First Stadtholderless Period - The "True Freedom"

The "True Freedom"

That dispersion of power, though seen by many, then and later, as a major weakness of the Republic, was actually the foundation stone of De Witt's political system, that he called de Ware Vrijheid (the "True Freedom"). We have already seen that De Witt primarily defended Oldenbarnevelt's and Grotius' claim to supremacy of (Holland's) provincial sovereignty over the sovereignty of the Generality under this moniker. But the doctrine went further. "True Freedom" implied the rejection of an "eminent head", not only of the federal state (where it would have conflicted with provincial sovereignty), but also of the provincial political system. De Witt considered Princes and Potentates as such, as detrimental to the public good, because of their inherent tendency to waste tax payer's money on military adventures in search of glory and useless territorial aggrandizement. As the province of Holland only abutted friendly territory, the Holland regents had no territorial designs themselves, and they looked askance at such designs by the other provinces, because they knew they were likely to have to foot the bill anyway. The Republic therefore from time to time threw its weight around in the German principalities to the East, but always to protect strategic interests, not for territorial gain. Likewise, after the dispute over the Overmaas territory (which still had been left over from the Munster treaty) was settled with the partition treaty of 1661 with Spain, there were no further territorial claims in the Southern Netherlands, till after the War of Spanish Succession fundamentally changed the strategic situation.

The rejection of the dynastic claims of the House of Orange therefore was not just a matter of defending the political patronage of one particular political faction, against the aspirations to lucrative political office of another faction. It was a matter of principle to the States Party: they were against the notion of any "eminent head" of the Dutch state, not just the Prince of Orange. The absence of such an "eminent head" was to them a mark of superiority of the Dutch political system over other forms of government. The fact that compromise was a constant feature of the Dutch political landscape, and that often the pace of decision-making was glacial, was also viewed in a not necessarily negative light. (Besides, as was abundantly proved during the reign of William III, when he had obtained the stadtholdership after 1672, an "eminent head" did not necessarily eliminate the need for compromise, or speed up decision-making). Like his contemporaries as statesmen, such as Mazarin, De Witt was a raison d'état statesman, but his raison d'état had a different content. Unlike the princely version, his disdained territorial aggrandizement, military capability for its own sake, and concentration of power in the central state. Instead, he strove to ensure security of the Dutch state, its independence from outside interference, and advancement of its trade and industry, all elements being intended to benefit the society of which the regent class were the proper representatives. The Republic, in De Witt's view, sought to attain goals which were commensurate with the interests of its citizens, not in conflict with them, as the goals of absolutist rulers often were.

Needless to say, the Orangist party saw things differently. Their adherence to the Prince of Orange's dynastic interest was partly a matter of personal advancement, as many Orangist regents resented being ousted from the offices they had monopolized under the Stadtholderate. But many people also had a genuine ideological attachment to the "monarchical" principle. Calvinism felt theological unease with a political system that did not have a Prince at its head, as such a system did not seem to be justifiable in biblical terms (at least if one overlooked the Book of Judges in preference to Books of Kings). As the analogy of the Dutch Republic with the biblical People of Israel was never far from people's minds, this helped to give an important underpinning for the Orangist claims in the mind of the common people, who were greatly influenced from the pulpit. Of course, the Public Church thought its interests best served by the Stadtholder, as the Erastianism of the Holland regents was seen as a constant threat to its independence. An example of what this threat might entail was the controversy about the formulary the States of Holland imposed in 1663 for prayers in favor of the government. Such prayers were said as a matter of routine in Dutch Reformed churches throughout the life of the Republic; it was an uncontested obligation following from its status as the Public Church. The problem in the view of the Holland regents, however, was first that the "wrong" sequence was observed: the States General were given precedence over the provincial states, and secondly that prayers were also said for that "private citizen", the Prince of Orange. The States therefore now prescribed that prayers for the States General should be said last, and those for the States of Holland first, and that the Prince of Orange (13 years at the time) should be omitted. Though this formulary only applied to the province of Holland, and the clergy (mindful of their livings) complied with discreetly gnashing teeth, the other provinces erupted in a furore. The States of Friesland took this opportunity to challenge the doctrine of provincial sovereignty head-on, and claimed that the formulary went contrary to the Acts of the Dort Synod, that had settled the church in 1619. Zeeland almost supported Friesland, but De Witt managed to get the Zeeland States (who always had to mind their volatile Calvinist base) to prevaricate.

