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The Rise of the Dutch Republic — Complete (1555-84)

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Title: The Rise of the Dutch Republic — Complete (1555-84)

Author: John Lothrop Motley


        
Release date: November 7, 2004 [eBook #4836]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC — COMPLETE (1555-84) ***




Produced by David Widger





MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, PG EDITION

THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC, 1555-1566, Complete

A History




JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D.C.L., LL.D. Corresponding Member of the Institute
of France, Etc.
1855

[Etext Editor's Note: JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, born in Dorchester, Mass.
1814, died 1877. Other works: Morton's Hopes and Merry Mount, novels.
Motley was the United States Minister to Austria, 1861-67, and the United
States Minister to England, 1869-70. Mark Twain mentions his respect for
John Motley. Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 'An Oration delivered before
the City Authorities of Boston' on the 4th of July, 1863: "'It cannot be
denied,'--says another observer, placed on one of our national
watch-towers in a foreign capital,--'it cannot be denied that the
tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high places, is
more and more unfriendly to our cause; but the people,' he adds,
'everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause is that of
free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the people against an
oligarchy.' These are the words of the Minister to Austria, whose
generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by
the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever
spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which
infused a portion of its life into our own,--John Lothrop Motley." (See
the biography of Motley, by Holmes) Ed.]




PREFACE

The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the
leading events of modern times. Without the birth of this great
commonwealth, the various historical phenomena of: the sixteenth and
following centuries must have either not existed; or have presented
themselves under essential modifications.--Itself an organized protest
against ecclesiastical tyranny and universal empire, the Republic guarded
with sagacity, at many critical periods in the world's history; that
balance of power which, among civilized states; ought always to be
identical with the scales of divine justice. The splendid empire of
Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty. It is a
consolation to those who have hope in humanity to watch, under the reign
of his successor, the gradual but triumphant resurrection of the spirit
over which the sepulchre had so long been sealed. From the handbreadth of
territory called the province of Holland rises a power which wages eighty
years' warfare with the most potent empire upon earth, and which, during
the progress of the struggle, becoming itself a mighty state, and binding
about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of earth,
from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees to the empire of
Charles.

So much is each individual state but a member of one great international
commonwealth, and so close is the relationship between the whole human
family, that it is impossible for a nation, even while struggling for
itself, not to acquire something for all mankind. The maintenance of the
right by the little provinces of Holland and Zealand in the sixteenth, by
Holland and England united in the seventeenth, and by the United States
of America in the eighteenth centuries, forms but a single chapter in the
great volume of human fate; for the so-called revolutions of Holland,
England, and America, are all links of one chain.

To the Dutch Republic, even more than to Florence at an earlier day, is
the world indebted for practical instruction in that great science of
political equilibrium which must always become more and more important as
the various states of the civilized world are pressed more closely
together, and as the struggle for pre-eminence becomes more feverish and
fatal. Courage and skill in political and military combinations enabled
William the Silent to overcome the most powerful and unscrupulous monarch
of his age. The same hereditary audacity and fertility of genius placed
the destiny of Europe in the hands of William's great-grandson, and
enabled him to mould into an impregnable barrier the various elements of
opposition to the overshadowing monarchy of Louis XIV. As the schemes of
the Inquisition and the unparalleled tyranny of Philip, in one century,
led to the establishment of the Republic of the United Provinces, so, in
the next, the revocation of the Nantes Edict and the invasion of Holland
are avenged by the elevation of the Dutch stadholder upon the throne of
the stipendiary Stuarts.

To all who speak the English language; the history of the great agony
through which the Republic of Holland was ushered into life must have
peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon
race--essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or
Massachusetts.

A great naval and commercial commonwealth, occupying a small portion of
Europe but conquering a wide empire by the private enterprise of trading
companies, girdling the world with its innumerable dependencies in Asia,
America, Africa, Australia--exercising sovereignty in Brazil, Guiana, the
West Indies, New York, at the Cape of Good Hope, in Hindostan, Ceylon,
Java, Sumatra, New Holland--having first laid together, as it were, many
of the Cyclopean blocks, out of which the British realm, at a late:
period, has been constructed--must always be looked upon with interest by
Englishmen, as in a great measure the precursor in their own scheme of
empire.

For America the spectacle is one of still deeper import. The Dutch
Republic originated in the opposition of the rational elements of human
nature to sacerdotal dogmatism and persecution--in the courageous
resistance of historical and chartered liberty to foreign despotism.
Neither that liberty nor ours was born of the cloud-embraces of a false
Divinity with, a Humanity of impossible beauty, nor was the infant career
of either arrested in blood and tears by the madness of its worshippers.
"To maintain," not to overthrow, was the device of the Washington of the
sixteenth century, as it was the aim of our own hero and his great
contemporaries.

The great Western Republic, therefore--in whose Anglo-Saxon veins flows
much of that ancient and kindred blood received from the nation once
ruling a noble portion of its territory, and tracking its own political
existence to the same parent spring of temperate human liberty--must look
with affectionate interest upon the trials of the elder commonwealth.
These volumes recite the achievement of Dutch independence, for its
recognition was delayed till the acknowledgment was superfluous and
ridiculous. The existence of the Republic is properly to be dated from
the Union of Utrecht in 1581, while the final separation of territory
into independent and obedient provinces, into the Commonwealth of the
United States and the Belgian provinces of Spain, was in reality effected
by William the Silent, with whose death three years subsequently, the
heroic period of the history may be said to terminate. At this point
these volumes close. Another series, with less attention to minute
details, and carrying the story through a longer range of years, will
paint the progress of the Republic in its palmy days, and narrate the
establishment of, its external system of dependencies and its interior
combinations for self-government and European counterpoise. The lessons
of history and the fate of free states can never be sufficiently pondered
by those upon whom so large and heavy a responsibility for the
maintenance of rational human freedom rests.

I have only to add that this work is the result of conscientious
research, and of an earnest desire to arrive at the truth. I have
faithfully studied all the important contemporary chroniclers and later
historians--Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, or German. Catholic
and Protestant, Monarchist and Republican, have been consulted with the
same sincerity. The works of Bor (whose enormous but indispensable folios
form a complete magazine of contemporary state-papers, letters, and
pamphlets, blended together in mass, and connected by a chain of artless
but earnest narrative), of Meteren, De Thou, Burgundius, Heuterus;
Tassis, Viglius, Hoofd, Haraeus, Van der Haer, Grotius-of Van der Vynckt,
Wagenaer, Van Wyn, De Jonghe, Kluit, Van Kampen, Dewez, Kappelle,
Bakhuyzen, Groen van Prinsterer--of Ranke and Raumer, have been as
familiar to me as those of Mendoza, Carnero, Cabrera, Herrera, Ulloa,
Bentivoglio, Peres, Strada. The manuscript relations of those Argus-eyed
Venetian envoys who surprised so many courts and cabinets in their most
unguarded moments, and daguerreotyped their character and policy for the
instruction of the crafty Republic, and whose reports remain such an
inestimable source for the secret history of the sixteenth century, have
been carefully examined--especially the narratives of the caustic and
accomplished Badovaro, of Suriano, and Michele. It is unnecessary to add
that all the publications of M. Gachard--particularly the invaluable
correspondence of Philip II. and of William the Silent, as well as the
"Archives et Correspondence" of the Orange Nassau family, edited by the
learned and distinguished Groen van Prinsterer, have been my constant
guides through the tortuous labyrinth of Spanish and Netherland politics.
The large and most interesting series of pamphlets known as "The Duncan
Collection," in the Royal Library at the Hague, has also afforded a great
variety of details by which I have endeavoured to give color and interest
to the narrative. Besides these, and many other printed works, I have
also had the advantage of perusing many manuscript histories, among which
may be particularly mentioned the works of Pontua Payen, of Renom de
France, and of Pasquier de la Barre; while the vast collection of
unpublished documents in the Royal Archives of the Hague, of Brussels,
and of Dresden, has furnished me with much new matter of great
importance. I venture to hope that many years of labour, a portion of
them in the archives of those countries whose history forms the object of
my study, will not have been entirely in vain; and that the lovers of
human progress, the believers in the capacity of nations for
self-government and self-improvement, and the admirers of disinterested
human genius and virtue, may find encouragement for their views in the
detailed history of an heroic people in its most eventful period, and in
the life and death of the great man whose name and fame are identical
with those of his country.

No apology is offered for this somewhat personal statement. When an
unknown writer asks the attention of the public upon an important theme,
he is not only authorized, but required, to show, that by industry and
earnestness he has entitled himself to a hearing. The author too keenly
feels that he has no further claims than these, and he therefore most
diffidently asks for his work the indulgence of his readers.

I would take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to Dr. Klemm,
Hofrath and Chief Librarian at Dresden, and to Mr. Von Weber,
Ministerial-rath and Head of the Royal Archives of Saxony, for the
courtesy and kindness extended to me so uniformly during the course of my
researches in that city. I would also speak a word of sincere thanks to
Mr. Campbell, Assistant Librarian at the Hague, for his numerous acts of
friendship during the absence of, his chief, M. Holtrop. To that most
distinguished critic and historian, M. Bakhuyzen van den Brinck, Chief
Archivist of the Netherlands, I am under deep obligations for advice,
instruction, and constant kindness, during my residence at the Hague; and
I would also signify my sense of the courtesy of Mr. Charter-Master de
Schwane, and of the accuracy with which copies of MSS. in the archives
were prepared for me by his care. Finally, I would allude in the
strongest language of gratitude and respect to M. Gachard,
Archivist-General of Belgium, for his unwearied courtesy and manifold
acts of kindness to me during my studies in the Royal Archives of
Brussels.




THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.




Part 1.

I.

The north-western corner of the vast plain which extends from the German
ocean to the Ural mountains, is occupied by the countries called the
Netherlands. This small triangle, enclosed between France, Germany, and
the sea, is divided by the modern kingdoms of Belgium and Holland into
two nearly equal portions. Our earliest information concerning this
territory is derived from the Romans. The wars waged by that nation with
the northern barbarians have rescued the damp island of Batavia, with its
neighboring morasses, from the obscurity in which they might have
remained for ages, before any thing concerning land or people would have
been made known by the native inhabitants. Julius Caesar has saved from,
oblivion the heroic savages who fought against his legions in defence of
their dismal homes with ferocious but unfortunate patriotism; and the
great poet of England, learning from the conqueror's Commentaries the
name of the boldest tribe, has kept the Nervii, after almost twenty
centuries, still fresh and familiar in our ears.

Tacitus, too, has described with singular minuteness the struggle between
the people of these regions and the power of Rome, overwhelming, although
tottering to its fall; and has moreover, devoted several chapters of his
work upon Germany to a description of the most remarkable Teutonic tribes
of the Netherlands.

Geographically and ethnographically, the Low Countries belong both to
Gaul and to Germany. It is even doubtful to which of the two the Batavian
island, which is the core of the whole country, was reckoned by the
Romans. It is, however, most probable that all the land, with the
exception of Friesland, was considered a part of Gaul.

Three great rivers--the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheld--had deposited
their slime for ages among the dunes and sand banks heaved up by the
ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus formed, habitable at last for
man. It was by nature a wide morass, in which oozy islands and savage
forests were interspersed among lagoons and shallows; a district lying
partly below the level of the ocean at its higher tides, subject to
constant overflow from the rivers, and to frequent and terrible
inundations by the sea.

The Rhine, leaving at last the regions where its storied lapse, through
so many ages, has been consecrated alike by nature and art-by poetry and
eventful truth--flows reluctantly through the basalt portal of the
Seven Mountains into the open fields which extend to the German sea.
After entering this vast meadow, the stream divides itself into two
branches, becoming thus the two-horned Rhine of Virgil, and holds in
these two arms the island of Batavia.

The Meuse, taking its rise in the Vosges, pours itself through the
Ardennes wood, pierces the rocky ridges upon the southeastern frontier of
the Low Countries, receives the Sambre in the midst of that picturesque
anthracite basin where now stands the city of Namur, and then moves
toward the north, through nearly the whole length of the country, till it
mingles its waters with the Rhine.

The Scheld, almost exclusively a Belgian river, after leaving its
fountains in Picardy, flows through the present provinces of Flanders and
Hainault. In Caesar's time it was suffocated before reaching the sea in
quicksands and thickets, which long afforded protection to the savage
inhabitants against the Roman arms; and which the slow process of nature
and the untiring industry of man have since converted into the
archipelago of Zealand and South Holland. These islands were unknown to
the Romans.

Such were the rivers, which, with their numerous tributaries, coursed
through the spongy land. Their frequent overflow, when forced back upon
their currents by the stormy sea, rendered the country almost
uninhabitable. Here, within a half-submerged territory, a race of
wretched ichthyophagi dwelt upon terpen, or mounds, which they had
raised, like beavers, above the almost fluid soil. Here, at a later day,
the same race chained the tyrant Ocean and his mighty streams into
subserviency, forcing them to fertilize, to render commodious, to cover
with a beneficent network of veins and arteries, and to bind by watery
highways with the furthest ends of the world, a country disinherited by
nature of its rights. A region, outcast of ocean and earth, wrested at
last from both domains their richest treasures. A race, engaged for
generations in stubborn conflict with the angry elements, was
unconsciously educating itself for its great struggle with the still more
savage despotism of man.

The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests. An
extensive belt of woodland skirted the sea-coast; reaching beyond the
mouths of the Rhine. Along the outer edge of this carrier, the dunes cast
up by the sea were prevented by the close tangle of thickets from
drifting further inward; and thus formed a breastwork which time and art
were to strengthen. The groves of Haarlem and the Hague are relics of
this ancient forest. The Badahuenna wood, horrid with Druidic sacrifices,
extended along the eastern line of the vanished lake of Flevo. The vast
Hercynian forest, nine days' journey in breadth, closed in the country on
the German side, stretching from the banks of the Rhine to the remote
regions of the Dacians, in such vague immensity (says the conqueror of
the whole country) that no German, after traveling sixty days, had ever
reached, or even heard of; its commencement. On the south, the famous
groves of Ardennes, haunted by faun and satyr, embowered the country, and
separated it from Celtic Gaul.

Thus inundated by mighty rivers, quaking beneath the level of the ocean,
belted about by hirsute forests, this low land, nether land, hollow land,
or Holland, seemed hardly deserving the arms of the all-accomplished
Roman. Yet foreign tyranny, from the earliest ages, has coveted this
meagre territory as lustfully as it has sought to wrest from their native
possessors those lands with the fatal gift of beauty for their dower;
while the genius of liberty has inspired as noble a resistance to
oppression here as it ever aroused in Grecian or Italian breasts.



II.

It can never be satisfactorily ascertained who were the aboriginal
inhabitants. The record does not reach beyond Caesar's epoch, and he
found the territory on the left of the Rhine mainly tenanted by tribes of
the Celtic family. That large division of the Indo-European group which
had already overspread many portions of Asia Minor, Greece, Germany, the
British Islands, France, and Spain, had been long settled in Belgic Gaul,
and constituted the bulk of its population. Checked in its westward
movement by the Atlantic, its current began to flow backwards towards its
fountains, so that the Gallic portion of the Netherland population was
derived from the original race in its earlier wanderings and from the
later and refluent tide coming out of Celtic Gaul. The modern appellation
of the Walloons points to the affinity of their ancestors with the
Gallic, Welsh, and Gaelic family. The Belgae were in many respects a
superior race to most of their blood-allies. They were, according to
Caesar's testimony, the bravest of all the Celts. This may be in part
attributed to the presence of several German tribes, who, at this period
had already forced their way across the Rhine, mingled their qualities
with the Belgic material, and lent an additional mettle to the Celtic
blood. The heart of the country was thus inhabited by a Gallic race, but
the frontiers had been taken possession of by Teutonic tribes.

When the Cimbri and their associates, about a century before our era,
made their memorable onslaught upon Rome, the early inhabitants of the
Rhine island of Batavia, who were probably Celts, joined in the
expedition. A recent and tremendous inundation had swept away their
miserable homes, and even the trees of the forests, and had thus rendered
them still more dissatisfied with their gloomy abodes. The island was
deserted of its population. At about the same period a civil dissension
among the Chatti--a powerful German race within the Hercynian
forest--resulted in the expatriation of a portion of the people. The
exiles sought a new home in the empty Rhine island, called it "Bet-auw,"
or "good-meadow," and were themselves called, thenceforward, Batavi, or
Batavians.

These Batavians, according to Tacitus, were the bravest of all the
Germans. The Chatti, of whom they formed a portion, were a pre-eminently
warlike race. "Others go to battle," says the historian, "these go to
war." Their bodies were more hardy, their minds more vigorous, than those
of other tribes. Their young men cut neither hair nor beard till they had
slain an enemy. On the field of battle, in the midst of carnage and
plunder, they, for the first time, bared their faces. The cowardly and
sluggish, only, remained unshorn. They wore an iron ring, too, or shackle
upon their necks until they had performed the same achievement, a symbol
which they then threw away, as the emblem of sloth. The Batavians were
ever spoken of by the Romans with entire respect. They conquered the
Belgians, they forced the free Frisians to pay tribute, but they called
the Batavians their friends. The tax-gatherer never invaded their island.
Honorable alliance united them with the Romans. It was, however, the
alliance of the giant and the dwarf. The Roman gained glory and empire,
the Batavian gained nothing but the hardest blows. The Batavian cavalry
became famous throughout the Republic and the Empire. They were the
favorite troops of Caesar, and with reason, for it was their valor which
turned the tide of battle at Pharsalia. From the death of Julius down to
the times of Vespasian, the Batavian legion was the imperial body guard,
the Batavian island the basis of operations in the Roman wars with Gaul,
Germany, and Britain.

Beyond the Batavians, upon the north, dwelt the great Frisian family,
occupying the regions between the Rhine and Ems, The Zuyder Zee and the
Dollart, both caused by the terrific inundations of the thirteenth
century and not existing at this period, did not then interpose
boundaries between kindred tribes. All formed a homogeneous nation of
pure German origin.

Thus, the population of the country was partly Celtic, partly German. Of
these two elements, dissimilar in their tendencies and always difficult
to blend, the Netherland people has ever been compounded. A certain
fatality of history has perpetually helped to separate still more widely
these constituents, instead of detecting and stimulating the elective
affinities which existed. Religion, too, upon all great historical
occasions, has acted as the most powerful of dissolvents. Otherwise, had
so many valuable and contrasted characteristics been early fused into a
whole, it would be difficult to show a race more richly endowed by Nature
for dominion and progress than the Belgo-Germanic people.

Physically the two races resembled each other. Both were of vast stature.
The gigantic Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of pigmies. The
German excited astonishment by his huge body and muscular limbs. Both
were fair, with fierce blue eyes, but the Celt had yellow hair floating
over his shoulders, and the German long locks of fiery red, which he even
dyed with woad to heighten the favorite color, and wore twisted into a
war-knot upon the top of his head. Here the German's love of finery
ceased. A simple tunic fastened at his throat with a thorn, while his
other garments defined and gave full play to his limbs, completed his
costume. The Gaul, on the contrary, was so fond of dress that the Romans
divided his race respectively into long-haired, breeched, and gowned
Gaul; (Gallia comata, braccata, togata). He was fond of brilliant and
parti-colored clothes, a taste which survives in the Highlander's
costume. He covered his neck and arms with golden chains. The simple and
ferocious German wore no decoration save his iron ring, from which his
first homicide relieved him. The Gaul was irascible, furious in his
wrath, but less formidable in a sustained conflict with a powerful foe.
"All the Gauls are of very high stature," says a soldier who fought under
Julian. (Amm. Marcel. xv. 12. 1). "They are white, golden-haired,
terrible in the fierceness of their eyes, greedy of quarrels, bragging
and insolent. A band of strangers could not resist one of them in a
brawl, assisted by his strong blue-eyed wife, especially when she begins,
gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen, brandishing her vast and snowy
arms, and kicking with her heels at the same time, to deliver her
fisticuffs, like bolts from the twisted strings of a catapult. The voices
of many are threatening and formidable. They are quick to anger, but
quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons; nor among them is ever
seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in ragged garments. At all
ages they are apt for military service. The old man goes forth to the
fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as hardened by cold and
assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers, as the young. Not
one of them, as in Italy is often the case, was ever known to cut off his
thumbs to avoid the service of Mars."

