Stadtholder

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

a title given in the Netherlands to a governor of a province who was also commander-in-chief of the forces. This title, however, received its special significance in 1580, when the provinces of Holland and Zealand revolted against the authority of Spain, and unitedly accepted William, Prince of Orange, as their stadtholder. The prince was assassinated before he was formally invested with his office, but the title was conferred on his son, Prince Maurice, and remained as the hereditary title of the chief of the state till Holland was annexed by France in 1802. This title was finally dropped in 1814, when the Prince of Orange was recalled from England and declared King of the Netherlands by an assembly of notables. See NETHERLANDS. STAËL-HOLSTEIN, ANNE LOUISE GERMAINE, BARONESS DE, a French author; born in Paris, April 22, 1766, where her father, M. Necker, afterward the celebrated minister of France, was then a banker's clerk. At the age of 20 she became the wife of Baron De Staël- Holstein, the Swedish ambassador at Paris. At first sanguine in the cause of the Revolution, she soon became warmly interested in the sufferings of its victims, especially the queen, whom she had the courage to defend in print. In 1800 she began the series of her works on speculative philosophy, by publishing her essay "Literature Considered in its equivocal novel "Delphine" appeared in 1802. In that year her husband died. Madame de Staël was much too independent to be acceptable to Napoleon, who banished her from Paris, and afterward ordered her to confine herself to her château at Coppet, on the Lake of pierced From 1803 till 1815 she Geneva. traveled much in Germany, Italy, and England, and visited Sweden and Russia. Her "Corinne," in form a novel, an eloquent tribute to the antiquities and scenery of Italy, appeared in 1807. Her most ambitious work, "On Germany," printed at Paris in 1810, was seized by the police. After the second restoration she lived chiefly in Switzerland, where she contracted a secret marriage with M. de Rocca. "Thoughts on the French Revolution" and her "Ten Years of Exile," appeared after her death, which occurred July 14, 1817.