Everything about Patriots Faction totally explained
The Patriots (in
Dutch:
Patriotten) were a political faction in the
Dutch Republic in the second half of the
eighteenth century. They were led by
Joan van der Capellen tot den Pol, gaining power from November 1782.
The Patriots struggled for the removal of the incompetent
stadtholder (at that time
William V, Prince of Orange), and his
nepotistic way of
governing. Discontented with the hereditary system of allocating posts, the decline of
VOC Asian trade, unemployment in the backward textile industry, the disastrous course of the
Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and - last but not least - desiring more democracy, the middle and upper classes looked towards the
United States and its
Declaration of Independence, and began to reclaim their rights (first written down in the
1579 Union of Utrecht). The lower classes largely remained supportive of the existing regime.
In the next two years - from spring 1783 - this culminated in the formation of
militia or
paramilitary groups like the
Exercitiegenootschappen, who tried to persuade the prince and city governments to allow non-
Calvinists (for example Roman-Catholics,
Mennonites and Jews, who formed more than one third of the nation's population) into the
vroedschap. The
aristocrats were divided, into
Orangists, republicans and democrats, and from summer 1785 more and more republicans backed the prince. The prince was still unwilling to carry out reforms, yet unable to take necessary decisions. In the city of
Utrecht the Orangist members of the government were sent home by the local militia under
Quint Ondaatje, a
burgher from
Colombo. Another big name,
Herman Willem Daendels, failed to get a seat in the local government, when state troops occupied the small city of
Hattem.
One year later, in September 1787, after the local militia was defeated by a well-trained Prussian army under
Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, many of the Patriots fled to
France, settling in the area around
Dunkirk, where they were able to understand the Flemish Dutch spoken by local population.
In the
Dutch Republic five leaders were sentenced to death and, although none of these sentences was carried through, all five were forced to leave the Netherlands. In 1789, two radical leaders
Francis Adrian Vanderkemp and
Adam Gerard Mappa moved to the USA at the invitation of
George Washington. In 1795, a few years after the
French Revolution, the Patriots remaining in Northern France returned and with the help of a French army founded the
Batavian Republic.
Sources
- Schama, S., Patriots and liberators - Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1813 (4th edition, Amsterdam 2005).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Patriots Faction'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://patriots__faction.totallyexplained.com">Patriots (faction) Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