The polity of each race differed widely from that of the other. The
government of both may be said to have been republican, but the Gallic
tribes were aristocracies, in which the influence of clanship was a
predominant feature; while the German system, although nominally regal,
was in reality democratic. In Gaul were two orders, the nobility and the
priesthood, while the people, says Caesar, were all slaves. The knights
or nobles were all trained to arms. Each went forth to battle, followed
by his dependents, while a chief of all the clans was appointed to take
command during the war. The prince or chief governor was elected
annually, but only by the nobles. The people had no rights at all, and
were glad to assign themselves as slaves to any noble who was strong
enough to protect them. In peace the Druids exercised the main functions
of government. They decided all controversies, civil and criminal. To
rebel against their decrees was punished by exclusion from the
sacrifices--a most terrible excommunication, through which the criminal
was cut off from all intercourse with his fellow-creatures.

With the Germans, the sovereignty resided in the great assembly of the
people. There were slaves, indeed, but in small number, consisting either
of prisoners of war or of those unfortunates who had gambled away their
liberty in games of chance. Their chieftains, although called by the
Romans princes and kings, were, in reality, generals, chosen by universal
suffrage. Elected in the great assembly to preside in war, they were
raised on the shoulders of martial freemen, amid wild battle cries and
the clash of spear and shield. The army consisted entirely of volunteers,
and the soldier was for life infamous who deserted the field while his
chief remained alive. The same great assembly elected the village
magistrates and decided upon all important matters both of peace and war.
At the full of the moon it was usually convoked. The nobles and the
popular delegates arrived at irregular intervals, for it was an
inconvenience arising from their liberty, that two or three days were
often lost in waiting for the delinquents. All state affairs were in the
hands of this fierce democracy. The elected chieftains had rather
authority to persuade than power to command.

The Gauls were an agricultural people. They were not without many arts of
life. They had extensive flocks and herds; and they even exported salted
provisions as far as Rome. The truculent German, Ger-mane, Heer-mann,
War-man, considered carnage the only useful occupation, and despised
agriculture as enervating and ignoble. It was base, in his opinion, to
gain by sweat what was more easily acquired by blood. The land was
divided annually by the magistrates, certain farms being assigned to
certain families, who were forced to leave them at the expiration of the
year. They cultivated as a common property the lands allotted by the
magistrates, but it was easier to summon them to the battle-field than to
the plough. Thus they were more fitted for the roaming and conquering
life which Providence was to assign to them for ages, than if they had
become more prone to root themselves in the soil. The Gauls built towns
and villages. The German built his solitary hut where inclination
prompted. Close neighborhood was not to his taste.

In their system of religion the two races were most widely contrasted.
The Gauls were a priest-ridden race. Their Druids were a dominant caste,
presiding even over civil affairs, while in religious matters their
authority was despotic. What were the principles of their wild Theology
will never be thoroughly ascertained, but we know too much of its
sanguinary rites. The imagination shudders to penetrate those shaggy
forests, ringing with the death-shrieks of ten thousand human victims,
and with the hideous hymns chanted by smoke-and-blood-stained priests to
the savage gods whom they served.

The German, in his simplicity, had raised himself to a purer belief than
that of the sensuous Roman or the superstitious Gaul. He believed in a
single, supreme, almighty God, All-Vater or All-father. This Divinity was
too sublime to be incarnated or imaged, too infinite to be enclosed in
temples built with hands. Such is the Roman's testimony to the lofty
conception of the German. Certain forests were consecrated to the unseen
God whom the eye of reverent faith could alone behold. Thither, at stated
times, the people repaired to worship. They entered the sacred grove with
feet bound together, in token of submission. Those who fell were
forbidden to rise, but dragged themselves backwards on the ground. Their
rules were few and simple. They had no caste of priests, nor were they,
when first known to the Romans, accustomed to offer sacrifice. It must be
confessed that in a later age, a single victim, a criminal or a prisoner,
was occasionally immolated. The purity of their religion was soon stained
by their Celtic neighborhood. In the course of the Roman dominion it
became contaminated, and at last profoundly depraved. The fantastic
intermixture of Roman mythology with the gloomy but modified superstition
of Romanized Celts was not favorable to the simple character of German
theology. The entire extirpation, thus brought about, of any conceivable
system of religion, prepared the way for a true revelation. Within that
little river territory, amid those obscure morasses of the Rhine and
Scheld, three great forms of religion--the sanguinary superstition of the
Druid, the sensuous polytheism of the Roman, the elevated but dimly
groping creed of the German, stood for centuries, face to face, until,
having mutually debased and destroyed each other, they all faded away in
the pure light of Christianity.

Thus contrasted were Gaul and German in religious and political systems.
The difference was no less remarkable in their social characteristics.
The Gaul was singularly unchaste. The marriage state was almost unknown.
Many tribes lived in most revolting and incestuous concubinage; brethren,
parents, and children, having wives in common. The German was loyal as
the Celt was dissolute. Alone among barbarians, he contented himself with
a single wife, save that a few dignitaries, from motives of policy, were
permitted a larger number. On the marriage day the German offered
presents to his bride--not the bracelets and golden necklaces with which
the Gaul adorned his fair-haired concubine, but oxen and a bridled horse,
a sword, a shield, and a spear-symbols that thenceforward she was to
share his labors and to become a portion of himself.

They differed, too, in the honors paid to the dead. The funerals of the
Gauls were pompous. Both burned the corpse, but the Celt cast into the
flames the favorite animals, and even the most cherished slaves and
dependents of the master. Vast monuments of stone or piles of earth were
raised above the ashes of the dead. Scattered relics of the Celtic age
are yet visible throughout Europe, in these huge but unsightly memorials.

The German was not ambitious at the grave. He threw neither garments nor
odors upon the funeral pyre, but the arms and the war-horse of the
departed were burned and buried with him.

The turf was his only sepulchre, the memory of his valor his only
monument. Even tears were forbidden to the men. "It was esteemed
honorable," says the historian, "for women to lament, for men to
remember."

The parallel need be pursued no further. Thus much it was necessary to
recall to the historical student concerning the prominent characteristics
by which the two great races of the land were distinguished:
characteristics which Time has rather hardened than effaced. In the
contrast and the separation lies the key to much of their history. Had
Providence permitted a fusion of the two races, it is, possible, from
their position, and from the geographical and historical link which they
would have afforded to the dominant tribes of Europe, that a world-empire
might have been the result, different in many respects from any which has
ever arisen. Speculations upon what might have been are idle. It is well,
however; to ponder the many misfortunes resulting from a mutual
repulsion, which, under other circumstances and in other spheres, has
been exchanged for mutual attraction and support.

It is now necessary to sketch rapidly the political transformations
undergone by the country, from the early period down to the middle of the
sixteenth century; the epoch when the long agony commenced, out of which
the Batavian republic was born.



III.

The earliest chapter in the history of the Netherlands was written by
their conqueror. Celtic Gaul is already in the power of Rome; the Belgic
tribes, alarmed at the approaching danger, arm against the universal,
tyrant. Inflammable, quick to strike, but too fickle to prevail against
so powerful a foe, they hastily form a league of almost every clan. At
the first blow of Caesar's sword, the frail confederacy falls asunder
like a rope of sand. The tribes scatter in all directions.

Nearly all are soon defeated, and sue for mercy. The Nervii, true to the
German blood in their veins, swear to die rather than surrender. They,
at least, are worthy of their cause. Caesar advances against them at the
head of eight legions. Drawn up on the banks of the Sambre, they await
the Roman's approach. In three days' march Caesar comes up with them,
pitches his camp upon a steep hill sloping down to the river, and sends
some cavalry across. Hardly have the Roman horsemen crossed the stream,
than the Nervii rush from the wooded hill-top, overthrow horse and rider,
plunge in one great mass into the current, and, directly afterwards, are
seen charging up the hill into the midst of the enemy's force. "At the
same moment," says the conqueror, "they seemed in the wood, in the river,
and within our lines." There is a panic among the Romans, but it is
brief. Eight veteran Roman legions, with the world's victor at their
head, are too much for the brave but undisciplined Nervii. Snatching a
shield from a soldier, and otherwise unarmed, Caesar throws himself into
the hottest of the fight. The battle rages foot to foot and hand to hand
but the hero's skill, with the cool valor of his troops, proves
invincible as ever. The Nervii, true to their vow, die, but not a man
surrenders. They fought upon that day till the ground was heaped with
their dead, while, as the foremost fell thick and fast, their comrades,
says the Roman, sprang upon their piled-up bodies, and hurled their
javelins at the enemy as from a hill. They fought like men to whom life
without liberty was a curse. They were not defeated, but exterminated. Of
many thousand fighting men went home but five hundred. Upon reaching the
place of refuge where they had bestowed their women and children, Caesar
found, after the battle, that there were but three of their senators left
alive. So perished the Nervii. Caesar commanded his legions to treat with
respect the little remnant of the tribe which had just fallen to swell
the empty echo of his glory, and then, with hardly a breathing pause, he
proceeded to annihilate the Aduatici, the Menapii, and the Morini.

Gaul being thus pacified, as, with sublime irony, he expresses himself
concerning a country some of whose tribes had been annihilated, some sold
as slaves, and others hunted to their lairs like beasts of prey, the
conqueror departed for Italy. Legations for peace from many German races
to Rome were the consequence of these great achievements. Among others
the Batavians formed an alliance with the masters of the world. Their
position was always an honorable one. They were justly proud of paying no
tribute, but it was, perhaps, because they had nothing to pay. They had
few cattle, they could give no hides and horns like the Frisians, and
they were therefore allowed to furnish only their blood. From this time
forth their cavalry, which was the best of Germany, became renowned in
the Roman army upon every battle-field of Europe.

It is melancholy, at a later moment, to find the brave Batavians
distinguished in the memorable expedition of Germanicus to crush the
liberties of their German kindred. They are forever associated with the
sublime but misty image of the great Hermann, the hero, educated in Rome,
and aware of the colossal power of the empire, who yet, by his genius,
valor, and political adroitness, preserved for Germany her nationality,
her purer religion, and perhaps even that noble language which her
late-flowering literature has rendered so illustrious--but they are
associated as enemies, not as friends.

Galba, succeeding to the purple upon the suicide of Nero, dismissed the
Batavian life-guards to whom he owed his elevation. He is murdered, Otho
and Vitellius contend for the succession, while all eyes are turned upon
the eight Batavian regiments. In their hands the scales of empire seem to
rest. They declare for Vitellius, and the civil war begins. Otho is
defeated; Vitellius acknowledged by Senate and people. Fearing, like his
predecessors, the imperious turbulence of the Batavian legions, he, too,
sends them into Germany. It was the signal for a long and extensive
revolt, which had well nigh overturned the Roman power in Gaul and Lower
Germany.



IV.

Claudius Civilis was a Batavian of noble race, who had served twenty-five
years in the Roman armies. His Teutonic name has perished, for, like most
savages who become denizens of a civilized state, he had assumed an
appellation in the tongue of his superiors. He was a soldier of fortune,
and had fought wherever the Roman eagles flew. After a quarter of a
century's service he was sent in chains to Rome, and his brother
executed, both falsely charged with conspiracy. Such were the triumphs
adjudged to Batavian auxiliaries. He escaped with life, and was disposed
to consecrate what remained of it to a nobler cause. Civilis was no
barbarian. Like the German hero Arminius, he had received a Roman
education, and had learned the degraded condition of Rome. He knew the
infamous vices of her rulers; he retained an unconquerable love for
liberty and for his own race. Desire to avenge his own wrongs was mingled
with loftier motives in his breast. He knew that the sceptre was in the
gift of the Batavian soldiery. Galba had been murdered, Otho had
destroyed himself, and Vitellius, whose weekly gluttony cost the empire
more gold than would have fed the whole Batavian population and converted
their whole island-morass into fertile pastures, was contending for the
purple with Vespasian, once an obscure adventurer like Civilis himself,
and even his friend and companion in arms. It seemed a time to strike a
blow for freedom.

By his courage, eloquence, and talent for political combinations, Civilis
effected a general confederation of all the Netherland tribes, both
Celtic and German. For a brief moment there was a united people, a
Batavian commonwealth. He found another source of strength in German
superstition. On the banks of the Lippe, near its confluence with the
Rhine, dwelt the Virgin Velleda, a Bructerian weird woman, who exercised
vast influence over the warriors of her nation. Dwelling alone in a lofty
tower, shrouded in a wild forest, she was revered as an oracle. Her
answers to the demands of her worshippers concerning future events were
delivered only to a chosen few. To Civilis, who had formed a close
friendship with her, she promised success, and the downfall of the Roman
world. Inspired by her prophecies, many tribes of Germany sent large
subsidies to the Batavian chief.

The details of the revolt have been carefully preserved by Tacitus, and
form one of his grandest and most elaborate pictures. The spectacle of a
brave nation, inspired by the soul of one great man and rising against an
overwhelming despotism, will always speak to the heart, from generation
to generation. The battles, the sieges, the defeats, the indomitable
spirit of Civilis, still flaming most brightly when the clouds were
darkest around him, have been described by the great historian in his
most powerful manner. The high-born Roman has thought the noble
barbarian's portrait a subject worthy his genius.

The struggle was an unsuccessful one. After many victories and many
overthrows, Civilis was left alone. The Gallic tribes fell off, and sued
for peace. Vespasian, victorious over Vitellius, proved too powerful for
his old comrade. Even the Batavians became weary of the hopeless contest,
while fortune, after much capricious hovering, settled at last upon the
Roman side. The imperial commander Cerialis seized the moment when the
cause of the Batavian hero was most desperate to send emissaries among
his tribe, and even to tamper with the mysterious woman whose prophecies
had so inflamed his imagination. These intrigues had their effect. The
fidelity of the people was sapped; the prophetess fell away from her
worshipper, and foretold ruin to his cause. The Batavians murmured that
their destruction was inevitable, that one nation could not arrest the
slavery which was destined for the whole world. How large a part of the
human race were the Batavians? What were they in a contest with the whole
Roman empire? Moreover, they were not oppressed with tribute. They were
only expected to furnish men and valor to their proud allies. It was the
next thing to liberty. If they were to have rulers, it was better to
serve a Roman emperor than a German witch.

Thus murmured the people. Had Civilis been successful, he would have been
deified; but his misfortunes, at last, made him odious in spite of his
heroism. But the Batavian was not a man to be crushed, nor had he lived
so long in the Roman service to be outmatched in politics by the
barbarous Germans. He was not to be sacrificed as a peace-offering to
revengeful Rome. Watching from beyond the Rhine the progress of defection
and the decay of national enthusiasm, he determined to be beforehand with
those who were now his enemies. He accepted the offer of negotiation from
Cerialis. The Roman general was eager to grant a full pardon, and to
re-enlist so brave a soldier in the service of the empire.

A colloquy was agreed upon. The bridge across the Nabalia was broken
asunder in the middle, and Cerialis and Civilis met upon the severed
sides. The placid stream by which Roman enterprise had connected the
waters of the Rhine with the lake of Flevo, flowed between the imperial
commander and the rebel chieftain.

     ***********************************************

Here the story abruptly terminates. The remainder of the Roman's
narrative is lost, and upon that broken bridge the form of the Batavian
hero disappears forever. His name fades from history: not a syllable is
known of his subsequent career; every thing is buried in the profound
oblivion which now steals over the scene where he was the most imposing
actor.

The soul of Civilis had proved insufficient to animate a whole people;
yet it was rather owing to position than to any personal inferiority,
that his name did not become as illustrious as that of Hermann. The
German patriot was neither braver nor wiser than the Batavian, but he had
the infinite forests of his fatherland to protect him. Every legion which
plunged into those unfathomable depths was forced to retreat
disastrously, or to perish miserably. Civilis was hemmed in by the ocean;
his country, long the basis of Roman military operations, was accessible
by river and canal, The patriotic spirit which he had for a moment
raised, had abandoned him; his allies had deserted him; he stood alone
and at bay, encompassed by the hunters, with death or surrender as his
only alternative. Under such circumstances, Hermann could not have shown
more courage or conduct, nor have terminated the impossible struggle with
greater dignity or adroitness.

The contest of Civilis with Rome contains a remarkable foreshadowing of
the future conflict with Spain, through which the Batavian republic,
fifteen centuries later, was to be founded. The characters, the events,
the amphibious battles, desperate sieges, slippery alliances, the traits
of generosity, audacity and cruelty, the generous confidence, the broken
faith seem so closely to repeat themselves, that History appears to
present the self-same drama played over and over again, with but a change
of actors and of costume. There is more than a fanciful resemblance
between Civilis and William the Silent, two heroes of ancient German
stock, who had learned the arts of war and peace in the service of a
foreign and haughty world-empire. Determination, concentration of
purpose, constancy in calamity, elasticity almost preternatural,
self-denial, consummate craft in political combinations, personal
fortitude, and passionate patriotism, were the heroic elements in both.
The ambition of each was subordinate to the cause which he served. Both
refused the crown, although each, perhaps, contemplated, in the sequel, a
Batavian realm of which he would have been the inevitable chief. Both
offered the throne to a Gallic prince, for Classicus was but the
prototype of Anjou, as Brinno of Brederode, and neither was destined, in
this world, to see his sacrifices crowned with success.

The characteristics of the two great races of the land portrayed
themselves in the Roman and the Spanish struggle with much the same
colors. The Southrons, inflammable, petulant, audacious, were the first
to assault and to defy the imperial power in both revolts, while the
inhabitants of the northern provinces, slower to be aroused, but of more
enduring wrath, were less ardent at the commencement, but; alone,
steadfast at the close of the contest. In both wars the southern Celts
fell away from the league, their courageous but corrupt chieftains having
been purchased with imperial gold to bring about the abject submission of
their followers; while the German Netherlands, although eventually
subjugated by Rome, after a desperate struggle, were successful in the
great conflict with Spain, and trampled out of existence every vestige of
her authority. The Batavian republic took its rank among the leading
powers of the earth; the Belgic provinces remained Roman, Spanish,
Austrian property.



V.

Obscure but important movements in the regions of eternal twilight,
revolutions, of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths
of Asia, outpourings of human rivets along the sides of the Altai
mountains, convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties,
shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying
upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as
precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire--as dying symptoms of the
proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of
sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hovering
with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and
perpetually reappearing in ever-increasing swarms, guided thither by a
fierce instinct, or by mysterious laws--such are the well known phenomena
which preceded the fall of western Rome. Stately, externally powerful,
although undermined and putrescent at the core, the death-stricken empire
still dashed back the assaults of its barbarous enemies.

