A Brill Calendar: November 3

William of Orange's Propoganda Machine

Few statesmen who have decisively influenced the history of Europe – and the world, for that matter – have received a posthumous appraisal so equivocal and tepid as Willem, Prince of Orange (The Hague, 1650 – London, 1702): Stadtholder of the United Provinces, but also King William III of the British kingdoms.

At the beginning of this third millennium, Willem didn’t even earn the right to feature in a government-endorsed historical Canon of The Netherlands; while the British Isles (outside of the Six Provinces) remains cool in its appraisal of this aloof, reserved foreigner. An explanation for this situation might be that Willem’s era was, in effect, one of historical transition, in which the Spanish Kingdom endured its demise as a great European Power; a complex, gruelling period coinciding with the expansionist strategy and aggressive tactics of the French Sun King, Louis XIV.

Willem’s bi-national politics were not founded on the urge for a kind of superiority that couldn’t be challenged by any European power; especially powers that could threaten the country of his birth. His was a rather Dutch Dream: a multi-national balance of countries which would breed and encourage an inherent pan-European stability. This was certainly not a rhetorical fantasy in his mind. It is seldom that what is truly new is recognized as such; while transition keeps implying innovation.

Willem’s adroit engineering of anti-Catholic fears in England leading up to the “Glorious Revolution’ provides an exception to the rule, however. Just before his invasion, two bulky ships headed for England from the harbour of Amsterdam, on November 3, 1688, with printed propaganda as their only goods; an enormous print-run, ‘out-sourced’ over a gamut of printers in Holland and the Republic. Within a week, one of the more than one hundred thousand rapidly printed copies of the brochure was in the hands of King James II, a well-organized mass-media approach ‘avant la lettre’.