1849 - Willem III
The final separation of the kingdom of the Netherlands into the kingdoms of Holland and of Belgium was not formally and entirely consummated until 1839. The next year William I abdicated in favor of his eldest son, and three years later his death occurred in Berlin, where he had retired. His abdication was not a matter of regret to the Dutch people, as, during the nine years pending the treaty of separation, his actions, totally lacking as they were in dignity, had put him in disfavor both with the Dutch and the Belgians. The accession of his son, who was inaugurated as William II, was therefore a happy change for the people. This prince, cosmopolitan in his education and having a soldier's record, won the love of his people. He made a decided change for the better in the finances of the country, improved the commerce and added to its freedom, by his concessions to the revolutionary fever which in 1848 spread from France throughout Europe.
When King William II died at Breda, in March 1849, a remarkable prince of Orange had passed away — a man of singular purpose and force of character. A born soldier, he had developed, upon Wellington's battle-fields in the peninsula, in the Pyrenees, and around Waterloo, some rare tactical gifts, and a personal valor which commanded the admiration and the lifelong friendship of the Iron Duke himself; and he enjoyed a popularity, both in Holland and in Belgium, which survived even after the Belgians had risen against the unwise and intolerant rule of King William I, which the narrow-minded congress of Vienna had imposed upon them.
But Willem III - the second King William of Holland was not a politician. He showed his lack of political wisdom in acting diametrically against the positive instructions of his royal father, who had sent him to the south with a mission which he openly ignored by issuing a manifesto to the Belgians in which he professed to recognise their independence. The king immediately repudiated that manifesto, which, without adding to his son's popularity in the southern Netherlands, seriously jeopardised his prestige and prospects in the north. Indeed, the wrath of the Dutch people, then highly incensed at what they branded as Belgian treason, became so violent that it was publicly proposed to exclude him from the throne.
Nor was his conduct in London, whither his father sent him on another political mission, which proved as futile as his previous errand to obtain the hand of Princess Charlotte had been, calculated to regain for him the hold he had lost upon his future Dutch subjects. Not even the brilliant military campaign which he undertook in Belgium at the head of the Dutch army could, fruitless as it turned out to be, entirely restore confidence in him. So when King William II ascended the throne of Holland on the abdication of his father in 1840, his position could hardly be called satisfactory or secure.
Peace with Belgium had, it is true, at last been made, but that more or less beneficial settlement of the Dutch crisis abroad was perhaps more than counterbalanced by threatening internal complications. The finances had become disordered, if not critical, in consequence of the Belgian troubles; taxes had been rapidly increasing, and with them popular discontent and disgust against a regime which failed to grasp the fact that the flimsy reforms, grudgingly bestowed in 1840, were wholly unavailing to stem the current of national feeling which set in stronger and swifter as the fateful year 1848 approached.
A wise and statesman-like ruler would not have resisted the popular demand for a thorough remodelling of Holland's constitution upon an enlightened basis so long as King William II did. But he was a soldier, not a statesman. Married to Anna Paulovna, a Russian grandduchess, he seemed to have abandoned the liberal traditions of his predecessors and of his people for the autocratic tendencies of Muscovite rule.
For eight years the king withstood the efforts of the Dutch reform party, who in Jan Rudolf Thorbecke, the foremost statesman of Holland in the nineteenth century — and "too great a man for so small a country" (as a British statesman is said to have characterised him) — had found a leader and a soul. Already in 1844 Thorbecke, with eight other members of the Dutch chamber, had elaborated a reform bill. Thorbecke, a student, afterwards a professor in the law faculty of Leyden University, was strongly supported by the vast mass of his educated and enlightened countrymen, then mostly unrepresented in the legislature.
Yet for a time all his endeavors were baffled by the powerful court party, and Thorbecke even failed to obtain re-election as a member of the second chamber in 1846. His time, however, was coming rapidly. In 1847 serious riots occurred at various places, even at the Hague, and notably at Groningen. The king at last saw the danger of further delay, and, prompted maybe by the warnings of coming crisis all over Europe, he promised reforms when opening the states-general in the autumn of the same year.
There is no doubt that this timely resolve warded off from Holland the threatening revolution which had broken out in neighboring states. In March, 1848, a royal commission was appointed to elaborate a new constitution. Of that royal commission Thorbecke was much more than a member. The commission was virtually his commission, and the project it presented to the king, his life-work. Its main features having been fully discussed and accepted beforehand, its progress was swift. In October following it became law, and an interim cabinet was appointed to carry out its provisions.