During the long struggle intervening between the age of Vespasian and
that of Odoacer, during all the preliminary ethnographical revolutions
which preceded the great people's wandering, the Netherlands remained
subject provinces. Their country was upon the high road which led the
Goths to Rome. Those low and barren tracts were the outlying marches of
the empire. Upon that desolate beach broke the first surf from the rising
ocean of German freedom which was soon to overwhelm Rome. Yet, although
the ancient landmarks were soon well nigh obliterated, the Netherlands
still remained faithful to the Empire, Batavian blood was still poured
out for its defence.

By the middle of the fourth century, the Franks and Allemanians,
alle-mannez, all-men, a mass of united Germans are defeated by the
Emperor Julian at Strasburg, the Batavian cavalry, as upon many other
great occasions, saving the day for despotism. This achievement, one of
the last in which the name appears upon historic record, was therefore as
triumphant for the valor as it was humiliating to the true fame of the
nation. Their individuality soon afterwards disappears, the race having
been partly exhausted in the Roman service, partly merged in the Frank
and Frisian tribes who occupy the domains of their forefathers.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the
swarming nations are now in full career. The Netherlands are successively
or simultaneously trampled by Franks, Vandals, Alani, Suevi, Saxons,
Frisians, and even Sclavonians, as the great march of Germany to
universal empire, which her prophets and bards had foretold, went
majestically forward. The fountains of the frozen North were opened, the
waters prevailed, but the ark of Christianity floated upon the flood. As
the deluge assuaged, the earth had returned to chaos, the last pagan
empire had been washed out of existence, but the dimly, groping,
faltering, ignorant infancy of Christian Europe had begun.

After the wanderings had subsided, the Netherlands are found with much
the same ethnological character as before. The Frank dominion has
succeeded the Roman, the German stock preponderates over the Celtic, but
the national ingredients, although in somewhat altered proportions,
remain essentially the same. The old Belgae, having become Romanized in
tongue and customs, accept the new Empire of the Franks. That people,
however, pushed from their hold of the Rhine by thickly thronging hordes
of Gepidi, Quadi, Sarmati, Heruli, Saxons, Burgundians, move towards the
South and West. As the Empire falls before Odoacer, they occupy Celtic
Gaul with the Belgian portion of the Netherlands; while the Frisians,
into which ancient German tribe the old Batavian element has melted, not
to be extinguished, but to live a renovated existence, the "free
Frisians;" whose name is synonymous with liberty, nearest blood relations
of the Anglo-Saxon race, now occupy the northern portion, including the
whole future European territory of the Dutch republic.

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the
Netherlands. The Frisians struggle, for several centuries, against their
dominion, until eventually subjugated by Charlemagne. They even encroach
upon the Franks in Belgic Gaul, who are determined not to yield their
possessions. Moreover, the pious Merovingian faineans desire to plant
Christianity among the still pagan Frisians. Dagobert, son of the second
Clotaire, advances against them as far as the Weser, takes possession of
Utrecht, founds there the first Christian church in Friesland, and
establishes a nominal dominion over the whole country.

Yet the feeble Merovingians would have been powerless against rugged
Friesland, had not their dynasty already merged in that puissant family
of Brabant, which long wielded their power before it assumed their crown.
It was Pepin of Heristal, grandson of the Netherlander, Pepin of Landen,
who conquered the Frisian Radbod (A.D. 692), and forced him to exchange
his royal for the ducal title.

It was Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, whose tremendous blows
completed his father's work. The new mayor of the palace soon drove the
Frisian chief into submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's
indiscretion, however, neutralized the apostolic blows of the mayor. The
pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal
font, when a thought struck him. "Where are my dead forefathers at
present?" he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. "In Hell, with
all other unbelievers," was the imprudent answer. "Mighty well," replied
Radbod, removing his leg, "then will I rather feast with my ancestors in
the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling hand of
Christians in Heaven." Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The
Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal
separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a
heathen. His son, Poppa, succeeding to the nominal sovereignty, did not
actively oppose the introduction of Christianity among his people, but
himself refused to be converted. Rebelling against the Frank dominion, he
was totally routed by Charles Martell in a great battle (A.D.750) and
perished with a vast number of Frisians. The Christian dispensation, thus
enforced, was now accepted by these northern pagans. The commencement of
their conversion had been mainly the work of their brethren from Britain.
The monk Wilfred was followed in a few years by the Anglo-Saxon
Willibrod. It was he who destroyed the images of Woden in Walcheren,
abolished his worship, and founded churches in North Holland. Charles
Martell rewarded him with extensive domains about Utrecht, together with
many slaves and other chattels. Soon afterwards he was consecrated Bishop
of all the Frisians. Thus rose the famous episcopate of Utrecht. Another
Anglo-Saxon, Winfred, or Bonifacius, had been equally active among his
Frisian cousins. His crozier had gone hand in hand with the battle-axe.
Bonifacius followed close upon the track of his orthodox coadjutor
Charles. By the middle of the eighth century, some hundred thousand
Frisians had been slaughtered, and as many more converted. The hammer
which smote the Saracens at Tours was at last successful in beating the
Netherlanders into Christianity. The labors of Bonifacius through Upper
and Lower Germany were immense; but he, too, received great material
rewards. He was created Archbishop of Mayence, and, upon the death of
Willibrod, Bishop of Utrecht. Faithful to his mission, however, he met,
heroically, a martyr's death at the hands of the refractory pagans at
Dokkum. Thus was Christianity established in the Netherlands.

Under Charlemagne, the Frisians often rebelled, making common cause with
the Saxons. In 785, A.D., they were, however, completely subjugated, and
never rose again until the epoch of their entire separation from the
Frank empire. Charlemagne left them their name of free Frisians, and the
property in their own land. The feudal system never took root in their
soil. "The Frisians," says their statute book; "shall be free, as long as
the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." They agreed,
however, to obey the chiefs whom the Frank monarch should appoint to
govern them, according to their own laws. Those laws were collected, and
are still extant. The vernacular version of their Asega book contains
their ancient customs, together with the Frank additions. The general
statutes of Charlemagne were, of course, in vigor also; but that great
legislator knew too well the importance attached by all mankind to local
customs, to allow his imperial capitulara to interfere, unnecessarily,
with the Frisian laws.



VI.

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome,
were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united,
in their slavery to Rome. Eight centuries pass away, and they are again
united, in subjection to Charlemagne. Their union was but in forming a
single link in the chain of a new realm. The reign of Charlemagne had at
last accomplished the promise of the sorceress Velleda and other
soothsayers. A German race had re-established the empire of the world.
The Netherlands, like-the other provinces of the great monarch's
dominion, were governed by crown-appointed functionaries, military and
judicial. In the northeastern, or Frisian portion, however; the grants of
land were never in the form of revocable benefices or feuds. With this
important exception, the whole country shared the fate, and enjoyed the
general organization of the Empire.

But Charlemagne came an age too soon. The chaos which had brooded over
Europe since the dissolution of the Roman world, was still too absolute.
It was not to be fashioned into permanent forms, even by his bold and
constructive genius. A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan
empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period. The discordant
elements out of which the Emperor had compounded his realm, did not
coalesce during his life-time. They were only held together by the
vigorous grasp of the hand which had combined them. When the great
statesman died, his Empire necessarily fell to pieces. Society had need
of farther disintegration before it could begin to reconstruct itself
locally. A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.
When did one man ever civilize a people? In the eighth and ninth
centuries there was not even a people to be civilized. The construction
of Charles was, of necessity, temporary. His Empire was supported by
artificial columns, resting upon the earth, which fell prostrate almost
as soon as the hand of their architect was cold. His institutions had not
struck down into the soil. There were no extensive and vigorous roots to
nourish, from below, a flourishing Empire through time and tempest.

Moreover, the Carlovingian race had been exhausted by producing a race of
heroes like the Pepins and the Charleses. The family became, soon, as
contemptible as the ox-drawn, long-haired "do-nothings" whom it had
expelled; but it is not our task to describe the fortunes of the
Emperor's ignoble descendants. The realm was divided, sub-divided, at
times partially reunited, like a family farm, among monarchs incompetent
alike to hold, to delegate, or--to resign the inheritance of the great
warrior and lawgiver. The meek, bald, fat, stammering, simple Charles, or
Louis, who successively sat upon his throne--princes, whose only historic
individuality consists in these insipid appellations--had not the sense
to comprehend, far less to develop, the plans of their ancestor.

Charles the Simple was the last Carlovingian who governed Lotharingia, in
which were comprised most of the Netherlands and Friesland. The German
monarch, Henry the Fowler, at that period called King of the East Franks,
as Charles of the West Franks, acquired Lotharingia by the treaty of
Bonn, Charles reserving the sovereignty over the kingdom during his
lifetime. In 925, A.D., however, the Simpleton having been imprisoned and
deposed by his own subjects, the Fowler was recognized King, of
Lotharingia. Thus the Netherlands passed out of France into Germany,
remaining, still, provinces of a loose, disjointed Empire.

This is the epoch in which the various dukedoms, earldoms, and other
petty sovereignties of the Netherlands became hereditary. It was in the
year 922 that Charles the Simple presented to Count Dirk the territory of
Holland, by letters patent. This narrow hook of land, destined, in future
ages, to be the cradle of a considerable empire, stretching through both
hemispheres, was, thenceforth, the inheritance of Dirk's descendants.
Historically, therefore, he is Dirk I., Count of Holland.

Of this small sovereign and his successors, the most powerful foe for
centuries was ever the Bishop of Utrecht, the origin of whose greatness
has been already indicated. Of the other Netherland provinces, now or
before become hereditary, the first in rank was Lotharingia, once the
kingdom of Lothaire, now the dukedom of Lorraine. In 965 it was divided
into Upper and Lower Lorraine, of which the lower duchy alone belonged to
the Netherlands. Two centuries later, the Counts of Louvain, then
occupying most of Brabant, obtained a permanent hold of Lower Lorraine,
and began to call themselves Dukes of Brabant. The same principle of
local independence and isolation which created these dukes, established
the hereditary power of the counts and barons who formerly exercised
jurisdiction under them and others. Thus arose sovereign Counts of Namur,
Hainault, Limburg, Zutphen, Dukes of Luxemburg and Gueldres, Barons of
Mechlin, Marquesses of Antwerp, and others; all petty autocrats. The most
important of all, after the house of Lorraine, were the Earls of
Flanders; for the bold foresters of Charles the Great had soon wrested
the sovereignty of their little territory from his feeble descendants as
easily as Baldwin, with the iron arm, had deprived the bald Charles of
his daughter. Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overyssel, Groningen, Drenthe
and Friesland (all seven being portions of Friesland in a general sense),
were crowded together upon a little desolate corner of Europe; an obscure
fragment of Charlemagne's broken empire. They were afterwards to
constitute the United States of the Netherlands, one of the most powerful
republics of history. Meantime, for century after century, the Counts of
Holland and the Bishops of Utrecht were to exercise divided sway over the
territory.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of
sovereignty. The separate history of such half-organized morsels is
tedious and petty. Trifling dynasties, where a family or two were every
thing, the people nothing, leave little worth recording. Even the most
devout of genealogists might shudder to chronicle the long succession of
so many illustrious obscure.

A glance, however, at the general features of the governmental system now
established in the Netherlands, at this important epoch in the world's
history, will show the transformations which the country, in common with
other portions of the western world, had undergone.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded
away. An entirely new polity has succeeded. No great popular assembly
asserts its sovereignty, as in the ancient German epoch; no generals and
temporary kings are chosen by the nation. The elective power had been
lost under the Romans, who, after conquest, had conferred the
administrative authority over their subject provinces upon officials
appointed by the metropolis. The Franks pursued the same course. In
Charlemagne's time, the revolution is complete. Popular assemblies and
popular election entirely vanish. Military, civil, and judicial
officers-dukes, earls, margraves, and others--are all king's creatures,
'knegton des konings, pueri regis', and so remain, till they abjure the
creative power, and set up their own. The principle of Charlemagne, that
his officers should govern according to local custom, helps them to
achieve their own independence, while it preserves all that is left of
national liberty and law.

The counts, assisted by inferior judges, hold diets from time to
time--thrice, perhaps, annually. They also summon assemblies in case of
war. Thither are called the great vassals, who, in turn, call their
lesser vassals; each armed with "a shield, a spear, a bow, twelve arrows,
and a cuirass." Such assemblies, convoked in the name of a distant
sovereign, whose face his subjects had never seen, whose language they
could hardly understand, were very different from those tumultuous
mass-meetings, where boisterous freemen, armed with the weapons they
loved the best, and arriving sooner or later, according to their
pleasure, had been accustomed to elect their generals and magistrates and
to raise them upon their shields. The people are now governed, their
rulers appointed by an invisible hand. Edicts, issued by a power, as it
were, supernatural, demand implicit obedience. The people, acquiescing in
their own annihilation, abdicate not only their political but their
personal rights. On the other hand, the great source of power diffuses
less and less of light and warmth. Losing its attractive and controlling
influence, it becomes gradually eclipsed, while its satellites fly from
their prescribed bounds and chaos and darkness return. The sceptre,
stretched over realms so wide, requires stronger hands than those of
degenerate Carlovingians. It breaks asunder. Functionaries become
sovereigns, with hereditary, not delegated, right to own the people, to
tax their roads and rivers, to take tithings of their blood and sweat, to
harass them in all the relations of life. There is no longer a metropolis
to protect them from official oppression. Power, the more sub-divided,
becomes the more tyrannical. The sword is the only symbol of law, the
cross is a weapon of offence, the bishop is a consecrated pirate, every
petty baron a burglar, while the people, alternately the prey of duke,
prelate, and seignor, shorn and butchered like sheep, esteem it happiness
to sell themselves into slavery, or to huddle beneath the castle walls of
some little potentate, for the sake of his wolfish protection. Here they
build hovels, which they surround from time to time with palisades and
muddy entrenchments; and here, in these squalid abodes of ignorance and
misery, the genius of Liberty, conducted by the spirit of Commerce,
descends at last to awaken mankind from its sloth and cowardly stupor. A
longer night was to intervene; however, before the dawn of day.

The crown-appointed functionaries had been, of course, financial
officers. They collected the revenue of the sovereign, one third of which
slipped through their fingers into their own coffers. Becoming sovereigns
themselves, they retain these funds for their private emolument. Four
principal sources yielded this revenue: royal domains, tolls and imposts,
direct levies and a pleasantry called voluntary contributions or
benevolences. In addition to these supplies were also the proceeds of
fines. Taxation upon sin was, in those rude ages, a considerable branch
of the revenue. The old Frisian laws consisted almost entirely of a
discriminating tariff upon crimes. Nearly all the misdeeds which man is
prone to commit, were punished by a money-bote only. Murder, larceny,
arson, rape--all offences against the person were commuted for a definite
price. There were a few exceptions, such as parricide, which was followed
by loss of inheritance; sacrilege and the murder of a master by a slave,
which were punished with death. It is a natural inference that, as the
royal treasury was enriched by these imposts, the sovereign would hardly
attempt to check the annual harvest of iniquity by which his revenue was
increased. Still, although the moral sense is shocked by a system which
makes the ruler's interest identical with the wickedness of his people,
and holds out a comparative immunity in evil-doing for the rich, it was
better that crime should be punished by money rather than not be punished
at all. A severe tax, which the noble reluctantly paid and which the
penniless culprit commuted by personal slavery, was sufficiently unjust
as well as absurd, yet it served to mitigate the horrors with which
tumult, rapine, and murder enveloped those early days. Gradually, as the
light of reason broke upon the dark ages, the most noxious features of
the system were removed, while the general sentiment of reverence for law
remained.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A country disinherited by nature of its rights
     A pleasantry called voluntary contributions or benevolences
     Annual harvest of iniquity by which his revenue was increased
     Batavian legion was the imperial body guard
     Beating the Netherlanders into Christianity
     Bishop is a consecrated pirate
     Brethren, parents, and children, having wives in common
     For women to lament, for men to remember
     Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of pigmies
     Great science of political equilibrium
     Holland, England, and America, are all links of one chain
     Long succession of so many illustrious obscure
     Others go to battle, says the historian, these go to war
     Revocable benefices or feuds
     Taxation upon sin
     The Gaul was singularly unchaste




MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, PG EDITION, VOLUME 2.

THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D.C.L., LL.D.
1855

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION., Part 2.



VII.

Five centuries of isolation succeed. In the Netherlands, as throughout
Europe, a thousand obscure and slender rills are slowly preparing the
great stream of universal culture. Five dismal centuries of feudalism:
during which period there is little talk of human right, little obedience
to divine reason. Rights there are none, only forces; and, in brief,
three great forces, gradually arising, developing themselves, acting upon
each other, and upon the general movement of society.

The sword--the first, for a time the only force: the force of iron. The
"land's master," having acquired the property in the territory and in the
people who feed thereon, distributes to his subalterns, often but a shade
beneath him in power, portions of his estate, getting the use of their
faithful swords in return. Vavasours subdivide again to vassals,
exchanging land and cattle, human or otherwise, against fealty, and so
the iron chain of a military hierarchy, forged of mutually interdependent
links, is stretched over each little province. Impregnable castles, here
more numerous than in any other part of Christendom, dot the level
surface of the country. Mail-clad knights, with their followers, encamp
permanently upon the soil. The fortunate fable of divine right is
invented to sanction the system; superstition and ignorance give currency
to the delusion. Thus the grace of God, having conferred the property in
a vast portion of Europe upon a certain idiot in France, makes him
competent to sell large fragments of his estate, and to give a divine,
and, therefore, most satisfactory title along with them. A great
convenience to a man, who had neither power, wit, nor will to keep the
property in his own hands. So the Dirks of Holland get a deed from
Charles the Simple, and, although the grace of God does not prevent the
royal grantor himself from dying a miserable, discrowned captive, the
conveyance to Dirk is none the less hallowed by almighty fiat. So the
Roberts and Guys, the Johns and Baldwins, become sovereigns in Hainault,
Brabant, Flanders and other little districts, affecting supernatural
sanction for the authority which their good swords have won and are ever
ready to maintain. Thus organized, the force of iron asserts and exerts
itself. Duke, count, seignor and vassal, knight and squire, master and
man swarm and struggle amain. A wild, chaotic, sanguinary scene. Here,
bishop and baron contend, centuries long, murdering human creatures by
ten thousands for an acre or two of swampy pasture; there, doughty
families, hugging old musty quarrels to their heart, buffet each other
from generation to generation; thus they go on, raging and wrestling
among themselves, with all the world, shrieking insane war-cries which no
human soul ever understood--red caps and black, white hoods and grey,
Hooks and Kabbeljaws, dealing destruction, building castles and burning
them, tilting at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the
highways, crusading--now upon Syrian sands against Paynim dogs, now in
Frisian quagmires against Albigenses, Stedingers, and other
heretics--plunging about in blood and fire, repenting, at idle times, and
paying their passage through, purgatory with large slices of ill-gotten
gains placed in the ever-extended dead-hand of the Church; acting, on the
whole, according to their kind, and so getting themselves civilized or
exterminated, it matters little which. Thus they play their part, those
energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins
and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the
great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be.

Another force--the force clerical--the power of clerks, arises; the might
of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force
embodied, as often before, as priestcraft--the strength of priests: craft
meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force,
too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes
malignant. Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing
penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing
the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an age of rapine and
homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure
and forsaken--deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a
leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious
honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling
wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring
in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become
visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the
gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other
ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with
bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the
head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the
kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and
cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and
loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold;
thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and
sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.

