Although it traces its ancestry back to the leader of the Dutch sixteenth – century struggle for independence from Spain, William the Silent, the House of Orange dates its monarchy only from 1813. Willem I (reigned 1813-40) was authoritarian, but his son and grandson, Willem II (reigned 1840-49) and Willem III (reigned 1849-90) were unimpressive, weak figures. Shorn of any real power by the liberal constitution of 1848, Willem III was irascible, petulant and irresponsible, negligent of his royal tasks, and frequently reluctant to appear in public. His two dissipated and undisciplined sons died young leaving the nation in some doubt about the succession, but in 1879 Willem III had married a second wife, the much younger German princess Emma, who in 1880 bore him a child, Princess Wilhelmina. The marriage, and its promise that the House of Orange would not die out, introduced a new image of domesticity to the Dutch royal family.
That domesticity was used to advantage by Liberals who had a stake in the stability of the constitutional monarchy. Seeking a variety of ways to make the royal family a binding element in a segmented society, in 1886 Liberal reformers instituted a national celebration of the princess’ birthday.5 The choice of the princess rather than the king as focal point of the holiday was a reflection of the king’s lack of popularity. However, the idea of the House of Orange, its future now embodied in the little princess, was one that united many strands in Dutch society.
Dutch nationalism was a construct of the nineteenth century and the House of Orange played a key role in it.6 Orange was historically rooted in the rebellion against Spain, an association that represented religious piety to the Orthodox Protestants and liberty to the Liberals. When Willem I returned to the Netherlands in 1813 after the defeat of Napoleon, his position as scion of Orange made him a symbol both of liberation from France and of national unity against France. The creation of the monarchy was supported by a broad political consensus, not least by the Liberals for whom the constitution was meant to be a guarantee that essentially republican values would hold sway. The revised Liberal constitution of 1848 further limited the power of the monarch, reducing the throne to a largely symbolic function and ushering in a period in which the Liberal bourgeois elite hoped to spread their values to the public at large. These hopes were largely dashed by 1870, however, when it became increasingly apparent that the republican umbrella of the constitution was making it possible for a number of segments in society to organize themselves according to their own systems of value. The rise of the Orthodox Protestants, Catholics, and Socialists initiated a transformation of the Netherlands into a pluralistic and socially mobile society. Both the variations in ideology and the mobilization of mass participation in the public realm threatened the rational order under bourgeois control that the Liberals had envisioned. However, Willem III was inadequate to fulfil the Liberals’ need for a public figure who could unite the Netherlands. The widow and child, Emma and Wilhelmina, were more appealing. A celebration of Wilhelmina’s birthday, for example, could attract many segments of society without touching on sensitive historical associations that might alienate some of the Dutch population.7
When Willem III died in 1890 he was mourned by few. Emma had been left to act as regent for the nine-year-old Wilhelmina. She began methodically to prepare her daughter for assumption of the throne in eight years and she also began a cleverly conceived campaign to polish the much tarnished luster of the monarchy, aided by propaganda in the Liberal press.8 Between 1891 and 1896, the two queens traversed the Netherlands, travelling to every region and district, establishing a bond with the locals and using such means to persuade them of Wilhelmina’s commitment to the nation as dressing her in regional costumes.9 This calculated introduction of the future queen to her subjects by systematically traversing all of the nation’s provinces found a local counterpart in the geographical use of Amsterdam.
The tradition of the sovereign’s annual visit to Amsterdam, the national capital, had already been established before Wilhelmina’s accession, though Willem III often shirked the obligation. A standard event in those visits was a carriage ride through working-class districts known as bastions of proOrange sentiment, such as the harbour islands, Bicker’s Eiland, the Zandhoek and Kattenburg, where stevedores and other casual labourers maintained a fierce allegiance to the House of Orange. To a degree this loyalty had been forged in the seventeenth century when the ties between the stadhouders and the lower classes contrasted with the conflicted relations each had with the Amsterdam patriciate.
