The Age of the Reformation Part 17

The Netherlands have always been a favorite topic for the speculation of those philosophers who derive a large part of national character from geographical conditions. A land that needed reclaiming from the sea by hard labor, a country situated at those two great outlets of European commerce, the mouths of the Rhine and the Scheldt, a borderland between German and Latin culture, naturally moulded a brave, stubborn, practical and intelligent people, destined to play in history a part seemingly beyond their scope and resources.

The people of the Netherlands became, to all intents, a state before they became a nation. The Burgundian dukes of the fourteenth and fifteenth century added to their fiefs counties, dukedoms and bishoprics, around the nucleus of their first domain, until they had forged a compact and powerful realm. [Sidenote: Philip the Good, 1419-67] Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and lord, under various t.i.tles, of much of the Netherlands, deserved the t.i.tle of _Conditor Belgii_ by his successful wars on France and by his statesmanlike policy of centralization. To foster unity he created the States General--borrowing the name and function thereof from France--in which all of the seventeen provinces[1]

of the Netherlands were represented on great occasions. Continually increasing {235} in power with reference to the various localities, it remained subordinate to the prince, who had the sole right of initiating legislation. At first it met now in one city, then in another, but after 1530 always convened at Brussels, and always used the French language officially.

[Sidenote: Charles the Bold, 1467-77]

Charles the Bold completed and yet endangered the work of Philip, for he was worsted in mortal strife with Louis XI of France and, dying in battle, left his dominions to his daughter, Mary. [Sidenote: Maximilian, 1477-93] Her husband, the Emperor Maximilian, and her son, Philip the Handsome, [Sidenote: Philip the Handsome, 1493-1506] added to her realms those vast dominions that made her grandson, Charles, the greatest potentate in Europe. Born in Ghent, reared in the Netherlands, and speaking only the French of the Walloons, Charles was always regarded by his subjects as one of themselves. He almost completed the unification of the Burgundian state by the conquest of Tournay from France (1521), and the annexation of the independent provinces of Friesland (1523), Overyssel and Utrecht (1528), Groningen (1536) and Guelders (1543).

Liege still remained a separate ent.i.ty under its prince-bishops. But even under Charles, notwithstanding a general feeling of loyalty to the house of Hapsburg, each province was more conscious of its own individuality than were the people as a whole of common patriotism. Some of the provinces lay within the Empire, others were va.s.sals of France, a few were independent. Dutch was regarded as a dialect of German. The most ill.u.s.trious Netherlander of the time, Erasmus, in discussing his race, does not even contemplate the possibility of there being a nation composed of Dutch and Flemish men. The only alternative that presents itself to him is whether he is French or German and, having been born at Rotterdam, he decides in favor of the latter.

{236}

[Sidenote: Cla.s.ses]

The Burgundian princes found their chief support in the n.o.bility, in a numerous cla.s.s of officials, and in the munic.i.p.al aristocracies. The n.o.bles, transformed from a feudal caste to a court clique, even though they retained, as satellites of the monarch, much wealth and power, had relatively lost ground to the rising pretensions of the cities and of the commercial cla.s.s. The clergy, too, were losing their old independence in subservience to a government which regulated their t.i.thes and forbade their indulgence-trade. In 1515 Charles secured from Leo X and again in 1530 from Clement VII the right of nomination to vacant benefices. He was able to make of the bishops his tools and to curtail the freedom, jurisdiction, and financial privileges of the clergy considerably because the spiritual estate had lost favor with the people and received no support from them.

As the two privileged cla.s.ses surrendered their powers to the monarch, the third estate was coming into its own. Not until the war of independence, however, was it able to withstand the combination of bureaucracy and plutocracy that made common cause with the central government against the local rights of the cities and the customary privileges of the gilds. Almost everywhere the prince was able, with the tacit support of the wealthier burghers, to subst.i.tute for the officers elected by the gilds his own commissioners. [Sidenote: Revolt of Ghent]

But this usurpation, together with a variety of economic ills for which the commoners were inclined, quite wrongly, to blame the government, caused general discontent and in one case open rebellion. The gilds of Ghent, a proud and ancient city, suffering from the encroachments of capitalism and from the decline of the Flemish cloth industry, had long a.s.serted among their rights that of each gild to refuse to pay one of the taxes, any one it chose, levied by the government. [Sidenote: 1539] The attempt {237} of the government to suppress this privilege caused a rising which took the characteristically modern form of a general strike.