A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent
than the rest: the power of gold. Even iron yields to the more ductile
metal. The importance of municipalities, enriched by trade, begins to be
felt. Commerce, the mother of Netherland freedom, and, eventually, its
destroyer--even as in all human history the vivifying becomes afterwards
the dissolving principle--commerce changes insensibly and miraculously
the aspect of society. Clusters of hovels become towered cities; the
green and gilded Hanse of commercial republicanism coils itself around
the decaying trunk of feudal despotism. Cities leagued with cities
throughout and beyond Christendom-empire within empire-bind themselves
closer and closer in the electric chain of human sympathy and grow
stronger and stronger by mutual support. Fishermen and river raftsmen
become ocean adventurers and merchant princes. Commerce plucks up
half-drowned Holland by the locks and pours gold into her lap. Gold
wrests power from iron. Needy Flemish weavers become mighty
manufacturers. Armies of workmen, fifty thousand strong, tramp through
the swarming streets. Silk-makers, clothiers, brewers become the gossips
of kings, lend their royal gossips vast sums and burn the royal notes of
hand in fires of cinnamon wood. Wealth brings strength, strength
confidence. Learning to handle cross-bow and dagger, the burghers fear
less the baronial sword, finding that their own will cut as well, seeing
that great armies--flowers of chivalry--can ride away before them fast
enough at battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget
insolence, tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults
stain the streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and
more out of the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at
priestcraft as at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in
the end, unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces,
supernatural as they are. And so, struggling along their appointed path,
making cloth, making money, making treaties with great kingdoms, making
war by land and sea, ringing great bells, waving great banners, they,
too--these insolent, boisterous burghers--accomplish their work. Thus,
the mighty power of the purse develops itself and municipal liberty
becomes a substantial fact. A fact, not a principle; for the old theorem
of sovereignty remains undisputed as ever. Neither the nation, in mass,
nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to human rights. All upper
attributes--legislative, judicial, administrative--remain in the
land-master's breast alone. It is an absurdity, therefore, to argue with
Grotius concerning the unknown antiquity of the Batavian republic. The
republic never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and was only
born after long years of agony. The democratic instincts of the ancient
German savages were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated
descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican polity had never
existed. The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right to
make the laws or to share in the government. As a matter of fact, they
did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions of
sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially. Sometimes by
bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard
blows they extorted their charters. Their codes, statutes, joyful
entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and
sworn to by the monarch. They were concessions from above; privileges
private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better
than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead
of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would
have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile
themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had
invaded, than to overturn the system. Thus the cities, not regarding
themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became
fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had
acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence. As
persons, therefore--gigantic individualities--they wheeled into the
feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities. The city of
Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing
fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals,
trampling upon its slaves.

Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand
remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically
and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.
Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now
backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves
along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it
goes. Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity. The people has
hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies buried.
There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities. In the northern
Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued longest. Even
in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient Frisians, had
been forfeited in a variety of ways. Slavery was both voluntary and
compulsory. Paupers sold themselves that they might escape starvation.
The timid sold themselves that they might escape violence. These
voluntary sales, which were frequent, wore usually made to cloisters and
ecclesiastical establishments, for the condition of Church-slaves was
preferable to that of other serfs. Persons worsted in judicial duels,
shipwrecked sailors, vagrants, strangers, criminals unable to pay the
money-bote imposed upon them, were all deprived of freedom; but the
prolific source of slavery was war. Prisoners were almost universally
reduced to servitude. A free woman who intermarried with a slave
condemned herself and offspring to perpetual bondage. Among the Ripuarian
Franks, a free woman thus disgracing herself, was girt with a sword and a
distaff. Choosing the one, she was to strike her husband dead; choosing
the other, she adopted the symbol of slavery, and became a chattel for
life.

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons
into servitude. They fled, by throngs, to church and monastery, and were
happy, by enslaving themselves, to escape the more terrible bondage of
the sea-kings. During the brief dominion of the Norman Godfrey, every
free Frisian was forced to wear a halter around his neck. The lot of a
Church-slave was freedom in comparison. To kill him was punishable by a
heavy fine. He could give testimony in court, could inherit, could make a
will, could even plead before the law, if law could be found. The number
of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number belonging
to the bishopric of Utrecht, enormous.

The condition of those belonging to laymen was much more painful. The
Lyf-eigene, or absolute slaves, were the most wretched. They were mere
brutes. They had none of the natural attributes of humanity, their life
and death were in the master's hands, they had no claim to a fraction of
their own labor or its fruits, they had no marriage, except under
condition of the infamous 'jus primoe noctis'. The villagers, or
villeins, were the second class and less forlorn. They could commute the
labor due to their owner by a fixed sum of money, after annual payment of
which, the villein worked for himself. His master, therefore, was not his
absolute proprietor. The chattel had a beneficial interest in a portion
of his own flesh and blood.

The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs. He who
became a soldier of the cross was free upon his return, and many were
adventurous enough to purchase liberty at so honorable a price. Many
others were sold or mortgaged by the crusading knights, desirous of
converting their property into gold, before embarking upon their
enterprise. The purchasers or mortgagees were in general churches and
convents, so that the slaves, thus alienated, obtained at least a
preferable servitude. The place of the absent serfs was supplied by free
labor, so that agricultural and mechanical occupations, now devolving
upon a more elevated class, became less degrading, and, in process of
time, opened an ever-widening sphere for the industry and progress of
freemen. Thus a people began to exist. It was, however; a miserable
people, with personal, but no civil rights whatever. Their condition,
although better than servitude, was almost desperate. They were taxed
beyond their ability, while priest and noble were exempt. They had no
voice in the apportionment of the money thus contributed. There was no
redress against the lawless violence to which they were perpetually
exposed. In the manorial courts, the criminal sat in judgment upon his
victim. The functions of highwayman and magistrate were combined in one
individual.

By degrees, the class of freemen, artisans, traders, and the like,
becoming the more numerous, built stronger and better houses outside the
castle gates of the "land's master" or the burghs of the more powerful
nobles. The superiors, anxious to increase their own importance, favored
the progress of the little boroughs. The population, thus collected,
began to divide themselves into guilds. These were soon afterwards
erected by the community into bodies corporate; the establishment of the
community, of course, preceding, the incorporation of the guilds. Those
communities were created by charters or Keuren, granted by the sovereign.
Unless the earliest concessions of this nature have perished, the town
charters of Holland or Zeland are nearly a century later than those of
Flanders, France, and England.

The oldest Keur, or act of municipal incorporation, in the provinces
afterwards constituting the republic, was that granted by Count William
the First of Holland and Countess Joanna of Flanders, as joint
proprietors of Walcheren, to the town of Middelburg. It will be seen that
its main purport is to promise, as a special privilege to this community,
law, in place of the arbitrary violence by which mankind, in general,
were governed by their betters.

"The inhabitants," ran the Charter, "are taken into protection by both
counts. Upon fighting, maiming, wounding, striking, scolding; upon
peace-breaking, upon resistance to peace-makers and to the judgment of
Schepens; upon contemning the Ban, upon selling spoiled wine, and upon
other misdeeds fines are imposed for behoof of the Count, the city, and
sometimes of the Schepens.......To all Middelburgers one kind of law is
guaranteed. Every man must go to law before the Schepens. If any one
being summoned and present in Walcheren does not appear, or refuses
submission to sentence, he shall be banished with confiscation of
property. Schout or Schepen denying justice to a complainant, shall,
until reparation, hold no tribunal again.......A burgher having a dispute
with an outsider (buiten mann) must summon him before the Schepens. An
appeal lies from the Schepens to the Count. No one can testify but a
householder. All alienation of real estate must take place before the
Schepens. If an outsider has a complaint against a burgher, the Schepens
and Schout must arrange it. If either party refuses submission to them,
they must ring the town bell and summon an assembly of all the burghers
to compel him. Any one ringing the town bell, except by general consent,
and any one not appearing when it tolls, are liable to a fine. No
Middelburger can be arrested or held in durance within Flanders or
Holland, except for crime."

This document was signed, sealed, and sworn to by the two sovereigns in
the year 1217. It was the model upon which many other communities,
cradles of great cities, in Holland and Zeland, were afterwards created.

These charters are certainly not very extensive, even for the privileged
municipalities which obtained them, when viewed from an abstract
stand-point. They constituted, however, a very great advance from the
stand-point at which humanity actually found itself. They created, not
for all inhabitants, but for great numbers of them, the right, not to
govern them selves but to be governed by law: They furnished a local
administration of justice. They provided against arbitrary imprisonment.
They set up tribunals, where men of burgher class were to sit in
judgment. They held up a shield against arbitrary violence from above and
sedition from within. They encouraged peace-makers, punished
peace-breakers. They guarded the fundamental principle, 'ut sua
tanerent', to the verge of absurdity; forbidding a freeman, without a
freehold, from testifying--a capacity not denied even to a country slave.
Certainly all this was better than fist-law and courts manorial. For the
commencement of the thirteenth century, it was progress.

The Schout and Schepens, or chief magistrate and aldermen, were
originally appointed by the sovereign. In process of time, the election
of these municipal authorities was conceded to the communities. This
inestimable privilege, however, after having been exercised during a
certain period by the whole body of citizens, was eventually monopolized
by the municipal government itself, acting in common with the deans of
the various guilds.

Thus organized and inspired with the breath of civic life, the
communities of Flanders and Holland began to move rapidly forward. More
and more they assumed the appearance of prosperous little republics. For
this prosperity they were indebted to commerce, particularly with England
and the Baltic nations, and to manufactures, especially of wool.

The trade between England and the Netherlands had existed for ages, and
was still extending itself, to the great advantage of both countries. A
dispute, however, between the merchants of Holland and England, towards
the year 1215, caused a privateering warfare, and a ten years' suspension
of intercourse. A reconciliation afterwards led to the establishment of
the English wool staple, at Dort. A subsequent quarrel deprived Holland
of this great advantage. King Edward refused to assist Count Florence in
a war with the Flemings, and transferred the staple from Dort to Bruges
and Mechlin.

The trade of the Netherlands with the Mediterranean and the East was
mainly through this favored city of Bruges, which, already in the
thirteenth century, had risen to the first rank in the commercial world.
It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great
entrepot for their merchandise. It now became, in addition, the great
marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the
Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East. It had,
however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with
Venice, and to sink with her decline. When the overland Indian trade fell
off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered. Grass
grew in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and sea-weed clustered
about the marble halls of Venice. At this epoch, however, both were in a
state of rapid and insolent prosperity.

The cities, thus advancing in wealth and importance, were no longer
satisfied with being governed according to law, and began to participate,
not only in their own, but in the general government. Under Guy of
Flanders, the towns appeared regularly, as well as the nobles, in the
assembly of the provincial estates. (1386-1389, A.D.) In the course of
the following century, the six chief cities, or capitals, of Holland
(Dort, Harlem, Delft, Leyden, Goads, and Amsterdam) acquired the right of
sending their deputies regularly to the estates of the provinces. These
towns, therefore, with the nobles, constituted the parliamentary power of
the nation. They also acquired letters patent from the count, allowing
them to choose their burgomasters and a limited number of councillors or
senators (Vroedschappen).

Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger. A
great physical convulsion in the course of the thirteenth century came to
add its influence to the slower process of political revolution. Hitherto
there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, and nearly all the
territory of the future republic. A slender stream alone separated the
two great districts. The low lands along the Vlie, often threatened, at
last sank in the waves. The German Ocean rolled in upon the inland Lake
of Flevo. The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by engulfing
thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and by
spreading a chasm between kindred peoples. The political, as well as the
geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this tremendous
deluge. The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in the east by
as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their Anglo-Saxon
brethren in Britain. The deputies to the general assemblies at Aurich
could no longer undertake a journey grown so perilous. West Friesland
became absorbed in Holland. East Friesland remained a federation of rude
but self-governed maritime provinces, until the brief and bloody dominion
of the Saxon dukes led to the establishment of Charles the Fifth's
authority. Whatever the nominal sovereignty over them, this most
republican tribe of Netherlanders, or of Europeans, had never accepted
feudalism. There was an annual congress of the whole confederacy. Each of
the seven little states, on the other hand, regulated its own internal
affairs. Each state was subdivided into districts, each district governed
by a Griet-mann (greatman, selectman) and assistants. Above all these
district officers was a Podesta, a magistrate identical, in name and
functions, with the chief officer of the Italian republics. There was
sometimes but one Podesta; sometimes one for each province. He was chosen
by the people, took oath of fidelity to the separate estates, or, if
Podesta-general, to the federal diet, and was generally elected for a
limited term, although sometimes for life. He was assisted by a board of
eighteen or twenty councillors. The deputies to the general congress were
chosen by popular suffrage in Easter-week. The clergy were not recognized
as a political estate.

Thus, in those lands which a niggard nature had apparently condemned to
perpetual poverty and obscurity, the principle of reasonable human
freedom, without which there is no national prosperity or glory worth
contending for, was taking deepest and strongest root. Already in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Friesland was a republic, except in
name; Holland, Flanders, Brabant, had acquired a large share of
self-government. The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be
evolved out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the
spirit of civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed. The
elements, of which that important republic was to be compounded, were
germinating for centuries. Love of freedom, readiness to strike and bleed
at any moment in her cause, manly resistance to despotism, however
overshadowing, were the leading characteristics of the race in all
regions or periods, whether among Frisian swamps, Dutch dykes, the gentle
hills and dales of England, or the pathless forests of America.
Doubtless, the history of human liberty in Holland and Flanders, as every
where else upon earth where there has been such a history, unrolls many
scenes of turbulence and bloodshed; although these features have been
exaggerated by prejudiced historians. Still, if there were luxury and
insolence, sedition and uproar, at any rate there was life. Those violent
little commonwealths had blood in their veins. They were compact of
proud, self-helping, muscular vigor. The most sanguinary tumults which
they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order and
silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism. That very unruliness
was educating the people for their future work. Those merchants,
manufacturers, country squires, and hard-fighting barons, all pent up in
a narrow corner of the earth, quarrelling with each other and with all
the world for centuries, were keeping alive a national pugnacity of
character, for which there was to be a heavy demand in the sixteenth
century, and without which the fatherland had perhaps succumbed in the
most unequal conflict ever waged by man against oppression.

To sketch the special history of even the leading Netherland provinces,
during the five centuries which we have thus rapidly sought to
characterize, is foreign to our purpose. By holding the clue of Holland's
history, the general maze of dynastic transformations throughout the
country may, however, be swiftly threaded. From the time of the first
Dirk to the close of the thirteenth century there were nearly four
hundred years of unbroken male descent, a long line of Dirks and
Florences. This iron-handed, hot-headed, adventurous race, placed as
sovereign upon its little sandy hook, making ferocious exertions to swell
into larger consequence, conquering a mile or two of morass or barren
furze, after harder blows and bloodier encounters than might have
established an empire under more favorable circumstances, at last dies
out. The courtship falls to the house of Avennes, Counts of Hainault.
Holland, together with Zeland, which it had annexed, is thus joined to
the province of Hainault. At the end of another half century the Hainault
line expires. William the Fourth died childless in 1355. His death is the
signal for the outbreak of an almost interminable series of civil
commotions. Those two great, parties, known by the uncouth names of Hook
and Kabbeljaw, come into existence, dividing noble against noble, city
against city, father against son, for some hundred and fifty years,
without foundation upon any abstract or intelligible principle. It may be
observed, however, that, in the sequel, and as a general rule, the
Kabbeljaw, or cod-fish party, represented the city or municipal faction,
while the Hooks (fish-hooks), that were to catch and control them, were
the nobles; iron and audacity against brute number and weight.

Duke William of Bavaria, sister's son--of William the Fourth, gets
himself established in 1354. He is succeeded by his brother Albert;
Albert by his son William. William, who had married Margaret of Burgundy,
daughter of Philip the Bold, dies in 1417. The goodly heritage of these
three Netherland provinces descends to his daughter Jacqueline, a damsel
of seventeen. Little need to trace the career of the fair and ill-starred
Jacqueline. Few chapters of historical romance have drawn more frequent
tears. The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to Netherlanders she is
endued with the palpable form and perpetual existence of the Iphigenias,
Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other consecrated individualities.
Exhausted and broken-hearted, after thirteen years of conflict with her
own kinsmen, consoled for the cowardice and brutality of three husbands
by the gentle and knightly spirit of the fourth, dispossessed of her
father's broad domains, degraded from the rank of sovereign to be lady
forester of her own provinces by her cousin, the bad Duke of Burgundy,
Philip surnamed "the Good," she dies at last, and the good cousin takes
undisputed dominion of the land. (1437.)

The five centuries of isolation are at end. The many obscure streams of
Netherland history are merged in one broad current. Burgundy has absorbed
all the provinces which, once more, are forced to recognize a single
master. A century and a few years more succeed, during which this house
and its heirs are undisputed sovereigns of the soil.

Philip the Good had already acquired the principal Netherlands, before
dispossessing Jacqueline. He had inherited, beside the two Burgundies,
the counties of Flanders and Artois. He had purchased the county of
Namur, and had usurped the duchy of Brabant, to which the duchy of
Limburg, the marquisate of Antwerp, and the barony of Mechlin, had
already been annexed. By his assumption of Jacqueline's dominions, he was
now lord of Holland, Zeland, and Hainault, and titular master of
Friesland. He acquired Luxemburg a few years later.

Lord of so many opulent cities and fruitful provinces, he felt himself
equal to the kings of Europe. Upon his marriage with Isabella of
Portugal, he founded, at Bruges, the celebrated order of the Golden
Fleece. What could be more practical or more devout than the conception?
Did not the Lamb of God, suspended at each knightly breast, symbolize at
once the woollen fabrics to which so much of Flemish wealth and
Burgundian power was owing, and the gentle humility of Christ, which was
ever to characterize the order? Twenty-five was the limited number,
including Philip himself, as grand master. The chevaliers were emperors,
kings, princes, and the most illustrious nobles of Christendom; while a
leading provision, at the outset, forbade the brethren, crowned heads
excepted, to accept or retain the companionship of any other order.

The accession of so potent and ambitious a prince as the good Philip
boded evil to the cause of freedom in the Netherlands. The spirit of
liberty seemed to have been typified in the fair form of the benignant
and unhappy Jacqueline, and to be buried in her grave. The usurper, who
had crushed her out of existence, now strode forward to trample upon all
the laws and privileges of the provinces which had formed her heritage.

At his advent, the municipal power had already reached an advanced stage
of development. The burgher class controlled the government, not only of
the cities, but often of the provinces, through its influence in the
estates. Industry and wealth had produced their natural results. The
supreme authority of the sovereign and the power of the nobles were
balanced by the municipal principle which had even begun to preponderate
over both. All three exercised a constant and salutary check upon each
other. Commerce had converted slaves into freemen, freemen into burghers,
and the burghers were acquiring daily, a larger practical hold upon the
government. The town councils were becoming almost omnipotent. Although
with an oligarchical tendency, which at a later period was to be more
fully developed, they were now composed of large numbers of individuals,
who had raised themselves, by industry and intelligence, out of the
popular masses. There was an unquestionably republican tone to the
institutions. Power, actually, if not nominally, was in the hands of many
who had achieved the greatness to which they had not been born.

