First Stadtholderless Period: Difference between revisions

 

However, in this period military threats did not come primarily from the land side, so there was little need for a large standing army, as there had been during the war with Spain. The Spanish Army of Flanders, with 70,000 men one of the largest standing armies in Europe at the time, was fully engaged in defending the [[Southern Netherlands]] against France up to the [[Treaty of the Pyrenees|Peace of the Pyrenees]] in 1659. Spain would never again be a threat to the Republic from this quarter, actually hoping to conclude a defensive alliance against France. Though the Republic in these first years after the war with Spain was loath "to shore up a neighboring ruin" as De Witt remarked to the Spanish ambassador, the latter's reply that he would be wise to do so, "if he didn't want that ruin to fall on his head",<ref name="Israel 1995, p. 778">Israel (1995), p. 778</ref> later proved all too true. From 1667 on, the Republic was continually engaged in chasing the French out of the Spanish lands, and probably could have taken the Spanish Netherlands for itself, any time it wanted, but it preferred the Spanish Netherlands as a [[buffer state]].<ref>Israel (1995), pp. 739–748</ref>

After the conflict with William II over the size of the army, which ended at his premature death, the now victorious regents lost little time in further reducing the size of the army. Unfortunately, they displayed the same parsimony to the navy, allowing the independent admiralties to sell off a large part of the fleet that had defeated the second Spanish Armada so resoundingly in neutral English waters in the [[Battle of the Downs]] of 1639. The foolishness of this policy was amply demonstrated in the First Anglo-Dutch War, when at least initially the Dutch navy did not stand a chance against the English fleet, at least in home waters, due to its qualitative and quantitative inferiority. While the war was still raging, the De-Witt regime therefore embarked on an ambitious program of naval construction and naval reform. The "new navy" was born that would become the pre-eminent instrument to project Dutch power abroad. The main innovation was that now sixty captains would be permanently employed by the navy, greatly increasing its professionalism. Due to the shallowness of Dutch home waters the size of the largest Dutch ships could still not be equal to that of the English [[first-rate]]s, but the gap in weight of guns was narrowed.<ref>Israel (1995), pp. 716–717</ref>