On arriving in the United Provinces, Andrew Becket asked: ‘Am I Not Still in a Land of Liberty’?Footnote 1 In crossing the North Sea, travellers like Becket traversed a geographical, legal, and cultural border. But Becket did not depict the country he arrived in as a completely alien land, such as France or Italy.Footnote 2 Instead, he had moved within a community bound by a shared political aspiration: liberty. His representation of the United Provinces as a semi-fraternal, freedom-loving country had been a commonplace since Sir William Temple wrote about the Dutch ‘obstinate Love of their Liberties’ over a hundred years earlier.Footnote 3 Although Temple’s sympathetic analysis of the United Provinces’ rise was contemporarily controversial,Footnote 4 his book went on to become the go-to piece to cite, adapt, and plagiarize, up to the French Revolution.Footnote 5
It will strike many as surprising that travel writers’ representations of the United Provinces remained virtually unchanged from the decade after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1670s) to the United Provinces’ dissolution (1795), given the many material changes that occurred over the century, not least how the role of Great Power dramatically shifted across the North Sea.Footnote 6 Although this article is supplemented by a wide range of printed works that represented the United Provinces, it focuses on published travel writing precisely because of the genre’s repetitive nature. These texts were found using title and text searches on Historical Texts Online, using the keywords ‘Holland’, ‘Dutch’, ‘Low Countries’, and ‘United Provinces’. The supplementary material used in this article was also gathered from these searches. Although this is a qualitative analysis, its findings are based on reading every piece of travel writing on the United Provinces published c. 1670–1795.
Published travel writing is defined here as works authored by someone going abroad and, either as a travelogue or a travel guide, purporting to reveal truths about that subject to their domestic audience.Footnote 7 Texts tended to have formulaic titles, conventions, and structures. They were also bound by pressures that resulted in the repetition of images that, in their potency and constancy, played a major role in the development of British political culture.Footnote 8 As imagologists have argued, representations of foreigners were stickier than even the most traumatic geopolitical changes, suffusing every European state, and producing centuries-enduring stereotypes.Footnote 9 These images influenced the production of travel writers’ texts in two major ways: first, their itineraries, experiences, and perceptions were shaped by them; second, not reproducing these tropes was tantamount to disagreeing with a centuries-long pedigree of thought on their subject’s identity, and, by extension, what it meant to be British.Footnote 10
Travel writers’ representations of the United Provinces were shaped by the dense web of interconnections that were spun from generations of Anglo-Dutch cultural exchange. Several factors spurred this intimacy. A non-exhaustive list includes: the changeability and complexity of the Dutch political system, which English people commented on and studied;Footnote 11 the number of English people who went to the United Provinces;Footnote 12 the frequency and extent of Anglo-Dutch trade;Footnote 13 the closeness of English- and Dutch-based news networks;Footnote 14 the number of Dutch expatriates in England;Footnote 15 alliances that bound the two states;Footnote 16 their shared maritime status;Footnote 17 and their religious communality.Footnote 18 Of all these commonalities, the claim that the two countries existed in a state of ‘freedom’ was one of the most repeated. These shared characteristics meant that representations of the United Provinces served paradoxically both as hetero- and auto-images: as both ‘them’ and ‘us’.Footnote 19
This unique liminality meant that travel writers’ commentaries on the United Provinces were not simply academic depictions of a curiously foreign land: they were pressingly relevant for discussions of what Great Britain was, or could become, given changes in its circumstances.Footnote 20 Specifically, because the two states were so similar, when travel writers discussed Dutch freedom, they were also engaged in a discussion of what freedom meant in Great Britain. This discussion is especially helpful to historians of British political culture because travel writing was so widely disseminated and popularly consumed. Although women and non-elite men wrote travel accounts, many of the authors identified themselves and their imagined readers as men of leisure.Footnote 21 However, notwithstanding the elite makeup of the genre’s authorship, we know these texts were well read because of the sheer number of editions that many of them went through, so much so that we can identify the genre with the general trend in the growth of popular reading, which occurred alongside the expansion of libraries, newspapers, cheap prints, and other cultural and logistical factors that scholars associate with the rise of literacy.Footnote 22 In being an important genre in the rising tide of popular literacy, travel writing served as an important means of representing political ideas to wider groups of British people.