The assemblies of the estates were rather diplomatic than representative.
They consisted, generally, of the nobles and of the deputations from the
cities. In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats in the
parliamentary body. Measures were proposed by the stadholder, who
represented the sovereign. A request, for example, of pecuniary,
accommodation, was made by that functionary or by the count himself in
person. The nobles then voted upon the demand, generally as one body, but
sometimes by heads. The measure was then laid before the burghers. If
they had been specially commissioned to act upon the matter; they voted,
each city as a city, not each deputy, individually. If they had received
no instructions, they took back the proposition to lay before the
councils of their respective cities, in order to return a decision at an
adjourned session, or at a subsequent diet. It will be seen, therefore,
that the principle of national, popular representation was but
imperfectly developed. The municipal deputies acted only under
instructions. Each city was a little independent state, suspicious not
only of the sovereign and nobles, but of its sister cities. This mutual
jealousy hastened the general humiliation now impending. The centre of
the system waging daily more powerful, it more easily unsphered these
feebler and mutually repulsive bodies.

Philip's first step, upon assuming the government, was to issue a
declaration, through the council of Holland, that the privileges and
constitutions, which he had sworn to as Ruward, or guardian, during the
period in which Jacqueline had still retained a nominal sovereignty, were
to be considered null and void, unless afterwards confirmed by him as
count. At a single blow he thus severed the whole knot of pledges, oaths
and other political complications, by which he had entangled himself
during his cautious advance to power. He was now untrammelled again. As
the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the measure of
provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them more
sparingly than they wished. From this point, then, through the Burgundian
period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the
Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations,
occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual
eclipse.

The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.
The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance. The invention
of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine of
wealth. The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen, and
were already indicating Holland's future naval supremacy. The fishermen
were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the war with the
Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland, in Philip's
name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on triumphantly at
this epoch. Then came into existence that race of cool and daring
mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name illustrious
throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the "beggars of
the sea," were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men, whose later
successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and whose
ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often lasted
four uninterrupted days and nights.

The main strength of Holland was derived from the ocean, from whose
destructive grasp she had wrested herself, but in whose friendly embrace
she remained. She was already placing securely the foundations of
commercial wealth and civil liberty upon those shifting quicksands which
the Roman doubted whether to call land or water. Her submerged deformity,
as she floated, mermaid-like, upon the waves was to be forgotten in her
material splendor. Enriched with the spoils of every clime, crowned with
the divine jewels of science and art, she was, one day, to sing a siren
song of freedom, luxury, and power.

As with Holland, so with Flanders, Brabant, and the other leading
provinces. Industry and wealth, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures,
were constantly augmenting. The natural sources of power were full to
overflowing, while the hand of despotism was deliberately sealing the
fountain.

For the house of Burgundy was rapidly culminating and as rapidly
curtailing the political privileges of the Netherlands. The contest was,
at first, favorable to the cause of arbitrary power; but little seeds
were silently germinating, which, in the progress of their gigantic
development, were, one day, to undermine the foundations of Tyranny and
to overshadow the world. The early progress of the religious reformation
in the Netherlands will be outlined in a separate chapter. Another great
principle was likewise at work at this period. At the very epoch when the
greatness of Burgundy was most swiftly ripening, another weapon was
secretly forging, more potent in the great struggle for freedom than any
which the wit or hand of man has ever devised or wielded. When Philip the
Good, in the full blaze of his power, and flushed with the triumphs of
territorial aggrandizement, was instituting at Bruges the order of the
Golden Fleece, "to the glory of God, of the blessed Virgin, and of the
holy Andrew, patron saint of the Burgundian family," and enrolling the
names of the kings and princes who were to be honored with its symbols,
at that very moment, an obscure citizen of Harlem, one Lorenz Coster, or
Lawrence the Sexton, succeeded in printing a little grammar, by means of
movable types. The invention of printing was accomplished, but it was not
ushered in with such a blaze of glory as heralded the contemporaneous
erection of the Golden Fleece. The humble setter of types did not deem
emperors and princes alone worthy his companionship. His invention sent
no thrill of admiration throughout Christendom; and yet, what was the
good Philip of Burgundy, with his Knights of the Golden Fleece, and all
their effulgent trumpery, in the eye of humanity and civilization,
compared with the poor sexton and his wooden types?

   [The question of the time and place to which the invention of
   printing should be referred, has been often discussed. It is not
   probable that it will ever be settled to the entire satisfaction of
   Holland and Germany. The Dutch claim that movable types were first
   used at Harlem, fixing the time variously between the years 1423 and
   1440. The first and very faulty editions of Lorenz are religiously
   preserved at Harlem.]

Philip died in February, 1467. The details of his life and career do not
belong to our purpose. The practical tendency of his government was to
repress the spirit of liberty, while especial privileges, extensive in
nature, but limited in time, were frequently granted to corporations.
Philip, in one day, conferred thirty charters upon as many different
bodies of citizens. These were, however, grants of monopoly not
concessions of rights. He also fixed the number of city councils or
Vroedschappen in many Netherland cities, giving them permission to
present a double list of candidates for burgomasters and judges, from
which he himself made the appointments. He was certainly neither a good
nor great prince, but he possessed much administrative ability. His
military talents were considerable, and he was successful in his wars. He
was an adroit dissembler, a practical politician. He had the sense to
comprehend that the power of a prince, however absolute, must depend upon
the prosperity of his subjects. He taxed severely the wealth, but he
protected the commerce and the manufactures of Holland and Flanders. He
encouraged art, science, and literature. The brothers, John and Hubert
Van Eyck, were attracted by his generosity to Bruges, where they painted
many pictures. John was even a member of the duke's council. The art of
oil-painting was carried to great perfection by Hubert's scholar, John of
Bruges. An incredible number of painters, of greater or less merit,
flourished at this epoch in the Netherlands, heralds of that great
school, which, at a subsequent period, was to astonish the world with
brilliant colors; profound science, startling effects, and vigorous
reproductions of Nature. Authors, too, like Olivier de la Marche and
Philippe de Comines, who, in the words of the latter, "wrote, not for the
amusement of brutes, and people of low degree, but for princes and other
persons of quality," these and other writers, with aims as lofty,
flourished at the court of Burgundy, and were rewarded by the Duke with
princely generosity. Philip remodelled and befriended the university of
Louvain. He founded at Brussels the Burgundian library, which became
celebrated throughout Europe. He levied largely, spent profusely, but was
yet so thrifty a housekeeper, as to leave four hundred thousand crowns of
gold, a vast amount in those days, besides three million marks' worth of
plate and furniture, to be wasted like water in the insane career of his
son.

The exploits of that son require but few words of illustration. Hardly a
chapter of European history or romance is more familiar to the world than
the one which records the meteoric course of Charles the Bold. The
propriety of his title was never doubtful. No prince was ever bolder, but
it is certain that no quality could be less desirable, at that particular
moment in the history of his house. It was not the quality to confirm a
usurping family in its ill-gotten possessions. Renewed aggressions upon
the rights of others justified retaliation and invited attack. Justice,
prudence, firmness, wisdom of internal administration were desirable in
the son of Philip and the rival of Louis. These attributes the gladiator
lacked entirely. His career might have been a brilliant one in the old
days of chivalry. His image might have appeared as imposing as the
romantic forms of Baldwin Bras de Fer or Godfrey of Bouillon, had he not
been misplaced in history. Nevertheless, he imagined himself governed by
a profound policy. He had one dominant idea, to make Burgundy a kingdom.
From the moment when, with almost the first standing army known to
history, and with coffers well filled by his cautious father's economy,
he threw himself into the lists against the crafty Louis, down to the day
when he was found dead, naked, deserted, and with his face frozen into a
pool of blood and water, he faithfully pursued this thought. His ducal
cap was to be exchanged for a kingly crown, while all the provinces which
lay beneath the Mediterranean and the North Sea, and between France and
Germany, were to be united under his sceptre. The Netherlands, with their
wealth, had been already appropriated, and their freedom crushed. Another
land of liberty remained; physically, the reverse of Holland, but stamped
with the same courageous nationality, the same ardent love of human
rights. Switzerland was to be conquered. Her eternal battlements of ice
and granite were to constitute the great bulwark of his realm. The world
knows well the result of the struggle between the lord of so many duchies
and earldoms, and the Alpine mountaineers. With all his boldness, Charles
was but an indifferent soldier. His only merit was physical courage. He
imagined himself a consummate commander, and, in conversation with his
jester, was fond of comparing himself to Hannibal. "We are getting well
Hannibalized to-day, my lord," said the bitter fool, as they rode off
together from the disastrous defeat of Gransen. Well "Hannibalized" he
was, too, at Gransen, at Murten, and at Nancy. He followed in the track
of his prototype only to the base of the mountains.

As a conqueror, he was signally unsuccessful; as a politician, he could
out-wit none but himself; it was only as a tyrant within his own ground,
that he could sustain the character which he chose to enact. He lost the
crown, which he might have secured, because he thought the emperor's son
unworthy the heiress of Burgundy; and yet, after his father's death, her
marriage with that very Maximilian alone secured the possession of her
paternal inheritance. Unsuccessful in schemes of conquest, and in
political intrigue, as an oppressor of the Netherlands, he nearly carried
out his plans. Those provinces he regarded merely as a bank to draw upon.
His immediate intercourse with the country was confined to the extortion
of vast requests. These were granted with ever-increasing reluctance, by
the estates. The new taxes and excises, which the sanguinary extravagance
of the duke rendered necessary, could seldom be collected in the various
cities without tumults, sedition, and bloodshed. Few princes were ever a
greater curse to the people whom they were allowed to hold as property.
He nearly succeeded in establishing a centralized despotism upon the
ruins of the provincial institutions. His sudden death alone deferred the
catastrophe. His removal of the supreme court of Holland from the Hague
to Mechlin, and his maintenance of a standing army, were the two great
measures by which he prostrated the Netherlands. The tribunal had been
remodelled by his father; the expanded authority which Philip had given
to a bench of judges dependent upon himself, was an infraction of the
rights of Holland. The court, however, still held its sessions in the
country; and the sacred privilege--de non evocando--the right of every
Hollander to be tried in his own land, was, at least, retained. Charles
threw off the mask; he proclaimed that this council--composed of his
creatures, holding office at his pleasure--should have supreme
jurisdiction over all the charters of the provinces; that it was to
follow his person, and derive all authority from his will. The usual seat
of the court he transferred to Mechlin. It will be seen, in the sequel,
that the attempt, under Philip the Second, to enforce its supreme
authority was a collateral cause of the great revolution of the
Netherlands.

Charles, like his father, administered the country by stadholders. From
the condition of flourishing self-ruled little republics, which they had,
for a moment, almost attained, they became departments of an
ill-assorted, ill-conditioned, ill-governed realm, which was neither
commonwealth nor empire, neither kingdom nor duchy; and which had no
homogeneousness of population, no affection between ruler and people,
small sympathies of lineage or of language.

His triumphs were but few, his fall ignominious. His father's treasure
was squandered, the curse of a standing army fixed upon his people, the
trade and manufactures of the country paralyzed by his extortions, and he
accomplished nothing. He lost his life in the forty-fourth year of his
age (1477), leaving all the provinces, duchies, and lordships, which
formed the miscellaneous realm of Burgundy, to his only child, the Lady
Mary. Thus already the countries which Philip had wrested from the feeble
hand of Jacqueline, had fallen to another female. Philip's own
granddaughter, as young, fair, and unprotected as Jacqueline, was now
sole mistress of those broad domains.



VIII.

A crisis, both for Burgundy and the Netherlands, succeeds. Within the
provinces there is an elastic rebound, as soon as the pressure is removed
from them by the tyrant's death. A sudden spasm of liberty gives the
whole people gigantic strength. In an instant they recover all, and more
than all, the rights which they had lost. The cities of Holland,
Flanders, and other provinces call a convention at Ghent. Laying aside
their musty feuds, men of all parties-Hooks and Kabbeljaws, patricians
and people, move forward in phalanx to recover their national
constitutions. On the other hand, Louis the Eleventh seizes Burgundy,
claiming the territory for his crown, the heiress for his son. The
situation is critical for the Lady Mary. As usual in such cases, appeals
are made to the faithful commons. A prodigality of oaths and pledges is
showered upon the people, that their loyalty may be refreshed and grow
green. The congress meets at Ghent. The Lady Mary professes much, but she
will keep her vow. The deputies are called upon to rally the country
around the duchess, and to resist the fraud and force of Louis. The
congress is willing to maintain the cause of its young mistress. The
members declare, at the same time, very roundly, "that the provinces have
been much impoverished and oppressed by the enormous taxation imposed
upon them by the ruinous wars waged by Duke Charles from the beginning to
the end of his life." They rather require "to be relieved than
additionally encumbered." They add that, "for many years past, there has
been a constant violation of the provincial and municipal charters, and
that they should be happy to see them restored."

The result of the deliberations is the formal grant by Duchess Mary of
the "Groot Privilegie," or Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland.
Although this instrument was afterwards violated, and indeed abolished,
it became the foundation of the republic. It was a recapitulation and
recognition of ancient rights, not an acquisition of new privileges. It
was a restoration, not a revolution. Its principal points deserve
attention from those interested in the political progress of mankind.

"The duchess shall not marry without consent of the estates of her
provinces. All offices in her gift shall be conferred on natives only. No
man shall fill two offices. No office shall be farmed. The 'Great Council
and Supreme Court of Holland' is re-established. Causes shall be brought
before it on appeal from the ordinary courts. It shall have no original
jurisdiction of matters within the cognizance of the provincial and
municipal tribunals. The estates and cities are guaranteed in their right
not to be summoned to justice beyond the limits of their territory. The
cities, in common with all the provinces of the Netherlands, may hold
diets as often ten and at such places as they choose. No new taxes shall
be imposed but by consent of the provincial estates. Neither the duchess
nor her descendants shall begin either an offensive or defensive war
without consent of the estates. In case a war be illegally undertaken,
the estates are not bound to contribute to its maintenance. In all public
and legal documents, the Netherland language shall be employed. The
commands of the duchess shall be invalid, if conflicting with the
privileges of a city.

"The seat of the Supreme Council is transferred from Mechlin to the
Hague. No money shall be coined, nor its value raised or lowered, but by
consent of the estates. Cities are not to be compelled to contribute to
requests which they have not voted. The sovereign shall come in person
before the estates, to make his request for supplies."

Here was good work. The land was rescued at a blow from the helpless
condition to which it had been reduced. This summary annihilation of all
the despotic arrangements of Charles was enough to raise him from his
tomb. The law, the sword, the purse, were all taken from the hand of the
sovereign and placed within the control of parliament. Such sweeping
reforms, if maintained, would restore health to the body politic. They
gave, moreover, an earnest of what was one day to arrive. Certainly, for
the fifteenth century, the "Great Privilege" was a reasonably liberal
constitution. Where else upon earth, at that day, was there half so much
liberty as was thus guaranteed? The congress of the Netherlands,
according to their Magna Charta, had power to levy all taxes, to regulate
commerce and manufactures, to declare war, to coin money, to raise armies
and navies. The executive was required to ask for money in person, could
appoint only natives to office, recognized the right of disobedience in
his subjects, if his commands should conflict with law, and acknowledged
himself bound by decisions of courts of justice. The cities appointed
their own magistrates, held diets at their own pleasure, made their local
by-laws and saw to their execution. Original cognizance of legal matters
belonged to the municipal courts, appellate jurisdiction to the supreme
tribunal, in which the judges were appointed by the sovereign. The
liberty of the citizen against arbitrary imprisonment was amply provided
for. The 'jus de non evocando', the habeas corpus of Holland, was
re-established.

Truly, here was a fundamental law which largely, roundly, and reasonably
recognized the existence of a people with hearts, heads, and hands of
their own. It was a vast step in advance of natural servitude, the dogma
of the dark ages. It was a noble and temperate vindication of natural
liberty, the doctrine of more enlightened days. To no people in the world
more than to the stout burghers of Flanders and Holland belongs the honor
of having battled audaciously and perennially in behalf of human rights.

Similar privileges to the great charter of Holland are granted to many
other provinces; especially to Flanders, ever ready to stand forward in
fierce vindication of freedom. For a season all is peace and joy; but the
duchess is young, weak, and a woman. There is no lack of intriguing
politicians, reactionary councillors. There is a cunning old king in the
distance, lying in wait; seeking what he can devour. A mission goes from
the estates to France. The well-known tragedy of Imbrecourt and Hugonet
occurs. Envoys from the states, they dare to accept secret instructions
from the duchess to enter into private negotiations with the French
monarch, against their colleagues--against the great charter--against
their country. Sly Louis betrays them, thinking that policy the more
expedient. They are seized in Ghent, rapidly tried, and as rapidly
beheaded by the enraged burghers. All the entreaties of the Lady Mary,
who, dressed in mourning garments, with dishevelled hair, unloosed
girdle, and streaming eyes; appears at the town-house and afterwards in
the market place, humbly to intercede for her servants, are fruitless
There is no help for the juggling diplomatists. The punishment was sharp.
Was it more severe and sudden than that which betrayed monarchs usually
inflict? Would the Flemings, at that critical moment, have deserved their
freedom had they not taken swift and signal vengeance for this first
infraction of their newly recognized rights? Had it not been weakness to
spare the traitors who had thus stained the childhood of the national joy
at liberty regained?



IX.

Another step, and a wide one, into the great stream of European history.
The Lady Mary espouses the Archduke Maximilian. The Netherlands are about
to become Habsburg property. The Ghenters reject the pretensions of the
dauphin, and select for husband of their duchess the very man whom her
father had so stupidly rejected. It had been a wiser choice for Charles
the Bold than for the Netherlanders. The marriage takes place on the 18th
of August, 1477. Mary of Burgundy passes from the guardianship of Ghent
burghers into that of the emperor's son. The crafty husband allies
himself with the city party, feeling where the strength lies. He knows
that the voracious Kabbeljaws have at last swallowed the Hooks, and run
away with them. Promising himself future rights of reconsideration, he is
liberal in promises to the municipal party. In the mean time he is
governor and guardian of his wife and her provinces. His children are to
inherit the Netherlands and all that therein is. What can be more
consistent than laws of descent, regulated by right divine? At the
beginning of the century, good Philip dispossesses Jacqueline, because
females can not inherit. At its close, his granddaughter succeeds to the
property, and transmits it to her children. Pope and emperor maintain
both positions with equal logic. The policy and promptness of Maximilian
are as effective as the force and fraud of Philip. The Lady Mary falls
from her horse and dies. Her son, Philip, four years of age, is
recognized as successor. Thus the house of Burgundy is followed by that
of Austria, the fifth and last family which governed Holland, previously
to the erection of the republic. Maximilian is recognized by the
provinces as governor and guardian, during the minority of his children.
Flanders alone refuses. The burghers, ever prompt in action, take
personal possession of the child Philip, and carry on the government in
his name. A commission of citizens and nobles thus maintain their
authority against Maximilian for several years. In 1488, the archduke,
now King of the Romans, with a small force of cavalry, attempts to take
the city of Bruges, but the result is a mortifying one to the Roman king.
The citizens of Bruges take him. Maximilian, with several councillors, is
kept a prisoner in a house on the market-place. The magistrates are all
changed, the affairs of government conducted in the name of the young
Philip alone. Meantime, the estates of the other Netherlands assemble at
Ghent; anxious, unfortunately, not for the national liberty, but for that
of the Roman king. Already Holland, torn again by civil feuds, and
blinded by the artifices of Maximilian, has deserted, for a season, the
great cause to which Flanders has remained so true. At last, a treaty is
made between the archduke and the Flemings. Maximilian is to be regent of
the other provinces; Philip, under guardianship of a council, is to
govern Flanders. Moreover, a congress of all the provinces is to be
summoned annually, to provide for the general welfare. Maximilian signs
and swears to the treaty on the 16th May, 1488. He swears, also, to
dismiss all foreign troops within four days. Giving hostages for his
fidelity, he is set at liberty. What are oaths and hostages when
prerogative, and the people are contending? Emperor Frederic sends to his
son an army under the Duke of Saxony. The oaths are broken, the hostages
left to their fate. The struggle lasts a year, but, at the end of it, the
Flemings are subdued. What could a single province effect, when its
sister states, even liberty-loving Holland, had basely abandoned the
common cause? A new treaty is made, (Oct.1489). Maximilian obtains
uncontrolled guardianship of his son, absolute dominion over Flanders and
the other provinces. The insolent burghers are severely punished for
remembering that they had been freemen. The magistrates of Ghent, Bruges,
and Ypres, in black garments, ungirdled, bare-headed, and kneeling, are
compelled to implore the despot's forgiveness, and to pay three hundred
thousand crowns of gold as its price. After this, for a brief season,
order reigns in Flanders.

