The Evolution of States Part 34

The result was a development of civic life still more rapid and more marked in inland Flanders,[735] where the territorial feudal power was naturally greater than in the maritime Dutch provinces. Self-ruling cities, such as Ghent and Antwerp, at their meridian, were too powerful to be effectively menaced by their immediate feudal lords. But on the side of their relations with neighbouring cities or States they all exhibited the normal foible; and it was owing only to the murderous compulsion put upon them by Spain in the sixteenth century that any of the provinces of the Netherlands became a federal republic. For five centuries after Charlemagne, who subdued them to his system, the Low Countries had undergone the ordinary slow evolution from pure feudalism to the polity of munic.i.p.alities. In the richer inland districts the feudal system, lay and clerical, was at its height, the baronial castles being "here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom";[736]

and when the growing cities began to feel their power to buy charters, the feudal formula was unchallenged,[737] while the ma.s.s of the outside population were in the usual "Teutonic" state of partial or complete serfdom. It was only by burning their suburbs and taking to the walled fortress that the people of Utrecht escaped the yoke of the Nors.e.m.e.n.[738]

Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh is responsible for the statement that "it seems doubtful whether any portion of the inhabitants of Holland were ever in a state of actual servitude or bondage," and that the northern provinces were more generally free from slavery than the others (_Industrial History of the Free Nations_, 1846, ii, 39).

Motley (_Rise of the Dutch Republic_, as cited, pp. 17, 18) p.r.o.nounces, on the contrary, that "in the northern Netherlands the degraded condition of the ma.s.s continued longest," and that "the number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht enormous." This is substantially borne out by Grattan, _Netherlands_, pp. 18, 34; Blok, _Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk_, i, 159, 160, 305-11, Eng. tr. i, 203-8; Wauters, _Les libertes communales_, 1878, pp. 222-30. As is noted by Blok, the status of the peasantry fluctuated, the thirteenth century being one of partial retrogression. Cp. pp. 318, 319, as to the general depression of the peasant cla.s.s. The great impulse to slavery, as above noted, seems to have been given by the Norse pirates in general and the later Norman invaders, who, under G.o.dfrey, forced every "free"

Frisian to wear a halter. The comparative protection accruing to slaves of the Church was embraced by mult.i.tudes. In the time of the Crusades, again, many serfs were sold or mortgaged to the Church by the n.o.bles in order to obtain funds for their expedition.

The cities were thus the liberating and civilising forces;[739] and the application of townsmen's capital to the land was an early influence in improving rural conditions.[740] But there was no escape from the fatality of strife in the Teutonic any more than in the ancient Greek or in the contemporary Italian world. Flanders, having the large markets of France at hand, developed its clothmaking and other industries more rapidly than the Frisian districts, where weaving was probably earlier carried on;[741] and here serfdom disappeared comparatively early,[742]

the n.o.bility dwindling through their wars; but the new industrial strifes of cla.s.ses, which grew up everywhere in the familiar fashion, naturally matured the sooner in the more advanced civilisation; and already at the beginning of the fourteenth century we find a resulting disintegration. The monopoly methods of the trade gilds drove much of the weaving industry into the villages; then the Franco-Flemish wars, wherein the townspeople, by expelling the French in despite of the n.o.bility, greatly strengthened their position,[743] nevertheless tended, as did the subsequent civil wars, to drive trade into South Brabant.

In Flemish Ghent and Bruges the clashing interests of weavers and woollen-traders, complicated by the strife of the French (aristocratic) and anti-French (popular) factions, led to riots in which citizens and magistrates were killed (1301). At times these enmities reached the magnitude of civil war. At Ypres (1303) a combination of workmen demanded the suppression of rival industries in neighbouring villages, and in an ensuing riot the mayor and all the magistrates were slain; at Bruges (1302) a trade riot led to the loss of fifteen hundred lives.[744] When later the weaving trade had flourished in Brabant, the same fatality came about: plebeians rebelled against patrician magistrates--themselves traders or employers of labour--in the princ.i.p.al cities; and Brussels (1312) was for a time given up to pillage and ma.s.sacre, put down only by the troops of the reigning duke. A great legislative effort was made in the "Laws of Cortenberg," framed by an a.s.sembly of n.o.bles and city deputies, to regulate fiscal and industrial affairs in a stable fashion;[745] but after fifty years the trouble broke out afresh, and was ill-healed.[746] At length, in a riot in the rich city of Louvain (1379), sixteen of its patrician magistrates were slain, whereupon many took flight to England, but many more to Haarlem, Amsterdam, Leyden, and other Dutch cities.[747] Louvain never again recovered its trade and wealth;[748] and since the renewed Franco-Flemish wars of this period had nearly destroyed the commerce of Flanders,[749] there was a general gravitation of both merchandise and manufacture to Holland.[750] Thus arose Dutch manufactures in an organic connection with maritime commerce, the Dutch munic.i.p.al organisation securing a balance of trade interests where that of the Flemish industrial cities had partially failed.

