Frederick Henry

Dutch military leader and politician

• Born: January 29, 1584
• Birthplace: Delft, Holland, United Provinces (now in the Netherlands)
• Died: March 14, 1647
• Place of death: The Hague, Holland, United Provinces (now in the Netherlands)

Frederick Henry, through his military and diplomatic abilities, completed successfully the Dutch Wars of Independence for the independence of the Dutch United Provinces from Spain and established the House of Orange as the hereditary sovereign of the new nation.

Early Life

The seventh child of William the Silent by William’s fourth wife, Louise de Coligny, daughter of the French Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny, Frederick Henry, count of Nassau and prince of Orange, was born less than six months prior to the assassination of his father on July 10, 1584, at Delft by Balthasar Gerard. Although his mother probably intended him for a career in France, his half brother Maurice of Nassau , who was also William the Silent’s successor in the struggle against Spain, directed him toward a life of service to the Dutch.

Educated at the University of Leiden, elected a member of the Council of State while still a very young man, a participant in foreign negotiations, and a close companion of his brother on the latter’s military campaigns, Frederick Henry acquired at an early age a firm foundation in the twin arts of diplomacy and military matters. Handsome, with a mustache and a small beard beneath thick black hair, a high forehead, and dark piercing eyes, possessed of noble bearing, renowned early for his gallantry in arms, and the first of his house with the ability to speak the Dutch language without a foreign accent, he endeared himself quickly both to the army and to the Dutch people. Unfortunately, during most of his life he suffered grievously from gout, ultimately dying of its complications.

In 1624, at the age of forty, largely on the urging of his brother Maurice, who had no children of his own, Frederick Henry married the intelligent and ambitious Amalia von Solms, who was perhaps Frederick Henry’s shrewdest adviser throughout the remainder of his career.

Life’s Work

The Netherlands, originally under the dominance of the Catholic Habsburg Dynasty of Spain, was divided at the time of the death of Maurice on April 23, 1625, into two parts: the southern part, primarily Roman Catholic (now Belgium and Luxembourg), under the control of Spain, and the northern part, primarily Dutch Protestant (now the Netherlands) but containing many Roman Catholics and consisting of eight provinces, struggling for its independence. Seven of the eight northern provinces were loosely bound together in a confederation congress called the Estates-General, which tried, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully, to unite all eight provinces into uniform action against the Habsburg Spanish overlord.

On the death of his brother, Frederick Henry was quickly elected by five of the eight northern provinces of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Gelders as stadtholder (chief executive officer) to replace Maurice and was appointed by the Estates-General captain-general and admiral-general of the confederation or union, as well as head of the Council of State. Friesland, Groningen, and Drente retained their own stadtholders, while Drente, although a northern province, was not then a member of the Estates-General.

Where William the Silent had been the spirit of the revolution of the Dutch northern provinces, he lacked the military ability to go with it; where his son Maurice had the military ability, he lacked the gift of diplomacy that would have made the military struggle easier. In Frederick Henry, both military ability and diplomacy were present, so that on occasion he was able to make the conflicting interests of Calvinists and Roman Catholics work together in the northern provinces, persuade the proud province of Holland to work together with the Estates-General, and convince Cardinal de Richelieu of France to give aid to the Protestant Dutch struggle against the Catholic Habsburgs.

His first consideration lay in securing the southern and eastern borders of the union against Spanish attack, and here he demonstrated his enormous ability in besieging fortresses with success. The 1627 campaign was marked by the brilliant capture of Grol, a town on the eastern frontier, and in 1629 the even more brilliant conquest of ’s Hertogenbosch. In this campaign, Frederick Henry exhibited an ability not only to obtain the highest efficiency from his soldiers but also to win their hearts, something made all the more difficult by the fact that where the Dutch Wars of Independence had become a training ground for military men from a variety of countries, of the eighteen regiments under him at ’s Hertogenbosch, three were Netherlanders, one Frisian, one Walloon, two German, four French, three Scottish, and four English. Although he was unable to take Dunkirk in 1631, a Spanish fleet of thirty-five large vessels and a number of smaller ships carrying stores and munitions were destroyed on September 12 in the Battle of the River Slaak, while in 1632 the eastern frontier was strengthened by the capture of the city of Maastricht. These setbacks brought the archduchess Isabel, Habsburg regent of the Netherlands, to an effort at negotiations.