The course of Maximilian had been stealthy, but decided. Allying himself
with the city party, he had crushed the nobles. The power thus obtained,
he then turned against the burghers. Step by step he had trampled out the
liberties which his wife and himself had sworn to protect. He had spurned
the authority of the "Great Privilege," and all other charters.
Burgomasters and other citizens had been beheaded in great numbers for
appealing to their statutes against the edicts of the regent, for voting
in favor of a general congress according to the unquestionable law. He
had proclaimed that all landed estates should, in lack of heirs male,
escheat to his own exchequer. He had debased the coin of the country, and
thereby authorized unlimited swindling on the part of all his agents,
from stadholders down to the meanest official. If such oppression and
knavery did not justify the resistance of the Flemings to the
guardianship of Maximilian, it would be difficult to find any reasonable
course in political affairs save abject submission to authority.

In 1493, Maximilian succeeds to the imperial throne, at the death of his
father. In the following year his son, Philip the Fair, now seventeen
years of age, receives the homage of the different states of the
Netherlands. He swears to maintain only the privileges granted by Philip
and Charles of Burgundy, or their ancestors, proclaiming null and void
all those which might have been acquired since the death of Charles.
Holland, Zeland, and the other provinces accept him upon these
conditions, thus ignominiously, and without a struggle, relinquishing the
Great Privilege, and all similar charters.

Friesland is, for a brief season, politically separated from the rest of
the country. Harassed and exhausted by centuries of warfare, foreign, and
domestic, the free Frisians, at the suggestion or command of Emperor
Maximilian, elect the Duke of Saxony as their Podesta. The sovereign
prince, naturally proving a chief magistrate far from democratic, gets
himself acknowledged, or submitted to, soon afterwards, as legitimate
sovereign of Friesland. Seventeen years afterward Saxony sells the
sovereignty to the Austrian house for 350,000 crowns. This little
country, whose statutes proclaimed her to be "free as the wind, as long
as it blew," whose institutions Charlemagne had honored and left
unmolested, who had freed herself with ready poniard from Norman tyranny,
who never bowed her neck to feudal chieftain, nor to the papal yoke, now
driven to madness and suicide by the dissensions of her wild children,
forfeits at last her independent existence. All the provinces are thus
united in a common servitude, and regret, too late, their supineness at a
moment when their liberties might yet have been vindicated. Their ancient
and cherished charters, which their bold ancestors had earned with the
sweat of their brows and the blood of their hearts, are at the mercy of
an autocrat, and liable to be superseded by his edicts.

In 1496, the momentous marriage of Philip the Fair with Joanna, daughter
of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon, is solemnized. Of this
union, in the first year of the century, is born the second Charlemagne,
who is to unite Spain and the Netherlands, together with so many vast and
distant realms, under a single sceptre. Six years afterwards (Sept. 25,
1506), Philip dies at Burgos. A handsome profligate, devoted to his
pleasures, and leaving the cares of state to his ministers, Philip,
"croit-conseil," is the bridge over which the house of Habsburg passes to
almost universal monarchy, but, in himself, is nothing.



X.

Two prudent marriages, made by Austrian archdukes within twenty years,
have altered the face of the earth. The stream, which we have been
tracing from its source, empties itself at last into the ocean of a
world-empire. Count Dirk the First, lord of a half-submerged corner of
Europe, is succeeded by Count Charles the Second of Holland, better known
as Charles the Fifth, King of Spain, Sicily, and Jerusalem, Duke of
Milan, Emperor of Germany, Dominator in Asia and Africa, autocrat of half
the world. The leading events of his brilliant reign are familiar to
every child. The Netherlands now share the fate of so large a group of
nations, a fate, to these provinces, most miserable. The weddings of
Austria Felix were not so prolific of happiness to her subjects as to
herself. It can never seem just or reasonable that the destiny of many
millions of human beings should depend upon the marriage-settlements of
one man with one woman, and a permanent, prosperous empire can never be
reared upon so frail a foundation. The leading thought of the first
Charlemagne was a noble and a useful one, nor did his imperial scheme
seem chimerical, even although time, wiser than monarchs or lawgivers,
was to prove it impracticable. To weld into one great whole the various
tribes of Franks, Frisians, Saxons, Lombards, Burgundians, and others,
still in their turbulent youth, and still composing one great Teutonic
family; to enforce the mutual adhesion of naturally coherent masses, all
of one lineage, one language, one history, and which were only beginning
to exhibit their tendencies to insulation, to acquiesce in a variety of
local laws and customs, while an iron will was to concentrate a vast, but
homogeneous, people into a single nation; to raise up from the grave of
corrupt and buried Rome a fresh, vigorous, German, Christian empire; this
was a reasonable and manly thought. Far different the conception of the
second Charlemagne. To force into discordant union, tribes which, for
seven centuries, had developed themselves into hostile nations, separated
by geography and history, customs and laws, to combine many millions
under one sceptre, not because of natural identity, but for the sake of
composing one splendid family property, to establish unity by
annihilating local institutions, to supersede popular and liberal
charters by the edicts of a central despotism, to do battle with the
whole spirit of an age, to regard the souls as well as the bodies of vast
multitudes as the personal property of one individual, to strive for the
perpetuation in a single house of many crowns, which accident had
blended, and to imagine the consecration of the whole system by placing
the pope's triple diadem forever upon the imperial head of the
Habsburgs;--all this was not the effort of a great, constructive genius,
but the selfish scheme of an autocrat.

The union of no two countries could be less likely to prove advantageous
or agreeable than that of the Netherlands and Spain. They were widely
separated geographically, while in history, manners, and politics, they
were utterly opposed to each other. Spain, which had but just assumed the
form of a single state by the combination of all its kingdoms, with its
haughty nobles descended from petty kings, and arrogating almost
sovereign power within their domains, with its fierce enthusiasm for the
Catholic religion, which, in the course of long warfare with the
Saracens, had become the absorbing characteristic of a whole nation, with
its sparse population scattered over a wide and stern country, with a
military spirit which led nearly all classes to prefer poverty to the
wealth attendant upon degrading pursuits of trade;--Spain, with her
gloomy, martial, and exaggerated character, was the absolute contrast of
the Netherlands.

These provinces had been rarely combined into a whole, but there was
natural affinity in their character, history, and position. There was
life, movement, bustling activity every where. An energetic population
swarmed in all the flourishing cities which dotted the surface of a
contracted and highly cultivated country. Their ships were the carriers
for the world;--their merchants, if invaded in their rights, engaged in
vigorous warfare with their own funds and their own frigates; their
fabrics were prized over the whole earth; their burghers possessed the
wealth of princes, lived with royal luxury, and exercised vast political
influence; their love of liberty was their predominant passion. Their
religious ardor had not been fully awakened; but the events of the next
generation were to prove that in no respect more than in the religious
sentiment, were the two races opposed to each other. It was as certain
that the Netherlanders would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards
would be uncompromising persecutors. Unhallowed was the union between
nations thus utterly contrasted.

Philip the Fair and Ferdinand had detested and quarrelled with each other
from the beginning. The Spaniards and Flemings participated in the mutual
antipathy, and hated each other cordially at first sight. The
unscrupulous avarice of the Netherland nobles in Spain, their grasping
and venal ambition, enraged and disgusted the haughty Spaniards. This
international malignity furnishes one of the keys to a proper
understanding of the great revolt in the next reign.

The provinces, now all united again under an emperor, were treated,
opulent and powerful as they were, as obscure dependencies. The regency
over them was entrusted by Charles to his near relatives, who governed in
the interest of his house, not of the country. His course towards them
upon the religious question will be hereafter indicated. The political
character of his administration was typified, and, as it were,
dramatized, on the occasion of the memorable insurrection at Ghent. For
this reason, a few interior details concerning that remarkable event,
seem requisite.



XI.

Ghent was, in all respects, one of the most important cities in Europe.
Erasmus, who, as a Hollander and a courtier, was not likely to be partial
to the turbulent Flemings, asserted that there was no town in all
Christendom to be compared to it for size, power, political constitution,
or the culture of its inhabitants. It was, said one of its inhabitants at
the epoch of the insurrection, rather a country than a city. The activity
and wealth of its burghers were proverbial. The bells were rung daily,
and the drawbridges over the many arms of the river intersecting the
streets were raised, in order that all business might be suspended, while
the armies of workmen were going to or returning from their labors. As
early as the fourteenth century, the age of the Arteveldes, Froissart
estimated the number of fighting men whom Ghent could bring into the
field at eighty thousand. The city, by its jurisdiction over many large
but subordinate towns, disposed of more than its own immediate
population, which has been reckoned as high as two hundred thousand.

Placed in the midst of well cultivated plains, Ghent was surrounded by
strong walls, the external circuit of which measured nine miles. Its
streets and squares were spacious and elegant, its churches and other
public buildings numerous and splendid. The sumptuous church of Saint
John or Saint Bavon, where Charles the Fifth had been baptized, the
ancient castle whither Baldwin Bras de Fer had brought the daughter of
Charles the Bald, the city hall with its graceful Moorish front, the
well-known belfry, where for three centuries had perched the dragon sent
by the Emperor Baldwin of Flanders from Constantinople, and where swung
the famous Roland, whose iron tongue had called the citizens, generation
after generation, to arms, whether to win battles over foreign kings at
the head of their chivalry, or to plunge their swords in each others'
breasts, were all conspicuous in the city and celebrated in the land.
Especially the great bell was the object of the burghers' affection, and,
generally, of the sovereign's hatred; while to all it seemed, as it were,
a living historical personage, endowed with the human powers and passions
which it had so long directed and inflamed.

The constitution of the city was very free. It was a little republic in
all but name. Its population was divided into fifty-two guilds of
manufacturers and into thirty-two tribes of weavers; each fraternity
electing annually or biennally its own deans and subordinate officers.
The senate, which exercised functions legislative, judicial, and
administrative, subject of course to the grand council of Mechlin and to
the sovereign authority, consisted of twenty-six members. These were
appointed partly from the upper class, or the men who lived upon their
means, partly from the manufacturers in general, and partly from the
weavers. They were chosen by a college of eight electors, who were
appointed by the sovereign on nomination by the citizens. The whole city,
in its collective capacity, constituted one of the four estates (Membra)
of the province of Flanders. It is obvious that so much liberty of form
and of fact, added to the stormy character by which its citizens were
distinguished, would be most offensive in the eyes of Charles, and that
the delinquencies of the little commonwealth would be represented in the
most glaring colors by all those quiet souls, who preferred the
tranquillity of despotism to the turbulence of freedom. The city claimed,
moreover, the general provisions of the "Great Privilege" of the Lady
Mary, the Magna Charta, which, according to the monarchical party, had
been legally abrogated by Maximilian. The liberties of the town had also
been nominally curtailed by the "calf-skin" (Kalf Vel). By this
celebrated document, Charles the Fifth, then fifteen years of age, had
been made to threaten with condign punishment all persons who should
maintain that he had sworn at his inauguration to observe any privileges
or charters claimed by the Ghenters before the peace of Cadsand.

The immediate cause of the discontent, the attempt to force from Flanders
a subsidy of four hundred thousand caroli, as the third part of the
twelve hundred thousand granted by the states of the Netherlands, and the
resistance of Ghent in opposition to the other three members of the
province, will, of course, be judged differently, according as the
sympathies are stronger with popular rights or with prerogative. The
citizens claimed that the subsidy could only be granted by the unanimous
consent of the four estates of the province. Among other proofs of this
their unquestionable right, they appealed to a muniment, which had never
existed, save in the imagination of the credulous populace. At a certain
remote epoch, one of the Counts of Flanders, it was contended, had
gambled away his countship to the Earl of Holland, but had been
extricated from his dilemma by the generosity of Ghent. The burghers of
the town had paid the debts and redeemed the sovereignty of their lord,
and had thereby gained, in return, a charter, called the Bargain of
Flanders (Koop van Flandern). Among the privileges granted by this
document, was an express stipulation that no subsidy should ever be
granted by the province without the consent of Ghent. This charter would
have been conclusive in the present emergency, had it not labored under
the disadvantage of never having existed. It was supposed by many that
the magistrates, some of whom were favorable to government, had hidden
the document. Lieven Pyl, an ex-senator, was supposed to be privy to its
concealment. He was also, with more justice, charged with an act of great
baseness and effrontery. Reputed by the citizens to carry to the Queen
Regent their positive refusal to grant the subsidy, he had, on the
contrary, given an answer, in their name, in the affirmative. For these
delinquencies, the imaginary and the real, he was inhumanly tortured and
afterwards beheaded. "I know, my children," said he upon the scaffold,
"that you will be grieved when you have seen my blood flow, and that you
will regret me when it is too late." It does not appear, however, that
there was any especial reason to regret him, however sanguinary the
punishment which had requited his broken faith.

The mischief being thus afoot, the tongue of Roland, and the
easily-excited spirits of the citizens, soon did the rest. Ghent broke
forth into open insurrection. They had been willing to enlist and pay
troops under their own banners, but they had felt outraged at the
enormous contribution demanded of them for a foreign war, undertaken in
the family interests of their distant master. They could not find the
"Bargain of Flanders," but they got possession of the odious "calf skin,"
which was solemnly cut in two by the dean of the weavers. It was then
torn in shreds by the angry citizens, many of whom paraded the streets
with pieces of the hated document stuck in their caps, like plumes. From
these demonstrations they proceeded to intrigues with Francis the First.
He rejected them, and gave notice of their overtures to Charles, who now
resolved to quell the insurrection, at once. Francis wrote, begging that
the Emperor would honor him by coming through France; "wishing to assure
you," said he, "my lord and good brother, by this letter, written and
signed by my hand, upon my honor, and on the faith of a prince, and of
the best brother you have, that in passing through my kingdom every
possible honor and hospitality will be offered you, even as they could be
to myself." Certainly, the French king, after such profuse and voluntary
pledges, to confirm which he, moreover, offered his two sons and other
great individuals as hostages, could not, without utterly disgracing
himself, have taken any unhandsome advantage of the Emperor's presence in
his dominions. The reflections often made concerning the high-minded
chivalry of Francis, and the subtle knowledge of human nature displayed
by Charles upon the occasion, seem, therefore, entirely superfluous. The
Emperor came to Paris. "Here," says a citizen of Ghent, at the time, who
has left a minute account of the transaction upon record, but whose
sympathies were ludicrously with the despot and against his own
townspeople, "here the Emperor was received as if the God of Paradise had
descended." On the 9th of February, 1540, he left Brussels; on the 14th
he came to Ghent. His entrance into the city lasted more than six hours.
Four thousand lancers, one thousand archers, five thousand halberdmen and
musqueteers composed his bodyguard, all armed to the teeth and ready for
combat. The Emperor rode in their midst, surrounded by "cardinals,
archbishops, bishops, and other great ecclesiastical lords," so that the
terrors of the Church were combined with the panoply of war to affright
the souls of the turbulent burghers. A brilliant train of "dukes,
princes, earls, barons, grand masters, and seignors, together with most
of the Knights of the Fleece," were, according to the testimony of the
same eyewitness, in attendance upon his Majesty. This unworthy son of
Ghent was in ecstasies with the magnificence displayed upon the occasion.
There was such a number of "grand lords, members of sovereign houses,
bishops, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries going about the streets,
that," as the poor soul protested with delight, "there was nobody else to
be met with." Especially the fine clothes of these distinguished guests
excited his warmest admiration. It was wonderful to behold, he said, "the
nobility and great richness of the princes and seignors, displayed as
well in their beautiful furs, martins and sables, as in the great chains
of fine gold which they wore twisted round their necks, and the pearls
and precious stones in their bonnets and otherwise, which they displayed
in great abundance. It was a very triumphant thing to see them so richly
dressed and accoutred."

An idea may be formed of the size and wealth of the city at this period,
from the fact that it received and accommodated sixty thousand strangers,
with their fifteen thousand horses, upon the occasion of the Emperor's
visit. Charles allowed a month of awful suspense to intervene between his
arrival and his vengeance. Despair and hope alternated during the
interval. On the 17th of March, the spell was broken by the execution of
nineteen persons, who were beheaded as ringleaders. On the 29th of April,
he pronounced sentence upon the city. The hall where it was rendered was
open to all comers, and graced by the presence of the Emperor, the Queen
Regent, and the great functionaries of Court, Church, and State. The
decree, now matured, was read at length. It annulled all the charters,
privileges, and laws of Ghent. It confiscated all its public property,
rents, revenues, houses, artillery, munitions of war, and in general
every thing which the corporation, or the traders, each and all,
possessed in common. In particular, the great bell--Roland was condemned
and sentenced to immediate removal. It was decreed that the four hundred
thousand florins, which had caused the revolt, should forthwith be paid,
together with an additional fine by Ghent of one hundred and fifty
thousand, besides six thousand a year, forever after. In place of their
ancient and beloved constitution, thus annihilated at a blow, was
promulgated a new form of municipal government of the simplest kind,
according to which all officers were in future to be appointed by himself
and the guilds, to be reduced to half their number; shorn of all
political power, and deprived entirely of self-government. It was,
moreover, decreed, that the senators, their pensionaries, clerks and
secretaries, thirty notable burghers, to be named by the Emperor, with
the great dean and second dean of the weavers, all dressed in black
robes, without their chains, and bareheaded, should appear upon an
appointed day, in company with fifty persons from the guilds, and fifty
others, to be arbitrarily named, in their shirts, with halters upon their
necks. This large number of deputies, as representatives of the city,
were then to fall upon their knees before the Emperor, say in a loud and
intelligible voice, by the mouth of one of their clerks, that they were
extremely sorry for the disloyalty, disobedience, infraction of laws,
commotions, rebellion, and high treason, of which they had been guilty,
promise that they would never do the like again, and humbly implore him,
for the sake of the Passion of Jesus Christ, to grant them mercy and
forgiveness.

The third day of May was appointed for the execution of the sentence.
Charles, who was fond of imposing exhibitions and prided himself upon
arranging them with skill, was determined that this occasion should be
long remembered by all burghers throughout his dominions who might be
disposed to insist strongly upon their municipal rights. The streets were
alive with troops: cavalry and infantry in great numbers keeping strict
guard at every point throughout the whole extent of the city; for it was
known that the hatred produced by the sentence was most deadly, and that
nothing but an array of invincible force could keep those hostile
sentiments in check. The senators in their black mourning robes, the
other deputies in linen shirts, bareheaded, with halters on their necks,
proceeded, at the appointed hour, from the senate house to the imperial
residence. High on his throne, with the Queen Regent at his side,
surrounded by princes, prelates and nobles, guarded by his archers and
halberdiers, his crown on his head and his sceptre in his hand, the
Emperor, exalted, sat. The senators and burghers, in their robes cf
humiliation, knelt in the dust at his feet. The prescribed words of
contrition and of supplication for mercy were then read by the
pensionary, all the deputies remaining upon their knees, and many of them
crying bitterly with rage and shame. "What principally distressed them,"
said the honest citizen, whose admiration for the brilliant accoutrement
of the princes and prelates has been recorded, "was to have the halter on
their necks, which they found hard to bear, and, if they had not been
compelled, they would rather have died than submit to it."