The commercial lead given by the Hanseatic League was followed in the Netherlands with a peculiar energy, and till the Spanish period the main part of Dutch maritime commerce was with northern Europe and the Hansa cities. So far as the language test goes, the original Hansards and the Dutch were of the same "Low Dutch" stock, which was also that of the Anglo-Saxons.[751] Thus there was seen the phenomenon of a vigorous maritime and commercial development among the continental branches of the race; while the English, having lost its early seafaring habits on its new settlement, lagged far behind in both developments. Kinship, of course, counted for nothing towards goodwill between the nations when it could not keep peace within or between the towns; and in the fifteenth century the Dutch cities are found at war with the Hansa, as they had been in the thirteenth with England, and were to be again. But the spirit of strife did its worst work at home. On the one hand, a physical schism had been set up in Friesland in the thirteenth century by the immense disaster of the inundation which enlarged the Zuyder Zee.[752]

Of that tremendous catastrophe there are singularly few historic traces; but it had the effect of making two small countries where there had been one large one, what was left of West Friesland being absorbed in the specific province of Holland, while East Friesland, across the Zuyder Zee, remained a separate confederation of maritime districts.[753] To the south-west, again, the great Flemish cities were incurably jealous of each other's prosperity, as well as inwardly distracted by their cla.s.s disputes; and within the cities of Holland, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while intelligible lines of cleavage between trades or cla.s.ses are hard to find, the factions of Hoek and Kabbeljauw, the "Hooks" and the "Codfish," appear to have carried on a chronic strife, as irrational as any to be noted in the cities of Italy. Thus in the north as in the south, among Teutons as among "Latins" and among ancient Greeks, the primary instincts of separation checked democratic growth and coalition; though after the period of local feudal sovereignties the powerful monarchic and feudal forces in the Netherlands withheld the cities from internecine wars.

The most sympathetic historians are forced from the first to note the stress of mutual jealousy among the cities and districts of the Netherlands. "The engrained habit of munic.i.p.al isolation," says one, "was the cause why the general liberties of the Netherlands were imperilled, why the larger part of the country was ultimately ruined, and why the war of independence was conducted with so much risk and difficulty, even in the face of the most serious perils"

(Thorold Rogers, _Holland_, p. 26. Cp. pp. 35, 43; Motley, pp. 29, 30, 43; Grattan, pp. 39, 50, 51). Van Kampen avows (_Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 131) that throughout the Middle Ages Friesland was unprogressive owing to constant feuds. Even as late as 1670 Leyden refused to let the Harle Maer be drained, because it would advantage other cities; and Amsterdam in turn opposed the reopening of the old Rhine channel because it would make Leyden maritime (Temple, _Observations_, i, 130, ch. iii).

As regards the early factions of the "Hooks" and the "Codfish" in the Dutch towns, the historic obscurity is so great that historians are found ascribing the names in contrary ways. Grattan (p. 49) represents the Hooks as the town party, and the Codfish as the party of the n.o.bles; Motley (p. 21) reverses the explanation, noting, however, that there was no consistent cleavage of cla.s.s or of principle (cp. M'Cullagh, pp. 99, 100). This account is supported by Van Kampen, i, 170, 171. The fullest survey of the Hook and Cod feud is given by Wenzelburger, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 210-42. As to feuds of other parties in some of the cities see Van Kampen, i, 172. They included, for example, a cla.s.s feud between the rich _Vetkooper_ (fat-dealers) and the poor _Schieringer_ (eel-fishers). See Davies, i, 180.

Thus dissident, and with feudal wars breaking out in every generation, the cities and provinces could win concessions from their feudal chiefs when the latter were in straits, as in the famous case of the "Great Privilege" extorted from the d.u.c.h.ess Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, after her father's overthrow by the Swiss; again in the case of her husband Maximilian after her death; and previously in the reaffirmation of the ill-observed Laws of Cortenberg, secured from the Duke of Brabant by the Louvainers in 1372; but they could never deliver themselves from the feudal superst.i.tion, never evolve the republican ideal. When the rich citizens exploited the poor, it was the local sovereign's cue, as of old, to win the populace; whereupon the patricians leant to the over-lord, were he even the King of France; or it might be that the local lord himself sought the intervention of his suzerain, who again was at times the first to meddle, and against whom, as against rival potentates, the cities would at times fight desperately for their recognised head, when he was not overtaxing or thwarting them, or endangering their commerce.[754] It was a medley of clashing interests, always in unstable equilibrium. And so when sovereign powers on a great scale, as the Dukes of Burgundy, followed by the Archduke Maximilian, and later by the Emperor Charles, came into the inheritance of feudal prestige, the Dutch and Flemish cities became by degrees nearly as subordinate as those of France and Germany, losing one by one their munic.i.p.al privileges.[755] The monarchic superst.i.tion overbore the pa.s.sions of independence and primary interest; and a strong feudal ruler could count on a more general and durable loyalty than was ever given to any citizen-statesman. James van Arteveldt, who guided Ghent in the fourteenth century, and whose policy was one of alliance with the English king against the French, the feudal over-lord, was "the greatest personality Flanders ever produced."[756] But though Arteveldt's policy was maintained even by his murderers, murdered he was by his fellow-citizens, as the great De Witt was to be murdered in Holland three hundred years later. The monarchised Netherlanders were republicans only in the last resort, as against insupportable tyranny.

Philip of Burgundy, who heavily oppressed them, they called "The Good."

At the end of the fifteenth century Maximilian was able, even before he became Emperor, not only to crush the "bread-and-cheese" rebellion of the exasperated peasantry in Friesland and Guelderland,[757] but to put down all the oligarchs who had rebelled against him, and finally to behead them by the dozen,[758] leaving the land to his son as a virtually subject State.