This incident illustrates that in the Republic the relationship between Church and State always remained problematic, even though it had seemed to be settled in favor of the church in 1619. Though the regents knew better than to interfere in matters of doctrine (as they were accused of doing in 1618), they thought they had certain rights of oversight in return for the privileged status of the Reformed Church. The clergy, on the other hand, had never reconciled itself to such oversight, and on the contrary was of the opinion that the Church had a right to oversee public policy. As the regents would never concede such a right there was a constant tension between the two, not least in the matter of tolerance, or rather, Toleration.

The Union of Utrecht had guaranteed freedom of conscience, but this did not imply freedom of worship. Except for the Dutch Reformed Church, public worship by other denominations was usually restricted with more or less severity, and membership of the privileged church was supposed to be a prerequisite for holding public office (though this rule was often honored in the breach, even as far as Catholic office holders in the Generality Lands were concerned). This policy of supremacy of the Public Church was, however, never enforced consistently, either in the different parts of the country, or over time. In general, a policy of de facto toleration predominated, even when legal prohibitions were in force. This went against the grain of the Calvinist diehards, who constantly insisted on official suppression of competing faiths, going back to the Contra-Remonstrant controversy of 1618. Their Remonstrant opponents had come to defend religious toleration after their own suppression, and though Remonstrant regents had been ousted at the time, this political point of view remained in favor with the Holland regents, unlike their colleagues in most other provinces. The debate continued to flare up from time to time. The flap over the Holland public prayers was just one of many instances. What makes it interesting is that such debates were usually not over doctrinal matters, but in a sense about "public order." Also, they tended quickly to widen to debates over unsettled constitutional matters, like the provincial-supremacy claim of the Holland regents.

Because of this intermingling of matters that at first view would not seem to be directly related, one discernes a peculiar line-up in the ideological debate of the times, that is contrary to many myths that have arisen in later historiography. Though privately they might be as intolerant as any person, the Holland regents for political reasons were often in favor of religious toleration, and freedom of thought, because their political opponents were in alliance with the forces of religious intolerance in the Calvinist church. On the other hand, the Orangist faction often supported intolerance, because they craved the support of the preachers. As toleration did not have the favorable press it has in our times, this was actually a weak point in the armor of the De-Witt regime. There was a need for ideological justification of these policies against accusations of allowing abominations as "atheism" and "libertinism" from the side of the Consistory.

There was therefore a healthy public debate in the form of pamphlets published by both sides. Most of these have only an interest as curiosities, but some have exercised lasting influence, also outside the Republic. In the controversy about the Holland formulary a cousin and almost namesake of De Witt, Johan de Wit (with one t), published one pseudonymously in 1663-4, under the title Public Gebedt. This asserted that the form of government of the Republic (as preferred by the Holland regents) was the "most excellent" and chosen by God himself, while he quoted Tacitus to say that prayers for any but the sovereign power in public ceremonies weaken the state. This heavy tome would be unremarkable if it were not for the fact that De Witt is believed to have vetted the book himself, and thus given it his tacit imprimatur.

In the same way, De Witt is thought to have lent a hand in revising a major work by Pieter de la Court, published in 1662: Interest van Hollandt. The disparaging remarks about the stadtholderate in this work, which amounted to the assertion that princes (and by implication stadtholders) have an interest in keeping the world in perpetual conflict, because they wield more influence in such circumstances, incensed the Orangist public.

Another work by De la Court, Political Discourses caused even more of a furore. In it he denounces all (quasi-)monarchy as harming the true interest of the citizen (which he distinguishes from the subjects of monarchies), because hereditary power subordinates the public good to dynastic concerns. For good measure he added that it was necessary for the public good to curb the influence of the Public Church outside its proper sphere in the spiritual domain. This, of course, earned him the enmity of the leadership of his Leyden church that barred him from the Lord's Supper in retaliation.

This anticlericalism was not left unanswered. The leader of the conservative Calvinists, Gisbertus Voetius, published the first volume of his Politica Ecclesiastica in 1663, in which he attacked (in Latin) De Witt and the Erastian policies of the regents. Possibly by Voetius also, but in any case by someone close to him, was the Resurrected Barnevelt, in which the anonymous writer, writing in Dutch, attacked the provincial-supremacy doctrine and the prayer formulary as an insidious attempt to make the other six provinces subservient to Holland. To which possibly De Witt himself replied with a scalding pamphlet, entitled Schotschen Duyvel in which he denounced Voetius by name as a master-mutineer.

