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John Lothrop Motley >> The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1559 60
These disorders among the higher ranks were in reality so extensive as
to justify the biting remark of the Venetian: "The gentlemen intoxicate
themselves every day," said he, "and the ladies also; but much less than
the men." His remarks as to the morality, in other respects, of both
sexes were equally sweeping, and not more complimentary.
If these were the characteristics of the most distinguished society,
it may be supposed that they were reproduced with more or less intensity
throughout all the more remote but concentric circles of life, as far as
the seductive splendor of the court could radiate. The lesser nobles
emulated the grandees, and vied with each other in splendid
establishments, banquets, masquerades, and equipages. The natural
consequences of such extravagance followed. Their estates were
mortgaged, deeply and more deeply; then, after a few years, sold to the
merchants, or rich advocates and other gentlemen of the robe, to whom
they had been pledged. The more closely ruin stared the victims in the
face, the more heedlessly did they plunge into excesses. "Such were the
circumstances," moralizes a Catholic writer, "to which, at an earlier
period, the affairs of Catiline, Cethegus, Lentulus, and others of that
faction had been reduced, when they undertook to overthrow the Roman
republic." Many of the nobles being thus embarrassed, and some even
desperate, in their condition, it was thought that they were desirous of
creating disturbances in the commonwealth, that the payment of just debts
might be avoided, that their mortgaged lands might be wrested by main
force from the low-born individuals who had become possessed of them,
that, in particular, the rich abbey lands held by idle priests might be
appropriated to the use of impoverished gentlemen who could turn them to
so much better account. It is quite probable that interested motives
such as these were not entirely inactive among a comparatively small
class of gentlemen. The religious reformation in every land of Europe
derived a portion of its strength from the opportunity it afforded to
potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property.
No doubt many Netherlanders thought that their fortunes might be improved
at the expense of the monks, and for the benefit of religion. Even
without apostasy from the mother Church, they looked with longing eyes
on the wealth of her favored and indolent children. They thought that
the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military
commanderies out of the abbey lands, whose possessors should be bound
to military service after the ancient manner of fiefs, so that a splendid
cavalry, headed by the gentlemen of the country, should be ever ready to
mount and ride at the royal pleasure, in place of a horde of lazy
epicureans, telling beads and indulging themselves in luxurious vice.
Such views were entertained; such language often held. These
circumstances and sentiments had their influence among the causes which
produced the great revolt now impending. Care should be taken, however,
not to exaggerate that influence. It is a prodigious mistake to refer
this great historical event to sources so insufficient as the ambition of
a few great nobles, and the embarrassments of a larger number of needy
gentlemen. The Netherlands revolt was not an aristocratic, but a
popular, although certainly not a democratic movement. It was a great
episode--the longest, the darkest, the bloodiest, the most important
episode in the history of the religious reformation in Europe. The
nobles so conspicuous upon the surface at the outbreak, only drifted
before a storm which they neither caused nor controlled. Even the most
powerful and the most sagacious were tossed to and fro by the surge of
great events, which, as they rolled more and more tumultuously around
them, seemed to become both irresistible and unfathomable.
For the state of the people was very different from the condition of the
aristocracy. The period of martyrdom had lasted long and was to last
loner; but there were symptoms that it might one day be succeeded by a
more active stage of popular disease. The tumults of the Netherlands
were long in ripening; when the final outbreak came it would have been
more philosophical to enquire, not why it had occurred, but how it could
have been so long postponed. During the reign of Charles, the sixteenth
century had been advancing steadily in strength as the once omnipotent
Emperor lapsed into decrepitude. That extraordinary century had not
dawned upon the earth only to increase the strength of absolutism and
superstition. The new world had not been discovered, the ancient world
reconquered, the printing-press perfected, only that the inquisition
might reign undisturbed over the fairest portions of the earth, and
chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands. It was impossible
that the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe should not feel
sympathy with the great effort made by Christendom to shake off the
incubus which had so long paralyzed her hands and brain. In the
Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where
in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than
Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters--Waldenses, Lollards,
Hussites--had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was
inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the
deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom. In
those provinces, so industrious and energetic, the disgust was likely to
be most easily awakened for a system under which so many friars battened
in luxury upon the toils of others, contributing nothing to the taxation,
nor to the military defence of the country, exercising no productive
avocation, except their trade in indulgences, and squandering in taverns
and brothels the annual sums derived from their traffic in licences to
commit murder, incest, and every other crime known to humanity.
