ORANGE & ORANJE
R. Sickinghe,
Oranje Nassau Dokumentation
Oranje Nassau Dokumentation
When Napoleon was defeated by the Allies (Russia, Austria, England) at Leipzig in October 1813, hopes were revived in the French-occupied areas. In the Netherlands, where anti-French unrest had already occurred that year, a number of politicians put their heads together to determine what should happen if the French had disappeared.
The study from the book Orange and Orange describes in broad outline the history of the old principality of "Orange" over a period of more than two thousand years. She attempts to answer the following questions:
🧩 1. Where did the exceptional meaning of the word 'Orange' for us Dutch people come from?
🧩 2. How did the name 'Orange' become associated with the Dutch royal family?
The figure of Prince Philips in particular. Willem receives a lot of attention, because this sympathetic Prince of Orange is so little known to us Dutch, and also because he was also an ornament to our royal house due to his high-minded character and his Christian patience.
«Orange & Oranje» highlights an aspect of our national history of special significance. It deals with the ties between our royal house and the former principality of Orange in the South of France, known to so many who pass it on their way to a southern holiday destination. Numerous historical and more recent images, including many from the Royal House Archives, were grouped around this facet of the past.
«Orange & Oranje» was published in 1969 as a numbered, bibliophile edition in a limited edition of one thousand copies. Numbers I to XXV were signed by the author and were not commercially available.
The author Jhr. P. F. O. R. Sickinghe was a former intendant of the royal palaces of Amsterdam and The Hague. Jhr. Sickinghe was also director of the Royal House Archives. His work and his interest in the origins and backgrounds of our, 'Royal House', formed a happy combination, which is reflected in this special Hof-edition. The well-known book designer Aldert Witte, gave shape and form to this precious and beautifully executed work.
HET BOEK
ORANGE & ORANJE
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How should the state that had become independent again be organised? Should the time of King Louis Napoleon (1806-1810) be taken as an example? That of the Batavian Republic? Or should one go back even further and restore the Republic of the Seven United Provinces from before 1795?
All these forms had their objections. Those who took the lead in November 1813 also had different ideas about the future. However, they did agree on one thing: the House of Orange had to return. The gentlemen Van Hogendorp, Van der Duijn van Maasdam and Van Limburg Stirum formed a so-called Triumvirate. They issued a proclamation in which they promised: 'The old times are coming back.
However, the members of the Triumvirate, which then prepared the reception of the new head of state, did not have complete control. Willem I, the eldest son of the stadtholder Willem V, who fled in 1795 and was welcomed as a 'sovereign prince' in 1813, had to give shape to the new state.
He agreed that his power would be regulated in a 'wise constitution'. But that did not mean the old times were back. In the constitution that was completed in 1814, the government of the country was centrally regulated: the prince was given the authority to establish administrative regulations for cities and provinces. And that put an end to the old point of contention from the time of the Republic (complete unity or a more or less loose association of provinces that had their own legislation). The Netherlands finally became a national state.
ORANJE NASSAU
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In that constitution of 1814, a States General was also considered that would represent the Dutch people. Not in the democratic way of today of course: not everyone, but only the thinking part of the nation (that is to say, gentlemen of standing or with money) was allowed to cast their vote, but in practice they had little power. The king was the boss, and if he pleased the voting citizens, why would one want more say?
All in all, there were some changes in the new state: not only was there a powerful central government, but there was also unity of finance, law and jurisdiction. The constitution laid down some so-called fundamental rights, such as the eligibility for appointment to state offices regardless of the candidate's religion. Little else remained of the democratic antics of the French Revolution; freedom of the press, that is to say the right to express an opinion unhindered in word and writing, especially in political matters, did not exist.
Forces were also at work from outside that would strongly influence the appearance and interior of the newly-formed Dutch state. After Napoleon had finally been safely stored on St. Helena - it was not yet customary at that time to have such people tried by international tribunals - the victors determined that the former Austrian Netherlands would be added to the Netherlands. They imagined that this union would be 'close and complete.
That great Netherlands would be a fine safeguard for England. After all, the great Netherlands after the union now controlled the Rhine and Scheldt estuaries and would therefore form a good counterweight to France, the defeated. Thus it was determined by treaty, the 'Eight Articles', in June 1814. William I would become King of this Kingdom of the Netherlands.
This merger created many difficulties. The Southern Netherlands (called 'Belgium' after 1830) had gone their own way since the Union of Arras (1579). Two dissimilar areas were now forcibly merged. The North: Protestant by tradition, trading, economically in poor condition: the national debt amounted to f 1,724,000,000, compared to that of the South: f 48,000,000!
