The Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands, also known as the Dutch Republic, was a compound state in which sovereignty was shared between towns, provinces, and the States General. The Union of Utrecht of 1579 was one of the Republic’s principal founding documents, yet paradoxically grounded the state in the diverging values of provincial independence and national unity. Unique to the Dutch republican system was the office of stadhouder, which at times has been described in modern scholarship as an ‘enigma’ or as ‘peculiar’. Despite a wealth of historical studies on the Dutch Republic and on the Princes of Orange, who in the majority of the Republic’s provinces were typically appointed to the stadhoudership, no thorough analysis exists of the exact constitutional position of the office itself, nor of its practical functioning within Dutch politics or of its representation in popular culture.

The present study addresses this lacuna in the scholarship by presenting a detailed overview of how the office of stadhouder developed from the beginning of the Dutch Revolt into the state’s Republican period. It argues that the inherent constitutional tension contained in the Union of Utrecht was embodied in the stadhoudership, which was subservient to provincial authority but simultaneously required by Articles 9 and 16 of the Union treaty to act as a mediator on both an inter- and supra-provincial level at times of political discord. This task of resolving conflict and preserving eendracht (‘unity’) within the Dutch state became the dominant feature of the role, both on a governmental level and in the stadhouder’s popular image. While thus undertaking an interrogation of the constitutional tensions underpinning the stadhoudership, this study draws on material culture in a variety of forms, from constitutional documents to popular literature and art.

The first part of the thesis predominantly engages with the constitutional position of the stadhouder within the governmental structure of the Dutch Republic, whereas the second section instead focuses on how the political culture surrounding the stadhoudership was reflected in contemporary popular literature and the visual arts. Overall, this thesis provides deeper insights into the different ways of negotiating tension between central and provincial power in early modern states.