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LordTempest

Starmtrooper for hire
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May 14, 2009
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Foreword and Acknowledgements:

Foreword by Mr. Batavus Droogstoppel: Coffee Broker and Patron of this fine work.
Acknowledgements:

Prologue:

The Eve of the Revolution
The Belgian Revolution:
Two Conferences and an Assassination

Chapter One: The Dutch War of Unification

Part One
Part Two

Chapter Two: The Aftermath

The Political
The Colonial

Chapter Three: Coronation

Part One
Part Two

Chapter Four:

In the Footsteps of Napoleon
The Dismissal

Elections:

1840 (Campaign)
1840 (Exit Polls)
1840 (Results)
1844 (Background)
1844 (Campaign and Polls)
1844 (Results)



 
Last edited:
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To those who do not know, I am a coffee broker and I live at No. 37 Lauriergracht in Amsterdam. To those who know me, or whom have read The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company – which I helped write and publish, being a coffee broker with twenty years experience on the commodities exchange I had some knowledge of the subject - will know, I have little time for novels because they are filled with lies and falsehoods and things which never did happen nor likely ever could happen. Sometimes I wonder what the purpose of novels and poems and other such things is apart from the spreading of slander and lies and falsehoods – I think people would be much better served if they stuck to reading the Holy Scriptures and factual works and nothing else. I mean, If you happened to be a coffee broker like me – I am a coffee broker at the firm Last & Co., the Co. being myself ever since the Meyers moved out of the business some years ago and Last being my father-in-law, and I live at No. 37 Lauriergracht in Amsterdam, I have over twenty years experience working at the commodities exchange – and I happened to make a statement on the subject of coffee which contained but a tiny fraction of all the lies and falsehoods contained in all the poems or novels ever published, you would surely take your business elsewhere, to Busselinck and Wasserman even – to those who do not know, they are a most unscrupulous coffee brokerage firm; I am qualified to say this for I have over twenty years experience working at the commodities exchange.

Therefore it makes perfect sense – as I am a coffee broker and not an author or poet – that my next book – which I have commissioned because there are too many lies and falsehoods in the history curriculum today, for instance: that Fernando Álvarez was in fact an infant-eating cannibal was opposed to an infant eating cannibal who also impaled puppies on pikes for fun, or that Willem the Silent really never did speak a word; rubbish I say! The Dutch people grew prosperous because they worked hard and kept to themselves and followed the true Calvinist faith, that is the only reason! – should be a factual work rather than a novel, and that it should be written by someone other than myself – since I am a coffee broker with over twenty years experience at the commodities exchange and not an author or poet, who are usually liars anyway – and that it should be a history of Holland, for there are far too many lies and falsehoods in the history curriculum these days; I think people should stick to the Holy Scriptures and factual works and nothing else. I couldn't ask that damned Scarfman to write it – he has caused enough sensation with his last book, I always knew he would be trouble – so instead I asked Stern if he would; he is a German and a Lutheran who works for me at Last & Co. Coffee Brokers, 37 Lauriergracht, Amsterdam. He also helped me with my last book, which thanks to Scarfman's mischief caused so much sensation.

There are some who may think that my motivation derives from the fact that Busselinck and Wasserman – who are a most unscrupulous coffee brokerage firm one should under no circumstances do business with – have commissioned their own, unfinished, History of Holland, starting with the reign of our King Frederik I. That is not true, for what Busselinck and Wasserman does is of no business of mine – for I am a scrupulous coffee broker with over twenty years experience at the commodities exchange, unlike Busselinck or Wasserman, whom both I suspect are in fact German and therefore Lutheran heretics. However I do find it an outrage that they should commission a history of Holland to be written by an Englishman no less, who undoubtedly is either an Anglican heretic or a Lutheran heretic or some other kind of heretic, and that said history should be filled with so many lies and falsehoods about our country! I've never read the book myself, for I do not read books apart from the Holy Scriptures for they tend to be filled with lies and falsehoods, but I am certain that it is filled to the brim with nothing but lies for it is written by a foreign heretic and commissioned by Busselinck and Wasserman, who are an unreliable firm; this I know because I have had over twenty years experience working at the commodities exchange. Besides, the author can't even speak Dutch! I heard that he had to rely on some kind of fanciful, steam-powered translation device in order to come up with a title, and even then it wasn't even in proper Dutch! This proves that machines are prone to telling lies and falsehoods, and are therefore not to be trusted – like Busselinck and Wasserman, who are German foreigners and therefore Lutheran heretics.

For my history – well it is not really mine because I am a coffee broker with over twenty years experience at the commodities exchange and not an author spinning lies and causing a commotion like that damned Scarfman – I have ensured that only facts and the truth shall be told, and have asked Stern, who is the author and also a German and a Lutheran who works for me at Last & Co. Coffee Brokers, 37 Lauriergracht, Amsterdam, to add some of information about the coffee trade so that you the reader shall get your money's worth out of your purchase. Apart from that, my contribution to this history which you are now reading shall be confined to this foreword, which Stern has asked me to write, for I am a busy man and do not have enough time to contribute further.

Batavus Droogstoppel,
Last & Co. Coffee Brokers
37 Lauriergracht, Amsterdam.



Note:

To those who do not know, Batavus Droogstoppel is a fictional character from Dutch author Eduard Dekker's famous novel: Max Havelaar; which was widely credited with bringing to an end the oppressive Cultuurstelsel or Cultivation System, which caused widespread famine in the Dutch East Indies. Droogstoppel is very much a caricature (in fact the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Max Havelaar names him as the most famous caricature in Dutch literary history) of a particular type of Dutchman, bigoted, selfish and above all boring (“dry as dust”) and concerned only with his career, his faith and of course, himself. This explains his rather idiosyncratic use of language. Stern, the “author” of this AAR is also fictional while “Scarfman” and Max Havelaar are both said to have been based on Eduard Dekker himself. In this odd parallel universe where both Dekker and his creations coexist, “Scarfman” and Eduard Dekker can be considered to be identical persons. The other history commissioned by Busselinck and Wasserman is of course, a reference to my first (and forever unfinished) AAR, of which the present AAR can be considered a remake of.

 
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This history has been a work over six decades in the making. It has been a labour of love, and indeed I have laboured over it for many hours at my desk until its completion now, when I am in the twilight stage of my life. I must confess that this labour has not been a bore – far from it in fact – for it has led me to places I would have never dreamed of visiting and people who I, as a mere humble commoner, could never have dreamt of meeting, let alone interviewing and in some special cases, befriending. It is to these people, the titans of their day, to whom I owe thanks and bear tribute to in these opening paragraphs.