The South: Catholic, industrially fairly strong. The South therefore saw itself simply added to an existing nation, the Netherlands. Many had great objections to what they felt was a 'detachment from France'. Much would have to be given to each other if this imposed connection was to have a chance of success.
The beginning was already bad. The new, amended constitution was in fact rejected by the Belgian 'notables'. In The Hague, however, those who had deliberately not shown up for the vote were considered as having voted in favour. This way of doing things went down in history as 'arithmetic Dutch'.
🧩 Who was the man who now had the difficult task of forging his disparate subjects into a nation? Who was King William 17? Born in 1772, he had to leave the country as early as 1795. An irrefutable accusation of carelessness when Krayenhoff's career broke. He escaped judicial condemnation but was removed from administration. During an exile of nineteen years he travelled all over Europe, fighting for the return of his House.
'The organisation of the court of Louis Napoleon corresponded to the organisation of Van Brunswijk. In addition to the grand chambellan, Louis had a premier chambellan honoraire and four chambellans ‘en activité de service’.
—(De Haan and van Zanten.)
At the age of 41 he saw his perseverance crowned with success: the entry as sovereign prince into Amsterdam. "He is a model of private virtues. By nature and temperament averse to any noisy amusement, to any kind of waste, work is his only desire, and he prefers to occupy himself with Culture Historical facts, thus Groen van Prinsterer, his private secretary, characterized. A boring man, one would say. But still a man who, through his curiosity, was often found in studies.
Politically, things were different. The king wanted to be an 'enlightened despot', was a rationally thinking, non-fanatical man, but he could nevertheless display unexpected indecisiveness at important moments. King William I was certainly a man of exemplary dedication and restless activity. He spent most of his days in his study, reading, writing, appraising and conferring, but anyone who sees him there in spirit feels compelled... to ask the question whether he really was not too much of the diligent head clerk, who sees the dots but no lines, who all too seldom directs his gaze at the world behind the concrete. Such a man is almost doomed to become an opportunist, in whose personality the fixed course is more apparent than real. According to the historian Rogier.
The king's services to the recovery of the economy were great. Everything had to be built up from scratch after the French occupation and the English Continental System. Our former trading position was lost. Amsterdam was no longer the lender of Europe. However, thanks to many initiatives by William I, the economy slowly started up again. In 1814 he founded the Dutch Bank. He stimulated many new private enterprises by financial assistance. For example, to the Dutch Steamboat Company, founded in 1823 by G. M. Roentgen in Rotterdam, and to the Amsterdam Steamboat Company, founded in 1825 by Paul van Vlissingen. In 1830, the Netherlands was the second trading country on the world list, after England, which remained first by a wide margin.
The prince also very much appreciated the importance of good transport connections (see also docs. 17 and 17A). A network of roads and canals, such as the Zuid-Willemsvaart and the Noord-Hollandskanaal, was constructed throughout the country. At the end of his reign, the first railway ran from Amsterdam to Haarlem. In the context of what we would now call his 'welfare policy', the king also supported the emerging textile industry in Twente.
The problem of poverty was still predominantly 'combated by charity or by private charity. The latter was practiced in association in the Maatschappij van Weldadigheid, founded in 1818 by General Van den Bosch. The Maatschappij exploited, among other things, a number of agricultural colonies, such as Veenhuizen and Frederiksoord. In 1827, the combined labour colonies had 7,000 residents, of whom 1,600 were 'beggars' and 1,800 were orphans.
The social conditions of a large part of the population were poor: working hours of 16 hours, far too long child and female labor, alcohol abuse, malnutrition during food shortages as a result of crop failures. Public health was also poor as a result.
Not all contemporaries agreed with the pursuit of better living conditions, money does not make you happy, says a good Dutch proverb. The very orthodox Isaac da Costa, author of the 1823 issue of 'Objections to the Spirit of the Age', was very critical in a letter: "He deserves to be put to death, that General Van den Bosch... Wanting to abolish poverty! The plan is beyond the reach of man. They want to build a Tower of Babel, but the entire building will be knocked down. The axe is already on the tree and the time of God's restoring Omnipotence is dawning.
It was not only Da Costa, a member of the so-called Reveil, a group that advocated a deeper experience of Christian religious values, who lived in religious dissatisfaction with his time. In the Southern Netherlands, religious resistance was very strong from the start. The tacking policy of the prince and his minister of Roman Catholic Worship was unable to eliminate this disintegrating factor.