In the sixteenth century, under Charles V, the men of Ghent, grown once again a great commercial community,[759] exhibited again the fatal instability of the undeveloped democracy of all ages. Called upon to pay their third of a huge subsidy of 1,200,000 _caroli_ voted by the Flemish States to the Emperor, they rang their bell of revolt and defied him, offering their allegiance to the King of France. That monarch, by way of a bargain, promptly betrayed the intrigue to his "brother," who thereupon marched in force through France to the rebel city, now paralysed by terror; and without meeting a shadow of resistance, penalised it to the uttermost, beheading a score of leading citizens, banishing many more, annulling its remaining munic.i.p.al rights, and exacting an increased tribute.[760] It needed an extremity of grievance to drive such communities to an enduring rebellion. When Charles V abdicated at Brussels in favour of his son Philip in 1555, he had already caused to be put to death Netherlanders to the number at least of thousands for religious heresy;[761] and still the provinces were absolutely submissive, and the people capable of weeping collectively out of sympathy with the despot's infirmities.[762] He, on his part, born and educated among them, and knowing them well, was wont to say of them that there was not a nation under the sun which more detested the _name_ of slavery, or that bore the reality more patiently when managed with discretion.[763] He spoke whereof he knew.

-- 2. _The Revolt against Spain_

That the people who endured so much at the hands of a despot should have revolted unsubduably against his son is to be explained in terms of certain circ.u.mstances little stressed in popular historiography. In the narratives of the rhetorical historians, no real explanation arises. The revolt figures as a stand for personal and religious freedom. But when Charles abdicated, after slaying his thousands, the Reformation had been in full tide for over thirty years; Calvin had built up Protestant Geneva to the point of burning Servetus; England had been for twenty years depapalised; France, with many scholars and n.o.bles converted to Calvinism, was on the verge of a civil war of Huguenots and Catholics; the Netherlands themselves had been drenched in the blood of heretics; and still no leading man had thought of repudiating either Spain or Rome. Yet within thirteen years they were in full revolt, led by William of Orange, now turned Protestant. Seeing that mere popular Protestantism had spread far and gone fast, religious opinion was clearly not the determining force.

In reality, the _conditio sine qua non_ was the psychological reversal effected by Philip when he elected to rule as a Spaniard, where his father had in effect ruled as a Fleming. Charles had always figured as a native of the Netherlands, at home among his people, friendly to their great men, ready to employ them in his affairs, even to the extent of partly ruling Spain through them. After his punishment of Ghent they were his boon subjects; and in his youth it was the Spaniards who were jealous of the Flemish and Dutch. This state of things had begun under his Flemish-German father, Philip I, who became King of Spain by marriage, and under whom the Netherland n.o.bles showed in Spain a rapacity that infuriated the Spaniards against them. It was a question simply of racial predominance; and had the dynasty chosen to fix its capital in the north rather than in the south, it would have been the lot of the Netherlanders to exploit Spain--a task for which they were perfectly ready.

The gross rapacity of the Flemings in Spain under Philip I is admitted by Motley (_Rise_, as cited, pp. 31, 75); but on the same score feeling was pa.s.sionately strong in Spain in the earlier years of the reign of Charles. Cp. Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. i (Works, ed. 1821, iv, 37, 40, 43, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 77 78); and van Kampen, _Geschichte der Niederlande_, i, 277, 278. It took more than ten years to bring Charles in good relations with the Spaniards. See Mr. E. Armstrong's _Introduction_ to Major Martin Hume's _Spain_, 1898, pp. 31-37, 57, 76. Even in his latter years they are found protesting against his customary absence from Spain, and his perpetual wars. Robertson, bk. vi, p. 494. Cp. bk. xii, vol. v, p. 417, as to the disregard shown him after his abdication.

While it lasted, the Flemish exploitation of Spain was as shameless as the Spanish exploitation of Italy. The Italian Peter Martyr Angleria, residing at the court of Spain, reckoned that in ten months the Flemings there remitted home over a million ducats (Robertson, bk. i, p. 53). A lad, nephew of Charles's Flemish minister Chievres, was appointed to the archbishopric of Toledo, in defiance of general indignation. The result was a clerico-popular insurrection. Everything goes to show that but for the Emperor's prudence his Flemings would have ruined him in Spain, by getting him to tyrannise for their gain, as Philip II later did for the Church's sake in the Netherlands.

It is not unwarrantable to say that had not Charles had the sagacity to adapt himself to the Spanish situation, learning to speak the language and even to tolerate the pride of the n.o.bles[764] to a degree to which he never yielded before the claims of the burghers of the Netherlands, and had he not in the end identified himself chiefly with his Spanish interests, the history of Spain and the Netherlands might have been entirely reversed. Had he, that is, kept his seat of rule in the Netherlands, drawing thither the unearned revenues of the Americas, and still contrived to keep Spain subject to his rule, the latter country would have been thrown back on her great natural resources, her industry, and her commerce, which, as it was, developed markedly during his reign,[765] despite the heavy burdens of his wars. And in that case Spain might conceivably have become the Protestant and rebellious territory, and the Netherlands on the contrary have remained Catholic and grown commercially decrepit, having in reality the weaker potential economic basis.