Although travel writers sometimes dedicated paragraphs to a discussion of freedom, it was more often the case that freedom was woven into anecdotes and descriptions of cities and buildings. This freedom was therefore presented as an animator of observable changes, rather than as a theoretical abstraction. Because of the rough-and-ready way in which freedom was invoked, the term itself was used promiscuously: the same word that William Temple used to describe the philosophical system that underpinned Dutch prosperityFootnote 23 was used by Henry Peckham to explain the motivation of those who disembowelled and cannibalized the brothers de Witt.Footnote 24 It served as a political, social, and confessional label. Sometimes, the use of this label approached contradiction, even within the same text. This looseness indicated both the assumed explanatory power of the term, and the authors’ apparent relaxedness about using it. The reconstruction of the term’s core meanings within this imprecision is a useful way of examining what (many) British people thought liberty meant when applied in an observable context like the United Provinces.
This article is divided into a discussion of the two aspects of how published travel accounts framed Dutch freedom. The first half discusses how the demand that the only legitimate limit on life should be laws that they freely made enriched the Dutch state. This was a state that was ‘opprest with the most cruel Hardship and Variety of Taxes, that was ever known under any Government’.Footnote 25 Yet, because the Dutch had oversight over what these taxes were, how they were collected, and how they were used, they acted as a dynamo that empowered the sovereign state that guaranteed peoples’ safety. This protection left people free to prosper under a government that was accountable to them.
The second half explores the writers’ claim that the Dutch insistence on freedom from moral boundaries inevitably corroded the Republic.Footnote 26 ‘Saucy boors’ and indulgent elites; Frenchified men, and women entrepreneurs; busy bourses and brothels, empty churches: the lowering of restrictions and the disrespect of rank encouraged a self-serving ethos that weakened the Dutch body politic. Because the short-term strengthening of the state was caused by the demand that led to its long-term weakening, the travel writers overall took a dim view of liberty in the United Provinces. Their analysis was therefore partly a political intervention in debates as to the extent to which the British state ought to allow this free spirit that provided so many obvious boons that, while bringing immediate modernization and urbanization, acted as seductions away from the limiting moral values that prevented Great Britain from descending into anarchy.
These published travel accounts of the United Provinces conveyed powerful representations of freedom that persisted, virtually unchanged, throughout the long eighteenth century. These depictions did not serve simply to distract and entertain curious readers who wanted to vicariously explore a strange land through their books. Instead, the emphasis that both the British and the Dutch were ‘free peoples’ meant that these texts served as commentaries that helped readers navigate their political understanding of freedom in their developing state.
I
Travel writers were shocked by the size and power of the Dutch state. In contrast to the apparently amateurish organs of the British state, the Dutch state was everywhere, shaping urban landscapes, terraforming the North Sea, regulating markets, enforcing laws, providing poor relief, equipping a large army and navy, and maintaining and expanding a global empire. These various state functions amounted to the United Provinces more perfectly achieving freedom because they fulfilled a contract between the Dutch state and people. This contract meant that the state imposed a significant number of taxes and regulated many aspects of Dutch life. In return, the state was controlled by the great majority of Dutch people. With echoes of Louis XIV’s apocryphal claim that he was the state, William Carr was one of many who reported ‘the meanest’ Dutchman saying ‘what is the Vaderlands is ours’.Footnote 27
Travel writers readily seconded this assessment. They claimed that right down to the most local level – guilds, cities, waterways – the United Provinces was self-governing, with a federal government that had very limited ability to intervene in the great majority of day-to-day political decision-making.Footnote 28 Each layer was often reported in detail, giving a semi-alien quality in comparison to the lack of political participation in Great Britain. However, it was common after this depiction to highlight that even the most local collective could not invade somebody’s ‘person or property’, the security of which was considered a precondition of true liberty.Footnote 29 Pieter de la Court, who was a propagandist for the United Provinces, argued that ‘this free Government’ set the rules that it and others invariably followed, giving people an incentive to ‘gain Riches for their Posterity, by Frugality and good Husbandry’, rather than wasting their wealth on transient pleasures before their property was arbitrarily expropriated by an unscrupulous monarch.Footnote 30 The incentive to save made the country wealthier and, therefore, increased what could be taxed.
