A Brill Calendar: November 16

William of Orange versus Amsterdam

Few ideas have marked the Low Countries so strongly over the last four centuries as strongly as an iconic pre-eminence of Amsterdam.

It is an assumed socio-cultural superiority, originally gained by wealth & riches. The political land-slide caused by resistance and rebellion against the Sovereign Lord of these northern lands, the King of Spain, in the final third of the 16th century, saw to it that a flood of immigrants, many of them industrious Calvinists, fled from much larger and far more prosperous southern cities like Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels to the northern, parochial towns of Dordrecht, Leyden and Amsterdam.

A generation later Amsterdam, with its unique selling-point of a safe sea-harbour, (unlike Leyden or Rotterdam), had developed into the cash-cow and money-machine of an new European power, proudly claiming to be a Republic of United Provinces. Amsterdam furnished 25% of the capital needed for running Business of State. Then as now, the tune was called by the party paying the piper. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between 25 and 51%.

Amsterdam was frequently called to heel by the States-General. Usually without success; occasionally at the risk of open warfare. But it is seldom that Amsterdam had its ‘ears washed’ so dramatically as with the sequence of events starting when Stadtholder Willem III – five years later King William III of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland – visited the stupendous City Hall on November 16, 1683 in order to persuade Amsterdam’s four Burgomasters to finance a campaign against France and its Sun King, Louis XIV. Threats, curses, manipulation and mud-slinging were a feature of this remarkable interview.

The Prince didn’t get his way; on Sunday, November 21 he received a final ‘No’. How the affair petered out, in spring of 1684, and alienated Holland further from the Republic as a community of Provinces is a different story.