The people were numerous, industrious, accustomed for centuries to a
state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by
which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry. It was
natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the
concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract
character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities,
were a commercial nation. Commerce was the mother of their freedom, so
far as they had acquired it, in civil matters. It was struggling to give
birth to a larger liberty, to freedom of conscience. The provinces were
situated in the very heart of Europe. The blood of a world-wide traffic
was daily coursing through the thousand arteries of that water-in-woven
territory. There was a mutual exchange between the Netherlands and all
the world; and ideas were as liberally interchanged as goods. Truth was
imported as freely as less precious merchandise. The psalms of Marot
were as current as the drugs of Molucca or the diamonds of Borneo. The
prohibitory measures of a despotic government could not annihilate this
intellectual trade, nor could bigotry devise an effective quarantine to
exclude the religious pest which lurked in every bale of merchandise, and
was wafted on every breeze from East and West.
The edicts of the Emperor had been endured, but not accepted. The
horrible persecution under which so many thousands had sunk had produced
its inevitable result. Fertilized by all this innocent blood, the soil
of the Netherlands became as a watered garden, in which liberty, civil
and religious, was to flourish perennially. The scaffold had its daily
victims, but did not make a single convert. The statistics of these
crimes will perhaps never be accurately adjusted, nor will it be
ascertained whether the famous estimate of Grotius was an exaggerated or
an inadequate calculation. Those who love horrible details may find
ample material. The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure
martyrs; but their names, hardly pronounced in their life-time, sound
barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of fame.
Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and
suffer in this world, and for the noblest cause which can inspire
humanity. Fanatics they certainly were not, if fanaticism consists in
show, without corresponding substance. For them all was terrible
reality. The Emperor and his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake
were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the
hand and walked into the flames, or with which women sang a song of
triumph while the grave-digger was shovelling the earth upon their living
faces, was a reality also.
Thus, the people of the Netherlands were already pervaded, throughout the
whole extent of the country, with the expanding spirit of religious
reformation. It was inevitable that sooner or later an explosion was to
arrive. They were placed between two great countries, where the new
principles had already taken root. The Lutheranism of Germany and the
Calvinism of France had each its share in producing the Netherland
revolt, but a mistake is perhaps often made in estimating the relative
proportion of these several influences. The Reformation first entered
the provinces, not through the Augsburg, but the Huguenot gate. The
fiery field-preachers from the south of France first inflamed the
excitable hearts of the kindred population of the south-western
Netherlands. The Walloons were the first to rebel against and the first
to reconcile themselves with papal Rome, exactly as their Celtic
ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier, had been foremost in the revolt
against imperial Rome, and precipitate in their submission to her
overshadowing power. The Batavians, slower to be moved but more
steadfast, retained the impulse which they received from the same source
which was already agitating their "Welsh" compatriots. There were
already French preachers at Valenciennes and Tournay, to be followed,
as we shall have occasion to see, by many others. Without undervaluing
the influence of the German Churches, and particularly of the garrison-
preaching of the German military chaplains in the Netherlands, it may be
safely asserted that the early Reformers of the provinces were mainly
Huguenots in their belief: The Dutch Church became, accordingly, not
Lutheran, but Calvinistic, and the founder of the commonwealth hardly
ceased to be a nominal Catholic before he became an adherent to the same
creed.
