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Title: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, Introduction II.
Author: John Lothrop Motley
Release Date: January, 2004 [EBook #4802]
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Edition: 10
Language: English
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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 12l5, 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 tie 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.
XIII.
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 these
bustling weavers and cutlers should excel their literary superiors in
taste or elegance.
Philip the Fair enrolled himself as a member in one of these societies.
It may easily be inferred, therefore, that they had already become bodies
of recognized importance. The rhetorical chambers existed in the most
obscure villages. The number of yards of Flemish poetry annually
manufactured and consumed throughout the provinces almost exceed belief.
The societies had regular constitutions. Their presiding officers were
called kings, princes, captains, archdeacons, or rejoiced in similar
high-sounding names. Each chamber had its treasurer, its buffoon, and
its standard-bearer for public processions. Each had its peculiar title
or blazon, as the Lily, the Marigold, or the Violet, with an appropriate
motto. By the year 1493, the associations had become so important, that
Philip the Fair summoned them all to a general assembly at Mechlin. Here
they were organized, and formally incorporated under the general
supervision of an upper or mother-society of Rhetoric, consisting of
fifteen members, and called by the title of "Jesus with the balsam
flower."
The sovereigns were always anxious to conciliate these influential guilds
by becoming members of them in person. Like the players, the
Rhetoricians were the brief abstract and chronicle of the time, and
neither prince nor private person desired their ill report. It had,
indeed, been Philip's intention to convert them into engines for the
arbitrary purposes of his house, but fortunately the publicly organized
societies were not the only chambers. On the contrary, the unchartered
guilds were the moat numerous and influential. They exercised a vast
influence upon the progress of the religious reformation, and the
subsequent revolt of the Netherlands. They ridiculed, with their farces
and their satires, the vices of the clergy. They dramatized tyranny for
public execration. It was also not surprising, that among the leaders of
the wild anabaptists who disgraced the great revolution in church and
state by their hideous antics, should be found many who, like David of
Delft, John of Leyden, and others, had been members of rhetorical
chambers. The genius for mummery and theatrical exhibitions,
transplanted from its sphere, and exerting itself for purposes of fraud
and licentiousness, was as baleful in its effects as it was healthy in
its original manifestations. Such exhibitions were but the excrescences
of a system which had borne good fruit. These literary guilds befitted
and denoted a people which was alive, a people which had neither sunk to
sleep in the lap of material prosperity, nor abased itself in the sty of
ignorance and political servitude. The spirit of liberty pervaded these
rude but not illiterate assemblies, and her fair proportions were
distinctly visible, even through the somewhat grotesque garb which she
thus assumed.
The great leading recreations which these chambers afforded to themselves
and the public, were the periodic jubilees which they celebrated in
various capital cities. All the guilds of rhetoric throughout the
Netherlands were then invited to partake and to compete in magnificent
processions, brilliant costumes, living pictures, charades, and other
animated, glittering groups, and in trials of dramatic and poetic skill,
all arranged under the superintendence of the particular association
which, in the preceding year, had borne away the prize. Such jubilees
were called "Land jewels."
From the amusements of a people may be gathered much that is necessary
for a proper estimation of its character. No unfavorable opinion can be
formed as to the culture of a nation, whose weavers, smiths, gardeners,
and traders, found the favorite amusement of their holidays in composing
and enacting tragedies or farces, reciting their own verses, or in
personifying moral and esthetic sentiments by ingeniously-arranged
groups, or gorgeous habiliments. The cramoisy velvets and yellow satin
doublets of the court, the gold-brocaded mantles of priests and princes
are often but vulgar drapery of little historic worth. Such costumes
thrown around the swart figures of hard-working artisans, for literary
and artistic purposes, have a real significance, and are worthy of a
closer examination. Were not these amusements of the Netherlanders as
elevated and humanizing as the contemporary bull-fights and autos-da-fe
of Spain? What place in history does the gloomy bigot merit who, for the
love of Christ, converted all these gay cities into shambles, and changed
the glittering processions of their Land jewels into fettered marches to
the scaffold?