The theorem that the two races were vitally opposed in "religious sentiment," and that "it was as certain that the Netherlanders would be fierce reformers as that the Spaniards would be uncompromising persecutors" (Motley, p. 31), is part of the common pre-scientific conception of national development, and proceeds upon flat disregard of the historical evidence. It is well established that there was as much heresy of the more rational Protestant and Unitarian sort in Spain, to begin with, as in Holland. Under Ferdinand and Isabella the Inquisition seems to have struck mainly at Judaic and Moorish monotheistic heresy, which was not uncommon among the upper cla.s.ses, while the lower were for the most part orthodox (Armstrong, _Introd._ to Major Hume's _Spain_, pp. 14, 18). Thus there is good ground for the surmise that Ferdinand's object was primarily the confiscation of the wealth of Jews and other rich heretics. (See U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, 1895, ii, 101; Hume's ed. 1900, ii, 74.) In Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia there was general resistance to the Inquisition; in Cordova there was a riot against it; in Saragossa the Inquisitor was murdered before the altar (Armstrong, p. 18; Llorente, _Hist. crit. de l'Inquisition d'Espagne_, ed. 1818, i, 185-213; M'Crie, _Reformation in Spain_, ed. 1856, pp. 52-53. Cp.

U.R. Burke, as cited, ii, 97, 98, 101, 103, 111; Hume's ed. ii, 66, 70-71, 74-77, 82; as to the general and prolonged resistance of the people). During that reign Torquemada is credited with burning ten thousand persons in eighteen years (Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 178, citing Llorente. But see p.

746, _note_, as to possible exaggeration. Cp. Burke, ii, 113; Hume's ed. ii, 84). In the early Lutheran period the spread of scholarly Protestantism in Spain was extremely rapid (La Rigaudiere, _Histoire des persecutions religieuses en Espagne_, 1860, p. 245 sq.), and in the early years of Philip II it needed furious persecution to crush it, thousands leaving the kingdom (Prescott, _Philip II_, bk. ii, ch. iii; M'Crie, _Reformation in Spain_, ch. viii; De Castro, _History of the Spanish Protestants_, Eng. tr. 1851, _pa.s.sim_). At the outset, 800 persons were arrested in Seville alone in one day; and the Venetian amba.s.sador in 1562 testifies to the large number of Huguenots in Spain (Ranke, _Hist.

of the Popes_, bk. v, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. p. 136).

Had Philip II had Flemish sympathies and chosen to make Brussels his capital, the stress of the Inquisition could have fallen on the Netherlands as successfully as it actually did on Spain. His father's reign had proved as much. According to Motley, not only mult.i.tudes of Anabaptists but "thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous and well-disposed men and women" had then been "butchered in cold blood" (_Rise_, p. 43), without any sign of rebellion on the part of the provinces, whose leading men remained Catholic. In 1600 most of the inhabitants of Groningen were Catholics (Davies, ii, 347). A Protestant historian (Grattan, p. 93) admits that the Protestants "never, and least of all in these days, formed the ma.s.s." Another has admitted, as regards those of Germany, that "nothing had contributed more to the undisturbed progress of their opinions than the interregnum after Maximilian's death, the long absence of Charles, and the slackness of the reins of government which these occasioned" (Robertson, _Charles V_, bk. v, ed. cited of _Works_, vol. iv, p. 387). "It was only tanners, dyers, and apostate priests who were Protestants at that day in the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 124). The same conditions would have had similar results in Spain, where many Catholics thought Philip much too religious for his age and station (Motley, p. 76).

It seems necessary to insist on the elementary fact that it was Netherlanders who put Protestants to death in the Netherlands; and that it was Spaniards who were burnt in Spain. In the Middle Ages "nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless than in the Netherlands" (Motley, p. 36; cp. p. 132). Grenvelle, most zealous of heresy-hunters, was a Burgundian; Viglius, an even bitterer persecutor, was a Frisian. The statement of Prescott (_Philip II_, Kirk's ed. 1894, p. 149) that the Netherlanders "claimed freedom of thought as their birthright" is a gratuitous absurdity. As regards, further, the old hallucination of "race types," it has to be noted that Charles, a devout Catholic and persecutor, was emphatically _Teutonic_, according to the established canons. His stock was Burgundo-Austrian on the father's side; his Spanish mother was of Teutonic descent; he had the fair hair, blue eyes, and hanging jaw and lip of the Teutonic Hapsburgs (see Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, cap. 341), and so had his descendants after him. On the other hand, William the Silent was markedly "Spanish" in his physiognomy (Motley, p. 56), and his reticence would in all ages pa.s.s for a Spanish rather than a "Teutonic" characteristic. Motley is reduced to such shifts of rhetoric concerning Philip II as the proposition (p. 75) that "the Burgundian and Austrian elements of his blood seemed to have evaporated." But his descendant, Philip IV, as seen in the great portraits of Velasquez, is, like him, a "typical" Teuton; and the stock preserved the Teutonic physiological tendency to gluttony, a most "un-Spanish" characteristic.

It is true that, as Buckle argues, the many earthquakes in Spain tended to promote superst.i.tious fear; but then on his principles the Dutch seafaring habits, and the constant risks and frequent disasters of inundation, had the same primary tendency. For the rest, the one serious oversight in Buckle's theory of Spanish civilisation is his a.s.sumption (cp. 3-vol. ed. ii, 455-61; 1-vol.

ed. p. 550) that Spanish "loyalty" was abnormal and continuous from the period of the first struggles with the Moors. As to this see the present writer's notes in the 1-vol. ed. of Buckle, as cited.

Even Ferdinand, as an Aragonese, was disrespectfully treated by the Castilians (cp. Armstrong as cited, pp. 5, 31, etc.; De Castro, _History of Religious Intolerance in Spain_, Eng. tr. 1853, pp. 40, 41); and Philip I and Charles V set up a new resistance. An alien dynasty could set up disaffection in Spain as elsewhere.

