The Conduct of the Dutch: British Opinion and the Dutch Alliance During the War of the Spanish Succession

I The story of the attitude of Englishmen to the Dutch in the later seventeenth century - a story of the complex interplay of engrained hostility and growing consciousness of common interest - has already been told in some detai1. ! With the death of the Stadtholder-King, however, the subject seems to have lost its attraction for the historian. Much has been written of the workings of the Anglo-Dutch alliance in the years that followed, but little has been done to relate the develop­ ment of 'official' attitudes and policies to the fluctuations and precon­ ceptions of public opinion . . Perhaps the very intimacy of the two countries for most of queen Anne's reign has made enquiries as to what 2 one thought of the other seem of little moment. Such a view would be plausible enough: conflict is certainly more spectacular and often more revealing than unity. 3 It is nonetheless obvious that the subjec­ tion of an alliance to the stresses of war may both reveal the underlying attitudes of the partners to each other and also invest their day-to-day reactions to each other's behaviour with a heightened significance. This is a truism which the present study is designed to illustrate. The ultimate object of this work is, through an examination of what 1 See below, Ch. II, pp. 16-17 and notes.