Social Mobility under the Regents of the Republic* H. VAN DIJK and D. J. ROORDA It is not difficult to form an impression of the social mobility of the regent patriciate in the Dutch Republic on the basis of the existing literature. The data seem to indicate that the chances of social ascent became increasingly small as the process of aristocratization took its course. The following might seem a reasonable reconstruction of what was taking place. During the sixteenth century the patriciate had been wakened out of its slumber, greatly rejuvenated in some places, and here and there completely renewed. The new vitality and urge to expansion continued into the seventeenth century. The lower middle class, which had lost influence since the late sixteenth century, still sometimes gave evidence of discontent with the local holders of power at times of political crisis, but the regent class, which was initially regularly replenished with newcomers mainly from the broad band of the middle class‘ and even sometimes from the lower middle class, did not need to concern itself much with this. Even- tually, however, there arose within the group opposition to the careers of people who, as a Gouda regent put it: ‘came floating along, as it were, on a wisp of straw, including among them those who did not dare to name their grandfather’. The expressions of anti-aristocratic feelings on the part of the lower middle class became weaker. Only at times of crisis did they momentarily increase in force, coupled with Orangist sentiments to which the regents had sometimes to yield. Aristocratization proceeded in all spheres of life, at all levels of society. In sectors where previously a larger group of citizens could exert an influence, such as * This article originally appeared under the title ‘Sociale mobiliteit onder de regenten van de republiek’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, LXXXIV (1971) 306-28. 1 For social stratification in the 17th century, ef. D. J. Roorda, Partij en factie. De oproeren van 1672 in de steden van Holland en Zeeland, een krachtmeting tussen partijen en facties (Groningen, 1961) 37 ff.; an elucidation of whom could be included in the ‘broad band of the middle class’, ibidem, 55. See also: D. J. Roorda, ‘The Ruling Classes in Holland in the Seventeenth Century’ in: J. $. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann, ed., Britain and the Netherlands, TI (Groningen, 1964) 109-32. 2. This expression of sentiment from Gouda (1650) put forward as a reason for reducing the number of vroedschap members from 40 to 28, is quoted by C. J. de Lange van Wijngaarden, Geschiedenis en beschrijving der stad van der Goude, II (Amsterdam, 1817) 190. 76SOCIAL MOBILITY UNDER THE REGENTS OF THE REPUBLIC Church-councils and guilds, the patricians began to assume the leadership and this was accepted by the population. The gulf between the ruling aristocracy and the population grew visibly wider and the actual group of ruling aristocrats smaller. From the middle of the seven- teenth century the membership of a number of vroedschappen (town councils) in the province of Holland decreased. Sometimes the leading urban official—the pensionary or secretary—became a member of the vroedschap. The regent class contracted, as also appears from the large number of endogamous marriages. It seems likely that the latter became increasingly numerous. In order to make these marriages possible it was necessary to suspend existing regulations about forbidden degrees of kinship within the municipal governments. Serious opposition to this was generally lacking. During the second half of the seventeenth century ‘con- tracts of correspondence’ became fashionable. These were private agreements between regents about the sharing of offices to which emoluments were attached. This practice, which was continued in the eighteenth century, resulted in an increasing rigidity, as can be scen from the function of burgomaster, which was held in turn by an ever smaller coterie of interrelated families.* In this way a climate was created that was not at all conductive to social mobility. ‘The aristocracy, initially still so full of elan, congealed into fixed, rigid forms’, writes Schéffer, ‘It began to crack in adverse times and it became brittle’. By the eighteenth century the aristocracy had degenerated into an oligarchy, into which a homo novus only sporadically penetrated,® but while the aristocratiza- tion was accepted by the outside world during the seventeenth century, partly because the regents were not yet a completely closed group, renewed opposition arose in the eighteenth century against what had now become a complete rigidity. ‘Only if he is certain that his son, if not himself, will enjoy the respect commensur- ate with his wealth’, says Lawrence Stone, ‘will the self-made man be content to accept the built-in rigidities of the stratification system as he finds it’.* C. H. E. de Wit, who believes that ‘an aristocracy can maintain itself only if it gives to talent and success the same chances as those through which it once itself arose’,’ considers that the Dutch aristocracy was ultimately ‘determined exclusively by birth’, not 3. Cf. the data about the Amsterdam burgomasters between 1696 and 1748 supplied by P. Geyl in Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam, 11 (Amsterdam, 1949) 317. 4. I, Schéffer, Ons tweede tijdvak (Arnhem, 1962) 23. 5. C.H.E. de Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland 1780-1848. Kritisch onderzoek van een historisch beeld en herwaardering van een periode (Heerlen, 1965) 18. 6. L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641, quoted by B. Barber and E. Barber, European Social Class: Stability and Change (New York, 1967) 16. 1. De Wit, Aristocratie en democratie, 58. 8. Ibidem, 7. UUH, VAN DUK AND D. J. ROORDA “by achievement in the spiritual or material sphere’.* He avidly quotes Van Hogen dorp’s crushing statement that the aristocrats separate themselves, as it were, ftom the people, that they want to appropriate to themselves and their kind the fortune of the people as a whole. They possess all the offices, they are privi leged in trade, they free themselves from burdens as far as they can, the magistrate does not dare to interfere with them, war is waged and peace made for their sakes. For a small numbet of regents rule arbitrarily and they promise each other secretly not to disclose anything punishable to any of their number. Van Hogendorp, as a member of a regent family from Rotterdam, where the arrogance of the regents towards the population had already assumed repugnant forms from the end of the seventeenth century, naturally knew very well what he was writing about. It is no wonder that De Wit finds support for his proposition that the aristocracy turned increasingly against the last surviving possibilities of penetrating to the ruling patriciate from below in what Palmer™ has to say about the strengthening of both aristocracy and democracy during the second half of the eighteenth century. According to Palmer, aristocratic conservatism was an eighteenth-century force against which the young democratic movement formed a reaction. In the period after 1763, he sees particularly in the aristocratic republics and weak monarchies a marked segregation, a contraction of the aristocracy that left increasingly less room for social climbing and assimilation, and he illustrates this view with striking figures and many quotations from numerous countries. The process of exclusion and seclusion also continued in this period. At most the arbitrary power of the regents was limited by their fear of a revolt that might be fostered by members of former regent families now excluded. Impotence and unwillingness to promote social renewal were accompanied by an inability to carry out political renewal, with the result that, with the revolution of 1795, the old Political order, which for two centuries had determined the size of the ruling patriciate and the form in which it had exercised its domination, fell victim to the greatly swollen discontent. Is this reconstruction of the process of aristocratization the correct one, however? All kinds of objections can be made and have become the occasion for further research. It is a fact that De Wit took a rather one-sided view of aristocrats and aristocracy and that Palmer’s statistical material has generally illustrative but little probative value. Both authors, however, do occasionally have a good eye for the forces acting against the aristocratization process in the period before about 1760. 9. G.K. van Hogendorp (1762-1824), Brieven en gedenkschriften, Ul, 1787 (The Hague, 1866) 278, quoted by C. H. E. de Wit, Aristocratie en democratie, 19. 10, Roorda, Partij en factie, 42 n. 2; J. H. W. Unger, ‘De correspondentie in de Rotterdamsche vroedschap’, Rotterdamsch Jaarboekje, IV (Rotterdam, 1894) 20. 11, R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution, 1, The Challenge (Princeton, 1959). 78