was to be appeased with all territorial gains it had up to then achieved by military means in the Southern Netherlands (among which the cities of Lille and Cambrai), and Spain was further called upon to cede either Luxembourg, or the Franche-Comté. The only thing that was required of Louis was that he halt his advance. This lopsided award was designed to placate Louis, without spoiling the relations with the Republic. The not-so-secret sting in the deal was that the three would intervene militarily if Louis rejected this generous award. Louis therefore complied at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) with the demands of the allies, but he took the humiliation very hard. After this he started to plot with Charles II of England and the prince-bishop of Munster (who had his own revenge needs after 1666) and the Elector of Cologne, Maximilian Henry of Bavaria, who resented Dutch interference with his attempts to subdue the Free City of Cologne. This resulted in a number of secret arrangements, among which the Secret treaty of Dover, designed to start a war of aggression against the Dutch Republic in 1672, and to divide that country among the participants.

Before that hot war started, France and the Republic already became engaged in an economic war, however. France had always been a very important trading partner with the Republic, especially since the 1640s. Sales of Dutch textiles, spices and other colonial wares, herring, whale products, Delftware and Gouda pipes, Baltic naval stores, tobacco products, and refined sugar (for a large part of raw sugar from French-Caribbean plantations) had greatly expanded in France. On the other hand, the Republic was a very large importer of French wine, brandy, salt, silk, paper, vinegar and Breton sail-canvas (often for reexport from its entrepot). In other words, the two economies complemented each other to a large extent (other than the Dutch and English economies, that mainly competed in the same markets). This complementarity would in modern eyes be seen as a happy opportunity for exploiting comparative advantage by specialization, which it indeed became in the years up to the mid-1650s. Unfortunately, in those days trade was seen as a zero-sum game (also by the Dutch incidentally); both parties suspected being exploited by the other.

Not being an economist, Louis resented the preponderant share in the French market, taken by the Dutch, on basically emotional grounds, but his new Superintendent of Finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, gave focused impetus to this resentment by a well-organised complex of economic policies, of a mercantilist nature. The first of these was his tariff list of 1664, which was calculated to just wrest away important French markets from the Dutch, without completely closing down trade (except for the trade in refined sugar, which was hit with a prohibitive tariff). However, in 1667 this was followed with a much more draconian list that doubled tariffs on Dutch fine cloth, linen, and Delftware; quadrupled them on whale products (for which France was Holland's biggest customer); and raised them sevenfold for tobacco products.

Another measure, directed directly at the Dutch trade system outside the direct Franco-Dutch relations, was the founding of a number of chartered trading companies that were intended to compete with the Dutch VOC and WIC, but also make inroads on the Dutch Baltic trade, like the already mentioned West India Company and the French East India Company, both formed in 1664, and given monopolies in France. These caused the Dutch some anxiety, but proved eventually not very successful. The same applied to the Compagnie du Nord that Colbert set up in 1669 to compete with the Dutch in Scandinavia. This was supposed to engross the Dutch salt trade with especially Norway, and replace it with French salt. Unfortunately, the French salt with a high magnesium content proved unfit for preserving herring (as the Dutch could have told Colbert, because they had tried to sell it to the Norwegians themselves, when the Iberian salt trade was closed to them). France therefore had to subsidise these exports, and also the otherwise uncompetitive French shipping rates. Despite government pressure the Bordeaux wine merchants were unwilling to shift their exports away from Dutch carriers, or do without Dutch prefinancing of their operations. The unprofitability of its operations, combined with Dutch dumping policies in the trade of Baltic naval stores, forced the winding up of the company in 1675.

Nevertheless, thanks to the importance of the French market to the Dutch, and the fact that the Dutch had less possibilities of imposing counter-pressure than they had in their conflicts with the English, the Dutch government at first tried to ignore the hostile policies of Colbert. Its inaction was also caused by differences of opinion about how best to proceed within the States Party. Amsterdam, and especially the Amsterdam diplomat Coenraad van Beuningen, argued in favor of firm economic counter-measures against the French economic policies, paired with the forming of a defensive alliance with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. De Witt, however, preferred avoiding such foreign entanglements, and a conciliatory approach in the economic sphere. As their economic interests were severely damaged by the French protectionism, the industrial cities of Leiden and Haarlem, however, teamed up with Amsterdam to support a more belligerent diplomacy. After the Rotterdam regents were promised compensation for the damage to their wine trade, to get their assent, the States of Holland decided in 1671 on severe retaliatory measures against French imports, in effect banning French wine, vinegar, paper, and sail-canvas. The stage was now set for war.