The regent of the Netherlands, Mary, yielded at first to the demands of the gilds, as she had no means of coercion convenient. Charles was in Spain at the time, but hurried northward, being granted free pa.s.sage through France by the king who felt he had an interest in aiding his fellow monarch to put down rebellious subjects. Early in 1540 Charles entered Ghent at the head of a sufficient army. He soon meted out a sanguinary punishment to the "brawlers" as the strikers were called, humbled the city government, deprived it of all local privileges, suppressed all independent corporations, a.s.serted the royal prerogative of nominating aldermen, and erected a fortress to overawe the burghers.

Thus the only overt attempt to resist the authority of Charles V, apart from one or two insignificant Anabaptist riots, was crushed.

In matters of foreign policy the people of the Netherlands naturally wished to be guided in reference to their own interests and not to the larger interests of the emperor's other domains. Wielding immense wealth--during the middle decades of the sixteenth century Antwerp was both the first port and the first money-market of Europe--and cherishing the sentiment that Charles was a native of their land, they for some time sweetly flattered themselves that their interests were the center around which gravitated the desires and needs of the Empire and of Spain.

Indeed, the balance of these two great states, and the regency of Margaret of Austria, [Sidenote: Margaret of Austria, Regent, 1522-31] a Hapsburg determined to give the Netherlands their due, for a time allowed them at least the semblance of getting their wishes. But when Charles's sister, Mary of Hungary, succeeded Margaret as regent, she was too entirely {238} dependent on her brother, and he too determined to consult larger than Burgundian interests, to allow the Netherlands more than the smallest weight in larger plans. The most that she could do was to unify, centralize and add to the provinces, and to get what commercial advantages treaties could secure. Thus, she redeemed Luxemburg from the Margrave of Baden to whom Maximilian had p.a.w.ned it. Thus, also, she negotiated fresh commercial treaties with England and unified the coinage. But with all these achievements, distinctly advantageous to the people she governed, her efforts to increase the power of the crown and the necessity she was under of subordinating her policy to that of Germany and Spain, made her extremely unpopular.

The relationship of the Netherlands to the Empire was a delicate and important question. Though the Empire was the feudal suzerain of most of the Burgundian provinces, Charles felt far more keenly for his rights as an hereditary, local prince than for the aggrandizement of his Empire, and therefore tried, especially after he had left Austria to his brother Ferdinand, [Sidenote: September 7, 1522] to loosen rather than to strengthen the bond. Even as early as 1512, when the Imperial Diet demanded that the "common penny" be levied in the Netherlands, Charles's council aided and abetted his Burgundian subjects in refusing to pay it.

In 1530 the Netherlands, in spite of urgent complaints from the Diet, completely freed itself from imperial jurisdiction in the administration of justice. Matters became still more complicated when Utrecht, Friesland, Groningen and Guelders, formerly belonging to the Westphalian district of the Empire, were annexed by Charles as Burgundian prince.

Probably he would not have been able to vindicate these acts of power, had not his victory at Muhlberg [Sidenote: 1547] freed him from the {239} restraints of the imperial const.i.tution. A convention was made at the next Diet of Augsburg, [Sidenote: Convention of June 26, 1548] providing that henceforth the Netherlands should form a separate district, the "Burgundian circle," of the Empire, and that their prince, as such, should be represented in the Diet and in the Imperial Supreme Court.

Taxes were so apportioned that in time of peace the Netherlands should contribute to the imperial treasury as much as did two electors, and in time of war as much as three. This treaty nominally added to the Empire two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the whole Netherlands the benefit of imperial protection. But, though ratified by the States General promptly, the convention remained almost a dead letter, and left the Netherlands virtually autonomous. As long as they were unmolested the Netherlands forgot their union entirely, and when, under the pressure of Spanish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by it, they found that the Empire had no wish to revive it.

[Sidenote: Reformation]

The general causes of the religious revolution were the same in the Low Countries as in other lands. The ground was prepared by the mystics of the earlier ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, and buy the Renaissance. The central situation of the country made it especially open to all currents of European thought. Printing was early introduced from Germany and expanded so rapidly in these years [Sidenote: 1525-55]

that no less than fifty new publishing houses were erected. As Antwerp was the most cosmopolitan of cities, so Erasmus was the most nearly the citizen of the world in that era. The great humanist, who did so much to prepare for the Reformation, spent in his native land just those early years of its first appearance when he most favored Luther.

{240} A group to take up with the Wittenberg professor's doctrines were the Augustinians, many of whom had been in close relations with the Saxon friaries. One of them, James Probst, had been prior of Wittenberg where he learned to know Luther well [Sidenote: 1515] and when he became prior of the convent at Antwerp he started a rousing propaganda in favor of the reform. [Sidenote: 1518] Another Augustinian, Henry of Zutphen, made his friary at Dordrecht the center of a Lutheran movement. Hoen at the Hague, Hinne Rode at Utrecht, Gerard Lister at Zwolle, Melchior Miritzsch at Ghent, were soon in correspondence with Luther and became missionaries of his faith. His books, which circulated among the learned in Latin, were some of them translated into Dutch as early as 1520.

