First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [44]
Britain’s humiliating inability to suppress the rebellion, which she held against the Dutch for their steady supply of arms to the Colonies, evoked from Yorke the most self-revealing British remark of the war. Some military success was essential, he wrote in May, 1778, to Lord Suffolk, a minister in Lord North’s government, “to restore the appearance which Britain had such a right to assume,” assuring that her neighbors would again speak the “language of respect and friendship.” Crucial for empire though it might be, Yorke voiced something deeper, the craving not merely for respect but to be acknowledged top dog as the British nation felt itself to be. Philosophers may talk all they like about why men go to war; there are many reasons, but they need seek no further than Joseph Yorke for one answer. What he said about the desire for respect exactly describes the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914. Believing themselves the most industrious and civilized of contemporary peoples, chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in history, the Germans wanted desperately to be acknowledged as paramount by lesser nations. It galled the Kaiser that visitors always went to Paris as the goal of civilized culture and not to his capital. In that sense, war, as Joseph Yorke’s words suggest, can often arise from injured ego as much as from more serious cause.
The crosscurrents of Dutch politics in the conflict between rearming the army or navy determined the positions taken toward the American Revolution. The Stadtholder, followed by his party, was of course opposed to the American rebels not merely because he was by heritage in the British camp but because his domestic opponents who sympathized with the American cause expressed revolutionary republican views threatening his status as a hereditary sovereign. This group called themselves by the French word patriotes, and their strength grew in proportion as the Prince’s place in public respect sank. The Duke of Brunswick as a British partisan, and believed by the public to have kept the Prince ignorant of the true state of affairs, was a prime object of the Patriotes’ dislike.
The most important influence with regard to the Americans was the mercantile interest dominated by Amsterdam, whose leaders were convinced that the great unknown continent of America, once independent and freed from the grip of British mercantalism, offered a flowing fountain of trade for the export of Haarlem cloth and Schiedam gin and the import of rice, indigo, sugar, cotton, coffee and rum, and the financing of loans to American merchants that in their hands would break British supremacy of the Atlantic. As reported by a French envoy at The Hague, the opportunities were expected to “multiply like sand” and the Dutch would not want any other nation to get ahead of them in their relationship to a new nation of such “vast possibilities.”
Yet, even in Amsterdam, Adams found few men of influence who took the Colonies’ battle seriously, as anything but “a desultory rage of a few enthusiasts without order, discipline, law or government.” Scarcely anyone had direct knowledge of America and its growing population and trade. In their golden dreams, what did the Dutch really know of America? Its immensity left a feeling of awe which bred some very odd notions fostered by pseudo-scientists and scholarly pretenders to universal knowledge,