Travel writers narrated that this wealth explained how the Dutch could afford to pay taxes levied to finance the Eighty Years’ War, commercial and imperial expansion, state building, and climatic reclamation: these taxes were far higher than those in ‘arbitrary’ states like France.Footnote 31 William Carr listed some of the taxes that had to be paid by a typical eighteenth-century Amsterdam resident: stamp duty on buying a property, a tax for the mill that drained the land, a tax for water banks, a tax for the military fortifications that protected the land (on top of extraordinary war taxes that were imposed during a conflict); a tax for the night watch; a poll tax; a coach tax; soap tax; salt tax; wine tax; butter tax; bean tax; light tax; wood tax; meat tax; bread tax; tax on most traded goods, that had to be weighed publicly; paper tax; cow tax; fruit tax; gate and bridge tolls. Carr also went through how many things were double-taxed (milk was taxed as milk, then again as butter), and required the deep involvement of state agents in peoples’ private lives: ‘no Man may bake his own Bread, or grind his own Corn, or brew his Beer, nor dare…keep in his House a Hand-Mill’, and he listed examples of Dutch people ‘ruined’ for doing these acts, because these activities were tantamount to tax avoidance.Footnote 32 Also, many activities were taxed: Thomas Nugent reported that theatres’ profits were taxed at 50 per cent, and every street entertainer’s income was taxed at a third.Footnote 33 These oft-repeated tax itineraries were a major superficial separator between the Dutch and the British state: the Encyclopaedia Britannica quipped that ‘the only thing that has escaped taxation [in the United Provinces] is the air they breathe’.Footnote 34 And given the repeated stereotype that the Dutch had the worst air in Europe, this exemption would hardly have been understood as magnanimous.
If the extent of the taxation distinguished the Dutch from the British, the underlying purpose of this tax collection squarely put them within the shared Anglo-Dutch camp. Taxes could not be raised without being viewed as legitimate by the great majority of those who paid them. This legitimacy was a major demarking line between the ‘free states’ of Europe, including Great Britain and the United Provinces, and the absolutist ones (principally France). Travel writers agreed that the amount of taxation did not determine whether a state was free: John Marshall argued that the high taxation in a free state never exceeded the limitless ‘value of liberty’.Footnote 35 In contrast, the illegitimacy of the high tax-raising of the absolutist Spanish Habsburgs was viewed as one of the main causes of the Dutch Rebellion.Footnote 36 The belief that the taxes were not being misappropriated undergirded the high trust that the Dutch were said to have in their civil institutions. As one writer put it, the Dutch were ‘assured’ that the taxes did not go towards ‘the Covetousness, Pride, or Luxury’ of their leaders, ‘but to defray the charges, the State is necessarily exposed to’.Footnote 37 Joseph Shaw, a barrister who travelled the United Provinces, compared this republican virtue with England, in letters to his patron, Anthony Ashley-Cooper. Whereas in the United Provinces money was spent appropriately, in England the money was spent and wasted on court-buying and corruption.Footnote 38 As opposed to the opulence of English courtiers, Dutch leaders lived modestly. William Temple reported that his contemporaneous Dutch leaders (the brothers de Witt) wore common clothes, had few servants, and lived in a normal sized house.Footnote 39 The modesty of their leaders’ private lives contrasted favourably with the beauty and wealth of the amenities erected for the public (the statehouse, the bridges, the roads), which William Temple thought made Amsterdam incomparable in the world in its ‘Strength, Beauty, and Convenience’.Footnote 40 Indeed, descriptions of Amsterdam in general were not short of superlatives in English travel writing, being ‘the country of chimes’,Footnote 41 ‘that modern Tyre’,Footnote 42 and ‘the Wonder of the World’.Footnote 43 These depictions of Amsterdam as a modern, large city, continued long after London superseded the Dutch city in size and grandeur, thus showing the potency of the seventeenth-century impression on the eighteenth-century imagination. Public buildings were major standard-bearers of this modernity and acted as exemplars of the sovereignty of a free, Dutch people.
As well as guaranteeing public amenities, the Dutch state also had a judicial system that guaranteed order, which in turn was seen as a bedrock guarantor of freedom. Walter Harris, an Irish historian, used ‘liberty’ and ‘security’ interchangeably: whereas a contemporary Londoner worried about going ‘ten miles out of London with Money in his Pocket’, a foreigner could travel throughout the United Provinces ‘by Day and by Night’ and feel safe.Footnote 44 Ann Radcliffe, a traveller and novelist, was typical in reporting her confidence that her luggage would not be stolen when disembarking in Rotterdam.Footnote 45 As one travel guide put it, ‘no Country at this time in the World that enjoys a Liberty equal to that of Holland’, because ‘every thing is so well regulated’.Footnote 46 Such regulation came from the power of the state to impose the collective’s will efficiently: ‘To protect the Good, ’tis necessary that [the Magistrate] punish the Evil.’Footnote 47 If security and liberty were interchangeable, then the British had much to learn from the Dutch law enforcement apparatus. The police were especially commented on. Amsterdam was widely regarded as the most policed city in Europe. The city was illuminated by 3,000 street lamps, and if a crime was committed, the authorities closed all the gates and ‘every one passing through was subjected to a search’.Footnote 48 Because the Amsterdam police were ‘superior’ to anywhere else, the city’s citizens lived ‘in perfect safety’, and were therefore free.Footnote 49 One Grand Tourist, Henry Peckham, thought that many of Amsterdam’s policing tactics should be replicated elsewhere, especially the policy of doubling up when on patrol.Footnote 50 Begging was so uncommon in the United Provinces that Samuel Ireland regarded with ‘astonishment’ the people who were allowed, ‘under the severity of Dutch police’, to beg during an annual fair in Rotterdam.Footnote 51 William Montague was particularly impressed by the lack of crime in Amsterdam, considering the famous frivolities that were indulged in at ‘Night-time’, like the ‘continual Fiddling’ and ‘Gaming’.Footnote 52 To travellers apparently used to not being free to travel their own country at any time of day without fear of vagabondage, the state’s efficiency in deterring and catching beggars and criminals was a major part of how the efficient Dutch state freed Dutch people. This moral was keenly relevant to an ever-urbanizing Great Britain.