First and foremost I must thank the late Mr. B. Droogstoppel, my former employer, for suggesting that such a history should be written and that I should be the one to write it. Though I regret that he did not live long enough to see its completion, I hope that he would ultimately be pleased with the end result. The foreword he penned decades ago still graces the first pages of this work as a tribute to his enduring kindness and patience. Secondly, special tribute must be paid to my late mentor and friend, Eduard Dekker, who had suffered much and to whom this work is dedicated to. I am – quite literally – the man I am today because of him and it is to his standard and example I aspired and continue to aspire to. Thirdly I must offer special thanks to my predecessor as Rector of Leiden University, the late Lord Thorbecke and HRH King Frederik I for consenting to be interviewed in my native tongue, German, in which they were both fluent. The personal insights of these two men, who for much of our recent history lived their lives at the very centre of Holland's affairs would be an invaluable tool for any historian and I am most grateful to have met and interviewed both of them, and even more so to have been entrusted with the honour and duty of custodian of their papers in the Royal and Prime Ministerial archives at Leiden University.

There are others too to whom I owe thanks, in particular I'd like to mention the late Lord Mackay whose first-hand knowledge of the founding and history of the ARP proved invaluable and who graciously read and re-read many of my early drafts of this text and also corrected many errors in the English translation at a time when my grasp of the language was less than fluent. The late Rev. Abraham Kupyer helped shore up any gaps in Lord Mackay's knowledge, while the late Jan and Theodorus Heemskerk proved to be valuable sources for Holland's more recent political history. Regardless of what one may think of their politics, Messrs. Colijn and de Geer were also useful in this regard. President of the House, Mr. de Beerenbrouck, helped fill in the gaps of my knowledge of Holland's Catholic minority while Mr. Metdepenningen did the same for my knowledge of the plight of the Orangists in the former Kingdom of Belgium, and of the people of Vlaanderen in general. The late Lord van Prinsterer perhaps possessed more knowledge about the low countries than anyone else I've ever met, and graciously offered to help with the early drafts on the Batavian Republic and revolutionary years, and also served as a useful counterweight to Lord Thorbecke's arguments. Messrs. De Meester and Cort van der Linden offered many suggestions from a Liberal perspective, while Mr. Van Tienhoven's years of experience in the cut and thrust world of Amsterdam politics was a proverbial gold mine and the late Lord Rocchusen's vast knowledge of statecraft also proved to be far too valuable for words. Mr. Ernest Dekker provided a most unique insight into Dutch rule in the East Indies from the point of view of both the Dutch and the Javanese and was kind enough to entertain me during my four weeks in Batavia while Mr. L. Botha and Mr. J.C. Smuts were a great help in explaining to me the situation in Africa and the colonies. I'd also like to thank the late Mr. Paul Kruger for finding a few precious minutes of his time for an interview during his brief yet very busy visit to The Netherlands thirty-odd years ago.

For this history I have gone to great lengths to seek foreign perspectives of our country. If there is any criticism I can level at my predecessors, it is that their histories were far too Hollandocentric – this may sound like an odd critcism for what are essentially histories of Holland, but in this day and age where Holland is counted amongst the great powers of the world, where so many of the world's foremost scientists, artists, writers and statesmen hail from Holland and where Holland seems all to often to be at the centre of world events, such a view strikes me as hopelessly insular and archaic. As Holland shapes the world, so shall the world shape Holland.

Both the late Fürst von Bismarck and the late Earl of Beaconsfield together in my sessions with them provided a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom (and in the latter's case, much wit also) and made for two of the most scintilating experiences of my long and happy life. To both of them I offer my most sincere and profound thanks. The late Mr. W.E. Gladstone was most helpful in sharing with me his reminsices of Thorbecke and other Liberal Dutch statesmen and in shedding some light over the enigma that was Lord Palmerston, the bete-noire of Dutch foreign policy for successive Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries for much of the mid-19th Century, while the Most Honourable Lord Tokugawa Yoshinobu did much to enlighten me about a relationship between our two respective countries which has existed for almost four centuries, and of Holland's relationship with the Orient in general. I must also offer my thanks to the countless others I have interviewed no matter how briefly, including: The late Earl of Oxford and Asquith, the late Prinz Maximillian von Baden, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, the late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Mr. W.S. Churchill, the late Monsieur G. Clemenceau, the late Marquess Curzon, the late Mr. Friedrich Ebert, HM Sultan Hamengkubuwono VIII, the late FM Paul von Hindenburg, Mr. Billy Hughes, HIM Emperor Karl I, Mr. W.L.M. King, Mr. Mustafa Kemal, the late Mr. Wilifred Laurier, the late Mr. Leung Kai Chiu, Monsieur Pierre Leval, Mr I.E. Pasha, Mr. F.D. Roosevelt, the late Mr. T. Roosevelt, HM Emperor Haile Selassie I, the late Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the late Mr. Woodrow Wilson. My sincere apologies to anyone whose names I have forgotten to mention.

Prof. Ludwig Stern,
Leiden University
1936


 
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With the natural exception of France, the Napoleonic Wars caused more turmoil in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands than in any other country in Europe. We Nederlanders were perhaps spared the widespread devestation bore by say Russia, but nevertheless families and households were divided: brother fought against brother and son fought against father, and all for the sake of competing ideologies: Monarchism against Republicanism; Calvinism against Catholicism; Dutch Patriotism against Francophilia; Orangism against Bonapartism. Geographically as well as politically and socially, the Dutch state was torn up, spat out and shook from its very foundations. North-South conflict, hitherto something of a rare phenomena in this country, was exaserbated by the territorial divisions thrust upon the Netherlands by the invading French: The predominately Catholic south spent much of the war chaffing under the weight of Parisian direct rule, and for the first time since the days of the Habsburgs found themselves subjects to Catholic masters. In the far south of the country – Wallonia -- the effect of French direct rule was even more dramatic. Predominately Francophone, many Walloons felt more at home with their new French masters than with their own countrymen in Amsterdam or Brussels. This of course would have a profound impact on events to come.