The German commercial colony at Antwerp was another channel for the infiltration of the Lutheran gospel. [Sidenote: 1520-1] The many travelers, among them Albert Durer, brought with them tidings of the revolt and sowed its seeds in the soil of Flanders and Holland.

Singularly enough, the colony of Portuguese Jews, the Marranos as they were called, became, if not converts, at least active agents in the dissemination of Lutheran works.

[Sidenote: Catholic answers]

A vigorous counter-propaganda was at once started by the partisans of the pope. This was directed against both Erasmus and Luther and consisted largely, according to the reports of the former, in the most violent invective. Nicholas of Egmont, "a man with a white pall but a black heart" stormed in the pulpit against the new heretics. Another man interspersed a sermon on charity with objurgations against those whom he called "geese, a.s.ses, stocks, and Antichrists." [Sidenote: 1533] One Dominican said he wished he could fasten his teeth in Luther's throat, for he would not fear to go to the Lord's supper with that blood on his {241} mouth. It was at Antwerp, a little later, that were first coined, or at least first printed, the so celebrated epigrams that Erasmus was Luther's father, that Erasmus had laid the eggs and Luther had hatched the chickens, and that Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Erasmus were the four soldiers who had crucified Christ.

The princ.i.p.al literary opposition to the new doctrines came from the University of Louvain. Luther's works were condemned by Cologne, and this sentence was ratified by Louvain. [Sidenote: August 30, 1519] A number of the leading professors wrote against him, [Sidenote: November 7] among them the ex-professor Adrian of Utrecht, recently created Bishop of Tortosa and cardinal, and soon to be pope.

The conservatives, however, could do little but scold until the arrival of Charles V in June 1520, and of the papal nuncio Aleander in September.

The latter saw Charles immediately at Antwerp and found him already determined to resist heresy. Acting under the edict procured at that time, though not published until the following March 22, Aleander busied himself by going around and burning Lutheran works in various cities and preaching against the heresy. [Sidenote: October, 1520] He found far more opposition than one would think probable, and the burning of the books, as Erasmus said, removed them from the bookstores only, not from the hearts of the people. The nuncio even discovered, he said, at this early date, heretics who denied the real presence in the eucharist: evidently independent spirits like Hoen who antic.i.p.ated the doctrine later taken up by Carlstadt and Zwingli.

The validity of the Edict of Worms was affirmed for the Burgundian provinces. The edict was read publicly at Antwerp [Sidenote: July 13, 1521] while four hundred of Luther's books were burnt, three hundred confiscated from the shops and one hundred brought by the people. {242} Whereas spiritual officers were at first employed, civil magistrates now began to act against the innovators. In the beginning, attention was paid to munic.i.p.al privileges, but these soon came to be disregarded, and resistance on any pretext was treated as rebellion and treason. The first persons to be arrested were the Prior of Antwerp, Probst, [Sidenote: 1522] who recanted, but later escaped and relapsed, and two other intimate friends of Erasmus.

[Sidenote: The Inquisition]

Charles wished to introduce the Spanish inquisition, but his councillors were all against it. Under a different name, however, it was exactly imitated when Francis van der Hulst was appointed chief inquisitor by the state, [Sidenote: April 23, 1522] and was confirmed by a bull of Adrian VI. [Sidenote: June 1, 1523] The original inquisitorial powers of the bishops remained, and a supreme tribunal of three judges was appointed in 1524.

[Sidenote: Martyrs, July 1, 1523]

The first martyrs, Henry Voes and John Esch of Brussels, said Erasmus, made many Lutherans by their death. Luther wrote a hymn on the subject and published an open letter to the Christians of the Netherlands.

[Sidenote: 1524] Censorship of the press was established in Holland in vain, for everything goes to show that Lutheranism rapidly increased.

Popular interest in the subject seemed to be great. Every allusion to ecclesiastical corruption in speeches or in plays was applauded.