In the mean time, it is more natural to regard the great movement,
psychologically speaking, as a whole, whether it revealed itself in
France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, or Scotland. The policy of
governments, national character, individual interests, and other
collateral circumstances, modified the result; but the great cause was
the same; the source of all the movements was elemental, natural, and
single. The Reformation in Germany had been adjourned for half a century
by the Augsburg religious peace, just concluded. It was held in suspense
in France through the Macchiavellian policy which Catharine de Medici had
just adopted, and was for several years to prosecute, of balancing one
party against the other, so as to neutralize all power but her own. The
great contest was accordingly transferred to the Netherlands, to be
fought out for the rest of the century, while the whole of Christendom
were to look anxiously for the result. From the East and from the West
the clouds rolled away, leaving a comparatively bright and peaceful
atmosphere, only that they might concentrate themselves with portentous
blackness over the devoted soil of the Netherlands. In Germany, the
princes, not the people, had conquered Rome, and to the princes, not the
people, were secured the benefits of the victory--the spoils of churches,
and the right to worship according to conscience. The people had the
right to conform to their ruler's creed, or to depart from his land.
Still, as a matter of fact, many of the princes being Reformers, a large
mass of the population had acquired the privilege for their own
generation and that of their children to practise that religion which
they actually approved. This was a fact, and a more comfortable one than
the necessity of choosing between what they considered wicked idolatry
and the stake--the only election left to their Netherland brethren. In
France, the accidental splinter from Montgomery's lance had deferred the
Huguenot massacre for a dozen years. During the period in which the
Queen Regent was resolved to play her fast and loose policy, all the
persuasions of Philip and the arts of Alva were powerless to induce her
to carry out the scheme which Henry had revealed to Orange in the forest
of Vincennes. When the crime came at last, it was as blundering as it
was bloody; at once premeditated and accidental; the isolated execution
of an interregal conspiracy, existing for half a generation, yet
exploding without concert; a wholesale massacre, but a piecemeal plot.
The aristocracy and the masses being thus, from a variety of causes, in
this agitated and dangerous condition, what were the measures of the
government?
The edict of 1550 had been re-enacted immediately after Philip's
accession to sovereignty. It is necessary that the reader should be made
acquainted with some of the leading provisions of this famous document,
thus laid down above all the constitutions as the organic law of the
land. A few plain facts, entirely without rhetorical varnish, will prove
more impressive in this case than superfluous declamation. The American
will judge whether the wrongs inflicted by Laud and Charles upon his
Puritan ancestors were the severest which a people has had to undergo,
and whether the Dutch Republic does not track its source to the same
high, religious origin as that of our own commonwealth.
"No one," said the edict, "shall print, write, copy, keep, conceal, sell,
buy or give in churches, streets, or other places, any book or writing
made by Martin Luther, John Ecolampadius, Ulrich Zwinglius, Martin Bucer,
John Calvin, or other heretics reprobated by the Holy Church; nor break,
or otherwise injure the images of the holy virgin or canonized saints....
nor in his house hold conventicles, or illegal gatherings, or be present
at any such in which the adherents of the above-mentioned heretics
teach, baptize, and form conspiracies against the Holy Church and the
general welfare..... Moreover, we forbid," continues the edict, in name
of the sovereign, "all lay persons to converse or dispute concerning the
Holy Scriptures, openly or secretly, especially on any doubtful or
difficult matters, or to read, teach, or expound the Scriptures, unless
they have duly studied theology and been approved by some renowned
university..... or to preach secretly, or openly, or to entertain any of
the opinions of the above-mentioned heretics..... on pain, should anyone
be found to have contravened any of the points above-mentioned, as
perturbators of our state and of the general quiet, to be punished in the
following manner." And how were they to be punished? What was the
penalty inflicted upon the man or woman who owned a hymn-book, or who
hazarded the opinion in private, that Luther was not quite wrong in
doubting the power of a monk to sell for money the license to commit
murder or incest; or upon the parent, not being a Roman Catholic doctor
of divinity, who should read Christ's Sermon on the Mount to his children
in his own parlor or shop? How were crimes like these to be visited upon
the transgressor? Was it by reprimand, fine, imprisonment, banishment,
or by branding on the forehead, by the cropping of the ears or the
slitting of nostrils, as was practised upon the Puritan fathers of New
England for their nonconformity? It was by a sharper chastisement than
any of these methods. The Puritan fathers of the Dutch Republic had to
struggle against a darker doom. The edict went on to provide--
"That such perturbators of the general quiet are to be executed, to wit:
the men with the sword and the women to be buried alive, if they do not
persist in their errors; if they do persist in them, then they are to be
executed with fire; all their property in both cases being confiscated to
the crown."