Far from the relatively stable political situation in the south, the North swung violently like a pendulum caught in a tempest. Holland has a stronger liberal and republican tradition than any other existing european state -- with the notable exception of Switzerland -- but the French strain of the republican virus was a particularly virulent one and it introduced elements of revolutionary culture, such as the guillotine, and political concepts like the rule of the mob and the so-called “reign of terror” which had hitherto been considered alien to the Dutch mind. The Batavian Republic was a black stain on our history, as black or even blacker I dare say than our mistreatment of the Javanese and other peoples of the East Indies prior to the establishment of the Ethische Politie, because unlike that stain, which was an injustice borne of ignorance and was corrected swiftly once the public became aware of the realities of the situation, the Batavian Republic had mass public and press support both before its establishment and for the duration of its short existence. The Dutch people had decided en masse to surrender their pride, their faith and their national identity to a foreign power, and in the process to prostitute themselves to the invading French in the manner one would expect from a common whore. This is not the way the citizens of a great nation like the Netherlands should behave.

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Dutch militiamen similar to the platoon of conscripts shown above were instrumental in the establishment and defence of the Batavian Republic. The fact that so many Dutchmen enlisted voluntarily illustrates the degree of popular support collaboration had amongst Hollanders, irrespective of first language or religious faith.

The situation grew further complicated with the dissulusion of the revolutionary government by Napoleon and establishment of the Bonapartist Kingdom of Holland – technically the first de jure monarchy to govern the province since the days of the foreign Hapsburgs -- in its place. Louis Napoleon was an odd king, and one who certainly defied the expectations his brother and others had placed on him. He did not behave as one would expect the puppet king of a French client state to behave; a French viceroy; Napoleon's man in The Hague. These things he most definitely was not. From the very start, King Lodewijk (as he styled himself) showed an independence and desire to fight in his subject's corner that was both courageous and admirable. He learned the Dutch language, styled himself in the Dutch manner and even identified culturally as a Dutchman rather than a Frenchman or Corsican. These attitudes did nothing but endear him to his subjects and enrage public opinion in the French capital, and his brother Napoleon soon saw to his removal after a botched invasion by the British. In football terms this would surely be classed as an own goal, one of Bonaparte's lesser known tactical blunders, for appointing Lodewijk as King of Holland was a brilliant propaganda coup for the Dutch Bonapartistsm, and planted seeds for the eruption of Bonapartist sentiment which would occur across the country in the years to come, long after Napoleon himself had been removed from power.

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One of history's oddities, King Lodewijk's willingness to put the interests of his adopted nation ahead of those of his homeland or his brother led to his forced abdication and the establishment of direct rule from Paris in the hitherto “independent” northern parts of the country. His legacy most notably included the founding of a de jure “Dutch” monarchy and the abolition of slavery.[1]

The Oranje Restoration:

Following the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte at to the isle of Elba, the Great Powers of Europe saw to the restoration of the House of Oranje as heads of state of the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the Congress of Wien. Stadthoulder Willem VI became King Willem I, the first ever Dutch-born titular King of the Netherlands and the nation long divided did unite; on paper that is.

As mentioned, the seething tensions caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the French occupation did not go the way of their instigators, instead they began to simmer and fester like a boil under the skin of the nation's consciousness. Willem inherited a nation united, but a people divided; by religion; by ideology; by language – if he wanted the nation to remain united, he had no choice but to act swiftly and decisively, which he did with gusto. In order to stabilise the country, King Willem proclaimed an “emergency” constitution, one so autocratic it would make even the Russian Tsar squirm and fluster. The people to their credit – the liberals among them included – saw the oppressive constitution as an immediate necessity, something that had to be put up with for the time being in order to rebuild the nation after the upheavals of the past fifteen to twenty years. King Willem unfortunately did not see it that way.

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Lord Acton once famously remarked that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." His dictum can certainly be applied to the dictatorial reign of King Willem I.

King Willem's autocratic style, and his persistence in maintaining what should have been a temporary constitutiuonal measure for a good fifteen years did little to endear him to his subjects. Unfavourable comparisons were made between King Willem and his predecessor, and there was a yearning – particularly in Amsterdam and in the south – for the days of “Good King Lodewijk.” Nostalgia as so often is the case soon turned to discontent, and marches and demonstrations soon began to spring up throughout the country against the House of Oranje and in favour of the Bonapartists or a republic. These protests ultimately and unfortunately proved counter-productive, and served to do nothing but prolong a state of crisis and therefore stiffen King Willem's resolve. This in turn stiffened the resolve of the Bonapartists and Republicans, resulting in a vicious cycle of bitterness and discontent.

Remembering the example of Willem's father, the equally autocratic last Stadthoulder, Willem V, King Willem's advisors urged him to take swift and drastic action once more, but this time to liberalise the constitution and introduce limited electons in order to stem the flowing revolutionary tide. King Willem acquiesed, and in the winter of 1829 the first elections to the Staten-Generaal[2] in thirty years were held right across the country (but not in any of the colonies outside The Netherlands.) As political parties were technically illegal in The Netherlands in those days, all candidates were nominally independents. Candidates were however allowed to label themselves as either Revolutionaire (Revolutionary) or Anti-Revolutionaire, (Anti-Revolutionary) principally because there was no law which explicitly forbade such a practice. We can therefore see the Revolutionaries and Anti-Revolutionaries as factions, or proto-parties; the harbingers of party politics in The Netherlands.[3]

As one might be able to guess from these labels, the Revolutionaries were a loose coalition of radicals, republicans, Catholics, Bonapartists, Belgian nationalists (in the south) and Francophones. The Revolutionaries identified themselves by wearing light yellow or sea green ribbons and cockades in the north, and yellow, black and/or red, (those of the former United States of Belgium[4]) or blue and red and/or white (the colours of the French revolutionaries) in the south. Blue, white and red were less popular amongst revolutionaries in the north outside of Amsterdam due to their Francophone or royalist connotations, while Amsterdam revolutionaries (typically either Bonapartists or pro-Batavian republicans) wore a sea green ribbon with a red, white and blue cockade in honour of the late French client states in Holland.

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A Walloon sans-culotte campaigns for the Revolutionaries in Charleroi. Though only the wealthy middle and upper classes had the vote in 1829, the poorer classes throughout The Netherlands took a great interest in the election, especially in the southern and urban parts of the country. Note the blue, white and red cockade and the tricolour this man is carrying: black, yellow and red; the colours of Belgium.

The Anti-revolutionaries were an even looser coalition than their leftist counterparts, combining monarchists and anti-Bonapartists of all political stripes and persuasions: from ultra-conservative Calvinists to Unionist Catholics; reactionaries; conservatives; liberals – even one or two radicals. It may come as quite a shock to modern ears to hear that men like Thorbecke and Schimmelpenninck
were first elected as candidates under the Anti-Revolutionary label – it is important therefore to remember that the Anti-Revolutionaries at this point in time were a very broad church indeed, and not quite the fundamentalist, ultra-conservative party they would soon evolve into in the years to come.