Thirty-eight laborers were arrested at Antwerp for a.s.sembling to read and discuss the gospel. [Sidenote: 1525] Iconoclastic outbreaks occurred in which crucifixes were desecrated. In the same year an Italian in Antwerp wrote that though few people were openly Lutheran many were secretly so, and that he had been a.s.sured by leading citizens that if the revolting peasants of Germany approached Antwerp, twenty thousand armed men would rise in the city to a.s.sist them. [Sidenote: July 31] When a Lutheran was drowned in the Scheldt, {243} the act precipitated a riot. In 1527 the English amba.s.sador wrote Wolsey from the Netherlands that two persons out of three "kept Luther's opinions," and that while the English New Testament was being printed in that city, repeated attempts on his part to induce the magistrates to interfere came to nothing. Protestant works also continued to pour from the presses. The Bible was soon translated into Dutch, and in the course of eight years four editions of the whole Bible and twenty-five editions of the New Testament were called for, though the complete Scriptures had never been printed in Dutch before.

[Sidenote: October 14, 1529]

Alarmed by the spread of heresy, attributed to too great mildness, the government now issued an edict that inaugurated a reign of terror. Death was decreed not only for all heretics but for all who, not being theologians, discussed articles of faith, or who caricatured G.o.d, Mary, or the saints, and for all who failed to denounce heretics known to them.

While the government momentarily flattered itself that heresy had been stamped out, at most it had been driven under ground. One of the effects of the persecution was to isolate the Netherlands from the Empire culturally and to some small extent commercially.

But heresy proved to be a veritable hydra. From one head sprang many daughters, the Anabaptists, [Sidenote: Anabaptists] harder to deal with than their mother. For while Lutheranism stood essentially for pa.s.sive obedience, and flourished nowhere save as a state church, Anabaptism was frankly revolutionary and often socialistic. Melchior Hoffmann, the most striking of their early leaders, a fervent and uneducated fanatic, driven from place to place, wandered from Sweden and Denmark to Italy and Spain [Sidenote: 1530-1533] preaching chiliastic and communistic ideas. Only for three years was he much in the Netherlands, but it was there that he won his greatest {244} successes. Appealing, as the Anabaptists always did, to the lower cla.s.ses, he converted thousands and tens of thousands of the very poor--beggars, laborers and sailors--who pa.s.sionately embraced the teaching that promised the end of kings and governments and the advent of the "rule of the righteous." Mary of Hungary was not far wrong when she wrote that they planned to plunder all churches, n.o.bles, and wealthy merchants, in short, all who had property, and from the spoil to distribute to every individual according to his need. [Sidenote: October 7, 1531] A new and severer edict would have meant a general ma.s.sacre, had it been strictly enforced, but another element entered into the situation. The city bourgeoisies that had previously resisted the government, now supported it in this one particular, persecution of the Anabaptists. When at Amsterdam [Sidenote: 1534] the sectaries rose and very nearly mastered the city, death by fire was decreed for the men, by water for the women. From Antwerp they were banished by a general edict especially aimed at them supplemented by ma.s.sacres in the northern provinces. [Sidenote: June 24, 1535] After the crisis at Munster, though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling cla.s.ses, their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character. Menno Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of the movement and succeeded in gathering the smitten people into a large and harmless body. The Anabaptists furnished, however, more martyrs than did any other sect.

Lutheranism also continued to spread. The edict of 1540 confesses as much while providing new and sterner penalties against those who even interceded for heretics. The fact is that the inquisition as directed against Lutherans was thoroughly unpopular and was resisted in various provinces on the technical ground of local privileges. The Protestants managed {245} to keep unnoticed amidst a general intention to connive at them, and though they did not usually flinch from martyrdom they did not court it. The inquisitors were obliged to arrest their victims at the dead of night, raiding their houses and hauling them from bed, in order to avoid popular tumult. [Sidenote: 1543] When Enzinas printed his Spanish Bible at Antwerp the printer told him that in that city the Scriptures had been published in almost every European language, doubtless an exaggeration but a significant one. Arrested and imprisoned at Brussels for this cause, Enzinas received while under duress visits from four hundred citizens of that city who were Protestants. To control the book trade an oath was exacted of every bookseller [Sidenote: 1546]

not to deal in heretical works and the first "Index of prohibited books,"

drawn up by the University of Louvain, was issued. A censorship of plays was also attempted. This was followed by an edict of 1550 requiring of every person entering the Netherlands a certificate of Catholic belief.

As Brabant and Antwerp repudiated a law that would have ruined their trade, it remained, in fact, a dead letter.