The relationship between liberty and order was particularly acute in representations of the Dutch state’s uniquely comprehensive provisions for the poor and ill. In seeking to entice English tourists away from Italy and towards the United Provinces, one writer contrasted ‘Italy’s Amphitheatres and Circus’s, for the cruel Sport of destroying the human species’, with ‘Works of real use and emolument to the Publick…Dutch Dykes and Sluices are seen as stupendious Works of no less Art and Grandeur, for the safety and preservation of the People.’Footnote 53 The writer was contrasting the old, decorative, useless civilizational institutions of ancient Rome with the new, urbane values that suited contemporary states like the United Provinces and, implicitly, Great Britain. This infrastructure was both physically and architecturally present: it was regularly written that at any one time the city of Amsterdam had 20,000 people in its institutions for the poor.Footnote 54 These houses were so large and comfortable that they were often described as ‘palaces’.Footnote 55 Thomas Nugent described the plentiful diet and permanent lodgings given to those who were unable to look after themselves, which were ‘kept extremely clean and neat, and richly adorned with pictures’. He also described the many social and legal institutions erected to keep these hospitals well funded: the donation boxes that littered the city, the twice-weekly procession with bells, and the expectation to donate after the conclusion of a significant deal.Footnote 56 William Carr thought the ‘one main Reason why [the Dutch poor] so willingly pay their Taxes’ was their knowledge that ‘if it please God to visit them with Poverty’, they will be looked after by the state.Footnote 57 The state’s legitimacy was not just because of actual participation in its inputs, but also in the potential receipt of its outputs.
If social welfare institutions were one guarantor of freedom, another was the country’s penal institutions, which writers repeatedly connected with the poor’s orderly behaviour. Joseph Shaw was typical in claiming that the United Provinces ‘deservedly glories in’ its methods of putting ‘the lazy and able Beggars’ to work, and which took in the ‘Weak’ to stop them ‘rotting in their Streets’. Shaw described an orphanage with 1,346 orphans, who were working and singing psalms ‘in wonderful Order’, which moved him so deeply that he turned to his guide and said these orphans were ‘the Sinews of their State’.Footnote 58 He also saw how ‘the lazy wandring Beggars’ were taken to a ‘Rasp-house…where a most severe Labour…makes them prefer Death to Life’; he wished the practice ‘might be imitated at London’, given how significantly it reduced begging and instilled values in the former beggars that improved social order.Footnote 59 The most cliched and repeated institution of Dutch justice was the houses of correction, which featured cellars for the particularly lazy. These places allowed the public to gawk as the cellars filled with water within fifteen minutes unless the inmates pumped ‘incessantly’.Footnote 60 If drowning did not incentivize good behaviour, inmates at these correction houses were also publicly whipped.Footnote 61 The purpose of these public punishments was ‘to intimidate and deter’.Footnote 62 However, these houses of correction also made people ‘useful to the public’, in that they forced people to make things for the state and the empire.Footnote 63 These practices were mostly depicted distastefully, but their animating spirit – to protect peoples’ liberties by deterring crime, and moulding criminals into becoming orderly citizens after their institutionalization – was generally considered worthy of emulation in Great Britain.