As soon as the words had been all spoken by the pensionary, the Emperor,
whose cue was now to appear struggling with mingled emotions of
reasonable wrath and of natural benignity, performed his part with much
dramatic effect. "He held himself coyly for a little time," says the
eye-witness, "without saying a word; deporting himself as though he were
considering whether or not he would grant the pardon for which the
culprits had prayed." Then the Queen Regent enacted her share in the
show. Turning to his Majesty "with all reverence, honor and humility, she
begged that he would concede forgiveness, in honor of his nativity, which
had occurred in that city."

Upon this the Emperor "made a fine show of benignity," and replied "very
sweetly" that in consequence of his "fraternal love for her, by reason of
his being a gentle and virtuous prince, who preferred mercy to the rigor
of justice, and in view of their repentance, he would accord his pardon
to the citizens."

The Netherlands, after this issue to the struggle of Ghent, were reduced,
practically, to a very degraded condition. The form of local
self-government remained, but its spirit, when invoked, only arose to be
derided. The supreme court of Mechlin, as in the days of Charles the
Bold, was again placed in despotic authority above the ancient charters.
Was it probable that the lethargy of provinces, which had reached so high
a point of freedom only to be deprived of it at last, could endure
forever? Was it to be hoped that the stern spirit of religious
enthusiasm, allying itself with the--keen instinct of civil liberty,
would endue the provinces with strength to throw off the Spanish yoke?



XII.

It is impossible to comprehend the character of the great Netherland
revolt in the sixteenth century without taking a rapid retrospective
survey of the religious phenomena exhibited in the provinces. The
introduction of Christianity has been already indicated. From the
earliest times, neither prince, people, nor even prelates were very
dutiful to the pope. As the papal authority made progress, strong
resistance was often made to its decrees. The bishops of Utrecht were
dependent for their wealth and territory upon the good will of the
Emperor. They were the determined opponents of Hildebrand, warm adherents
of the Hohenstaufers-Ghibelline rather than Guelph. Heresy was a plant of
early growth in the Netherlands. As early as the beginning of the 12th
century, the notorious Tanchelyn preached at Antwerp, attacking the
authority of the pope and of all other ecclesiastics; scoffing at the
ceremonies and sacraments of the Church. Unless his character and career
have been grossly misrepresented, he was the most infamous of the many
impostors who have so often disgraced the cause of religious reformation.
By more than four centuries, he anticipated the licentiousness and
greediness manifested by a series of false prophets, and was the first to
turn both the stupidity of a populace and the viciousness of a priesthood
to his own advancement; an ambition which afterwards reached its most
signal expression in the celebrated John of Leyden.

The impudence of Tanchelyn and the superstition of his followers seem
alike incredible. All Antwerp was his harem. He levied, likewise, vast
sums upon his converts, and whenever he appeared in public, his apparel
and pomp were befitting an emperor. Three thousand armed satellites
escorted his steps and put to death all who resisted his commands. So
groveling became the superstition of his followers that they drank of the
water in which, he had washed, and treasured it as a divine elixir.
Advancing still further in his experiments upon human credulity, he
announced his approaching marriage with the Virgin Mary, bade all his
disciples to the wedding, and exhibited himself before an immense crowd
in company with an image of his holy bride. He then ordered the people to
provide for the expenses of the nuptials and the dowry of his wife,
placing a coffer upon each side of the image, to receive the
contributions of either sex. Which is the most wonderful manifestation in
the history of this personage--the audacity of the impostor, or the
bestiality of his victims? His career was so successful in the
Netherlands that he had the effrontery to proceed to Rome, promulgating
what he called his doctrines as he went. He seems to have been
assassinated by a priest in an obscure brawl, about the year 1115.

By the middle of the 12th century, other and purer heresiarchs had
arisen. Many Netherlanders became converts to the doctrines of Waldo.
From that period until the appearance of Luther, a succession of
sects--Waldenses, Albigenses, Perfectists, Lollards, Poplicans,
Arnaldists, Bohemian Brothers--waged perpetual but unequal warfare with
the power and depravity of the Church, fertilizing with their blood the
future field of the Reformation. Nowhere was the persecution of heretics
more relentless than in the Netherlands. Suspected persons were subjected
to various torturing but ridiculous ordeals. After such trial, death by
fire was the usual but, perhaps, not the most severe form of execution.
In Flanders, monastic ingenuity had invented another most painful
punishment for Waldenses and similar malefactors. A criminal whose guilt
had been established by the hot iron, hot ploughshare, boiling kettle, or
other logical proof, was stripped and bound to the stake:--he was then
flayed, from the neck to the navel, while swarms of bees were let loose
to fasten upon his bleeding flesh and torture him to a death of exquisite
agony.

Nevertheless heresy increased in the face of oppression The Scriptures,
translated by Waldo into French, were rendered into Netherland rhyme, and
the converts to the Vaudois doctrine increased in numbers and boldness.
At the same time the power and luxury of the clergy was waxing daily. The
bishops of Utrecht, no longer the defenders of the people against
arbitrary power, conducted themselves like little popes. Yielding in
dignity neither to king nor kaiser, they exacted homage from the most
powerful princes of the Netherlands. The clerical order became the most
privileged of all. The accused priest refused to acknowledge the temporal
tribunals. The protection of ecclesiastical edifices was extended over
all criminals and fugitives from justice--a beneficent result in those
sanguinary ages, even if its roots were sacerdotal pride. To establish an
accusation against a bishop, seventy-two witnesses were necessary;
against a deacon, twenty-seven; against an inferior dignitary, seven;
while two were sufficient to convict a layman. The power to read and
write helped the clergy to much wealth. Privileges and charters from
petty princes, gifts and devises from private persons, were documents
which few, save ecclesiastics, could draw or dispute. Not content,
moreover, with their territories and their tithings, the churchmen
perpetually devised new burthens upon the peasantry. Ploughs, sickles,
horses, oxen, all implements of husbandry, were taxed for the benefit of
those who toiled not, but who gathered into barns. In the course of the
twelfth century, many religious houses, richly endowed with lands and
other property, were founded in the Netherlands. Was hand or voice raised
against clerical encroachment--the priests held ever in readiness a
deadly weapon of defence: a blasting anathema was thundered against their
antagonist, and smote him into submission. The disciples of Him who
ordered his followers to bless their persecutors, and to love their
enemies, invented such Christian formulas as these:--"In the name of the
Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the blessed Virgin Mary, John the
Baptist, Peter and Paul, and all other Saints in Heaven, do we curse and
cut off from our Communion him who has thus rebelled against us. May the
curse strike him in his house, barn, bed, field, path, city, castle. May
he be cursed in battle, accursed in praying, in speaking, in silence, in
eating, in drinking, in sleeping. May he be accursed in his taste,
hearing, smell, and all his senses. May the curse blast his eyes, head,
and his body, from his crown to the soles of his feet. I conjure you,
Devil, and all your imps, that you take no rest till you have brought him
to eternal shame; till he is destroyed by drowning or hanging, till he is
torn to pieces by wild beasts, or consumed by fire. Let his children
become orphans, his wife a widow. I command you, Devil, and all your
imps, that even as I now blow out these torches, you do immediately
extinguish the light from his eyes. So be it--so be it. Amen. Amen." So
speaking, the curser was wont to blow out two waxen torches which he held
in his hands, and, with this practical illustration, the anathema was
complete.

Such insane ravings, even in the mouth of some impotent beldame, were
enough to excite a shudder, but in that dreary epoch, these curses from
the lips of clergymen were deemed sufficient to draw down celestial
lightning upon the head, not of the blasphemer, but of his victim. Men,
who trembled neither at sword nor fire, cowered like slaves before such
horrid imprecations, uttered by tongues gifted, as it seemed, with
superhuman power. Their fellow-men shrank from the wretches thus blasted,
and refused communication with them as unclean and abhorred.

By the end of the thirteenth century, however, the clerical power was
already beginning to decline. It was not the corruption of the Church,
but its enormous wealth which engendered the hatred, with which it was by
many regarded. Temporal princes and haughty barons began to dispute the
right of ecclesiastics to enjoy vast estates, while refusing the burthen
of taxation, and unable to draw a sword for the common defence. At this
period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland
sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from
acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The
downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces
and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same
time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its
authority declined. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the
doctrines of Wicklif had made great progress in the land. Early in the
fifteenth, the executions of Huss and Jerome of Prague, produce the
Bohemian rebellion. The Pope proclaims a crusade against the Hussites.
Knights and prelates, esquires and citizens, enlist in the sacred cause,
throughout Holland and its sister provinces; but many Netherlanders, who
had felt the might of Ziska's arm, come back, feeling more sympathy with
the heresy which they had attacked, than with the Church for which they
had battled.

Meantime, the restrictions imposed by Netherland sovereigns upon clerical
rights to hold or acquire property, become more stern and more general.
On the other hand, with the invention of printing, the cause of
Reformation takes a colossal stride in advance. A Bible, which, before,
had cost five hundred crowns, now costs but five. The people acquire the
power of reading God's Word, or of hearing it read, for themselves. The
light of truth dispels the clouds of superstition, as by a new
revelation. The Pope and his monks are found to bear, very often, but
faint resemblance to Jesus and his apostles. Moreover, the instinct of
self-interest sharpens the eye of the public. Many greedy priests, of
lower rank, had turned shop-keepers in the Netherlands, and were growing
rich by selling their wares, exempt from taxation, at a lower rate than
lay hucksters could afford. The benefit of clergy, thus taking the bread
from the mouths of many, excites jealousy; the more so, as, besides their
miscellaneous business, the reverend traders have a most lucrative branch
of commerce from which other merchants are excluded. The sale of
absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests. The enormous
impudence of this traffic almost exceeds belief. Throughout the
Netherlands, the price current of the wares thus offered for sale, was
published in every town and village. God's pardon for crimes already
committed, or about to be committed, was advertised according to a
graduated tariff. Thus, poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven
ducats, six livres tournois. Absolution for incest was afforded at
thirty-six livres, three ducats. Perjury came to seven livres and three
carlines. Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper. Even a
parricide could buy forgiveness at God's tribunal at one ducat; four
livres, eight carlines. Henry de Montfort, in the year 1448, purchased
absolution for that crime at that price. Was it strange that a century or
so of this kind of work should produce a Luther? Was it unnatural that
plain people, who loved the ancient Church, should rather desire to see
her purged of such blasphemous abuses, than to hear of St. Peter's dome
rising a little nearer to the clouds on these proceeds of commuted crime?

At the same time, while ecclesiastical abuses are thus augmenting,
ecclesiastical power is diminishing in the Netherlands. The Church is no
longer able to protect itself against the secular aim. The halcyon days
of ban, book and candle, are gone. In 1459, Duke Philip of Burgundy
prohibits the churches from affording protection to fugitives. Charles
the Bold, in whose eyes nothing is sacred save war and the means of
making it, lays a heavy impost upon all clerical property. Upon being
resisted, he enforces collection with the armed hand. The sword and the
pen, strength and intellect, no longer the exclusive servants or
instruments of priestcraft, are both in open revolt. Charles the Bold
storms one fortress, Doctor Grandfort, of Groningen, batters another.
This learned Frisian, called "the light of the world," friend and
compatriot of the great Rudolph Agricola, preaches throughout the
provinces, uttering bold denunciations of ecclesiastical error. He even
disputes the infallibility of the Pope, denies the utility of prayers for
the dead, and inveighs against the whole doctrine of purgatory and
absolution.

With the beginning of the 16th century, the great Reformation was
actually alive. The name of Erasmus of Rotterdam was already celebrated;
the man, who, according to Grotius, "so well showed the road to a
reasonable reformation." But if Erasmus showed the road, he certainly did
not travel far upon it himself. Perpetual type of the quietist, the
moderate man, he censured the errors of the Church with discrimination
and gentleness, as if Borgianism had not been too long rampant at Rome,
as if men's minds throughout Christendom were not too deeply stirred to
be satisfied with mild rebukes against sin, especially when the mild
rebuker was in receipt of livings and salaries from the sinner. Instead
of rebukes, the age wanted reforms. The Sage of Rotterdam was a keen
observer, a shrewd satirist, but a moderate moralist. He loved ease, good
company, the soft repose of princely palaces, better than a life of
martyrdom and a death at the stake. He was not of the stuff of which
martyrs are made, as he handsomely confessed on more than one occasion.
"Let others affect martyrdom," he said, "for myself I am unworthy of the
honor;" and, at another time, "I am not of a mind," he observed "to
venture my life for the truth's sake; all men have not strength to endure
the martyr's death. For myself, if it came to the point, I should do no
better than Simon Peter." Moderate in all things, he would have liked, he
said, to live without eating and drinking, although he never found it
convenient to do so, and he rejoiced when advancing age diminished his
tendency to other carnal pleasures in which he had moderately indulged.
Although awake to the abuses of the Church, he thought Luther going too
fast and too far. He began by applauding ended by censuring the monk of
Wittemberg. The Reformation might have been delayed for centuries had
Erasmus and other moderate men been the only reformers. He will long be
honored for his elegant, Latinity. In the republic of letters, his
efforts to infuse a pure taste, a sound criticism, a love for the
beautiful and the classic, in place of the owlish pedantry which had so
long flapped and hooted through mediveval cloisters, will always be held
in grateful reverence. In the history of the religious Reformation, his
name seems hardly to deserve the commendations of Grotius.

As the schism yawns, more and more ominously, throughout Christendom, the
Emperor naturally trembles. Anxious to save the state, but being no
antique Roman, he wishes to close the gulf, but with more convenience to
himself: He conceives the highly original plan of combining Church and
Empire under one crown. This is Maximilian's scheme for Church
reformation. An hereditary papacy, a perpetual pope-emperor, the
Charlemagne and Hildebrand systems united and simplified--thus the world
may yet be saved. "Nothing more honorable, nobler, better, could happen
to us," writes Maximilian to Paul Lichtenstein (16th Sept. 1511), "than
to re-annex the said popedom--which properly belongs to us--to our
Empire. Cardinal Adrian approves our reasons and encourages us to
proceed, being of opinion that we should not have much trouble with the
cardinals. It is much to be feared that the Pope may die of his present
sickness. He has lost his appetite, and fills himself with so much drink
that his health is destroyed. As such matters can not be arranged without
money, we have promised the cardinals, whom we expect to bring over,
300,000 ducats, [Recall that the fine for redemption and pardon for the
sin of murder was at that time one ducat. D.W.] which we shall raise from
the Fuggers, and make payable in Rome upon the appointed day."

These business-like arrangements he communicates, two days afterwards, in
a secret letter to his daughter Margaret, and already exults at his
future eminence, both in this world and the next. "We are sending
Monsieur de Gurce," he says; "to make an agreement with the Pope, that we
may be taken as coadjutor, in order that, upon his death, we may be sure
of the papacy, and, afterwards, of becoming a saint. After my decease,
therefore, you will be constrained to adore me, of which I shall be very
proud. I am beginning to work upon the cardinals, in which affair two or
three hundred thousand ducats will be of great service." The letter was
signed, "From the hand of your good father, Maximilian, future Pope."

These intrigues are not destined, however, to be successful. Pope Julius
lives two years longer; Leo the Tenth succeeds; and, as Medici are not
much prone to Church reformation some other scheme, and perhaps some
other reformer, may be wanted. Meantime, the traffic in bulls of
absolution becomes more horrible than ever. Money must be raised to
supply the magnificent extravagance of Rome. Accordingly, Christians,
throughout Europe, are offered by papal authority, guarantees of
forgiveness for every imaginable sin, "even for the rape of God's mother,
if that were possible," together with a promise of life eternal in
Paradise, all upon payment of the price affixed to each crime. The
Netherlands, like other countries, are districted and farmed for the
collection of this papal revenue. Much of the money thus raised, remains
in the hands of the vile collectors. Sincere Catholics, who love and
honor the ancient religion, shrink with horror at the spectacle offered
on every side. Criminals buying Paradise for money, monks spending the
money thus paid in gaming houses, taverns, and brothels; this seems, to
those who have studied their Testaments, a different scheme of salvation
from the one promulgated by Christ. There has evidently been a departure
from the system of earlier apostles. Innocent conservative souls are much
perplexed; but, at last, all these infamies arouse a giant to do battle
with the giant wrong. Martin Luther enters the lists, all alone, armed
only with a quiver filled with ninety-five propositions, and a bow which
can send them all over Christendom with incredible swiftness. Within a
few weeks the ninety-five propositions have flown through Germany, the
Netherlands, Spain, and are found in Jerusalem.

At the beginning, Erasmus encourages the bold friar. So long as the axe
is not laid at the foot of the tree, which bears the poisonous but golden
fruit, the moderate man applauds the blows. "Luther's cause is considered
odious," writes Erasmus to the Elector of Saxony, "because he has, at the
same time, attacked the bellies of the monks and the bulls of the Pope."
He complains that the zealous man had been attacked with roiling, but not
with arguments. He foresees that the work will have a bloody and
turbulent result, but imputes the principal blame to the clergy. "The
priests talk," said he, "of absolution in such terms, that laymen can not
stomach it. Luther has been for nothing more censured than for making
little of Thomas Aquinas; for wishing to diminish the absolution traffic;
for having a low opinion of mendicant orders, and for respecting
scholastic opinions less than the gospels. All this is considered
intolerable heresy."

Erasmus, however, was offending both parties. A swarm of monks were
already buzzing about him for the bold language of his Commentaries and
Dialogues. He was called Erasmus for his errors--Arasmus because he would
plough up sacred things--Erasinus because he had written himself an
ass--Behemoth, Antichrist, and many other names of similar import. Luther
was said to have bought the deadly seed in his barn. The egg had been
laid by Erasmus, hatched by Luther. On the other hand, he was reviled for
not taking side manfully with the reformer. The moderate man received
much denunciation from zealots on either side. He soon clears himself,
however, from all suspicions of Lutheranism. He is appalled at the fierce
conflict which rages far and wide. He becomes querulous as the mighty
besom sweeps away sacred dust and consecrated cobwebs. "Men should not
attempt every thing at once," he writes, "but rather step by step. That
which men can not improve they must look at through the fingers. If the
godlessness of mankind requires such fierce physicians as Luther, if man
can not be healed with soothing ointments and cooling drinks, let us hope
that God will comfort, as repentant, those whom he has punished as
rebellious. If the dove of Christ--not the owl of Minerva--would only fly
to us, some measure might be put to the madness of mankind."