Anti-Revolutionaries almost universally favoured colour purple or blue in the north, while orange was the preferred colour in the south, where Orangists made up the ARP's prime constituency. Anti-Revolutionaries shunned cockades, which they viewed as too Francophone and Revolutionary and instead favoured wearing rosettes as the primary means of identifying one another.

Unlike general elections elsewhere in Europe and the first world, Dutch elections were rarely dull, apathetic affairs and attracted a great deal of attention and enthusiasm from the Dutch public; voters or not. Turnout, both of voters and of candidates, was often high and walkovers were almost unheard of – this surely was a reflection of the high level of civic pride the Dutch people placed on their democratic institutions. Perhaps in a perverse way, having their liberties deprived from them for so long: first by the Spaniards; then the Austrians; the French and finally; their fellow Dutchmen, helped to build this high level of trust. Sadly, that trust back in the winter of 1829 proved to be misplaced, as once the results of the election were in it became obvious to anyone who even vaguely knew the King's mind that hey would not stand. In those days before opinion polling, the result once announced came as quite a shock and especially to those residing in the Koninklijk Paleis.

results1829_zpsf0c98d24.png

Results of the 1829 Dutch general election. The first such election in thirty years, the shock success of the Revolutionaries caused a sensation across the country while King Willem's actions in the aftermath of the election would live forever in the Dutch collective consciousness as a moment of despotic tyranny worthy of the most oblivious and uncaring of Russian Tsars. Never before or since has a Dutch monarch been so ignorant of the needs and desires of his subjects.

King Willem was outraged, to say the least. What started out as an election to determine the makeup of the Tweede Kamer had morphed into a referendum on his leadership, and a shocking one third of the population had voted against him (tame as this may sound to modern ears with experience of modern elections, a result as low as ten percent for the Revolutionaries would likely have been seen as a rebuff in 1829.) To make matters worse, in Vlaanderen and Wallonia the Revolutionaries had won a plurality of both votes and seats. Willem saw his divine right as King insulted and his nation threatened from the inside, and therefore acted accordingly: the results were declared null and void by a royal edict (which the King was well within his rights to do according to the old constitution.) and the Tweede Kamer was dissolved indefinitely. King Willem had acted from his gut rather than from his head, and the results would prove catastrophically counter-productive, and catastrophic for the people of the country as well.

Now it was the turn of the proletariat and bourgeoise to be outraged by the actions of the King. Peaceful demonstrations soon turned to riots and in the south, where the Revolutionaries were in the majority as far as votes and seats were concerned, there was open talk of seccession in the bars and coffee houses of the major cities. A revolutionary citizen's millita was founded on the Batavian Republic model in Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi with the intention of “defending the people's liberty by force from the oppression of the foreign tyrant” to quote from one such revolutionary leaflet; hundreds of men signed up. Cooler heads in Amsterdam prevailed however briefly, and the repeal of restrictive language laws early in 1830 earned the country a respite; a brief respite, from turmoil and civil war. It would not last for very long, and on the night after the King's birthday in a quiet little opera house[5] in Brussels, an opera was performed... one which would change the future of the Low Countries forever.

belgianrevolution_zps4ca20cfb.png


Notes:

[1] The abolition of slavery in The Netherlands actually occured during the period of French direct rule, if I recall correctly.

[2] The Staten-Generaal is the collective term given to both houses of the Dutch parliament, known as the Eerste Kamer (First Chamber, or the upper house) and the Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, or the lower house.)

[3] Like much of this prologue, the Revolutionaries are entirely fictional and only exist to help form an interesting back-story to the Belgian Revolution and perhaps also as to how the ARP got their name. The Anti-Revolutionaire Partij (ARP) was a real political party -- the first political party founded in The Netherlands – which existed from 1879 to 1980, when it merged (along with the Christian Historical Union and the Catholic Party) into the once-dominant Christian Democratic Appeal, or CDA. The real-life ARP was an ultra-conservative, Calvinist, fundamentalist party which supported verzuiling or religious-based segregation and the rejection of the ideals of the French revolution, hence its name. In Vicky terms it would probably be better classed as reactionary than anarcho-liberal (which is the ideology the party is classified under in the vanilla game) and I have modded the party in-game to reflect that. As Professor Stern mentions above, this current “broad church” ARP bears little resemblance to the party it will become in future updates, which will be much closer to the real-life ARP in terms of membership and ideology.

[4] A short-lived rebel state which revolted against Austrian Hapsburg rule in early 1790, and was disestablished later that year.

[5] la Monnaie , the National Theatre of Belgium, can hardly be considered a quiet little theatre, but it was here on August 25th 1830 that the Belgian Revolution started, inspired no doubt by the performance of a patriotic opera.

 
Wonderful. Truly wonderful, and I'm anaspeptic to have not found my way here sooner. I couldn't read the Foreword for laughing ;)

I'm really looking forward to this. Colour me subscribed.
 
Hooray for the Reboot of Onze Plaats an der Son. :)

Also hooray for the fact that this is my 1,000 post! :D
 
Hooray for the Reboot of Onze Plaats an der Son. :)

Also hooray for the fact that this is my 1,000 post! :D

Gratz on the 1,000th post, and usually I don't like reboots/remakes of AAR's but because of the quality of Tanzhengs writing I am definitely making an exception haha.
 
Leviathan123: We AAR writers all long to hear praise like that! The good thing about AAR remakes is that since each game plays a little differently, even if one tries to do everything exactly the same as one did the first time, the AAR may end up radically different to the original - it's like a fresh new experience each time!

My first AAR was also probably my most popular and most successful one, but to be perfectly honest I don't think it ages very well. I remember the great Rens himself made a comment about it at the time calling it a little "rough" or something like that, and I think after giving some of the earlier chapters a bit of a re-read what he said rings true. It does lack cohesion at times, and the early chapters especially lack polish. Apart from the fact it was never finished due to savegame issues, and the fact I love Vicky II that was my main motivation for writing this remake.

Oh and BTW, are you the forumite formerly known as Leviathan07?

DensleyBlair: Well naturally I'm absolutely frasmotic and compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulations. Always a pleasure to have you following, it just wouldn't be the same without you! Nice to hear also that at least one person got the foreword!

HoI2Geek: Ah, a veteran from the first AAR! (though I think leviathan may have been there also) Hooray!