Although these descriptions remained fixed throughout the period discussed here, writers communicated the dynamic nature of the forces that formed the bedrock of Dutch freedom. Institutions like the non-arbitrary government acted as shining advertisements for likeminded, talented people to come and work in the Republic. As Temple put it, the reputation of being a country that safeguarded peoples’ wealth created a virtuous cycle, with the state attracting likeminded foreigners who brought their industriousness with them and therefore contributed to the common wealth.Footnote 64 John Williams, who travelled throughout northern Europe, put this point at length, arguing that the immigrants to the United Provinces sought ‘asylum from oppression and tyranny’, and were ‘animated by the love of liberty’. These immigrants worked doubly hard so that they could regain the wealth that they had sacrificed when they fled from the persecution they suffered in absolutist countries.Footnote 65 The immigration of likeminded people buttressed liberal institutions, which buttressed more immigration; such an analysis informed debates on who and how many immigrants should be allowed into Great Britain.Footnote 66
Overall, the travel writers represented the Dutch state as a major guarantor of peoples’ liberties in general, but particularly the liberties of people who had wealth and who sought the social order to enjoy that wealth in peace. It was true that to pay for the state’s apparatus, Dutch people paid heavy taxes on many things. However, these taxes were gathered in such a way as to underpin, rather than undermine, the freedom that the travel writers hoped to have in Great Britain. Taxes went towards public utilities, rather than corrupt courtiers, and they provided an apparatus that lowered crime, giving the social order that the writers enjoyed so much. The large Leviathan that the English encountered across the sea was a guarantor of a type of liberty that writers admired so immensely and sought, in various ways, to use as a signpost in discussions relevant to the development of the British state.
II
However much travel writers admired Dutch institutions, it was commonly held that very impulse that secured this kind of state also led to its decline. Commentaries on Dutch decline were as present in the seventeenth century as they were in the eighteenth, when it was far from evident that the Dutch state would in fact decline to the extent that it did. This was because the literal, economic decline of the United Provinces was depicted, right from the Republic’s highpoint, as a moral decline triggered by two impulses: disruptive egalitarianism, and a worship of money that displaced true religion. The consequence of these impulses was not just a jealous citizenry ensuring their government did not impoverish them, but more broadly the upending of proper society. Thus, the freedom worn so clearly on Dutch peoples’ sleeves spread and caused its own downfall, in its tendency to degenerate into corruption, anarchy, and licentiousness. This moral narrative was important to the many travel writers who linked Great Britain’s future with the trajectory of its earlier-developed neighbour. Great Britain would follow the anarchic Dutch path if it did not moderate its ‘free’ impulses and defer to the moral institutions that the Dutch had forgotten.
One clear egalitarian impulse stemmed from the United Provinces being a republic. Generally, writers and their assumed readers did not understand the details of Dutch politics. One English tourist quipped that a foreigner could not hope to understand the Dutch system of government, ‘when the natives themselves hold two opinions’.Footnote 67 It was true that constitutional questions periodically divided and upended the United Provinces.Footnote 68 And yet, however much the Dutch system was contested, it was always in some sense a republic, and could therefore be stigmatized for having the faults that were held to characterize all republics. Writers who wrote explicitly from the perspective of being British subjects were consistently pro-stadtholder in their commentaries on Dutch history. This was partly for realpolitik reasons: the stadtholder was historically more engaged in funding land forces to fight France, whereas republican burghers tended to favour funding an anti-English navy.Footnote 69 However, pro-stadtholder writing also revealed fears of republicanism. For one, it was argued that the stadtholder was the closest that the Dutch had to a limiting influence on the inevitable levelling violence that accompanies republican government.Footnote 70 As one writer put it, Dutch history showed that republican government was ‘the pill of anarchy…disguised under the flattering name of Liberty’.Footnote 71 A stadtholder, like any strong executive leader, put a break on the anarchic tendency often found in republics to divide into factions and weakness: writers often represented Dutch division to peak during the country’s stadtholderless periods (1650–72; 1702–47).Footnote 72
The anarchic tendencies of Dutch liberalism were tied deeply to the egalitarianism that ran through Dutch society. It was common to remark how little regard the Dutch appeared to have for social rank. Indeed, a Dutch writer argued that ‘a Kind of Equality’ was ‘natural’ to all ‘Republicks’, meaning that, ‘If in this Land of Liberty the greatest Lord strikes his Servant with a Cane’, the state sided with the servant. Given the cultural antipathy to lords hurting their inferiors, the author had never known the law to be needed.Footnote 73 Another pro-Dutch piece argued that ‘All the Hollanders…love Liberty’, which partially meant that Dutch people across the social spectrum ‘hate nothing more than Pride and Arrogance’, and expected social superiors to ‘drink freely’ with those below them.Footnote 74 A hostile observer agreed, commenting that, ‘the liberty so much boasted here’ mainly allowed ‘a Boor to presume to be saucy to a Burgher, to despise the Nobility, to censure his Masters with Impunity’.Footnote 75 However praised this social egalitarianism was by Dutch authors hoping to attract their English audience, most English writers took a dim view, presenting this levelling tendency as regrettable and dangerous. Richard Lassels, one of the earliest and most influential English travel writers, was afraid that such behaviour could prove contagious. He warned young travellers against mimicking ‘their rude exacting upon Noblemen strangers in their Inns’, and their general ‘clownish hatred of Nobility’.Footnote 76 The bias against the wealthy also meant a few travel guides advised English travellers to dress down. For example, Walter Harris advised readers that if they did not dress as ‘a Man of Quality’, and kept ‘prudent’ and ‘peaceable’, they would receive ‘fair dealing’.Footnote 77 The legal and social freedoms of the poor created a resentful animus that had practical consequences for English travellers.
