The King and Queen of the Netherlands had the greatest difficulty in persuading the Prince to visit them in Holland. The Communal Council of Brussels waited on them at The Hague with an address of congratulation on their accession. 'I don't know,' said the Queen, 'what you do to keep my son at Brussels; but he is so fond of you that we hardly ever see him here.' It would have been better for the stability of his throne if the King had spent more of his own time in Brussels, for signs of that discontent about which the Prince had written to Wellington soon began to appear, and he might, perhaps, have taken warning before it was too late, if he had known the truth.
Like Joseph II., William came to the throne full of good intentions; like him, he alienated the clergy at the outset; and, like him, he tried to give the Catholic Netherlands a liberal Constitution on his own terms. His aim was to make them free and happy, but 'Alone I did it' must be written over all. His character was a combination of sage ideas and Dutch obstinacy; and one great root of bitterness between him and the clergy was that never-ending question of education, over which parties are fighting in Belgium at the present day. It was not that he wished to make the southern provinces Protestant. But he was bent on raising the intellectual standard of the country; and for this purpose he founded, amongst other institutions, the Collège Philosophique at Louvain, where the young priests were to receive a thorough education in accordance with the spirit of the time--a scheme which the Church resisted as it had resisted the Séminaire Générale of Joseph II., and with equal success.
In a variety of ways the King alienated the people as well as the priests. Though the States-General met alternately at The Hague and at Brussels, all the great departments of the executive were in Holland. They would, indeed, have been safest there in the event of a war; but it was made a grievance that some of them were not at Brussels, Antwerp, or Ghent. Most of the officials were Dutch, which was said to prove a wish for Hollander supremacy, though the Dutch were a minority of the population of the United Kingdom. The press attacked the Government, and was severely punished under a system of decrees emanating from the personal authority of the King. The use of Dutch as the official language was enforced against the wishes of the majority. Dutch methods of taxation were extended to Belgium, and trouble was caused by the fact that Holland was for Free Trade and Belgium for Protection. And of course the southern provinces were Catholic and the northern Protestant, which more than anything else kept them on bad terms. At last the impression became universal that the King's policy was to sacrifice the interests of the Belgian provinces to those of Holland; and the result was that the two great parties, or schools of thought, which had always bitterly opposed each other, the Catholics and the Liberals, united to oppose the Government.[44] This was in 1829. Next year the Paris revolt of July, which drove out Charles X., and put Louis Philippe on the throne of France, taught the Belgians how easy it might be to get rid of a ruler with whom they were discontented; and when the news from Paris came to Brussels, the streets and cafés were full of men reading the papers, and saying to each other, 'That's the way to revolt! Long live the barricades! Long live the people!'