Meantime the man, whose talk is not of doves and owls, the fierce
physician, who deals not with ointments and cooling draughts, strides
past the crowd of gentle quacks to smite the foul disease. Devils,
thicker than tiles on house-tops, scare him not from his work. Bans and
bulls, excommunications and decrees, are rained upon his head. The
paternal Emperor sends down dire edicts, thicker than hail upon the
earth. The Holy Father blasts and raves from Rome. Louvain doctors
denounce, Louvain hangmen burn, the bitter, blasphemous books. The
immoderate man stands firm in the storm, demanding argument instead of
illogical thunder; shows the hangmen and the people too, outside the
Elster gate at Wittenberg, that papal bulls will blaze as merrily as
heretic scrolls. What need of allusion to events which changed the
world--which every child has learned--to the war of Titans, uprooting of
hoary trees and rock-ribbed hills, to the Worms diet, Peasant wars, the
Patmos of Eisenach, and huge wrestlings with the Devil?

Imperial edicts are soon employed to suppress the Reformation in the
Netherlands by force. The provinces, unfortunately; are the private
property of Charles, his paternal inheritance; and most paternally,
according to his view of the matter, does he deal with them. Germany can
not be treated thus summarily, not being his heritage. "As it appears,"
says the edict of 1521, "that the aforesaid Martin is not a man, but a
devil under the form of a man, and clothed in the dress of a priest, the
better to bring the human race to hell and damnation, therefore all his
disciples and converts are to be punished with death and forfeiture of
all their goods." This was succinct and intelligible. The bloody edict,
issued at Worms, without even a pretence of sanction by the estates, was
carried into immediate effect. The papal inquisition was introduced into
the provinces to assist its operations. The bloody work, for which the
reign of Charles is mainly distinguished in the Netherlands, now began.
In 1523, July 1st, two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels, the first
victims to Lutheranism in the provinces. Erasmus observed, with a sigh,
that "two had been burned at Brussels, and that the city now began
strenuously to favor Lutheranism."

Pope Adrian the Sixth, the Netherland boat-maker's son and the Emperor's
ancient tutor, was sufficiently alive to the sins of churchmen. The
humble scholar of Utrecht was, at least, no Borgia. At the diet of
Nuremberg, summoned to put down Luther, the honest Pope declared roundly,
through the Bishop of Fabriane, that "these disorders had sprung from the
Sins of men, more especially from the sins of priests and prelates. Even
in the holy chair," said he, "many horrible crimes have been committed.
Many abuses have grown up in the ecclesiastical state. The contagious
disease, spreading from the head to the members--from the Pope to lesser
prelates--has spread far and wide, so that scarcely any one is to be
found who does right, and who is free from infection. Nevertheless, the
evils have become so ancient and manifold, that it will be necessary to
go step by step."

In those passionate days, the ardent reformers were as much outraged by
this pregnant confession as the ecclesiastics. It would indeed be a slow
process, they thought, to move step by step in the Reformation, if
between each step, a whole century was to intervene. In vain did the
gentle pontiff call upon Erasmus to assuage the stormy sea with his
smooth rhetoric. The Sage of Rotterdam was old and sickly; his day was
over. Adrian's head; too; languishes beneath the triple crown but twenty
months. He dies 13th Sept., 1523, having arrived at the conviction,
according to his epitaph, that the greatest misfortune of his life was to
have reigned.

Another edict, published in the Netherlands, forbids all private
assemblies for devotion; all reading of the scriptures; all discussions
within one's own doors concerning faith, the sacraments, the papal
authority, or other religious matter, under penalty of death. The edicts
were no dead letter. The fires were kept constantly supplied with human
fuel by monks, who knew the art of burning reformers better than that of
arguing with them. The scaffold was the most conclusive of syllogisms,
and used upon all occasions. Still the people remained unconvinced.
Thousands of burned heretics had not made a single convert.

A fresh edict renewed and sharpened the punishment for reading the
scriptures in private or public. At the same time, the violent personal
altercation between Luther and Erasmus, upon predestination, together
with the bitter dispute between Luther and Zwingli concerning the real
presence, did more to impede the progress of the Reformation than ban or
edict, sword or fire. The spirit of humanity hung her head, finding that
the bold reformer had only a new dogma in place of the old ones, seeing
that dissenters, in their turn, were sometimes as ready as papists, with
age, fagot, and excommunication. In 1526, Felix Mants, the anabaptist, is
drowned at Zurich, in obedience to Zwingli's pithy formula--'Qui iterum
mergit mergatur'. Thus the anabaptists, upon their first appearance, were
exposed to the fires of the Church and the water of the Zwinglians.

There is no doubt that the anabaptist delusion was so ridiculous and so
loathsome, as to palliate or at least render intelligible the wrath with
which they were regarded by all parties. The turbulence of the sect was
alarming to constituted authorities, its bestiality disgraceful to the
cause of religious reformation. The leaders were among the most depraved
of human creatures, as much distinguished for licentiousness, blasphemy
and cruelty as their followers for grovelling superstition. The evil
spirit, driven out of Luther, seemed, in orthodox eyes, to have taken
possession of a herd of swine. The Germans, Muncer and Hoffmann, had been
succeeded, as chief prophets, by a Dutch baker, named Matthiszoon, of
Harlem; who announced himself as Enoch. Chief of this man's disciples was
the notorious John Boccold, of Leyden. Under the government of this
prophet, the anabaptists mastered the city of Munster. Here they
confiscated property, plundered churches, violated females, murdered men
who refused to join the gang, and, in briefs practised all the enormities
which humanity alone can conceive or perpetrate. The prophet proclaimed
himself King of Sion, and sent out apostles to preach his doctrines in
Germany and the Netherlands. Polygamy being a leading article of the
system, he exemplified the principle by marrying fourteen wives. Of
these, the beautiful widow of Matthiszoon was chief, was called the Queen
of Sion, and wore a golden crown. The prophet made many fruitless efforts
to seize Amsterdam and Leyden. The armed invasion of the anabaptists was
repelled, but their contagious madness spread. The plague broke forth in
Amsterdam. On a cold winter's night, (February, 1535), seven men and five
women, inspired by the Holy Ghost, threw off their clothes and rushed
naked and raving through the streets, shrieking "Wo, wo, wo! the wrath of
God, the wrath of God!" When arrested, they obstinately refused to put on
clothing. "We are," they observed, "the naked truth." In a day or two,
these furious lunatics, who certainly deserved a madhouse rather than the
scaffold, were all executed. The numbers of the sect increased with the
martyrdom to which they were exposed, and the disorder spread to every
part of the Netherlands. Many were put to death in lingering torments,
but no perceptible effect was produced by the chastisement. Meantime the
great chief of the sect, the prophet John, was defeated by the forces of
the Bishop of Munster, who recovered his city and caused the "King of
Zion" to be pinched to death with red-hot tongs.

Unfortunately the severity of government was not wreaked alone upon the
prophet and his mischievous crew. Thousands and ten-thousands of
virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little sympathy with
anabaptistical as with Roman depravity; were butchered in cold blood,
under the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands. In 1533, Queen
Dowager Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor, Regent of the provinces,
the "Christian widow" admired by Erasmus, wrote to her brother that "in
her opinion all heretics, whether repentant or not, should be prosecuted
with such severity as that error might be, at once, extinguished, care
being only taken that the provinces were not entirely depopulated." With
this humane limitation, the "Christian Widow" cheerfully set herself to
superintend as foul and wholesale a system of murder as was ever
organized. In 1535, an imperial edict was issued at Brussels, condemning
all heretics to death; repentant males to be executed with the sword,
repentant females to be buried alive, the obstinate, of both sexes, to be
burned. This and similar edicts were the law of the land for twenty
years, and rigidly enforced. Imperial and papal persecution continued its
daily deadly work with such diligence as to make it doubtful whether the
limits set by the Regent Mary might not be overstepped. In the midst of
the carnage, the Emperor sent for his son Philip, that he might receive
the fealty of the Netherlands as their future lord and master.
Contemporaneously, a new edict was published at Brussels (29th April,
1549), confirming and reenacting all previous decrees in their most
severe provisions. Thus stood religious matters in the Netherlands at the
epoch of the imperial abdication.



XIII.

The civil institutions of the country had assumed their last provincial
form, in the Burgundo-Austrian epoch. As already stated, their tendency,
at a later period a vicious one, was to substitute fictitious personages
for men. A chain of corporations was wound about the liberty of the
Netherlands; yet that liberty had been originally sustained by the system
in which it, one day, might be strangled. The spirit of local
self-government, always the life-blood of liberty, was often excessive in
its manifestations. The centrifugal force had been too much developed,
and, combining with the mutual jealousy of corporations, had often made
the nation weak against a common foe. Instead of popular rights there
were state rights, for the large cities, with extensive districts and
villages under their government, were rather petty states than
municipalities. Although the supreme legislative and executive functions
belonged to the sovereign, yet each city made its by-laws, and possessed,
beside, a body of statutes and regulations, made from time to time by its
own authority and confirmed by the prince. Thus a large portion, at
least, of the nation shared practically in the legislative functions,
which, technically, it did not claim; nor had the requirements of society
made constant legislation so necessary, as that to exclude the people
from the work was to enslave the country. There was popular power enough
to effect much good, but it was widely scattered, and, at the same time,
confined in artificial forms. The guilds were vassals of the towns, the
towns, vassals of the feudal lord. The guild voted in the "broad council"
of the city as one person; the city voted in the estates as one person.
The people of the United Netherlands was the personage yet to be
invented, It was a privilege, not a right, to exercise a handiwork, or to
participate in the action of government. Yet the mass of privileges was
so large, the shareholders so numerous, that practically the towns were
republics. The government was in the hands of a large number of the
people. Industry and intelligence led to wealth and power. This was great
progress from the general servitude of the 11th and 12th centuries, an
immense barrier against arbitrary rule. Loftier ideas of human rights,
larger conceptions of commerce, have taught mankind, in later days, the
difference between liberties and liberty, between guilds and free
competition. At the same time it was the principle of mercantile
association, in the middle ages, which protected the infant steps of
human freedom and human industry against violence and wrong. Moreover, at
this period, the tree of municipal life was still green and vigorous. The
healthful flow of sap from the humblest roots to the most verdurous
branches indicated the internal soundness of the core, and provided for
the constant development of exterior strength. The road to political
influence was open to all, not by right of birth, but through honorable
exertion of heads and hands.

The chief city of the Netherlands, the commercial capital of the world,
was Antwerp. In the North and East of Europe, the Hanseatic league had
withered with the revolution in commerce. At the South, the splendid
marble channels, through which the overland India trade had been
conducted from the Mediterranean by a few stately cities, were now dry,
the great aqueducts ruinous and deserted. Verona, Venice, Nuremberg,
Augsburg, Bruges, were sinking, but Antwerp, with its deep and convenient
river, stretched its arm to the ocean and caught the golden prize, as it
fell from its sister cities' grasp. The city was so ancient that its
genealogists, with ridiculous gravity, ascended to a period two centuries
before the Trojan war, and discovered a giant, rejoicing in the classic
name of Antigonus, established on the Scheld. This patriarch exacted one
half the merchandise of all navigators who passed his castle, and was
accustomed to amputate and cast into the river the right hands of those
who infringed this simple tariff. Thus Hand-werpen, hand-throwing, became
Antwerp, and hence, two hands, in the escutcheon of the city, were ever
held up in heraldic attestation of the truth. The giant was, in his turn,
thrown into the Scheld by a hero, named Brabo, from whose exploits
Brabant derived its name; "de quo Brabonica tellus." But for these
antiquarian researches, a simpler derivation of the name would seem
an t' werf, "on the wharf." It had now become the principal entrepot and
exchange of Europe. The Huggers, Velsens, Ostetts, of Germany, the
Gualterotti and Bonvisi of Italy, and many other great mercantile houses
were there established. No city, except Paris, surpassed it in
population, none approached it in commercial splendor. Its government was
very free. The sovereign, as Marquis of Antwerp, was solemnly sworn to
govern according to the ancient charters and laws. The stadholder, as his
representative, shared his authority with the four estates of the city.
The Senate of eighteen members was appointed by the stadholder out of a
quadruple number nominated by the Senate itself and by the fourth body,
called the Borgery. Half the board was thus renewed annually. It
exercised executive and appellate judicial functions, appointed two
burgomasters, and two pensionaries or legal councillors, and also
selected the lesser magistrates and officials of the city. The board of
ancients or ex-senators, held their seats ex officio. The twenty-six
ward-masters, appointed, two from each ward, by the Senate on nomination
by the wards, formed the third estate. Their especial business was to
enrol the militia and to attend to its mustering and training. The deans
of the guilds, fifty-four in number, two from each guild, selected by the
Senate, from a triple list of candidates presented by the guilds,
composed the fourth estate. This influential body was always assembled in
the broad-council of the city. Their duty was likewise to conduct the
examination of candidates claiming admittance to any guild and offering
specimens of art or handiwork, to superintend the general affairs of the
guilds and to regulate disputes.

There were also two important functionaries, representing the king in
criminal and civil matters. The Vicarius capitalis, Scultetus, Schout,
Sheriff, or Margrave, took precedence of all magistrates. His business
was to superintend criminal arrests, trials, and executions. The Vicarius
civilis was called the Amman, and his office corresponded with that of
the Podesta in the Frisian and Italian republics. His duties were nearly
similar, in civil, to those of his colleague, in criminal matters.

These four branches, with their functionaries and dependents, composed
the commonwealth of Antwerp. Assembled together in council, they
constituted the great and general court. No tax could be imposed by the
sovereign, except with consent of the four branches, all voting
separately.

The personal and domiciliary rights of the citizen were scrupulously
guarded. The Schout could only make arrests with the Burgomaster's
warrant, and was obliged to bring the accused, within three days, before
the judges, whose courts were open to the public.

The condition of the population was prosperous. There were but few poor,
and those did not seek but were sought by the almoners: The schools were
excellent and cheap. It was difficult to find a child of sufficient age
who could not read, write, and speak, at least, two languages. The sons
of the wealthier citizens completed their education at Louvain, Douay,
Paris, or Padua.

The city itself was one of the most beautiful in Europe. Placed upon a
plain along the banks of the Scheld, shaped like a bent bow with the
river for its string, it enclosed within it walls some of the most
splendid edifices in Christendom. The world-renowned church of Notre
Dame, the stately Exchange where five thousand merchants daily
congregated, prototype of all similar establishments throughout the
world, the capacious mole and port where twenty-five hundred vessels were
often seen at once, and where five hundred made their daily entrance or
departure, were all establishments which it would have been difficult to
rival in any other part of the world.

From what has already been said of the municipal institutions of the
country, it may be inferred that the powers of the Estates-general were
limited. The members of that congress were not representatives chosen by
the people, but merely a few ambassadors from individual provinces. This
individuality was not always composed of the same ingredients. Thus,
Holland consisted of two members, or branches--the nobles and the six
chief cities; Flanders of four branches--the cities, namely, of Ghent,
Bruges, Ypres, and the "freedom of Bruges;" Brabant of Louvain, Brussels,
Bois le Due, and Antwerp, four great cities, without representation of
nobility or clergy; Zeland, of one clerical person, the abbot of
Middelburg, one noble, the Marquis of Veer and Vliessingen, and six chief
cities; Utrecht, of three branches--the nobility, the clergy, and five
cities. These, and other provinces, constituted in similar manner, were
supposed to be actually present at the diet when assembled. The chief
business of the states-general was financial; the sovereign, or his
stadholder, only obtaining supplies by making a request in person, while
any single city, as branch of a province, had a right to refuse the
grant.

Education had felt the onward movement of the country and the times. The
whole system was, however, pervaded by the monastic spirit, which had
originally preserved all learning from annihilation, but which now kept
it wrapped in the ancient cerecloths, and stiffening in the stony
sarcophagus of a bygone age. The university of Louvain was the chief
literary institution in the provinces. It had been established in 1423 by
Duke John IV. of Brabant. Its government consisted of a President and
Senate, forming a close corporation, which had received from the founder
all his own authority, and the right to supply their own vacancies. The
five faculties of law, canon law, medicine, theology, and the arts, were
cultivated at the institution. There was, besides, a high school for
under graduates, divided into four classes. The place reeked with
pedantry, and the character of the university naturally diffused itself
through other scholastic establishments. Nevertheless, it had done and
was doing much to preserve the love for profound learning, while the
rapidly advancing spirit of commerce was attended by an ever increasing
train of humanizing arts.

The standard of culture in those flourishing cities was elevated,
compared with that observed in many parts of Europe. The children of the
wealthier classes enjoyed great facilities for education in all the great
capitals. The classics, music, and the modern languages, particularly the
French, were universally cultivated. Nor was intellectual cultivation
confined to the higher orders. On the contrary, it was diffused to a
remarkable degree among the hard-working artisans and handicraftsmen of
the great cities.

For the principle of association had not confined itself exclusively to
politics and trade. Besides the numerous guilds by which citizenship was
acquired in the various cities, were many other societies for mutual
improvement, support, or recreation. The great secret, architectural or
masonic brotherhood of Germany, that league to which the artistic and
patient completion of the magnificent works of Gothic architecture in the
middle ages is mainly to be attributed, had its branches in nether
Germany, and explains the presence of so many splendid and elaborately
finished churches in the provinces. There were also military sodalities
of musketeers, cross-bowmen, archers, swordsmen in every town. Once a
year these clubs kept holiday, choosing a king, who was selected for his
prowess and skill in the use of various weapons. These festivals, always
held with great solemnity and rejoicing, were accompanied bye many
exhibitions of archery and swordsmanship. The people were not likely,
therefore, voluntarily to abandon that privilege and duty of freemen, the
right to bear arms, and the power to handle them.

Another and most important collection of brotherhoods were the so-called
guilds of Rhetoric, which existed, in greater or less number, in all the
principal cities. These were associations of mechanics, for the purpose
of amusing their leisure with poetical effusions, dramatic and musical
exhibitions, theatrical processions, and other harmless and not inelegant
recreations. Such chambers of rhetoric came originally in the fifteenth
century from France. The fact that in their very title they confounded
rhetoric with poetry and the drama indicates the meagre attainments of
these early "Rederykers." In the outset of their career they gave
theatrical exhibitions. "King Herod and his Deeds" was enacted in the
cathedral at Utrecht in 1418. The associations spread with great celerity
throughout the Netherlands, and, as they were all connected with each
other, and in habits of periodical intercourse, these humble links of
literature were of great value in drawing the people of the provinces
into closer union. They became, likewise, important political engines. As
early as the time of Philip the Good, their songs and lampoons became so
offensive to the arbitrary notions of the Burgundian government, as to
cause the societies to be prohibited. It was, however, out of the
sovereign's power permanently to suppress institutions, which already
partook of the character of the modern periodical press combined with
functions resembling the show and licence of the Athenian drama. Viewed
from the stand-point of literary criticism their productions were not
very commendable in taste, conception, or execution. To torture the Muses
to madness, to wire-draw poetry through inextricable coils of difficult
rhymes and impossible measures; to hammer one golden grain of wit into a
sheet of infinite platitude, with frightful ingenuity to construct
ponderous anagrams and preternatural acrostics, to dazzle the vulgar eye
with tawdry costumes, and to tickle the vulgar ear with virulent
personalities, were tendencies which perhaps smacked of the hammer, the
yard-stick and the pincers, and gave sufficient proof, had proof been
necessary, that literature is not one of the mechanical arts, and that
poetry can not be manufactured to a profit by joint stock companies. Yet,
if the style of these lucubrations was often depraved, the artisans
rarely received a better example from the literary institutions above
them. It was not for guilds of mechanics to give the tone to literature,
nor were their efforts in more execrable taste than the emanations from
the pedants of Louvain. The "Rhetoricians" are not responsible for all
the bad taste of their generation. The gravest historians of the
Netherlands often relieved their elephantine labors by the most asinine
gambols, and it was not to be expected that

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