ontinued until the time
of the Union of Utrecht to exercise authority in those and other
provinces professedly in the name of the king. After his death one would
have expected that the office would have fallen into abeyance, but the
coming of Leicester into the Netherlands led to a revival of the
stadholderate. Holland and Zeeland, in their desire to exercise a check
upon the governor-general's arbitrary exercise of his powers, appointed
Maurice of Nassau to take his father's place; and at the same time
William Lewis of Nassau became Stadholder of Friesland, and stadholders
were also appointed in Utrecht, Gelderland and Overyssel. In 1609
Maurice was Stadholder in the five provinces of Holland, Zeeland,
Gelderland, Utrecht and Overyssel; his cousin William Lewis in Friesland
and Groningen with Drente. The powers of the stadholder were not the
same in the different provinces, but generally speaking he was the
executive officer of the Estates; and in Holland, where his authority
was the greatest, he had the supervision of the administration of
justice, the appointment of a large number of municipal magistrates,
and the prerogative of pardon, and he was charged with the military and
naval defence of the province. The stadholder received his commission
both from the Provincial Estates and from the States-General and took an
oath of allegiance to the latter. In so far, then, as he exercised
quasi-sovereign functions, he did it in the name of the States, whose
servant he nominally was. But when the stadholder, as was the case with
Maurice and the other Princes of Orange, was himself a sovereign-prince
and the heir of a great name, he was able to exercise an authority far
exceeding those of a mere official. The descendants of William the
Silent--Maurice, Frederick Henry, William II and William III--were,
moreover, all of them men of exceptional ability; and the stadholderate
became in their hands a position of almost semi-monarchical dignity and
influence, the stadholder being regarded both by foreign potentates and
by the people of the Netherlands generally as "the eminent head of the
State." Maurice, as stated above, was stadholder in five provinces;
Frederick Henry, William II and William III in six; the seventh
province, Friesland, remaining loyal, right through the 17th century, to
their cousins of the house of Nassau-Siegen, the ancestors of the
present Dutch royal family. That the authority of the States-General and
Stat