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In his recent biography of William I, Jeroen Koch wondered, in his conclusion, if the life of the first Dutch king could be captured in one image. He suggested that a suitable image would be the inauguration of William Frederick as king in the city hall of Brussels on 21 September 1815. This marked the start of ‘his great project, the construction of the so keenly anticipated United Kingdom as a prosperous and efficiently organised unitary state under his leadership’ (Koch 2013, 571).

Already during the early years of the Restoration, liberals and Catholics expressed, through their predominant political journals, sympathy for each other’s ideas and arguments on numerous occasions.

In 1817 the government, still controlled by its more moderate members, recognised that there existed a problem concerning ministerial responsibility, and initiated a debate on how the situation could be improved through a constitutional revision. However, different views on the bases of the constitutional order would result in misunderstandings on all sides about the intentions of the other sides, and, as a consequence, the debate would be aborted before it had truly started. The failure to address the constitutional void would, as we will see, bring with it the triumph within the government of the political forces which advanced the view that the monarch held priority over the constitution.

After the Northern Netherlands had been liberated, and William Frederick had been declared Sovereign Prince and head of a provisional government, a Constitutional Commission was set up to draft a new constitution for the country. The prince had declared on 2 November 1813 that he would only accept becoming the new sovereign ‘under guarantee of a wise Constitution’ (van Sas 2004, 461).

One of most important questions within the historiography of the Restoration Kingdom of the Netherlands has been why Catholics in the Southern Netherlands by the end of the Restoration period supported and joined a liberal opposition. I believe the answer can be found, on the one hand, by situating Catholic political opposition during the Restoration in a longue duree development of political Catholicism.

Political Catholicism emerged, both in France and in the Southern Netherlands, at the end of the eighteenth century in response to the revolutionary events in these countries. It developed out of political-ecclesiastical battles that took place during the eighteenth century. But the fundamentally different nature of the revolutions in France and the Habsburg Netherlands also meant that political Catholicism developed in both countries along very different paths.

In 1814–1815, political debate in the Southern Netherlands on the future of the country revolved around the question of the need to restore the ‘ancient constitutions’, in combination with the question as to what political arrangement would best promote unity. In view of the totally different nature of the political debate in later years, primarily after 1825, which revolved around the liberal issues of civil and political liberties, historians have often emphasised the discontinuity in the political culture of the period.

If the conclusion of a union of Catholics and liberals did not require any serious reconsideration of the ideas underpinning the two oppositions in the Southern Netherlands, it nevertheless triggered a further radicalisation of political positions. In the discourse of the union of oppositions, this created a dynamic towards Belgian nationalism.

The conclusion of the Catholic-liberal union sparked some Catholics to explore new avenues in political thought, a development on which the Belgian Revolution would have a dramatic, catalysing effect. This included the influence of the political thought of Joseph de Maistre and, especially, Felicite de Lamennais, which involved a secular, ‘modern’ version of ultramontanism. Their ideas would ultimately, after the Belgian Revolution, encapsulate a major part of Catholic opinion in the Southern Netherlands.