This update is the second of three prologues, after that we'll get stuck in to the game itself. I have done a bit of modding: (fortunately the powers that be at Paradox have seen the logic in giving the nation that invented the stock exchange two centuries before the game's start date the stock exchange tech - so i don't have to add any additional techs) the (mostly fictional anyway) political parties have been completely overhauled as usual, and there have been one or two tweaks to the geopolitical situation which you'll find out about in the next update (I won't want to spoil anything...) to better fit the theme of the first AAR. Apart from that there has been no major changes (no extra armies or territories) from vanilla.
 
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News of the revolutionary uprising in Brussels spread like wildfire throughout the rest of the southern counties, and men and women throughout the land piled on to the Belgian bandwagon in droves. To the revolutionary militias already formed this was the news they had hoped for, and for many others of revolutionary disposition this was the news they had dreamed to hear. Men who were not already members of a militia soon signed up in droves: farmers abandoned their farms, shopkeepers abandoned their shops; servants even fled from their masters; and in the King's own regiments in the southlands there were mass desertions. Men such as Charles Rogier, who stood under the Revolutionaire banner in Liege almost a year earlier and hitherto had stuck to fighting the Orangists with his pen soon picked up their rifles and rallied their countrymen. Brussels was the epicentre of Bonapartist revolt, and it was to the centre men like he gravitated.

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Rogier leading the volunteers of Liege, a romanticist's view.

None of this escaped the attention of the monarch in Amsterdam, who no doubt was incandescent – more so than usual, it has to be said that King Willem got angry an awful lot – and acted accordingly. Willem appointed two young and talented generals, men he knew he could trust, to lead the best troops the Kingdom could manage and expel the revolutionary rabble to the pages of the history books where they belonged. Their names were Willem, Prince of Orange and Frederik, Prince of Orange-Nassau – the King's two sons.

His eldest son and heir, Prince Willem was born in 1792, three years before the Napoleonic Wars. Like much of the European royalist diaspora, the young Willem fled from the revolutionary French and hopped from one allied (or coalition) court to another. Settling on Britain, the greatest free power of the age, he briefly attended Oxford University and upon his coming of age joined the British Army where he had served as ADC to one of the two towering military figures of the era; The Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.

Prince Willem was unlike his father in more ways than one. At Oxford he had absorbed moderate liberal tendencies which in the palaces and grand houses of the great families of Europe would widely be decried as radical: he favoured limited suffrage, religious pluralism, was openly against his father's decision to dissolve the Tweede Kamer in the aftermath of the 1829 elections and even supported Belgian independence to an extent. To his father's credit he was well aware of his son's political views: Prince Willem was chosen to lead the Dutch forces against the revolutionaries in spite of his sympathies, not because his father was ignorant of them. It was a rare example of King Willem exercising his almost non-existent sense of meritocracy.

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Willem, Prince of Orange also picked up... other tendencies at Oxford University; he was widely considered by both contemporaries and later historians to have been a practising bisexual. In spite of any sexual leanings he may have had, he married Anna, the granddaughter of Tsarina Catherine the Great in 1816.

Prince Frederik had a similar but ultimately less carefree upbringing. Born in Berlin five years after his brother in 1797, Frederik grew into the very model of a modern, Prussian major-general – and for the record he did know Kings of England, and could quote the fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical. Frederik was in most aspects more Prussian than Dutch: German was his first language (as it is mine) and he only started to learn Dutch in late adolescence (fortunately he had a bit of a knack for languages, and by the end of his life could also speak English, French and Latin fluently.) His early education in the gymnasia of Berlin was equal to that of any Junker's son, and like his peers his young life consisted of seemingly endless bayonet drills and marches in the rain. As a prince though, he also was given a top class education both civil and military, the very best money could buy with tutors of the calibre of the Prussian maestro of war, Carl von Clausewitz. Like his brother Willem, Frederik would also serve his tour of duty fighting Napoleon and the French; but instead he joined the Prussian army and fought as a young officer at the battle of Leiden under another future hero of Waterloo, the legendary Prussian commander Count von Blücher.

Frederik's conservative education in Prussia must have contrasted greatly with that he received at Leiden University; then as now a hotbed of Dutch Liberalism. However Frederik was a different man than his brother, and whereas the latter embraced university liberalism Frederik initially seemed morally repelled by it. After all, he would have thought, were these not the very same ideas that he and his comrades had been fighting against on the battlefields of Europe these past two decades? Frederik let politics pass by him, as the second-born he could perhaps afford to, and instead focused his energies where he felt they could be best put to use; the army.

Indeed Frederik learned a great deal from his studies and experiences during the Napoleonic Wars, and he wasted no time in putting them to practical effect after the war. The Dutch army was reorganised on Prussian lines (then as now the strongest lines there were!) and in 1828 the Royal Dutch Military Academy was founded in the old fortress town of Breda thanks to Frederik's personal initiative (he also suggested that a Royal Naval Academy – what would become the Royal Institute for the Navy – should also be established, which it would a year later in 1829, but Frederik was an army man and played little role other than to suggest that one should exist.) As luck would have it, the first batch of officers graduated only days before the outbreak of hostilities with the Belgians; just in time.

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The young Prince Frederik's Prussian-inspired military reforms proved to be of untold importance in determining the source of The Netherlands' future military successes. Thanks primarily to him, The Netherlands had a modern, efficient army with a staff system which was forever after the envy of the non-Germanic world

Ten Days Which Shook The Netherlands:

The revolutionary militias did their job well, and before long most of the Southern Netherlands were under their control. King Willem and his talented sons didn't just intend to take this insult lying down, and deep within the hallowed halls of the Amsterdam palaces, they plotted their counter-attack.

Influenced heavily by aggressive, Prussian-style offensive tactics, King Willem and his chiefs of staff planned for a rapid thrust at the heart of Bonapartist power; the cities. The joint chiefs predicted that if each of the major urban centres fell, the revolutionaries would quickly run out of steam. These revolutionary militias were after all just that, militias; rabble; farmers; shopkeepers; peasants, not battle-hardened professional soldiers. With the revolutionary hotbeds under Dutch control, the revolutionaries out in the countryside will soon gather that their cause was lost and give up the fight, returning to whatever it was that they did before taking up arms against the King; in short, it was to be a campaign shock and awe. Victory was predicted to be achieved within ten days; a ten day campaign.[1]

The first city to be recaptured, the first domino in the Belgian line as it were, was the important seaport of Antwerp. Antwerp had prospered under Napoleonic rule, and therefore had a sizeable Bonapartist contingent; capturing it would certainly benefit the Orange cause, and the Dutch put their best foot forward in order to seize and hold it; The Netherlands' most decorated general, David Hendrik Chassé.

