The Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland (or Anglo-Russian expedition to Holland, or Helder Expedition) was a military campaign from 27 August to 19 November 1799 during the War of the Second Coalition, in which an expeditionary force of British and Russian troops invaded the North Holland peninsula in the Batavian Republic. The campaign had two strategic objectives: to neutralize the Batavian fleet and to promote an uprising by followers of the former stadtholder William V against the Batavian government. The invasion was opposed by a smaller joint Franco-Batavian army.
From a tactical standpoint, the Anglo-Russian forces were successful initially, defeating the defenders in the battles of Callantsoog, Krabbendam and Alkmaar, but subsequent battles went against the Anglo-Russian forces. Following a defeat at Castricum, the Duke of York, the British supreme commander, decided upon a strategic retreat to the original bridgehead in the extreme north of the peninsula. Subsequently, an agreement was negotiated with the supreme commander of the Franco-Batavian forces, General Guillaume Marie Anne Brune, that allowed the Anglo-Russian forces to evacuate this bridgehead unmolested. However, the expedition partly succeeded in its first objective, capturing a significant proportion of the Batavian fleet.
Background
In the 1780s, a pro-French Patriot rebellion failed to establish a democratic Dutch republic without the House of Orange-Nassau, when the latter's power was restored following the 1787 Prussian invasion of Holland.
The Dutch Republic, again ruled by the Orangists, had been a member of the First Coalition that opposed the revolutionary French Republic after 1792. In 1795, at the end of their Flanders Campaign, the forces of stadtholder William V of Orange, and his British and Austrian allies were defeated by the invading French army under General Charles Pichegru, augmented by a contingent of Dutch Patriot revolutionaries under General Herman Willem Daendels. The Dutch Republic was overthrown; the stadtholder fled the country to London; and the Batavian Republic was proclaimed.
Despite the conquest of the old Republic in 1795, the war had not ended; the Netherlands had just changed sides and now fully participated in the continuing conflagration, but its role had changed. France did not need its army so much as its naval resources, in which France itself was deficient. In 1796, under the new alliance, the Dutch started a programme of naval construction. Manning the new ships was a problem, because the officer corps of the old navy was staunchly Orangist. People like the "Hero of Doggerbank" Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen withheld their services. The new navy was therefore officered by people like Jan Willem de Winter, who were of the correct political hue, but had only limited experience. This directly led to the debacles of the surrender at Saldanha Bay at the Cape of Good Hope in 1796, and of the Battle of Camperdown in 1797. At Camperdown the Batavian navy behaved creditably, but this did not lessen the material losses, and the Republic had to start its naval construction programme all over again. This programme soon brought the Batavian navy up to sufficient strength that Great Britain had to worry about its potential contribution to a threatened French invasion of England or Ireland.
The First Coalition broke up in 1797, but Britain soon found a new ally in Emperor Paul I of Russia. The new Allies scored some successes in the land war against France, especially in the puppet Cisalpine Republic and Helvetic Republic where the armies of the Second Coalition succeeded in pushing back the French on a broad front in early 1799. The British, especially the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, were eager to maintain this momentum by attacking at other extremes of the French "empire". The Batavian Republic seemed an opportune target for such an attack, with the Prince of Orange lobbying hard for just such a full military effort to reinstate him, and with Orangist agents leading the British to believe that France's hold over the Batavian Republic was weak and that a determined strike by the British towards Amsterdam would lead to a massive uprising against the French. An added incentive was that a combined campaign against the Dutch had been a condition of the agreement with the Russians of 28 December 1798. In that agreement, Emperor Paul I had placed 45,000 Russian troops at the disposal of the Coalition in return for British subsidies. This convention was further detailed in an agreement of 22 June 1799, whereby Paul promised to furnish a force of seventeen battalions of infantry, two companies of artillery, one company of pioneers, and one squadron of hussars for the expedition to Holland; 17,593 men in total. In return, Britain promised to pay a subsidy of £88,000, and another £44,000 a month when the troops were in the field. Great Britain would itself furnish 13,000 troops and supply most of the transport and naval-escort vessels.
Campaign
From the outset, the joint expedition that was now planned was not to be a purely military affair. Pitt assumed that, like the Italian and Swiss populations, the Dutch would enthusiastically support the invasion against the French. According to the British historian Simon Schama: "Once the Orange standard had been raised, he seems to have believed that the Batavian army would go over to the forces of the Coalition to the last man and that its Republic would collapse under the barest pressure." Ultimately, these expectations were disappointed.
Preparations
The British forces were assembled in the vicinity of Canterbury under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby. They were mostly made up of volunteers from the militia who had recently been permitted to join regular regiments. On 14 June, the Russian Rear Admiral Carl von Breyer was commanded to equip a naval squadron in Reval for the transport of part of the Russian forces. While a British transport fleet under Admiral Home Riggs Popham sailed to Reval to collect the rest of the Russian contingent, the mustering of the British troops progressed smoothly. It was therefore decided not to wait for the return of Popham but to send a division under Abercromby to establish a bridgehead on which it was hoped the Russian troops and a second division under the designated supreme commander of the expedition, the Duke of York, could easily be disembarked.
