ABSTRACT
Prussia’s Frederick the Great possessed an enviable capacity to coin a striking figure of speech. Writing in his account of the Austrian Succession War, drafted in the mid- 1740s and finalised three decades later, the King famously compared the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic to a longboat attached to the stem of an English man-of-war and content to be towed along in its wake. Frederick’s simile was equally applicable to the contours of Anglo-Dutch diplomatic relations from the 1740s to the 1780s – the period when Sir Joseph Yorke was first minister and then ambassador at The Hague. Yorke took up his post in 1751, and the middle decades of the eighteenth century were crucial in the history both of the alliance and of his own mission. When the European war was over, the Republic’s political and financial collapse was revealed.