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Chassé was a veteran general and by and large the best and most experienced military man the King had at his disposal. He had cut his teeth fighting for Napoleon against the British during the Penninsular Campaign and later for the British against the French at Waterloo. Suffice it to say, he had fought this kind of war before; twice.

Belgian scouts were surprisingly good at their job, and detected the Dutch advance before it could launch a surprise attack. The revolutionary commanders in Antwerp however were surprisingly bad at their job, and failed to adequately prepare the cities' defences to meet the impending assault. To call the Dutch victory a walkover is perhaps to belittle slightly the actual strength and tenacity of the Antwerpen defenders, but not by much.

The two royal princes then took the bulk of the Dutch army and pressed on towards Brussels, where they met stiffer resistance. Prince Willem led his troops gallantly and from the front, and after two days and three nights of bitter fighting, the Dutch tricolour flew once more over the flagpoles of the former revolutionary capital. Oddly, the victorious general ordered that they should be taken down again, and replaced with the revolutionaries' own flag! Sympathetic to the Belgians' plight as always, Prince Willem felt that if Dutch flags flew over Brussels it would be construed as an occupation by the locals.

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Prince Willem of Orange personally leading Dutch troops at the Battle of Belgium.

The Bonapartists were on the run, and their leaders (they were led by a kind of Directoire) quickly came to the collective decision that without foreign (or divine, if they believed in that sort of thing) intervention their cause was as good as lost. A principally Francophone rebellion, France remained the obvious choice for foreign aid and emissaries were dispatched to Paris with due haste. For their part the French were still reeling from their defeat in 1815 and looking for an appropriate chance to reassert their authority on the world stage; the Belgian Revolution would prove to be just that very chance.

Frankish troops soon poured into Wallonia while Prince Frederik was fighting the revolutionaries in Hasselt in Belgium's north. Dutch scouts were rather better at their job than their Belgian counterparts and the Dutch chiefs of staff were definitely superior to the mad rabble which was put in charge of defending Antwerp, so it was not long before the two princes wheeled their forces around and met to defend Brussels from the impending Frankish attack. They got the destination of the French offensive right, but not the route; the French commander (one Maréchal Étienne Maurice Gérard) was an adventurous and imaginative sort, and rather than do the obvious thing and invade Brussels from the south, he too wheeled his armies around and marched them up through Wallonia and into Vlaanderen, his plan was to actually head past Brussels, turn his army round in a hook turn and invade from the north, predicting quite accurately as it turned out, that the city's cannons and artillery would be all pointing towards the south. Fortunately for Prince Frederik, his scouts picked up movement of French troops near the town of Leuwen, west of Brussels. Maréchal Gérard's master plan had been thwarted before it could be put into action, or so it seemed.

The two princes quickly force-marched their armies towards Leuwen with the hope of catching the French off guard. Both men knew that while their officers were well and truly up to the task, the average Dutch soldier was no match for the average French soldier in a straight fight, especially when one conceded that the French had a slight numerical advantage. Their only chance of victory would come through a surprise attack, but unfortunately for both them and for The Netherlands Maréchal Gérard was not a man accustomed to being caught unawares, and had billited himself and his troops in Leuwen where they were well-fed and well-rested, and with adequate watches and scouting intelligence just in case the Dutch caught wind of his brilliant plan. These scouts – French professionals – did detect the princes' march, and rallied the French just in time for the Franco-Belgian army to form their lines of battle on the fields outside of Leuwen. The princes had no choice but to fight exactly the sort of pitched battle they had feared and hoped to avoid. They were right to express caution.

The French had for centuries excelled at this kind of warfare. Open fields gave Napoleon the greatest opportunity to make use of his signature field artillery bombardments, and provided that they didn't charge their elite cavalry right into the middle of a great big pool of mud the French had a pretty good track record at this kind of thing. They were well-rested and confident while the Dutch had forced-marched throughout the night and, upon seeing the enemy lined up ready and waiting, morale plummeted. Nevertheless, these were the elites, the crème de la crème of the Royal Dutch Army: they did not flinch and nor did they waver; they fought with honour and for many of them, to the last.

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The Battle of Leuwen. Though technically the battle ended in defeat for the Dutch, the tenacity of the Princes' forces helped earn their country a moral victory.

An honourable defeat earned an honourable surrender, and the bulk of the Dutch forces were able to retreat back to Brussels in the Spartan fashion; either with their metaphorical shields or upon them. The joint chiefs knew that even if the Maréchal himself could be repulsed, the French had thousands of troops ready and waiting across the border. It was like Holland and France were engaged in an arm-wrestle: France was fighting with both hands tied behind its back and it was still winning. In order to defeat the Belgian revolutionaries and get rid of the intervening French, The King in Amsterdam had no other option but to appeal to that same force which put the French genie back into its bottle some fifteen years ago; the Concert of Europe...



Notes:

[1] In our timeline, the Ten Days Campaign took place about a year after the Belgian Revolution started, not immediately after.

 
A very intriguing second part to the prologue. France's entrance was not too welcome for the Orangists, I imagine. I'm looking forward to seeing how all of these events will affect the game start.

Very nicely written, as ever. Looking forward to the next.
 
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To King Willem appealing to the great powers to stop the French must have seemed like a foolproof plan: after all these Belgian revolutionaries were nothing but Bonapartist rabble, and the last time the French tried to intervene in another nation's affairs it led to the Battle of Waterloo! Hell, the French even sent the ex-Bonapartist Talleyrand to London to put forward the Franco-Belgian case! Surely said case was an open-shut case, and the negotiators would be back home in time for tea and Dutch waffles in Brussels.

Unfortunately for Willem a lot had changed in European geopolitics since the heady days of Wien 1814. Priorities changed, loyalties changed and above all, leaders changed. Speculation is a fools game but in the study of history it is sometimes a necessary tool to determine what went wrong and why, and I speculate that had King Willem called for a conference only a handful of days earlier the entire History of the Netherlands from then onwards would have turned out to be radically different.

Then as now, Britain remained the envy of the world's empires: Its navy was second to none, its financial and economic clout was unmatched and (back then) it's industrial prowess was without contest. It's empire though not yet near its eventual peak still spanned a wider reach than any other, as the saying went the sun never set upon it. Britain's prestige in Europe grew since the Napoleonic Wars: as the power which fought for longer and did more than any other to defeat Napoleon it had earned itself a unique place at the centre of European affairs. It had been the current Prime Minister of Britain himself, the Duke of Wellington who delivered the final and crushing blow to Bonapartism at the Battle of Waterloo. He had also been the man who liberated, among other countries, The Netherlands. It made perfect sense to ask the “neutral” British to hold a conference in order to check the twin forces of Bonapartism and French aggression, and who could be a more “neutral” man to chair it than their esteemed Prime Minister Wellesley?