Matters of religion and trade, however, interfered with the negotiations, as the Spaniards insisted upon the elimination of heresy in the Netherlands, and the Calvinists in the United Provinces pressed for the restriction of Roman Catholicism. Furthermore, the merchants of Amsterdam wished an elimination of trading restrictions against them that Spain was not willing to grant.

The failure of these negotiations and the need for money led Frederick Henry to achieve an almost miraculous alliance with Richelieu’s France. Spain and France were both Catholic, but as they were political enemies, France was loath to see the Netherlands in Spanish hands. Although the Dutch were primarily Protestants and heretics in the eyes of Richelieu, he needed the Dutch fleet to help blockade the French Huguenot port of La Rochelle, which he was besieging. Despite the objections of French Catholics on one side and Dutch Calvinists on the other, a defensive and offensive alliance was concluded between the Dutch and the French in the early part of 1635. By the terms of the agreement, any conquests in the southern Netherlands were to be divided between them; neither nation was to conclude peace without the consent of the other; and each was to provide for field action an army consisting of twenty-five thousand foot soldiers and five thousand cavalry.

In 1637, the important city of Breda in the province of Brabant fell to the Dutch, giving the Dutch Republic the security of three great frontier fortresses: ’s Hertogenbosch, Maastricht, and Breda. The following year, at the great Battle of the Downs, Lieutenant-Admiral Maarten Tromp debilitated a powerful Spanish fleet under the command of Antonio de Oquendo. For the Dutch, this battle was comparable to England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588, and it ended any attempt of the Spaniards toward dominance on the sea. The following year, however, Frederick Henry’s campaign against the frontier town of Hulst ended in failure, made even more disappointing by the death in that campaign of Count Henry Casimir of Nassau-Dietz, who was stadtholder of the three provinces of Groningen, Friesland, and Drente. Groningen and Drente chose Frederick Henry to be their stadtholder in place of Henry Casimir, which strengthened the union, but Friesland chose to elect William

Frederick, the younger brother of Henry Casimir, as its stadtholder. On May 12, 1640, Frederick Henry had gained sufficient prestige to enable him to marry his son William to Mary, the eldest daughter of Charles I of England, by which he hoped to add England’s aid to that of France. The rift between the two branches of the House of Nassau eventually was healed when, three or four years after the death of Frederick Henry, William Frederick in 1651 married Frederick Henry’s daughter Albertine Agnes.

During the Civil War in England, in which the Puritan Parliament under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell rebelled against Charles I, Frederick Henry’s sympathies were with Charles. Henrietta Maria , Charles’s wife, who resided at The Hague during the early stages of that revolt, pressured Frederick Henry to come to the aid of her husband, but that statesman was much too prudent not to know that the Calvinists in the northern provinces would never do again as they did in France—come to the aid of a non-Calvinist king against their fellow Calvinists. They were already dissatisfied with an alliance that in its ultimate effects permitted France to enlarge itself in the southern Netherlands at the expense of Spain, and Frederick Henry himself came to realize that it was far too dangerous to his country to permit a powerful France to take the place of a much weaker Spain in the southern Netherlands.

When religion was involved, Frederick Henry always had to be prudent. The insistence by Spain that the Inquisition be introduced into the Netherlands to crush the Protestants was the original spark that inflamed the Protestants of the northern provinces to their wars for independence under William the Silent beginning in 1568. That portion of the Reformed church in the northern provinces, the Calvinists, demanded the complete suppression of Roman Catholicism. Those Protestants of the Dutch provinces who were more worldly and more tolerant of Catholicism so long as they themselves could practice their own religion were called Remonstrants, or Arminians, after the Amsterdam preacher Jacobus Arminius, while the Calvinists were called Counter-Remonstrants.

The Synod of Dort, under the dominance of the Counter-Remonstrants and Maurice’s armed forces, condemned the Remonstrants and had their major leader, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, put to death. Yet the realities of the situation outweighed the theories of the Calvinists, and in the course of time the Dutch of the northern provinces, and Frederick Henry, came to see that Catholics and Protestants could live together as Dutch folk, tolerant of one another’s religious beliefs, in a country independent of Spain. Therefore, like the merchant-burghers of Amsterdam, Frederick Henry concluded that so long as the northern Dutch provinces had secured their borders, it would be better to make peace with Spain.