It should be noted, finally, that the stiff ceremonialism which is held to be the special characteristic of Spanish royalty was a Burgundo-Teutonic innovation, dating from Philip I, and that even in the early days of Philip the Cortes pet.i.tioned "that the household of the Prince Don Carlos should be arranged on the old Spanish lines, and not in the pompous new-fangled way of the House of Burgundy" (Major Hume's _Spain_, p. 127). Prescott (_Philip II_, ed. cited, pp. 655, 659) makes the pet.i.tion refer to the king's own household, and shows it to have condemned the king's excessive expenditure in very strong terms, saying the expense of his household was "as great as would be required for the conquest of a kingdom." At the same time the Cortes pet.i.tioned against bull-fights, which appear to have originated with the Moors, were strongly opposed by Isabella the Catholic, and were much encouraged by the Teutonic Charles V (U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, 1895, ii, 2-4; Hume's ed. i, 328 _sq._). In fine, the conventional Spain is a manufactured system, developed under a Teutonic dynasty. "To a German race of sovereigns Spain finally owed the subversion of her national system and ancient freedom" (Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ 4th ed. i, 5).

No doubt the Dutch disaffection to Philip, which began to reveal itself immediately after his accession, may be conceived as having economic grounds. Indeed, his creation of fresh bishoprics, and his manipulation of the abbey revenues, created instant and general resentment among churchmen and n.o.bles,[766] as compared with his mere continuation of religious persecution; and despite his pledges to the contrary, certain posts in the Low Countries were conferred on Spaniards.[767] But had he shown his father's adaptability, all this could have been adjusted. Had he either lived at Brussels or made the Flemings feel that he held them an integral part of his empire, he would have had the zealous support of the upper cla.s.ses in suppressing the popular heresy, which repelled them. Heresy in the Netherlands, indeed, seems thus far to have been on the whole rather licentious and anarchic than austere or "spiritual."

The pre-Protestant movements of the Beguines, Beghards, and Lollards, beginning well, had turned out worse than the orders of friars in the south; and the decorous "Brethren of the Common Lot" were in the main "good churchmen," only a minority accepting Protestantism.[768] In face of the established formulas concerning the innate spirituality of the Teuton, and of the play of his "conscience" in his course at the Reformation, there stand the historic facts that in the Teutonic world alone was the Reformation accompanied by widespread antinomianism, debauchery, and destructive violence. In France, Spain, and Italy there were no such movements as the Anabaptist, which so far as it could go was almost a dissolution of sane society.[769] From Holland that movement drew much of its strength and leadership, even as, in a previous age, the antinomian movement of Tanquelin had there had its main success.[770] Such was the standing of Dutch Protestantism in 1555; and no edict against heresy could be more searching and merciless than that drawn up by Charles in 1550[771] without losing any upper-cla.s.s loyalty. Philip did but strive to carry it out.[772]

Had Philip, further, maintained a prospect of chronic war for the n.o.bility of the Netherlands, the accruing chances of wealth[773] would in all likelihood have sufficed to keep them loyal. In the early wars of his reign with France immense gains had been made by them in the way of ransoms and booty. When these ceased, luxury continuing, embarra.s.sment became general.[774] But when Philip's energies were seen to be mainly bent on killing out heresy, the discontented n.o.bles began to lean to the side of the persecuted commonalty. At the first formation of the Confederacy of the "Beggars" in 1566, almost the only zealous Protestant among the leaders was William's impetuous brother Louis of Na.s.sau, a Calvinist by training, who had for comrade the bibulous Brederode. The name of "Gueux," given to the malcontents in contempt by the councillor Berlaimont, had direct application to the known poverty or embarra.s.sment of the great majority.[775] There was thus undisguisedly at work in the Netherlands the great economic force which had brought about "the Reformation" in all the Teutonic countries; and the needy n.o.bles insensibly grew Protestant as it became more and more clear that only the lands of the Church could restore their fortunes.[776] This holds despite the fact that the more intelligent Protestantism which latterly spread among the people was the comparatively democratic form set up by Calvin, which reached the Low Countries through France, finding the readier reception among the serious because of the prestige accruing to its austerity as against the moral disrepute which now covered the German forms.

[As to the proportional success of Lutheranism and Calvinism, see Motley, pp. 132, 133; and Grattan, pp. 110, 111. (On p. 110 of Grattan there is a transposition of "second" and "third" groups, which the context corrects.) Motley, an inveterate Celtophobe, is at pains to make out that the Walloons rebelled first and were first reconciled to Rome, "exactly like their Celtic ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier." He omits to comment on the fact that it was only the French form of Protestantism, that of Calvin, that became viable in the Netherlands at all, or on the fact that indecent Anabaptism flourished mainly in Friesland; though he admits that the Lutheran movement left all religious rights in the hands of the princes, the people having to follow the creed of their rulers. The "racial" explanation is mere obscurantism, here as always. The Walloons of South Flanders were first affected simply because they were first in touch with Huguenotism. That they were never converted in large numbers to Protestantism is later admitted by Motley himself (p. 797), who thereupon speaks of the "intense attachment to the Roman ceremonial which distinguished the Walloon population." Thus his earlier statement that they had rebelled against "papal Rome" is admittedly false. They had rebelled simply against the Spanish tyranny. Yet the false statement is left standing--one more ill.u.s.tration of the havoc that may be worked in a historian's intelligence by a prejudice. (For other instances see, in the author's volume _The Saxon and the Celt_, the chapters dealing with Mommsen and Burton.)