Another worrying causal factor in shaping the Dutch state, again common to all republics, was the pursuit of money by trade. Samuel Pufendorf, whose influential book on European states was reprinted and read throughout the eighteenth century, argued that ‘the great Liberty’ held by the Dutch was the bulwark of their political economy.Footnote 78 This liberty to trade animated the wealth that underpinned Dutch freedom and drove an anti-noble, egalitarian, democratic impulse. The seventeenth-century polemicist, Owen Felltham, argued that the Dutch monomaniacal pursuit of ‘Money and Liberty’ was conjoined.Footnote 79 As de Pollnitz put it, the main religion of the United Provinces was ‘the acquiring of Riches’, which was more important than ‘Birth, Wit and Merit’. In practice, this meant that the Dutch tortured themselves to ensure they ‘have the Pleasure of dying rich’.Footnote 80 While people busied themselves making money, the churches were so empty that going into one would cause a cold.Footnote 81 Amsterdam’s business districts were perennially full: it was the ‘Beehive of Cities’, where ‘Before the shrine of Gain all knees bow!’Footnote 82 One author was ‘sorry to inform my reader’ that it was essential to agree the price of everything beforehand in the United Provinces, because the Dutch ‘are the most imposing people in the world’.Footnote 83 This valorization of practical, money-making matters over spiritual, moral matters was a warning for a country like Great Britain, which was undergoing its own financial, commercial, and urban revolutions. The United Provinces showed what could happen when this growing trade became valorized over other factors.
Dutch freedom, therefore, was intrinsically related to the freedom of the poor to rail against their natural superiors, and to pursue money above all else. This type of liberty congenitally degenerated into licentiousness, luxury, and decline, which all eighteenth-century states – Great Britain included – could be exposed to. Travel writers had prima facie evidence of this theory, given the decline of the United Provinces that was so apparent to observers throughout the long eighteenth century. However, even in the seventeenth century, when one Dutchman called the United Provinces ‘the most Powerful Republick’ in the world,Footnote 84 and an English statesman called the state ‘the Bulwark of Christendom’,Footnote 85 William Temple forecasted that the United Provinces had ‘past its Meridian’ and entered perennial decline.Footnote 86 It was a commonplace in travel writing to depict Dutch decline.Footnote 87 For example, Grand Tourists passing through Leiden rarely failed to point out how the city had gone from a scholarly and manufacturing hub to an impoverished backwater.Footnote 88 In 1777, John Williams gave the consensus view that the United Provinces had ‘fallen into such insignificancy’, in its economic and geopolitical importance.Footnote 89
Given the obviousness of Dutch decline, a cottage industry explaining that decline grew. These decline narratives were part of a larger fixation, perhaps most associated with Edward Gibbon’s Decline and fall of the Roman empire, of tying luxury, commerce, and decline together.Footnote 90 The impact of Bernard Mandeville’s benign interpretation of luxury and commerce on the history of political thought is undoubted, and was perhaps rooted in his positive experiences in the United Provinces and England.Footnote 91 However, the vast majority of travel writers remained unimpressed with the Mandevillian logic that attached greater freedom to pursue pleasure with prosperity. Particularly, the travel writers’ major and repeated explanation of Dutch decline was rooted in its political economy, with its emphasis on commercial freedom. The link between commerce, luxury, and decline was ironclad: Joseph Shaw thought that ‘of all the Arts their Enemies use to destroy them, none can have so…fatal Success, as the Introduction of Luxury and Debauchery’.Footnote 92 Another drew a direct line between the ‘avarice and selfishness’ taught in the United Provinces as moral values from ‘infancy’, which made the Dutch such a commercial success, and how that commerce ‘tends to soften the manners of mankind…open[ing] the door to all kinds of luxury, fraud, chicanery, and deceit’.Footnote 93 A generally positive Dutch guide conceded that their state was writhe with ‘Luxury [which] is a fatal Disease in the Vitals of a State’. They noted with alarm the growing number of ‘Assemblies, Gaming, Dancing, and fine Clothes…Feasting, Dressing, Balls, &c.’ that were lowering peoples’ ‘Tempers’ and making them ‘grow too soft and delicate’ to live how ‘Divine Providence seems to have designed them’.Footnote 94 This moral decline was partially considered a geographically universal phenomenon, and many writers regarded the Dutch as still being more frugal than their French and English neighbours.Footnote 95
