This year the Netherlands celebrates 200 years of kingdom. That occasion is one of the reasons that Queen Beatrix recently announced that she will hand over the throne to Crown Prince Willem-Alexander on April 30th. 200 years ago, the year 1813. What happened then in our country and beyond?
The Netherlands is a country of small gestures, not megalomaniac monuments. But although not really megalomaniac, the monument on the Plein 1813 in The Hague is quite impressive. For Dutch standards then. It is a more than ten meters high stone plinth topped by a triumphant Dutch Virgin, a traditional symbol of independence. Statues of Dutch statesmen can be seen all around. Including the first Dutch king Willem I, who swears allegiance to the constitution.
Construction started in 1863, when it was exactly fifty years ago that Napoleon's French army of occupation withdrew from the Netherlands of its own accord. Before that, the Netherlands had been a client state of the French Empire (the 'Kingdom of Holland', between 1806 and 1810), and was even briefly annexed to France (1810 to 1813). The regaining of independence in 1813 symbolized a new beginning. A grand monument had to portray that.
That independence would also mean that the Netherlands would receive a king from the House of Orange-Nassau for the first time from that moment on was not very likely at all just a few years earlier. Dissatisfied with the economic decline of the Republic in the eighteenth century and the increasing power of the stadtholder, democratically minded republicans, so-called 'Patriots', had founded the Batavian Republic after the invasion by the French in 1795. Shortly afterwards, William V of Orange-Nassau, the last stadtholder of the old Republic of the Netherlands, fled to England.
'Wise' constitution
But in 1813 the return of the Oranges was self-evident. Almost immediately after the French withdrew, the most important parties involved, Orange-minded politicians such as Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, the future King William and the great powers England and Prussia who had defeated Napoleon, agreed on the formal introduction of a monarchy. The Netherlands had to be a stable and decisive state. And that was best done by restoring a pre-revolutionary, old form of government. All over Europe, old royal houses were restored after the troubled revolutionary time.
But the revolution had also taught something else, namely that the power of a monarch could no longer be absolute. Willem had understood that well. When he was invited by letter to England by three orange-minded statesmen to act as 'sovereign prince' (not yet king) of the Netherlands, he only wanted to do so if the state power was guaranteed by a 'wise' constitution; a constitution that regulated the relations between the people and the monarch. On November 30, 1813, Willem was taken with the English ship The Warrior brought to Scheveningen, where he set foot on Dutch soil again after more than 18 years. From the place where Plein 1813 is now, one could – according to tradition – see the ship approaching.
“Our vile Fatherland is saved:The old times will soon be revived,” wrote Willem in a proclamation that he soon had issued. That sounded nice, but the old times of the Republic of the Netherlands would never return. A number of typical and unpopular measures of the French occupation, such as the government's tobacco monopoly, censorship and the customs system, were quickly abolished. But for the first time in its history, the Netherlands would become a formal monarchy.
At the same time, many senior officials from that time remained in place. The structure from the French era, with the increasingly centralization of state power, was also continued. The constitution, for which Van Hogendorp made the first draft, would have fit perfectly in the French era with a few adjustments. On December 2, Willem was inaugurated as sovereign Prince William I of the Netherlands. That happened in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, where the inauguration of Willem-Alexander will also take place on April 30 this year.
North and South in one country
But the biggest change was yet to take place. William I had a big dream for years, adding the orphaned Southern Netherlands to the territory of the old Republic. The politician Van Hogendorp also liked such a reunification. Together with the king, he submitted detailed plans to the British. They negotiated with Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia at the Congress of Vienna about the future of Europe.
In any case, the British government wanted to ensure that the Netherlands would contribute to the security of the French northern border, in case France became too powerful again. Willem and Van Hogendorp managed to submit their plans in such a way that it was eventually decided to unite the Northern and Southern Netherlands.
The union of North and South was nevertheless presented to the people as a "command" of the powers. Especially in the (Catholic) south, the Belgians had great difficulty with it. They were linked to a country with a 'great past', but in the meantime that mainly meant that the Southerners had to contribute to the enormous government debt that the Northern Netherlands had accumulated in the meantime.
Artificial and hopeless
The turning point came in the form of new unrest in France. Former revolutionary Emperor Napoleon had escaped from his exile Elba and headed for Paris. He quickly assembled a large army and continued north. The fear of many Belgians of being re-incorporated by France changed their hesitant attitude. William I responded by immediately proclaiming himself King of the United Netherlands and mobilizing both north and south against the French threat. Very formally, the Netherlands will not be a kingdom until 2015.
It worked. The Belgians would rather join the north than fall under the French yoke again. A large coalition of allied armies defeated Napoleon definitively in 1815 at the town of Waterloo. However, the union of the Northern and Southern Netherlands turned out to be artificial and therefore hopeless. In 1830 the Belgians again separated and the Netherlands and Belgium continued as two separate kingdoms.