It was the Teutonic-speaking city populations of North Flanders and Brabant who became Protestants in ma.s.s after the troubles had begun (Motley, p. 798). When the Walloon provinces withdrew from the combination against Spain, the cities of Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, and Ypres joined the Dutch Union of Utrecht. They were one and all reduced by the skill and power of Alexander of Parma, who thereupon abolished the freedom of Protestant worship. The Protestants fled in thousands to England and the Dutch provinces, the remaining population, albeit mostly Teutonic, becoming Catholic. At this moment one-and-a-half of the four-and-a-half millions of Dutch are Catholics; while in Belgium, where there are hardly any Protestants, the Flemish-speaking and French-speaking populations are nearly equal in numbers.

Van Kampen, who antic.i.p.ated Motley in disparaging the Walloons as being Frenchly fickle (_Geschichte_, i, 366), proceeds to contend that even the Flemings are more excitable than the Dutch and other Teutons; but he notes later that as the Dutch poet Cats was much read and imitated in Belgium, he was thus proved to have expressed the spirit of the whole Netherlands (ii, 109). Once more, then, the racial theory collapses.]

Thus the systematic savagery of the Inquisition under Philip, for which the people at first blamed not at all the king but his Flemish minister, Cardinal Granvelle, served rather to make a basis and pretext for organised revolt than directly to kindle it. In so far as the people spontaneously resorted to violence, in the image-breaking riots, they compromised and imperilled the nationalist movement in the act of precipitating it. The king's personal equation, finally, served to make an enemy of the masterly William of Orange, who, financially embarra.s.sed like the lesser n.o.bility,[777] could have been retained as an administrator by a wise monarch. A matter so overlaid with historical declamation is hard to set in a clear light; but it may serve to say of William that he was made a "patriot," as was Robert the Bruce, by stress of circ.u.mstances;[778] and that in the one case as in the other it was exceptional character and capacity that made patriotism a success;[779]

William in particular having to maintain himself against continual domestic enmity, patrician as well as popular. Nothing short of the ferocity and rapacity of the Spanish attack, indeed, could have long united the Netherlands. The first confederacy dissolved at the approach of Alva, who, strong in soldiership but incapable of a statesmanlike settlement, drove the Dutch provinces to extremities by his cruelty, caused a hundred thousand artisans and traders to fly with their industry and capital, exasperated even the Catholic ministers in Flanders by his proposed taxes, and finally by imposing them enraged into fresh revolt the people he had crushed and terrorised, till they were eager to offer the sovereignty to the queen of England. When Requesens came with pacificatory intentions, it was too late; and the Pacification of Ghent (1576) was but a breathing-s.p.a.ce between grapples.

What finally determined the separation and independence of the Dutch Provinces was their maritime strength. Antwerp, trading largely on foreign bottoms, represented wealth without the then indispensable weapons. Dutch success begins significantly with the taking of Brill (1572) by the gang of William van der Marck, mostly pirates and ruffians, whose methods William of Orange could not endure.[780] But they had shown the military basis for the maritime States. It was the Dutch fleet that prevented Parma's from joining "the" Armada under Medina-Sidonia,[781] thereby perhaps saving England. Such military genius and energy as Parma's might have made things go hard with the Dutch States had he lived, or had he not been called off against his judgment to fight in France; but his death well balanced the a.s.sa.s.sination of William of Orange, who had thus far been the great sustainer and welder of the movement of independence. Plotted against and vilified by the demagogues of Ghent, betrayed by worthless fellow n.o.bles, Teutonic and French alike; chronically insulted in his own person and humiliated in that of his brother John, whom the States treated with unexampled meanness; stupidly resisted in his own leadership by the same States, whose egoism left Maestricht to its fate when he bade them help, and who cast on him the blame when it fell; thwarted and crippled by the fanaticism and intolerant violence of the Protestant mobs of the towns; bereaved again and again in the vicissitude of the struggle, William turned to irrelevance all imputations of self-seeking; and in his unfailing sagacity and fort.i.tude he finally matches any aristocrat statesman in history. Doubtless he would have served Philip well had Philip chosen him and trusted him. But as it lay in one thoroughly able man, well placed for prestige in a crisis, to knit and establish a new nation, so it lay in one fanatical dullard[782] to wreck half of his own empire, with the greatest captains of his age serving him; and to bring his fabled treasury to ruin while his despised rebels grew rich.

As to the vice of the Dutch const.i.tution, the principle of the supremacy of "State rights," see M'Cullagh, p. 215; Motley, _Rise_, pp. 794, 795 (Pt. vi, ch. ii, _end_), and _United Netherlands_, ed.

1867, iv, 564. Wicquefort (_L'histoire des Provinces-Unies_, La Haye, 1719, pp. 5, 16), following Grotius, laid stress long ago on the fact that the Estates of each province recognised no superior, not even the entire body of the Republic. It was only the measure of central government set up in the Burgundo-Austrian and Spanish periods that made the Seven Provinces capable of enough united action to repel Spanish rule during a chronic struggle of eighty years. Cp. Van Kampen (i, 304), who points out (p. 306) that the word "State" first appears in Holland in the fifteenth century. It arose in Flanders in the thirteenth, and in Brabant in the fourteenth. Only in 1581, after some years of war, did the United Provinces set up a General Executive Council. In the same year the Prince of Orange was chosen sovereign (Motley, pp. 838, 841).