The apparent corruption of the Dutch elite – seduced by the devil-may-care freedom to make money, irrespective of social responsibility – was proof that the Dutch political economy caused its own decline. Joseph Marshall contrasted the English poor, who loved to ‘squander and drink away’, with the ‘very frugal’ Dutch poor.Footnote 96 Given that the Dutch poor had stayed true to their industrious roots, one of Marshall’s interlocutors put the blame for Dutch decline on ‘our merchants’, who had changed their ‘dress, equipage, table, and all family expences’, and had thereby sucked money out of productive investments and into their own vanity.Footnote 97 John Williams noted how it used to be ‘generally observed, that those who were corrupted by their riches, were afterwards much more so by their poverty’. The United Provinces saw ‘a torrent of luxury and extravagance’, where Dutch ladies lost their families’ estates in one night at cards.Footnote 98 Thomas Nugent used the incursion of French manners and customs as a proxy to show the extent to which Dutch elites had been corrupted.Footnote 99 In these practices, Dutch elites were shown to abuse the freedom that was intrinsic to being a commercial republic: their openness to the cosmopolitan pull of France (in contrast to the poor, who remained rooted in national frugality) encouraged the extravagant lifestyle that was an inevitable consequence of the monomania for money. Ironically, this consumption was causing the decline of that capacity to make money.
As well as showing how the poor felt empowered to attack the rich, the freedom of Dutch women was also seen as a potent example of how Dutch liberty was leading to degeneracy in the state. Dutch women were more engaged in trade than women of other nationalities,Footnote 100 and tourists often noticed. Married Dutch women were often presented in a morally positive light.Footnote 101 However, the topsy-turvy structure of the Dutch household, which allowed women freedom to leave their domestic space and even make financial decisions, alarmed English writers. One piece wrote mockingly of how Dutch women were the ‘Head of the Husband’.Footnote 102 William Montague highlighted the role reversal of the sexes from their supposedly natural places, in that ‘Women are found in the Shops and Business’ with ‘the Conduct of the Purse and Commerce’, while ‘The Men take all the Pleasure.’ Specifically, while the men gambled and drank, ‘the good Wife’ earned the money for him to spend.Footnote 103 Montague was typical when he praised the women on a personal level for keeping their husbands afloat, but condemned the family and economic structure that allowed them to be praiseworthy: far better was it to have the concrete gender roles that were so attacked by the social and political changes engendered by the Dutch state’s liberality.
Nowhere was Dutch liberty shown to degenerate into licentiousness more than in the country’s many licensed brothels, which most Grand Tourists found the time to visit. These trips filled a familiar pattern: the tourist entered the brothel, was repulsed, then lamented that the Dutch state allowed such sexual freedom. William Montague reported that the Dutch magistrates justified places like the ‘filthy’ ‘nasty common Bawdy-House’ he visited because they were said to ‘prevent worse Things, Violations, Rapes, &c.’, especially given how many visitors were ‘Strangers, Travellers, and Mariners, long absent from Women’.Footnote 104 He was not convinced. The moral absolute – that sexual encounters could not be economic transactions – was at the heart of his and others’ repulsion. Isaiah Thomas visited a state-licensed brothel and claimed he could not ‘endure the sight five minutes’, drinking wine that tasted like vinegar and looking at the ‘forty or fifty’ ‘devoted wretches seated round the room’, who looked like ‘painted dolls’. He compared the place to ‘a butcher’s slaughter house’.Footnote 105 This analogy cemented the image of something that was supposed to be sacred being turned into a commercial exchange. Henry Peckham simply commented that ‘It is as morally evil to license fornication, as it is politically so to shut up for life women’ who were being denied the chance to become ‘fruitful members of society’.Footnote 106 Money corrupted even those responsible for rehousing and rehabilitating prostitutes. Thomas Nugent claimed he saw men pay to encounter Dutch prostitutes under the care of the state, thus showing how ‘a trifle of money’ was the ‘Dutch god’.Footnote 107 Nugent pithily drew the English travel writers’ critique of Dutch freedom full circle: the levelling logic of Dutch freedom, which allowed no moral barrier other than what could be spent, had produced the degeneration of the Dutch people to such an extent that the state was prostituting women in its care.