Thus fifteen ages have passed away, and in the place of a horde of
savages, living among swamps and thickets, swarm three millions of
people, the most industrious, the most prosperous, perhaps the most
intelligent under the sun. Their cattle, grazing on the bottom of the
sea, are the finest in Europe, their agricultural products of more
exchangeable value than if nature had made their land to overflow with
wine and oil. Their navigators are the boldest, their mercantile marine
the most powerful, their merchants the most enterprising in the world.
Holland and Flanders, peopled by one race, vie with each other in the
pursuits of civilization. The Flemish skill in the mechanical and in the
fine arts is unrivalled. Belgian musicians delight and instruct other
nations, Belgian pencils have, for a century, caused the canvas to glow
with colors and combinations never seen before. Flemish fabrics are
exported to all parts of Europe, to the East and West Indies, to Africa.
The splendid tapestries, silks, linens, as well as the more homely and
useful manufactures of the Netherlands, are prized throughout the world.
Most ingenious, as they had already been described by the keen-eyed
Caesar, in imitating the arts of other nations, the skillful artificers
of the country at Louvain, Ghent, and other places, reproduce the shawls
and silks of India with admirable accuracy.
Their national industry was untiring; their prosperity unexampled; their
love of liberty indomitable; their pugnacity proverbial. Peaceful in
their pursuits, phlegmatic by temperament, the Netherlands were yet the
most belligerent and excitable population of Europe. Two centuries of
civil war had but thinned the ranks of each generation without quenching
the hot spirit of the nation.
The women were distinguished by beauty of form and vigor of constitution.
Accustomed from childhood to converse freely with all classes and sexes
in the daily walks of life, and to travel on foot or horseback from one
town to another, without escort and without fear, they had acquired
manners more frank and independent than those of women in other lands,
while their morals were pure and their decorum undoubted. The prominent
part to be sustained by the women of Holland in many dramas of the
revolution would thus fitly devolve upon a class, enabled by nature and
education to conduct themselves with courage.
Within the little circle which encloses the seventeen provinces are 208
walled cities, many of them among the most stately in Christendom, 150
chartered towns, 6,300 villages, with their watch-towers and steeples,
besides numerous other more insignificant hamlets; the whole guarded by a
belt of sixty fortresses of surpassing strength.
XIV.
Thus in this rapid sketch of the course and development of the Netherland
nation during sixteen centuries, we have seen it ever marked by one
prevailing characteristic, one master passion--the love of liberty, the
instinct of self-government. Largely compounded of the bravest Teutonic
elements, Batavian and Frisian, the race ever battles to the death with
tyranny, organizes extensive revolts in the age of Vespasian, maintains a
partial independence even against the sagacious dominion of Charlemagne,
refuses in Friesland to accept the papal yoke or feudal chain, and,
throughout the dark ages, struggles resolutely towards the light,
wresting from a series of petty sovereigns a gradual and practical
recognition of the claims of humanity. With the advent of the Burgundian
family, the power of the commons has reached so high a point, that it is
able to measure itself, undaunted, with the spirit of arbitrary rule, of
which that engrossing and tyrannical house is the embodiment. For more
than a century the struggle for freedom, for civic life, goes on; Philip
the Good, Charles the Bold, Mary's husband Maximilian, Charles V., in
turn, assailing or undermining the bulwarks raised, age after age,
against the despotic principle. The combat is ever renewed. Liberty,
often crushed, rises again and again from her native earth with redoubled
energy. At last, in the 16th century, a new and more powerful spirit,
the genius of religious freedom, comes to participate in the great
conflict. Arbitrary power, incarnated in the second Charlemagne, assails
the new combination with unscrupulous, unforgiving fierceness. Venerable
civic magistrates; haltered, grovel in sackcloth and ashes; innocent,
religious reformers burn in holocausts. By the middle of the century,
the battle rages more fiercely than ever. In the little Netherland
territory, Humanity, bleeding but not killed, still stands at bay and
defies the hunters. The two great powers have been gathering strength
for centuries. They are soon to be matched in a longer and more
determined combat than the world had ever seen. The emperor is about to
leave the stage. The provinces, so passionate for nationality, for
municipal freedom, for religious reformation, are to become the property
of an utter stranger; a prince foreign to their blood, their tongue,
their religion, their whole habits of life and thought.
