First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [40]
Deepest and most dangerous to the state was the rift over the issue of whether rearmament should go to the army or the navy. Both were in poor, close to useless, condition and the question of which was to receive priority of the state’s expenditure divided the country in bitter political dispute, between friends of England, who wanted improvement of the land forces against France, and the mercantile interests led by Amsterdam, who wanted improvement of the navy to resist British interference with their trade. The Stadtholder, being half-English himself, naturally favored the British position but in his hesitations could not give a strong lead or come to a firm decision on which military arm should have priority. With the provinces and the States General blocking each other from a deciding vote, the result was that no new funds for either arm were appropriated and neither army nor navy was strengthened.
The army’s forces at this time had fallen to a worrisome level below 30,000, of which a majority were German mercenaries. Recruits were not coming in because, according to Sir Joseph Yorke, who was of course tireless in pointing out the army’s deficiency, the service was too ill-paid and could not subsist at all without half the force being absent on furlough. Some deep illogic seems to lie in a war-oriented society that was so careless about paying its armed forces. Non-payment precipitated the fury of the troops, who had erupted in the terrible sack of Rome in 1527 and again, as we have seen, in the mutiny of the Spanish troops who sacked Antwerp. It was true too of the American Congress which early in the Revolution did not exert itself to find the funds to pay the farmers and citizens who enlisted from their homes to fight for the birthright of their country. If the object was worth a war, why was attention to the strength of the armed forces so lax? Why were soldiers, the instrument of every state’s policy, so stingily treated as bound to be mutinous and dispirited? The reason was less in some mysterious illogic than in the simple absence of regular revenue for organized armies. Military service had once been a required feudal service owed to the state without recompense. When history moved slowly, as it did before 1900, rulers were slow in learning realities in the exercise of government, and some, like the Bourbons, never learned at all. It took a very long time before rulers came to realize that armed service would have to be paid for or that they needed to concern themselves with the wants of the lower orders from whom their armies were drawn. We have been living since under Henry Adams’ law of the acceleration of changing times, which obscures for us the time lag that existed for our ancestors between the fact of change and the social and political understanding of what had happened.
The navy, so bold and hardy in the days of Tromp and de Ruyter, today lay neglected at its moorings with torn sails and rotting timber. Harbors and dockyards had silted up; even the Texel, the deepwater roadstead in the Zuyder Zee that was the gateway to Amsterdam, had lost draft for seagoing vessels. Because the wage scale for sailors had sunk too low for voluntary recruitment in competition with merchantmen in the contraband trade, enough crews could not be assembled to man the ships even had they been seaworthy. Fortification of harbors had been neglected, so that any petty pirate or English privateer could break and enter. Increasing the disrespect for the Stadtholder, the public in the ports and maritime cities was demanding that measures be taken to protect shipping from British insolence.