The licensed brothel was a synecdoche of the excesses of Dutch liberty. Without social rank, religion, and clear boundaries, the United Provinces had become an amoral state that pursued luxury and money above all else. A state that levied taxes and imposed obligations on everyone, whether rich or poor, was efficient, but it could only exist in a republican society.Footnote 108 A Dutch history warned how quickly liberty of speech and conscience could descend into ‘Licentiousness’, but argued that the United Provinces was not yet at that point.Footnote 109 Travel writers repeatedly begged to differ. Dutch freedoms that empowered the state derived from social forces that caused chaos, immorality, and decline. To many writers, this depiction of freedom was alarmingly relevant to Great Britain because the United Provinces’ supposed spiritual and economic ailments were caused by a kind of political economy that Great Britain at least in part shared. Both economies were increasingly commercial, maritime, and urban; both had parliamentary governments, and both allowed a degree of religious heterogeneity. The main difference was that the United Provinces was depicted as further along these paths than Great Britain. The moral was clear: if the British continued on the trajectory of their Dutch neighbours, they too would inevitably suffer these maladies.
III
There were limits to the extent to which the Dutch and English could be depicted as close analogies. Travel guides generally began with a climatically deterministic account of how their subject’s society and politics came about,Footnote 110 and travel writing on the Dutch was no different.Footnote 111 One guide wrote that ‘the vapours’ and the ‘low, moist, and boggy’ earth altered ‘the minds of the inhabitants’.Footnote 112 The breathing of so much bad air – Owen Felltham polemically called the United Provinces ‘the Great Bog of Europe’Footnote 113 – turned the Dutch into ‘amphibious Creature[s]’.Footnote 114 It was this suffusion with wet, cold air that differentiated a Dutch person from anybody else, and therefore limited the universal applicability of their politics.
However, this Otherness only went so far. The earnest establishing of boundaries belied the subversiveness of the authors’ subject-matter: to plausibly present their analysis as a comfortable hetero-image, as something to contrast with Great Britain. But behind the climatic descriptions and guffawing at different cultural practices, there was the clear supposition that there were deep commonalities between the Dutch and the English. These commonalities were informed by centuries of transnational exchange and interaction, and put the two states in such close proximity that the boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ became porous enough to allow travel writing to lapse into social and political commentaries that were applicable to states on both sides of the North Sea.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is a good example of how a well-trodden traveller, who often clearly demarked foreigners as an Other, would treat the United Provinces with sympathy and nuance. In Montagu’s telling, the United Provinces was to be admired and emulated as a practical comparison with England. When she framed Rotterdam in almost utopian terms,Footnote 115 she wrote of ‘a new scene of pleasure’, made up of well-paved streets, beautiful houses, and well-stocked shops.Footnote 116 These were legitimate aspirations in any ‘free country’. Other English tourists marvelled at the availability of exotic fruit,Footnote 117 and the punctuality of the boat transit system,Footnote 118 but always from the perspective of commonality: this was not a description of a fantasy land, of no consequence to their readers’ domestic political world, but of a peer country that was undergoing similar social and political changes to those encountered in Great Britain.
These guides described a country on a similar path to Great Britain’s. Of course, it was not the case that every writer repeated an identical mantra on every issue that arose when travelling United Provinces. Writers took differing views on issues like religious toleration (although most used their experiences as evidence for more toleration of Protestant dissenters),Footnote 119 and they wrote for different niches and purposes. For example, Charles Burney travelled to study Dutch music, Cornelius Cayley to show Dutch ‘sentiments’, Thomas Bowdler to represent Dutch politics, and William Carr sought to bring anything forward that might ‘contribute to the common Good of Human Society and Civil Life’.Footnote 120 However, as has been shown, these distinctions are dwarfed by the extent to which they borrowed stories, tropes, and whole paragraphs on their subjects. Travel writers’ strong tendencies to repeat tropes meant that the ideas they produced – such as how the Dutch were free – were remarkably durable and cohesive, amounting to centuries-strong images that survived the hurly-burly of eighteenth-century geopolitics. In so doing, these texts formed a powerful current of comparative socio-politics and transcended in both scope and scale our understanding of both British identity formation as something implacably against an Other, and of traditional English articulations of liberty as Whiggish advocacies of the ancient constitution and contract theory. When the United Provinces collapsed in 1795, so too did a leitmotif that was so useful to one of the most important questions facing contemporary Britons: what it meant to be free.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor, Dr John Gallagher, for their very helpful suggestions in the revising of this article. I am also grateful to Prof. Tony Claydon, Dr Paul Stock, Dr Tim Hochstrasser, and Dr Hugo Bromley for commenting on earlier drafts.
