Our First Revolution
The Glorious Revolution: William of Orange and his Dutch army land in England, 1688
(Johan Herman Isings / Wikimedia Commons)
By Michael Barone
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
In 1894, during his senior year at Amherst College, Calvin Coolidge debated the topic “Do the United States owe more to England or to Holland?”
This debate topic would surely puzzle twenty-first-century students, who have been taught that cultural and ethnic diversity came to America only in the past few decades. But the undergraduate Coolidge understood the diversity of America’s colonial settlers, who came from various distinct corners of the British Isles and, yes, from the Netherlands.
The Dutch heritage was familiar to literate Americans in Coolidge’s youth. They read Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They knew perhaps that Martin Van Buren, the eighth president and founder of the Democratic Party, grew up speaking Dutch in the village of Kinderhook in the Hudson Valley. They were familiar with the figure of jolly Saint Nicholas from Clement Clark Moore’s poem, based on the Dutch legends retold by his neighbors in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. They did not yet know, but would learn later, that Theodore Roosevelt, who was appointed New York City police commissioner during Coolidge’s senior year at Amherst, grew up in Manhattan in an affluent family that gathered for Sunday dinners at his grandfather’s where everyone spoke Dutch.
The Dutch heritage was still tangible more than two hundred years after Peter Stuyvesant surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam to the naval forces of James, Duke of York. By this point, New York had long since become America’s largest city, its leader in manufacturing and commerce, finance and the arts. It was the city where Coolidge’s Amherst schoolmates Dwight Morrow and Harlan Fiske Stone made their careers. In New York State, also the nation’s largest, political leaders included the Dutch Americans who occupied the White House for almost twenty of the first forty-five years of the twentieth century, men whose surname Americans learned to pronounce the Dutch way: Roosevelt.
The young Coolidge was surely familiar with perhaps America’s most popular history book in the second half of the nineteenth century, Thomas Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848). That book’s hero was Dutch: William, Prince of Orange, the prime mover of the astonishing and unlikely events known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, which installed William and his wife, Mary, as king and queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
When America’s Second Continental Congress declared independence in 1776, only eighty-seven years had elapsed since the Glorious Revolution. The Dutch influence on America’s Founding was profound.
DUTCH DYNAMO
The Dutch Republic, which became independent in the late sixteenth century, was a federal republic. As President Coolidge would observe in 1926, in a speech marking the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Dutch based their republic on “the idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers.”
William served as the Dutch Republic’s stadtholder, a sort of hereditary commander in chief. He depended for military supply on the vote of the States General, which included delegates from each of the seven Dutch states, whose representatives were in turn chosen by the elected representatives of each city. The Dutch Republic was unique in Europe as a land of religious toleration and free exercise of religion. It was a commercial dynamo as well, with ships trading around the world, the first business corporations, a national bank financing great enterprises, and a standard of living and artistic achievement second to none in Europe.
William was also, as the grandson of King Charles I, third in line for the English throne. Beginning in 1685, the monarch who ruled Britain was James II, who as Duke of York had seized New Netherland. That made James’s daughter Mary—William’s wife and first cousin—heiress to the throne, with her sister Anne second in line. William, Mary, and Anne were all Protestants, but James was Catholic—as was his second wife, who in June 1688 gave birth to a son, who threatened to replace them as heirs to the throne.
In response, William secretly procured an invitation, signed by seven lords, to come to England. He assembled an army of twenty-five thousand men and a flotilla of fifty ships. He sought to forestall James’s alliance with Louis XIV of France, the wealthy and aggressive monarch who was amassing absolutist power. Sixteen years before, at age twenty-one, William had led his army to open the dikes and flood the lowlands to foil Louis’s invasion of the Dutch Republic.
BLOODLESS REVOLUTION
In fall 1688, William’s flotilla waited five weeks for the Protestant Wind that would take them across the English Channel, in the only successful cross-channel invasion between 1066 and 1944.
The many contingencies that could have defeated this daring enterprise did not occur. William’s army landed and advanced. James fled the kingdom and sailed to France. Parliamentary Whigs and Tories—for England had already developed political parties—proclaimed William and Mary as king and queen. They voted for a Bill of Rights and a Toleration Act. William agreed that he would spend no money unless voted by Parliament, which—for the first time—would meet every year. Negotiating with Parliament, as he had negotiated with the Dutch Republic’s States General, he led Britain in war against Louis XIV.
Just as he had negotiated financing from the nouveaux riches merchants of Amsterdam, who paid half the Dutch Republic’s tax revenues, so he persuaded Parliament to establish the Bank of England, modeled after the Bank of Amsterdam, and a funded debt to finance war with France, which had four times the population and riches of Britain.
The Dutch king’s Glorious Revolution represented a giant step forward for representative government, guaranteed liberties, global capitalism, and opposition to hegemonic tyrannical powers.
This bloodless revolution had enormous reverberations for America. King James had been busy abolishing the colonial legislatures in North America. King William restored them, and it was in these legislatures that the Founding Fathers—Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and many others—gained their political education.
As Coolidge emphasized in 1926, the Declaration they produced reflected “an orderly process of government,” resulting from “the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body.”
A DEBT TO THE DUTCH
The Founders created a federal republic with sovereign states—a structure closer to the Dutch Republic than to the British King-in-Parliament. They established an executive commander in chief dependent for funding on a Congress chosen through a complicated set of elections and meeting every year. They enacted a Bill of Rights, some of which came straight from its British predecessor. They established a Bank of the United States and a national debt to provide funding for defense and war. They created a framework for a capitalist economy that produced widespread prosperity through technical innovations, and traded with all the world, as the Dutch had from Amsterdam and Leiden and Haarlem.
In time and by stages, often amid controversy, this American republic has become a participant in and then a leader of successful struggles that echoed William of Orange’s efforts to defeat hegemonic tyrannical powers.
Civic equality, religious toleration, representative government, free markets—people can argue about how to put these principles into practice, but as principles they are final, incapable of further progress, as Coolidge argued in 1926. Still, defending them against those who would lead peoples and nations backward into tyranny can be an exacting challenge. It is a matter of record that in 1939, 1940, and 1941, when hegemonic totalitarian tyrants were threatening to conquer the entire Eurasian landmass, the leaders who stood up against them were a British prime minister who was a descendant of William of Orange’s great ally in the Glorious Revolution—John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough—and an American president who was a descendant of Hudson Valley Dutch patroons.
We do not know whether the undergraduate Calvin Coolidge argued that America owed more to England or to Holland. But given how those nations’ histories were braided together in the risky enterprise of the Glorious Revolution, we owe much of what we hold dear to both countries.
Michael Barone is the author of Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers. He is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner and the longtime coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.