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Arthur Wellesley: Duke of Wellington; Hammer of Napoleon; Liberator of the Low Countries and Tory Prime Minister.

An iron-clad theory almost, provided that PM Wellesley would indeed be the man to chair it. But while the people of the low countries had been busy battling it out with bullets and bayonets in a bout of violent revolution, there had been another revolution taking place across the North Sea; a revolution of a much more tranquil variety, conducted through the ballot box.

The death of the Anglo-German King and fashion icon George IV in June had forced Wellesley to call an early election under the backdrop of an agricultural depression and the resulting riots and civil unrest triggered by Luddite farm workers. The Luddites themselves couldn't vote at this point of time, but their bosses could, and at election time they flocked to the Whig opposition in droves. With more than a little help from the Irish nationalists, the Whig Earl Grey, who had been ostracised during the Georgian era, became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on the First of September 1830, only a week after the opening shots were fired in Belgium.[1]

Grey's election would in time bring radical changes to the governance of Britain and her numerous colonies, but outside the isles proper it is the legacy of his cabinet, not he, which has gained a certain level of notoriety. The name of his first Lord Privy Seal would go on to achieve the status of a profanity in the more Francophone parts of Canada[2] whereas in the Low Countries (and for that matter, the Orient and Greece as well) It was the spectre of Lord Palmerston who haunted the collective minds of the populace for decades to come: For a good forty years to come besmirching Palmerston would become almost a fetish for the Dutch gutter press, while the common man would invoke his name in the form of a bogeyman used to frighten small children[3]. What could a man possibly have done to deserve such vitriol? such hate? Chairing the 1830 London Conference was a good start.

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Wellington's successor as PM, the Whig Earl Grey was by no means a Bonapartist but by equal measure he was by no means an anti-Bonapartist cut from the same cloth as his predecessor. His election, or more accurately his appointment of the future Liberal PM Lord Palmerston as Foreign secretary and chair of the London Conference would have grave consequences for The Netherlands' future.

Palmerston was perhaps – from a British perspective at least – the greatest Foreign secretary in the entire history of the position. He championed his nation's interest with a vigour and zest unmatched by his predecessors and successors, and among Prime Ministers only the Earl of Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone could be considered a match for him in this department. As one may expect, earning great concessions from nations whom one considers rivals does not endear one to said rival nations. Unfortunately for the Netherlands, we would count amongst the ranks of said rival nations in Palmerston's brilliant yet possibly deranged mind. Our nation was seen by the Liberal statesman with some justification as an authoritarian, pseudo-Tsarist despotism. The contrast with revolutionary, democratic, “egalitarian” Belgium could not have been starker in his view, and as a liberal Whig, was it not his duty to defend the light of liberty wherever it shone?

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Likely, Palmerston was also motivated by more practical concerns. It is widely believed that he saw a neutral Belgium as a useful tool in checking French ambitions in the European north-west, and tried to convince – with a good deal of success I should add – Prince Willem of this “fact”.

Despite the protests of revolutionaries like Rogier who favoured a return to Parisian direct rule, or Talleyrand, who favoured a four-way partition between The Netherlands, France, Britain (who for their troubles earned themselves a protectorate in Vlaanderen) and Prussia the conference agreed – thanks in good part to the efforts of Chair Palmerston – that Belgium should be independent and neutral. King Willem was gobsmacked, to say the very least.

King Willem wasn't going to take this insult against his country lying down. In a fit of rage, he ordered General Chassé to stand his ground in Antwerp; the city remained under Dutch control until 1832. Border skirmishes between Belgian and Dutch troops persisted, similar to the seemingly endless skirmishes fought between the Japanese, Chinese and Russians in Manchuria today. King Willem intended to take the rebuff at London as a temporary setback, to whittle away at the young Belgium while waiting out the winds of supra-national opinion. The winds would change, but neither King Willem nor his eldest son could possibly have foreseen the violent and abrupt manner which would force this change.

The Assassination of Willem, Prince of Orange:

The loss of Belgium did not do King Willem's already failing health any favours, and in the years following London he grew sicker and sicker and thus spent less and less time managing affairs of state. As Prince of Orange and heir to the throne, it was natural that Prince Willem would step up and take up the slack. His special interest in Belgium and the “Belgian” people naturally led him to gravitate his energies towards improving tarnished relations with the young state, becoming a sort of unofficial ambassador for The Netherlands in that country. He was sympathetic to the plight of the Belgians and this made him a popular figure, perhaps too popular. To the far-left, the lunatic fringe of Belgium's Bonapartists and republicans, Prince Willem's popularity amongst the average citizen was a threat to the revolution itself. They were gravely concerned that should Willem become King – a likely contingency given that he was first in line to the throne – an Orange resurgence would take hold in Vlaanderen and elsewhere, leading to a popular reunification of the two nations. This of course would have been news to Willem, but there's no use contemplating the rationality of madmen.

Groups of revolutionaries, anarchists and other such scum of the earth formed what became to be known as the FLB, or the Front for the Liberation of Belgium, began to plot the assassination of Prince Willem. It would be easy enough, he often travelled to Brussels in his unofficial capacity as ambassador and security protocols were surprisingly lax in retrospect. In the spring of 1835 the assassins would have their chance.

Prince Willem had been invited by the new King of Belgium, Leopold I, to talks aiming to end the border skirmishes and issue a kind of official ceasefire between the two Low Country nations. Despite the violent protests of his father, who was by now king in name only and living in what we would now call an old pensioner's home and of virtually the entire composition of the Ridderkamer, or Holland's House of Lords[4] Willem agreed with alacrity. His own brother Prince Frederik would be counted amongst the objectors. Prince Willem however would not be dissuaded; it would prove to be a fatal mistake.

Prince Willem, his wife and five children (who had also been invited by King Leopold, whom no doubt hoped to make a good impression on the next generation of Dutch monarchs) arrived at the Royal Palace in Brussels early on the brisk spring morning of the 22nd of March, 1855 with a small, mostly ceremonial guard and a handful of assorted servants. Frederik had also been invited but expressing his opposition to the meeting wisely decided to stay in Holland. Willem's arrival was greeted by a mass of citizens, a virtual sea of people who no doubt were keen to catch a glimpse of the people's prince. Amongst them lie in wait four men, each members of the FLB who were no doubt there for a rather different purpose, each armed to the teeth with guns, knives and crude, fuse-lit grenades. The four men pushed their way to the front of the crowd just as the carriage began to pull into the palace gates, security was lax and the crowds were far too fixated on the carriage to notice four men with lit grenades; they threw those grenades at the carriage. The Prince and all five of his children died, likely instantaneously. Princess Anna survived albeit with grievous injuries. The angry crowd reacted first with shock, then with anger and finally grief at the attacks; the assassins would not live to see the final stage, as the mob vented their anger and rage on the four assassins, beating them savagely before they could be put to trial. It is impossible to know what Leopold thought of the attack, some say he even planned it, but what is known to history is what Prince Frederik thought of it; he saw it as a declaration of war.