-- 3. _The Supremacy of Dutch Commerce_

The conquest of Flanders by Alexander of Parma, reducing its plains to wolf-haunted wildernesses, and driving the great ma.s.s of the remaining artisans from its ruined towns,[783] helped to consummate the prosperity of the United Provinces, who took over the industry of Ghent with the commerce of Antwerp.[784] Getting the start of all northern Europe in trade, they had become at the date of their a.s.sured independence the chief trading State in the world. Whatever commercial common sense the world had yet acquired was there in force. And inasmuch as the wealth and strength of these almost landless States, with their mostly poor soil and unavoidably heavy imposts, depended so visibly on quant.i.ty of trade turnover, they not only continued to offer a special welcome to all immigrants, but gradually learned to forego the congenial Protestant strife of sects. It was indeed a reluctantly-learned lesson. Even as local patriotisms constantly tended to hamper unity during the very period of struggle, so the primary spirit of self-a.s.sertion set the ruling Calvinistic party upon persecuting not only Catholics and Lutherans, but the new heresy of Arminianism:[785] so little does "patriotic" warfare make for fraternity in peace. The judicial murder of the statesman John van Olden Barneveldt (1619) at the hands of Maurice of Orange, whom he had guarded in childhood and trained to statesmanship, was accomplished as a sequel to the formal proscription of the Arminian heresy in the Synod of Dort; and Barneveldt was formally condemned for "troubling G.o.d's Church" as well as on the charge of treason.[786] On the same pretexts Grotius was thrown into prison; and the freedom of the press was suspended.[787] It was doubtless the shame of the memory of the execution of Barneveldt (the true founder of the Republic as such),[788] on an absolutely false charge of treason, and the observation of how, as elsewhere, persecution drove away population, that mainly wrought for the erection of tolerance (at least as between Protestant sects) into a State principle.

The best side of the Dutch polity was its finance, which was a lesson to all Europe. Already in the early stages of the struggle with Spain, the States were able on credit to make war, in virtue of their character for commercial honour. Where the king of Spain, with all his revenues mortgaged past hope,[789] got from the Pope an absolution from the payment of interest on the sums borrowed from Spanish and Genoese merchants, and so ruined his credit,[790] the Dutch issued tin money and paper money, and found it readily pa.s.s current with friends and foes.[791]

Of all the Protestant countries, excepting Switzerland, the Dutch States alone disposed of their confiscated church lands in the public interest.[792] There was indeed comparatively little to sell,[793] and the money was sorely needed to carry on the war; but the transaction seems to have been carried through without any corruption. It was the suggestion of what might be accomplished in statecraft by the new _expertise_ of trade, forced into the paths of public spirit and checked by a stress of public opinion such as had never come into play in Venice. Against such a power as Spain, energy ruled by unteachable unintelligence, a world-empire financed by the expedients of provincial feudalism, the Dutch needed only an enduring resentment to sustain them, and this Philip amply elicited. Had he spent on light cruisers for the destruction of Dutch commerce the treasure he wasted on the Armadas against England and on his enormous operations by land, typified in the monstrous siege of Antwerp, he might have struck swiftly and surely at the very arteries of Dutch life; but in yielding to them the command of their primary source and channel of wealth, the sea, he insured their ultimate success. In the Franco-Spanish war of 1521-25 the French cruisers nearly ruined the herring fishery of Holland and Zealand;[794]

and it was doubtless the memory of that plight that set the States on maintaining predominant power at sea.[795]

Throughout the war, which from first to last spread over eighty years, the Dutch commerce grew while that of Spain dwindled. Under Charles V, Flanders and Brabant alone had paid nearly two-thirds of the whole imperial taxation of the Netherlands;[796] but after a generation or two the United Provinces must have been on an equality of financial resources with those left under Spanish rule, even in a state of peace.

Yet in this posture of things there had grown up a burden which represented, in the warring commercial State, the persistent principle of cla.s.s parasitism; for at the Peace of Munster (1648) the funded public debt of the province of Holland alone amounted to nearly 150,000,000 florins, bearing interest at five per cent.[797] Of this annual charge, the bulk must have gone into the pockets of the wealthier citizens, who had thus secured a mortgage on the entire industry of the nation. All the while, Holland was nominally rich in "possessions"

beyond sea. When, in 1580, Philip annexed Portugal, with which the Dutch had hitherto carried on a profitable trade for the eastern products brought as tribute to Lisbon, they began to cast about for an Asiatic trade of their own, first seeking vainly for a north-east pa.s.sage. The need was heightened when in 1586 Philip, who as a rule ignored the presence of Dutch traders in his ports under friendly flags, arrested all the Dutch shipping he could lay hands on;[798] and when in 1594 he closed to them the port of Lisbon, he forced them to a course which his successors bitterly rued. In 1595 they commenced trading by the Cape pa.s.sage to the Indies, and a fleet sent out by Spain to put down their enterprise was as usual defeated.[799] Then arose a mult.i.tude of companies for the East Indian trade, which in 1602 were formed by the government into a great semi-official joint-stock concern, at once commercial and military, reminiscent of the Hanseatic League. The result was a long series of settlements and conquests. Amboyna and the Moluccas were seized from the Portuguese, now subordinate to Spain; Java, where a factory was founded in 1597, was in the next generation annexed; Henry Hudson, an English pilot in the Dutch Company's service, discovered the Hudson River and Bay in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam about 1624. In 1621 was formed the Dutch West India Company, which in fifteen years fitted out 800 ships of trade and war, captured 545 from the Spanish and Portuguese, with cargoes valued at 90,000,000 florins, and conquered the greater part of what had been the Portuguese empire in Brazil.