In the meantime, the Dutch were expanding both in the West and East Indies (the Americas and Southeast Asia, respectively). On May 9, 1624, under Piet Hein , a Dutch fleet captured Bahia in Brazil from the Portuguese, who were then under Spanish domination, then lost Bahia to the Spaniards on April 28, 1625; Hein recaptured it on March 23, 1627. The following year, Hein started attacking the treasure ships bringing gold and silver from the New World back to Spain, while other attacks on Spanish shipping led the way toward a gradual extension of Dutch control in Brazil. In the East Indies, Dutch naval supremacy over all European rivals became especially evident, so that soon rich cargoes were flowing back to Amsterdam from Amboina, Banda, the Moluccas, Java, Formosa, and even Japan. Where the Dutch West India Company had been successful in planting colonies, the Dutch East India Company had been successful in planting colonies as well as developing a rich trade in the spices and jewels that Europe prized most, both companies acting with the encouragement of Frederick Henry.

After the campaign against Hulst, Frederick Henry, age sixty-three, was broken in health, suffering badly from gout, with rapidly failing faculties of mind, spirit, and body. On March 14, 1647, he died and was buried with great pomp beside his father William and his brother Maurice in Delft. By the Acte de Survivance of April 19, 1631, almost sixteen years before, the Estates-General had declared the son of Frederick Henry, William, to be heir to his father’s offices of captain-general and admiral-general of the United Provinces, giving Frederick Henry something of the position of a sovereign prince. Therefore, on Frederick Henry’s death, his son succeeded him in his various offices and honors as William II.

Spain, its treasury empty; its gold galleons attacked by Dutch, French, and English buccaneers; and facing French armies at the Pyrenees, Portugal, and Catalonia in revolt, was ready for the peace that came about at Münster, on January 30, 1648, in which Spain recognized the independence of the Dutch Republic and brought an end to the Dutch Wars of Independence.

Significance

The stadtholdership of Frederick Henry has been called the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, in that Netherlanders were enormously productive in many fields of learning: law, philosophy, painting, letters, science, and seafaring. As a human being, Frederick Henry, with his natural characteristics of military ability, tolerance, and humanity, was able not only to win for his country its independence but also to stand as a model of the religious tolerance, kindliness, and practical wisdom for which the Dutch people have became so well known.

Bibliography

Edmundson, George. “Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange.” In The Cambridge Modern History, edited by A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes. Vol. 4. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1906. Although there is little information about his life prior to 1625, this is still the best survey in English of Frederick Henry’s career from 1625 until his death. The portion of the book dealing with the Dutch overseas activities in the Western Hemisphere and the East Indies is concise and understandable.

Geyl, Pieter. The Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century. Rev. ed. London: Ernest Benn, 1961. For the seasoned student of history, volume 1 of this multivolume collection deals with Dutch history from 1609 through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, of which the Treaty of Münster, which ended the Dutch Wars of Independence, was a portion. Contains little on the life of Frederick Henry prior to his becoming stadtholder in 1625.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Orange and Stuart, 1641-1672. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. Chapter 1, “Frederick Henry of Orange and King Charles I, 1641-47,” deals more with the politics of the marriage of Frederick Henry’s son William than with the life and personality of Frederick Henry. Yet the book does address Frederick Henry’s difficult position between the Calvinists on one side and the non-Calvinist Stuarts on the other, both of whom he sought to please.

Memegalos, Florence S. “Breda ’Bravely Besieged.’” Military History 19, no. 4 (October, 2002). Recounts how Frederick Henry’s leadership enabled the Dutch to capture the city of Breda from Spanish forces. Describes the battle’s significance to the Netherlands.

Rowen, Herbert H. The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Describes the lives, minds, and personalities of Frederick Henry and other members of the House of Orange-Nassau who helped develop the unique institution of stadtholderate.

Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Although this book does not discuss Frederick Henry and the military situation in the Dutch Republic, it presents an extensive kaleidoscope of Dutch society during that period, including domestic life, eating habits, business, trade, the making of money, child care, and the general Dutch mentality.