parliaments. No votes were held on some proposal and there was no round of debates. The grand pensionary controlled the agenda. He introduced a subject and then invited the members to state their opinions, which was done in a fixed order, reflecting the dates the cities they represented had been given city rights. At the end, the grand pensionary summarised each of the statements of the delegates, with an implicit conclusion about what collective decision had been made by this. This way, if he was a competent man, he could control the entire decision-making process, especially as one of his duties was to represent the ten members of the nobility delegates—the —in their absence and phrase the single opinion they as a body had the right to express. The office existed because all delegates of the States were, although ranked according to ancient feudal hierarchy, still basically equal and none among them could thus act as a head. The grand pensionary also took care of the total correspondence of the Estates. He thus handled communications with lower administrative bodies, the other provinces of the Republic, the States General of the Netherlands, and foreign powers. This means his function combined elements of the duties performed by modern ministers of internal and foreign affairs. Letters to the Estates could be read by all the members. Therefore, messages of a more secretive nature were sent to the grand pensionary personally. Large parts of the correspondence of the various grand pensionaries have been preserved, forming an important source of information for later historians. The diplomatic contacts of the Republic were in principle managed by the States General. However, they were ill-equipped to receive and entertain envoys with the pomposity needed in the seventeenth century to avoid offending foreign rulers. In practice, this was delegated to the court of the stadtholder of Holland, who also resided at The Hague. When no stadtholder was appointed, the grand pensionary received envoys. The Batavian Republic of 1795 first abolished the office but in the last year of the Batavian Commonwealth, 1805–1806, the title had to be reinstituted on orders of Napoleon as part of a number of measures to strengthen the executive power; Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck thus functioned for a short time as the last grand pensionary. He officially functioned as a president of the entire Republic, not just of Holland. In June 1806, Carel de Vos van