No such commercial development had before been seen in Europe. About 1560, according to Guicciardini,[800] 500 ships had been known to come and go in a day from Antwerp harbour in the island of Walcheren; but in the spring of 1599, it is recorded, 640 ships engaged solely in the Baltic trade discharged cargoes at Amsterdam;[801] and in 1610, according to Delacourt, there sailed from the ports of Holland in three days, on the eastward trade alone, 800 or 900 ships and 1,500 herring boats.[802] At the date of the Peace of Munster these figures were left far behind, whence had arisen a reluctance to end the war, under which commerce so notably flourished. Many Hollanders, further, had been averse to peace in the belief that it would restore Antwerp and injure their commerce, even as Prince Maurice of Orange, the republic's general and stadthouder, had been averse to it as likely to lessen his power and revenue.[803] But between 1648 and 1669 the trade increased by fifty per cent.,[804] Holland taking most of the Spanish trade from the shipping of England and the Hansa, and even carrying much of the trade between Spain and her colonies. When the Dutch had thus a mercantile marine of 10,000 sail and 168,000 men, the English carried only 27,196 men; and the Dutch shipping was probably greater than that of all the rest of Europe together.[805]

This body of trade, as has been seen, was built up by a State which, broadly speaking, had a surplus wealth-producing power in only one direction, that of fishing; and even of its fishing, much was done on the coasts of other nations. In that industry, about 1610, it employed over 200,000 men; and the Greenland whale fishery, which was a monopoly from 1614 to 1645, began to expand rapidly when set free,[806] till in 1670 it employed 120 ships.[807] For the rest, though the country exported dairy produce, its total food product was not equal to its consumption; and as it had no minerals and no vineyards, its surplus wealth came from the four sources of fishing, freightage, extorted colonial produce, and profits on the handling of goods bought and sold.

_Par excellence_, it was, in the phrase of Louis XIV, the nation of shopkeepers, of middlemen; and its long supremacy in the business of buying cheap and selling dear was due firstly to economy of means and consumption, and secondarily to command of acc.u.mulated money capital at low rates of interest. The sinking of interest was the first sign that the limits to its commercial expansion were being reached; but it belonged to the conditions that, with or without "empire," its advantage must begin to fall away as soon as rival States were able to compete with it in the economies of "production" in the sense of transport and transfer.

In such economies the Dutch superiority grew out of the specially practical basis of their marine--habitual fishing and the constant use of ca.n.a.ls. There is no better way than the former of building up seamanship; and just as the Portuguese grew from hardy fishers to daring navigators, so the Dutch grew from thrifty fishers and bargemen to thrifty handlers of sea-freight, surpa.s.sing in economy the shippers of England as they did in seamanship the marine of Spain. Broadly speaking, the navies which owed most to royal fostering--as those of Spain, France, and in part England--were the later to reach efficiency in the degree of their artificiality; and the loss of one great Spanish navy after another in storms must be held to imply a lack of due experience on the part of their officers.

One of the worst military mistakes of Spain was the creation of great galleons in preference to small cruisers. The sight of the big ships terrorised the Dutch once, in 1606; but as all existing seacraft had been built up in small vessels, there was no sufficient science for the navigation of the great ones in stress of weather, or even for the building of them on sound lines. The English and Dutch, on the other hand, fought in vessels of the kind they had always been wont to handle, increasing their size only by slow degrees. In the reign of Henry VIII, again, nothing came of the English expeditions of discovery fitted out by him (Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik_, i, 321), but private voyages were successfully made by traders (_id._ pp. 321, 327).

In the seventeenth century, however, and until far on in the eighteenth, all Dutch shipping was more economically managed than the English. In all likelihood the Dutch traders knew and improved upon the systematic control of ship-construction which the Venetians and Genoese had first copied from the Byzantines, and in turn developed. (Above, p. 197.) Raleigh was one of the first to point out that the broad Dutch boats carried more cargo with fewer hands than those of any other nation (_Observations touching Trade_, in _Works_, ed. 1829, viii, 356). Later in the century Petty noted that the Dutch practised freight-economies and adaptations of every kind, having different sorts of vessels for different kinds of traffic (_Essays in Political Arithmetic_ [1690], ed. 1699, pp. 179, 180, 182, 183). This again gave them the primacy in shipbuilding for the whole of Europe (_Memoires de Jean De Witt_, ptie. i, ch. vi), though they imported all the materials for the purpose. When Colbert began navy-building, his first care was to bring in Dutch shipwrights (Dussieux, _etude biographique sur Colbert_, 1886, p. 101). Compare, as to the quick sailing of the Dutch, Motley, _United Netherlands_, ed. 1867, iv, 556. In the next century the English marine had similar economic advantages over the French, which was burdened by royal schemes for multiplying seamen (see Tucker, _Essay on Trade_, 4th ed. p. 37).

The frugality which pervaded the whole of Dutch life may, however, have had one directly disastrous effect. Sir William Temple noted that the common people were poorly fed (_Observations upon the United Provinces_, ch. iv: Works, ed. 1814, i, 133, 147); and though their fighting ships were manned by men of all nations, the tendency was to feed them in the native fashion. Such a practice would tell fatally in the sea-fights with the English. Cp.

Gardiner, _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, ii, 123.