We must take into account that at that time in Europe religion was still considered a state affair. Freedom of conscience was fought for, but slowly. It was the king who established the Regulations for the Dutch Reformed Church in 1816. He entered into negotiations with Rome to arrive at a 'Concordat.
When the matter got stuck on the regulation of the right of appointment of bishops, the government took matters into its own hands: it abolished the minor seminaries - where priests were trained - and founded a so-called Collegium Philo sophicum in Leuven (1825), where the future priests were obliged to come and study. These measures caused bad blood and this effect could not be undone when the government - after concluding a concordat (1827) - returned to its roots.
The language decrees of September 1819, whereby Dutch became the official language in schools and in the civil service in the provinces of Flanders and Limburg, also met with strong resistance in the higher circles, where French was the language of instruction. In the meantime, there were more grievances in the South. A growing liberal opposition - at that time the progressives par excellence - demanded freedom of the press and of education.
Among other things, the liberals - although themselves anti-clerical, found the Roman Catholic opposition that detested the 'neutral' public school - on this last point. However, the government did not budge; especially where the (in)freedom of the press was concerned. Time and again, the justice system, led by Minister Van Maanen, intervened when it believed that someone had gone too far in their criticism of the monarch and his government; many were sentenced to long prison terms.
Fighting in Brussels 1830
Thus, by 1830, a crisis year in the history of European states (think of the events in Poland and France), a situation had arisen in which in the South there were voices calling for secession. It is difficult to point out either party as 'guilty of the uprising and secession. The merger envisaged in 1814 could not have happened otherwise than with the will of both. Where that good will was lacking for whatever reason, unity had to remain a chimera. The attempt to realise it became a fiasco. People did not understand each other, had remained alien to each other. The military action against the rebels brought no improvement in this. As always, the King's policy had failed.
In 1839 he had to accept the definitive secession of the Kingdom of the Belgians. His persistence during the period of the so-called status quo. against the proposals of the great powers (by whom the king felt abandoned, had not brought him any honour. On the contrary. This policy also cost a lot of money, because it required the maintenance of a large military force.
It was the colonies, in particular the Dutch East Indies, that contributed significantly to the costs. The king personally supervised the colonies. Only once every ten years was an obscure budget submitted to the States-General. As early as 1825, William I clearly stated in a speech from the throne what he had in mind with the overseas territories: 'Our foreign possessions are the subject of my special attention. My efforts are directed towards obtaining the most possible advantages for the Netherlands and Dutch industry, apart from the promotion of their internal prosperity.'
In 1829, in Java, where the 'Java War' had almost ended, the tireless General Van den Bosch, in his function as Governor General, instituted the Cultivation System. This refined form of forced labour meant on paper that the Javanese had to grow products on 1/5 of his land that the government sanctioned, such as sugar, coffee, tobacco. He delivered these products as tax in kind. In practice, he was forced by the officials to cultivate more than one fifth of his land for this purpose. The Dutch Trading Company shipped these government goods and auctioned them on the Dutch market (think of Multatuli's 'Koffijveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij').
By giving advances on upcoming deliveries, the Trading Company not only acted as a commission agent, but also as a banker to the government. In this way, the government could dispose of considerable sums of money outside the official budget, which was spent on military expenditure, among other things. In 1840 the monarch abdicated in favour of his son. It must have been hard for him, the authoritarian ruler: the failure of his Belgian policy, the forced revision of the land law, the smear campaign in the press because of his intended second marriage with the Belgian countess Henriette d'Oultremont, a lady-in-waiting of the king's wife Wilhelmina who died in 1837. After his abdication in 1840, William, disillusioned, left for Berlin. In 1841 he married Henriette. In 1843 he died, abandoned and forgotten.
Despite this gloomy ending, we must not forget the reality of the entire reign. In a time of Jan Salies (Potgieter) and Stastokken (Hildebrand), William I was not a Dutch monopoly! a man who far exceeded the other 'entrepreneurs' in initiative and drive. He had even been active in the cultural field: the foundation of the Royal Academy of Art in Amsterdam and Antwerp, of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam, etc., came about on his initiative or with his support and approval. (Doc. 18).
Koninklijke Bibliotheek-complex Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5
In the literary Dutch world, towards the end of William's reign, a group that pursued literary renewal and aesthetic reorientation tried to stifle the dull, self-satisfied petty-bourgeois spirit. The foundation of 'De Gids' in 1837 and the appearance of Hildebrand's 'Camera Obscura' are examples of this. As always, the younger generation showed the new way.
— HOME ORANGE & ORANJE
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