First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [42]
Prussia, Sweden and every nation that could command a sail scrambled for a share of the Indies trade. Sweden pre-empted the tea trade with China; the commerce of Spain and Portugal was drawn away by France, England, Sweden and the Hanseatic merchants. Markets and manufacturers once monopolized by the Dutch were cut into by foreign “enterprisers” from all sides. Industries lacking the former fresh supply of raw materials for cloth and other manufactures were losing markets and closing down. Unemployment rose, spreading from town to town and from one occupation to the next. Beggars and the homeless appeared in the streets. Formerly spotless walkways were now littered, once shining and polished windows were dust-stained, no longer reflecting the green of tall trees along the canal.
Spokesmen of liberal discontent, impatient of the conservative status quo, were active partisans of the American cause. Their spokesman was the radical Baron Johan Derck van der Capellen tot den Pol, representative in the States General of Zwolle, capital of the Province of Overyssel. Member of an old noble family who had absorbed in every fiber the 18th century’s ideals of liberty, van der Capellen was the author of a pamphlet on the history of liberty from ancient Thebes to his own country’s struggle against Spain. His critics called him “a Lafayette with an even lighter head.”
Rising to his feet in Parliament in December, 1775, he caused a sensation by a speech denouncing the loan to England of the Scots Brigade, the key issue of the pro-English party, and proposing a loan to relieve the financial poverty of the American Colonies, where money for conducting war was almost as short as gunpowder. The Scots Brigade had come to Holland after independence to help against the Catholic power of Spain and had remained in Dutch service as a barrier against the French. By the terms of the Dutch Treaty of Alliance with England in 1678, it was supposed to be loaned back upon request as one of the mutual subsidies the treaty called for if either party were attacked by a third. Supposed to number 6,000, it had dwindled because of the expense to 1,800, hardly proportionate to the hubbub it was exciting.
If the troops were loaned, England offered to lend the Netherlands a Hanoverian regiment in exchange or pay the cost of equipping a Dutch regiment to fill the place of the Scots. Creating yet another divided counsel, the Duke of Brunswick as Commander-in-Chief opposed the Prince on the issue, believing that to let the brigade go would reduce the land forces still further and that the loss would probably not be made up. Political adversaries of lending the brigade suspected that Lord North, the British Prime Minister, had planned the request expecting it to be refused. He could then use the refusal as justification for demanding from Parliament a vote for additional German mercenaries for the American war, whose use, because of the hatred they aroused in the Colonies, was strongly opposed by the Whigs of the Opposition.
Certain that discussion of the Scots Brigade would be prolonged in the United Provinces where it had become a divisive issue, the British, to make it no easier, asked for a reply in a month.
Van der Capellen, roughly trampling on the local tradition of moderate discourse, excoriated the loan of the Scots Brigade as a violation of neutrality and an act of injustice to the Americans who were fighting for a righteous cause. Partisanship over the issue was growing sharp and neutrality thin and ever harder to maintain because the principle of “free ships, free goods” offered such profitable opportunity for making money. Nevertheless, no one yet ventured to come out openly for the rebellious American cause. Van der Capellen was the first to do so, and he did not stint. He said