Such was the political, religious, and social condition of a nation who
were now to witness a new and momentous spectacle.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Absolution for incest was afforded at thirty-six livres
Achieved the greatness to which they had not been born
Advancing age diminished his tendency to other carnal pleasures
All his disciples and converts are to be punished with death
All reading of the scriptures (forbidden)
Altercation between Luther and Erasmus, upon predestination
An hereditary papacy, a perpetual pope-emperor
Announced his approaching marriage with the Virgin Mary
As ready as papists, with age, fagot, and excommunication
Attacking the authority of the pope
Bold reformer had only a new dogma in place of the old ones
Charles the Fifth autocrat of half the world
Condemning all heretics to death
Craft meaning, simply, strength
Criminal whose guilt had been established by the hot iron
Criminals buying Paradise for money
Crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs
Democratic instincts of the ancient German savages
Denies the utility of prayers for the dead
Difference between liberties and liberty
Dispute between Luther and Zwingli concerning the real presence
Divine right
Drank of the water in which, he had washed
Enormous wealth (of the Church) which engendered the hatred
Erasmus encourages the bold friar
Erasmus of Rotterdam
Even for the rape of God's mother, if that were possible
Executions of Huss and Jerome of Prague
Fable of divine right is invented to sanction the system
Felix Mants, the anabaptist, is drowned at Zurich
Few, even prelates were very dutiful to the pope
Fiction of apostolic authority to bind and loose
Fishermen and river raftsmen become ocean adventurers
For myself I am unworthy of the honor (of martyrdom)
Forbids all private assemblies for devotion
Force clerical--the power of clerks
Great Privilege, the Magna Charta of Holland
Guarantees of forgiveness for every imaginable sin
Halcyon days of ban, book and candle
Heresy was a plant of early growth in the Netherlands
In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats
Invented such Christian formulas as these (a curse)
July 1st, two Augustine monks were burned at Brussels
King of Zion to be pinched to death with red-hot tongs
Labored under the disadvantage of never having existed
Learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as at swordcraft
Many greedy priests, of lower rank, had turned shop-keepers
No one can testify but a householder
Not of the stuff of which martyrs are made (Erasmus)
Nowhere was the persecution of heretics more relentless
Obstinate, of both sexes, to be burned
One golden grain of wit into a sheet of infinite platitude
Pardon for crimes already committed, or about to be committed
Pardon for murder, if not by poison, was cheaper
Paying their passage through, purgatory
Poisoning, for example, was absolved for eleven ducats
Pope and emperor maintain both positions with equal logic
Power to read and write helped the clergy to much wealth
Readiness to strike and bleed at any moment in her cause
Repentant females to be buried alive
Repentant males to be executed with the sword
Sale of absolutions was the source of large fortunes to the priests
Same conjury over ignorant baron and cowardly hind
Scoffing at the ceremonies and sacraments of the Church
Sharpened the punishment for reading the scriptures in private
Slavery was both voluntary and compulsory
Soldier of the cross was free upon his return
St. Peter's dome rising a little nearer to the clouds
Tanchelyn
The bad Duke of Burgundy, Philip surnamed "the Good,"
The egg had been laid by Erasmus, hatched by Luther
The vivifying becomes afterwards the dissolving principle
Thousands of burned heretics had not made a single convert
Thus Hand-werpen, hand-throwing, became Antwerp
To prefer poverty to the wealth attendant upon trade
Tranquillity of despotism to the turbulence of freedom
Villagers, or villeins
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