The great Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel, a partisan of Oldenbarnevelt, reissued his play Palamedes that in a veiled way deplored the execution of Oldenbarnevelt, in these years (it had been suppressed under the Stadtholderate before 1650). It was performed in Rotterdam in 1663 and elicited a forgettable Orangist counterblast in the form of the tragedy Wilhem, of gequetste vryheit by the rector of the Dordrecht Latin school, Lambert van de Bosch. Vondel felt sufficiently provoked to write Batavische gebroeders of Onderdruckte vryheit (1663), his last political play, in which he explicitly defended the "True Freedom" against Orangism.

Though these contributions to Dutch literature were a happy byproduct of the controversy, more important from the standpoint of enduring political science were the key publications by the democratic republican theorists around Baruch Spinoza that were published at the end of the 1660s. Franciscus van den Enden, Spinoza's mentor, went beyond the De la Court brothers in his espousal of political democracy in his Free Political Propositions, published in 1665, which is one of the first systematic statements of democratic republicanism in the western world. Van den Enden argued that government should not only be in the interest of the citizens (as De la Court had proposed), but should create equality of opportunity and be controlled by the people, not the regent oligarchy. Van den Ende acknowledged only two writers that had preceded him with such ideas to his knowledge: Johan de la Court (Pieter's brother with his Consideratiën van Staat of 1660), and Pieter Corneliszoon Plockhoy, whose English-language pamphlet A way propounded to make the poor in these and other nations happy (published in London in 1659) also took aristocrats and priests to task. Plockhoy and Van den Ende first tried to implement their ideas in New Netherland in the early 1660s.

Spinoza, in his Tractatus theologico-politicus, tried to give Van den Enden's political ideas a foundation in his own philosophy, by pointing out that demcocracy is the best form of government "approaching most closely to that freedom which nature grants to every man". Other than Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza posited that Man does not give up the rights he possesses in the state of Nature to the State, when he enters the social contract. To him therefore leaving Man as close as possible to that state of Nature is important, and he thinks that democracy accomplishes this best, as it is "the most natural" and "rational" form of government. This theme runs through most Dutch republican doctrine of the 17th century, before resurfacing in the work of the mid-18th century French republican philosophers, and ultimately in the French Revolution.

Like the De la Court brothers, and Van den Enden, Spinoza stressed the importance of unlimited toleration and freedom of expression. They went much farther in this respect than John Locke, whose Epistola de tolerantia was published in Latin and Dutch in Gouda in 1689, after having been written during Locke's exile in the Republic. Locke did not go further than the Dutch Remonstrants, like Simon Episcopius, in their 1620s polemics about toleration. His was a basically conservative, limited conception of toleration, that was acceptable to "main-stream" thinking of the time, though he denied toleration to atheists and non-monotheist religions. (One has to take into account that Locke was an Englishman, writing for an English public that was scarcely ready for notions of toleration, as William III - no flaming liberal himself - was to discover from the wall of opposition that his attempts to convey toleration on English Catholics encountered later that year).

The Spinozists clothed their demands for toleration in a virulent anticlericalism, because experience had taught them that if the Church was left with autonomy in the state, its prestige would allow it to mobilize the masses against anyone of whose ideas the clergy would disapprove. They insisted consequently on completely eliminating the autonomy, privileges, property, dominance of education, and censorship functions of the clergy. Lodewijk Meyer, a friend of Spinoza, formulated this in his De jure ecclesiaticorum, as did Pieter de la Court in his Aanwijsing der Heilsame Politieke Gronden (a reformulation of his Interest van Holland, that he published in 1669). It was this anticlericalism that made them vulnerable to attacks by the clergy, leading to the suppression of the Aanwijsing by the States of Holland at the request of the South-Holland Synod in 1669. Spinoza published his Tractatus exclusively in Latin (and objected against attempts to publish translations in French and Dutch), because he hoped in that way to cause as little provocation as possible to the regents.

Nevertheless, such censorship was the exception rather than the rule. As long as one took care to be discreet, and did not cross the boundaries of "blasphemy" as Adriaan Koerbagh was accused of having done in 1669, the authorities were prepared to turn a blind eye to this kind of radical publications (though freedom of the press did not exist de jure). The "True Freedom" as a political concept was accompanied by intellectual freedom in practice, and this practical freedom engendered the formulation of philosophical justifications thereof, that would resound in the later Enlightenment.