In the working-class district, the Jordaan, a foul canal was filled in as a hygienic improvement in 1857 and the resulting street, the Willemstraat, was then named for Willem I. Willem III was feted there on his carriage rides during his annual visit to Amsterdam. After her father’s death in 1890, this tradition was maintained by Wilhelmina, who was ritualistically greeted at the Willemstraat by song and presented with bouquets along the decorated street.10
However, Emma soon introduced a new method to the annual visits to Amsterdam that contrasted markedly with previous practice. From 1892, the police chief maintained a book logging the locations of each year’s visits which would be sent to the mayor annually when he received official notification from the royal secretary of the dates the queen would arrive.11
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5.2 Crowds gathered to view a royal carriage ride, Amsterdam, 1901 |
In consultation with the police chief and heeding the expressed wishes of the queen, the mayor would design a programme for the queen’s annual visit. The aim was to demonstrate the impartiality of the queen’s favour to those institutions that represented the values of urban bourgeois respectability. Visits invariably included the zoo, the municipal theatre, the municipal museum, and the contemporary art gallery Arti et Amicitiae. Charitable institutions and hospitals, industrial works, and museums were varied from year to year. Care was taken to represent institutions of varied sectarian affiliation: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. The director of the children’s hospital would write to the Queen each year to request that the royal carriage pass by so that the children could wave to the queen.12 Neighbourhood associations would request the honour of singing to the royal procession, individuals would ask to be permitted to present bouquets, and the path of the various carriage drives would be announced the day before in the newspapers so that people could gather on the street to greet their monarch (Figure 5.2).
The result was a calculated effort to visit all the neighbourhoods of Amsterdam over time, not unlike the national campaign for recognition being carried out in the same period. The two queens cumulatively traversed not only the centre of the city, but also its periphery, penetrating the newly constructed working-class districts at the edge of the city13 (Figure 5.3). This pattern of distribution is all the more striking when contrasted with the patterns followed by the routes of official royal events.
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5.3 Paths followed by Wilhelmina on yearly visits to Amsterdam, 1891-1913 |
Through the seventeenth century, a standard route was established that incorporated one of the oldest streets in the city, the Nieuwendam, leading to the Dam, location of the city hall.14 Starting in the eighteenth century, the canals of the new half-moon plan, the Herengracht and Keizersgracht which had become the seat of the Amsterdam patriciate, became the focus of the route.15 In the nineteenth century, the coronation routes of Willem II (1840), and Willem III (1849), as well as celebration of Willem III’s silver anniversary as king (1874) continued the pattern of favouring the main canals (Figure 5.4). The paths reflected two phases in the city’s history: its originating location at the Dam and the large expansion of the city
during the seventeenth century. The latter was associated with the glorious period of Dutch mercantile hegemony and the success of the Protestant rebellion. The scions of Amsterdam’s leading families, who continued to dominate its public life, lived here along the Herengracht and Keizersgracht. The paths did not veer to include the areas in the city where the lower classes lived.
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5.4 Paths followed during the Coronations of 1840, 1849, and Silver Jubilee of 1874 |
By the time of Wilhelmina’s coronation in 1898, the city included working-class neighbourhoods outside the seventeenth-century ring: the Spaarndammerbuurt, Staatsliedenbuurt, Kinkerbuurt, Pijp, and Dapperbuurt, a middle-class neighbourhood in the Oosterparkbuurt, and a new district attracting the wealthy elite near the Vondelpark, Rijksmuseum, and Concertgebouw. While the function of the main canals was rapidly changing during this period as large houses were taken over by offices, until the First World War this was where the majority of the members of the municipal
council lived.16 The coronation entry route and the city-wide carriage drive of 1898 still privileged the main canals and the city within its seventeenth – century boundaries, ignoring the ring of new districts.
Virtually the same entry route was followed in 1901 when the city welcomed Wilhelmina with her new husband. However, by 1901 the principle of visiting a wide net of neighbourhoods during the annual visits was so entrenched that representatives of a neighbourhood in the nineteenth-century ring, the Pijp, wrote to request that it not be left out as it had been in 1898.17 Only in 1910, on the occasion of the first visit to Amsterdam by Wilhelmina’s child Juliana did the official routes of the main events veer out of the seventeenth-century city into the new districts.
Outreach to these neighbourhoods had occurred earlier in the patterns of the yearly visits, although the emphasis of the carriage rides still lay on the repeated traversal of the main canals. Indeed, when for one annual visit the usual route to the zoo was altered, complaints came in from the Herengracht that they had been neglected, their assumed right to the passage of the queen infringed.18 The tradition of visiting the Willemstraat and Bickers Eiland also continued regularly.19 However, other neighbourhoods previously excluded now came to expect royal attention. As one conservative author writing on the history of the relationship between Amsterdam and the House of Orange on the occasion of Wilhelmina’s coronation put it: the city was now fragmented into electoral wards, its citizenry divided into political parties, but it was still united under the peacefulness of Orange’s protection.20 Royal movement through the city had come to reflect a need to establish solid public relations not only with Amsterdam’s elite, but with a citizenry raising their political voices. The inclusion of working-class districts in the geography of royal carriage tours signified acknowledgement of the widening participation of this population in the public realm.