Charles's policy of repression had been on the whole a failure, due partly to the cosmopolitan culture of the Netherlands and their commercial position making them open to the importation of ideas as of merchandise from all Europe. It was due in part to the local jealousies and privileges of the separate provinces, and in part to the strength of certain n.o.bles and cities. The persecution, indeed, had a decidedly cla.s.s character, for the emperor well knew Protestant n.o.bles whom he did not molest, while the poor seldom failed to suffer. And yet Charles had accomplished something. Even the Protestants were loyal, strange to say, to him personally. The number of martyrs in his reign has been estimated at barely one thousand, {246} but it must be remembered that for every one put to death there were a number punished in other ways. And the body of the people was still Catholic, even in the North. It is noteworthy that the most popular writer of this period, as well as the first to use the Dutch tongue with precision and grace, was Anna Bijns, a lay nun, violently anti-Lutheran in sentiment. [Sidenote: Anna Bijns, 1494-1575]

[1] Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, Guelders, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, Holland, Zeeland, Malines, Namur, Lille, Tournay, Friesland, Utrecht, Overyssel and Groningen.

SECTION 2. THE CALVINIST REVOLT

When Charles V, weary of the heaviest scepter ever wielded by any European monarch from Charlemagne to Napoleon, sought rest for his soul in a monk's cell, he left his great possessions divided between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip. To the former went Austria and the Empire, to the latter the Burgundian provinces and Spain with its vast dependencies in the New World.

[Sidenote: Spain and the Netherlands]

The result of this was to make the Netherlands practically a satellite of Spain. Hitherto, partly because their interests had largely coincided with those of the Empire, partly because by balancing Germany against Spain they could manage to get their own rights, they had found prosperity and had acquired a good deal of national power. Indeed, with their wealth, their central position, and growing strength as province after province was annexed, and their consciousness that their ruler was a native of Flanders, their pride had been rather gratified than hurt by the knowledge that he possessed far larger dominions.

[Sidenote: Abdication of Charles] But when Charles, weeping copiously and demanding his subjects' pardon, descended from the throne supported by the young Prince of Orange, [Sidenote: October 25, 1555] and when his son Philip II had replied to his father in Spanish, even those present had an uneasy feeling that the situation had changed for the worse, and that the Netherlands were being handed over from a Burgundian to a Spanish ruler. From {247} this time forth the interests and sentiments of the two countries became more and more sharply divergent, and, as the smaller was sacrificed to the larger, a conflict became inevitable. The revolt that followed within ten years after Philip had permanently abandoned the Netherlands to make his home in Spain [Sidenote: 1559] was first and foremost a nationalist revolt.

Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.

[Sidenote: Religious issue]

But though the catastrophe was apparently inevitable from political grounds, it was greatly complicated and intensified by the religious issue. Philip was determined, as he himself said, either to bring the Netherlands back to the fold of Rome or "so to waste their land that neither the natives could live there nor should any thereafter desire the place for habitation." And yet the means he took were even for his purpose the worst possible, a continual vacillation between timid indulgence and savage cruelty. Though he insisted that his ministers should take no smallest step without his sanction, he could never make up his mind what to do, waited too long to make a decision and then, with fatal fatuity, made the wrong one.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

At the same time the people were coming under the spell of a new and to the government more dangerous form of Protestantism. Whereas the Lutherans had stood for pa.s.sive obedience and the Anabaptists for revolutionary communism, the Calvinists appealed to the independent middle cla.s.ses and gave them not only the enthusiasm to endure martyrdom but also--what the others had lacked--the will and the power to resist tyranny by force. Calvin's polity, as worked out in Geneva, was a subordination of the state to the church. His reforms were thorough and consciously social and political. Calvinism in all lands aroused {248} republican pa.s.sions and excited rebellion against the powers that be. This feature was the more prominent in the Netherlands [Sidenote: 1545] in that its first missionaries were French exiles who irrigated the receptive soil of the Low Countries with doctrines subversive of church and state alike. The intercourse with England, partly through the emigration from that land under Mary's reign, partly through the coming and going of Flemings and Walloons, also opened doors to Protestant doctrine.

At first the missionaries came secretly, preaching to a few specially invited to some private house or inn. People attended these meetings disguised and after dark. First mentioned in the edict of 1550, nine years later the Calvinists drew up a _Confess...o...b..lgica_, as a sign and an aid to union. Calvin's French writings could be read in the southern provinces in the original. Though as early as 1560 some n.o.bles had been converted, the new religion undoubtedly made its strongest appeal, as a contemporary put it, "to those who had grown rich by trade and were therefore ready for revolution." It was among the merchants of the great cities that it took strongest root and from the middle cla.s.s spread to the laborers; influenced not only by the example of their masters, but sometimes also by the policy of Protestant employers to give work only to co-religionists. In a short time it had won a very considerable success, though perhaps not the actual majority of the population. Many of the poor, hitherto Anabaptists, thronged to it in hopes of social betterment. Many adventurers with no motive but to stir the waters in which they might fish joined the new party. But on the whole, as its appeal was primarily moral and religious, its const.i.tuency was the more substantial, progressive, and intelligent part of the community.