The Second London Conference:

Acting in his sick father's stead, whose health had deteriorated even further after hearing news of his son's untimely demise, Prince Frederik immediately called a conference – again to be held in London – to settle the Belgian problem once and for all. His goal was not to discuss the peaceful dismemberment of Belgium, or to avoid a war; he wanted to start one. Frederik could count on the French to back Belgium, the Spanish to back the French and he could equally trust the Prussians to back him to spite the French and Spanish. Russia, Austria and The Ottomans were either too far away, too preoccupied with domestic problems or both to care one way or the other, which left only Britain. Hitherto Britain had acted as a kind of guardian angel of the Belgian state, a role no doubt fostered by Foreign Secretary Palmerston. Frederik knew that war with Britain would not only be both unprofitable and undesirable given the (somewhat) close diplomatic and (very close) economic ties between Britain and The Netherlands, it would also be suicide. His goal therefore was to ensure British neutrality in any war between The Netherlands and Belgium, no easy task given the influence of Palmerston.

Prince Frederik however still had a trump card he was yet to play and just like at the first London conference, fate and fortune would be the decisive factor. This time however fate was on Frederik's side: Britain once more had an election during conference time and the Whigs, this time led by Lord Melbourne had triumphed. In spite of this the leader of the new Conservative Party, Sir Robert Peel had with the monarch's help endured for months as the head of a minority government. Peel's government would not last for much longer, but it would last for long enough, and at the helm of his cabinet lay none other than his Foreign secretary and the man most likely to chair any second London conference: that Conservative, ex-PM, and staunch anti-Bonapartist, The Duke of Wellington.

Wellington had been utterly heartbroken upon hearing the news of his former ADC's assassination; and Wellington did not feel heartbroken very often. He knew, as Prince Frederik did, that he would be acting against the tide of popular opinion but such things did not faze men such as they, who had stood ramrod stiff while their attendants standing beside them had their legs amputated by French cannonballs. Wellington had already been discredited in 1832 after presiding over the worst Tory electoral defeat ever,[5] and probably felt that one further discredit was negligible. He and Frederik acted in concert and with haste, and called a conference just before Melbourne formed his government. Wellington, behaving with all the airs and drama of a trained actor, announced that in light of recent events Britain could no longer act as Belgium's primary guardian and protector and asked with the great courtesy one would expect from a gentleman of his stature, whether or not the French would be willing to take up the burden. The French literally jumped at the chance to expand their continental influence at the expense of their rivals, and readily agreed. Even if Palmerston tried to call another conference to reverse the decision – which as a matter of fact, he did try to do – the French, not wanting to relinquish their easily-won influence, would refuse to attend. As would Prussia and The Netherlands. France thought that it had won itself a bargain at that conference; little did they know that they were playing right into Prince Frederik's hands...

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Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary: If there are but two men who made the circumstances possible for the United Kingdom of the Netherlands to exist, it was they.



Notes:

[1] That's when the lengthy election campaign ended, but IIRC Wellington held on for a few more weeks in our timeline. For story purposes I've brought Grey's election forward a little.

[2] But here in AARland his reputation couldn't be more different.

[3] Palmerston as Holland's bête-noire is another hangover from my first AAR.

[4] A more literal translation would be House of Knights.

[5] In terms of total seats won, it would be surpassed by John Major's defeat in 1997. In terms of share of the popular vote, it remains the worst electoral result for the Tory party ever.
 
I do love Palmerstone. And 19th century politics, for that matter, so this was an incredibly entertaining update.

As an aside, I have downloaded Max Havelaar onto my iPad. It's really good stuff this far.

Looking forward to more.
 
DensleyBlair: Speaking of, I just started reading David Brown's Palmerston: A Biography yesterday! For some reason I've never quite been able to get into 19th century (British) politics in the same way I've been able to get into 19th century history or 20th century politics, which is a shame given some of the awesome characters who dominated the period: Wellington, Dizzy, Gladstone, Chamberlain, etc. I'm glad you liked the update. :)

Great also to hear I've helped Eduard Dekker's posthumous reputation a little by indirectly introducing someone to Havelaar - after what I did to him in my first AAR I feel like I owe him! As with any text old enough to be in the public domain, I'd advise getting a Penguin Classics edition over those sorts of electronic transfers I see floating around online for little or no cost, but hey whatever works for you...

LordOfBlood: Hurrah! Another comment! Hopefully I won't keep you waiting too long... :)

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Before I start the game proper, I have a small question for those among us with experience of Heart of Darkness and/or the beta patch: is there any way to stop colonial nations releasing dominions too early? Things like watermelon Australia or Canada really destroys the immersion for me.
 
I haven actually committed to buying it yet - just the free sample (the Public Domain version is in Dutch) - so getting a nice physical book is still a possibility. Considering I have a rather odd love of Penguin Classics, I would prefer to get one :)

EDIT: After having engaged in a spot of archaeology (i.e., reading the last few bits of Onze Plaats, I happened upon a rather familiar portrait. Seeing Prime Minister Dekker made me smile ;)
 
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DensleyBlair: I don't think that's at all odd, I have a long-standing love affair with Penguin Classics myself! You poor thing though having to go back all that way and read my first AAR... Oh well you seemed to enjoy it so it couldn't have been all that arduous. :)

LordofBlood: Thank you very much for the help. :)

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After due deliberation and long consultation with my ever loyal readership, (yes, both of them) and several hours modding and testing the beta patch, I have decided to postpone this AAR until patch 3.02 is released. Personally I think the beta actually looks quite stable and I'd probably be fine with starting the game now, but just to be absolutely sure and since from what I gather the new patch will be out in a few days anyway, I think that waiting for the full patch is the safest option.

That of course means that the current title is a lie. When I have a bit of time I'll fix the header and ask Avindian to change that last digit into a 2.
 
Hopefully the patch comes out soon! This has been great so far. The Netherlands has been one country I've blissfully ignored in Victoria II, but this is inspiring me to give them a go.