CHAPTER XXII

FROM THE INVASION OF HOLLAND BY THE FRENCH TO THE RETURN OF THE PRINCE OF ORANGE

A.D. 1794—­1818

While the fate of Belgium was decided on the plains of Fleurus, Pichegru prepared to carry the triumphant arms of France into the heart of Holland.  He crossed the Meuse at the head of one hundred thousand men, and soon gained possession of most of the chief places of Flanders.  An unusually severe winter was setting in; but a circumstance which in common cases retards the operations of war was, in the present instance, the means of hurrying on the conquest on which the French general was bent.  The arms of the sea, which had hitherto been the best defences of Holland, now became solid masses of ice; battlefields, on which the soldiers manoeuvred and the artillery thundered, as if the laws of the elements were repealed to hasten the fall of the once proud and long flourishing republic.  Nothing could arrest the ambitious ardor of the invaders.  The Duke of York and his brave army resisted to the utmost; but, borne down by numbers, he was driven from position to position.  Batteries, cannons, and magazines were successfully taken; and Pichegru was soon at the term of his brilliant exploits.

But Holland speedily ceased to be a scene of warfare.  The discontented portion of the citizens, now the majority, rejoiced to retaliate the revolution of 1787 by another, received the French as liberators.  Reduced to extremity, yet still capable by the aid of his allies of making a long and desperate resistance, the stadtholder took the nobler resolution of saving his fellow-citizens from the horrors of prolonged warfare.  He repaired to The Hague; presented himself in the assembly of the states-general; and solemnly deposited in their hands the exercise of the supreme power, which he found he could no longer wield but to entail misery and ruin on his conquered country.  After this splendid instance of true patriotism and rare virtue, he quitted Holland and took refuge in England.  The states-general dissolved a national assembly installed at The Hague; and, the stadtholderate abolished, the United Provinces now changed their form of government, their long-cherished institutions, and their very name, and were christened the Batavian Republic.

Assurances of the most flattering nature were profusely showered on the new state, by the sister republic which had effected this new revolution.  But the first measure of regeneration was the necessity of paying for the recovered independence, which was effected for the sum of one hundred million florins.  The new constitution was almost entirely modelled on that of France, and the promised independence soon became a state of deplorable suffering and virtual slavery.  Incalculable evils were the portion of Holland in the part which she was forced to take in the war between France and England.  Her marine was nearly annihilated, and some of her most valuable possessions in the Indies ravished from her by the British arms.  She was at the same time obliged to cede to her ally the whole of Dutch Flanders, Maestricht, Venloo, and their dependencies; and to render free and common to both nations the navigation of the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheldt.