old flags and banners). At first in some cities the encouraged this usurpation of the role of the , because it helped to undermine the stadtholder's right to appoint the leadership of the militia (as in Alkmaar, Leiden and Dordrecht), which the resented themselves. But this in itself was a threat to the established order, as the claim to revive the was commingled with the principle of electing officers freely from the citizenry and the claim to restore their "proper" place in the hierarchy of civic institutions. Where a remained in charge of the he was suddenly supposed to represent his men in the thereby cunningly reverting the old hierarchy. The Patriots made no secret of the political implications of their reform of the . In cities like Leiden, Zutphen and Utrecht the Free corps drew up petitions demanding recognition of the newly-constituted militias by the city governments, which was subsequently granted. In this early phase there was a happy cooperation between the Patriots and the anti-Orangist , because of their common interest in diminishing the powers of the stadtholder. In Holland province his advantage of exercising command of the Hague garrison of the States Army was offset by the power of the Free Corps in most cities, and the latter had the additional advantage of providing a defense against the usual Orangist weapon of threatened mob violence, because the middle-class Patriots feared the city paupers as much as the did, and formed a common front against the poor. And not without reason, because in several cities, there were Orangist-inspired riots by members of the working class, like the riots in Rotterdam in 1783 and the Hague in 1784, led by the fish-monger Kaat Mussel. On 3 April 1784 such a riot was bloodily suppressed by a Free-Corps company in Rotterdam, when a panicky officer ordered his men to open fire on the mob, which resulted in several people killed. Initially, the officer was blamed, but (due to the fact that more and more riots occurred) the States of Holland later exonerated the Free Corps and blamed the Orangist rioters. The Free Corps were a local phenomenon, limited to the areas where the Patriot movement was strong, partly because the Patriot ideology for a very long time respected the confederal structure of the Dutch Republic. They remained "federal" democrats. But from the end of 1784 they started to organize on