The question was where this amphibious landing could best take place. Several locations on the Dutch coast were considered. Many strategists preferred either the mouth of the Meuse river, or the vicinity of Scheveningen, both of which offered an opportunity to quickly deploy the attacking forces and threaten the supply lines of the French army of occupation in the Batavian Republic. These locations had as a severe drawback the dangerous shoals before the Dutch coast that made it difficult to navigate these waters. The extreme north of the North Holland peninsula did not have this drawback and a landing here could thus be supported by British sea power in the North Sea. It also recommended itself to the planners of the invasion, because the area was only lightly fortified; a large part of the Dutch fleet (an important objective of the expedition) was based nearby and might be at least dislocated, if the landing was successful; and the terrain seemed to promise the possibility of an easy advance on the important strategic objective of the city of Amsterdam. The area south of Den Helder was therefore selected as the landing place.
The British did not make a secret of their preparations. The authorities in France and the Batavian Republic were therefore aware of them. The intended landing location was not known to them and they were therefore forced to spread their forces thinly to guard against all eventualities. The Batavian army at the time consisted of two divisions (each of about 10,000 men), one commanded by Lieutenant-General Daendels, the other by Lieutenant-General Jean-Baptiste Dumonceau. The latter had taken up positions in Friesland and Groningen to guard against a landing from the Wadden Sea or an incursion from the East. Daendels indeed was positioned in the northern part of North Holland, with headquarters at Schagen. The French troops (only 15,000 of the full complement of 25,000 troops that the Treaty of The Hague called for) were divided between Zeeland (another logical landing spot, where in 1809 the Walcheren Expedition took place), and the middle of the country, strung out between the coast and Nijmegen. The entire Franco-Batavian army was placed under the command of the French General Brune.
Landing at Callantsoog and the surrender of the Batavian squadron
The invasion met with early success. The depleted Dutch fleet, under Rear-Admiral Samuel Story, evaded battle, leaving the disembarkation of the British troops near Callantsoog on 27 August 1799, unopposed. General Daendels was defeated in the Battle of Callantsoog when he tried to prevent the establishment of a bridgehead by the division under General Abercromby. This was due to the fact that he was forced to divide his forces, because of the nature of the field of battle, a narrow band of dunes, bordered by the North-Sea beach on one side, and a swamp on the other. Due to communication problems, his right wing was never fully engaged, and the forces of his left wing were fed piecemeal into the battle. The British made very good use of the support their gunboats could offer from close inshore. The naval gunfire inflicted heavy losses on the Dutch.
Daendels then concluded that the Helder fortresses were untenable and evacuated their garrisons, thereby offering the invaders a fortified base. This decision proved disastrous for Dutch morale: the sight of the flag of the hereditary stadtholder, who soon joined the expedition, further undermined the already questionable loyalty of the Dutch fleet in the Zuyder Zee. When Admiral Story belatedly decided to engage the British fleet, he had a full-fledged mutiny on his hands, where the Orangist sailors were led by their own officers, Captains Van Braam and Van Capellen. This led to the Vlieter Incident, the surrender on 30 August of the fleet with 632 guns and 3,700 men to Admiral Andrew Mitchell, without a shot being fired. Later, the Prince went aboard Story's flagship, Washington to receive the accolades of the mutineers.
Arnhem and Krabbendam
The Dutch land forces were less amenable to the Prince's powers of persuasion, and neither was the civilian population in North Holland. If anything, the effect of the invasion was to unify the divided Republic against the invader. The Prince's arrogant proclamation, peremptorily ordering the Dutch people to rally to Orange, was also not calculated to convince the Dutch of the wisdom of a restoration of the Stadholderate. It was therefore not surprising that the call for an uprising by the old Stadtholder himself from Lingen met with indifference by the people. A motley band of Orangist émigrés at the Westervoortsche Bridge near Arnhem, was easily put to flight on September 4 by a small detachment of the Batavian National Guard, proving that the invaders had to do the work themselves. Other Orangist incursions in the eastern Netherlands and Friesland met with even less success. Nevertheless, the Uitvoerend Bewind of the Batavian Republic declared martial law and under these emergency measures an aristocratic partisan of the stadtholder, the freule (baroness) Judith Van Dorth tot Holthuizen was convicted of sedition and executed.
Meanwhile, the Franco-Batavian forces on the North Holland front were being reinforced. General Brune brought up a French division under General Dominique Vandamme and ordered General Dumonceau to bring up the main part of his 2nd Batavian division in forced marches from Friesland. The latter arrived on 9 September at Alkmaar. The Franco-Batavian army now had about 25,000 men available against about 20,000 for the British. In view of this numerical superiority, and the fact that reinforcements for the British were expected any day, Brune decided to attack Abercromby's position.