Thus, the clemency of the sovereign permitted the repentant heretic to be
beheaded or buried, alive, instead of being burned.
The edict further provided against all misprision of heresy by making
those who failed to betray the suspected liable to the same punishment as
if suspected or convicted themselves: "we forbid," said the decree, "all
persons to lodge, entertain, furnish with food, fire, or clothing, or
otherwise to favor any one holden or notoriously suspected of being a
heretic;..... and any one failing to denounce any such we ordain shall be
liable to the above-mentioned punishments."
The edict went on to provide, "that if any person, being not convicted of
heresy or error, but greatly suspected thereof, and therefore condemned
by the spiritual judge to abjure such heresy, or by the secular
magistrate to make public fine and reparation, shall again become
suspected or tainted with heresy--although it should not appear that he
has contravened or violated any one of our abovementioned commands--
nevertheless, we do will and ordain that such person shall be considered
as relapsed, and, as such, be punished with loss of life and property,
without any hope of moderation or mitigation of the above-mentioned
penalties."
Furthermore, it was decreed, that "the spiritual judges, desiring to
proceed against any one for the crime of heresy, shall request any of our
sovereign courts or provincial councils to appoint any one of their
college, or such other adjunct as the council shall select, to preside
over the proceedings to be instituted against the suspected. All who
know of any person tainted with heresy are required to denounce and
give them up to all judges, officers of the bishops, or others having
authority on the premises, on pain of being punished according to the
pleasure of the judge. Likewise, all shall be obliged, who know of any
place where such heretics keep themselves, to declare them to the
authorities, on pain of being held as accomplices, and punished as such
heretics themselves would be if apprehended."
In order to secure the greatest number of arrests by a direct appeal to
the most ignoble, but not the least powerful principle of human nature,
it was ordained "that the informer, in case of conviction, should be
entitled to one half the property of the accused, if not more than one
hundred pounds Flemish; if more, then ten per cent. of all such excess."
Treachery to one's friends was encouraged by the provision, "that if
any man being present at any secret conventicle, shall afterwards come
forward and betray his fellow-members of the congregation, he shall
receive full pardon."
In order that neither the good people of the Netherlands, nor the judges
and inquisitors should delude themselves with the notion that these
fanatic decrees were only intended to inspire terror, not for practical
execution, the sovereign continued to ordain--"to the end that the judges
and officers may have no reason, under pretext that the penalties are too
great and heavy and only devised to terrify delinquents, to punish them
less severely than they deserve--that the culprits be really punished by
the penalties above declared; forbidding all judges to alter or moderate
the penalties in any manner forbidding any one, of whatsoever condition,
to ask of us, or of any one having authority, to grant pardon, or to
present any petition in favor of such heretics, exiles, or fugitives, on
penalty of being declared forever incapable of civil and military office,
and of being, arbitrarily punished besides."
Such were the leading provisions of this famous edict, originally
promulgated in 1550 as a recapitulation and condensation of all the
previous ordinances of the Emperor upon religious subjects. By its style
and title it was a perpetual edict, and, according to one of its clauses,
was to be published forever, once in every six months, in every city and
village of the Netherlands. It had been promulgated at Augsburg, where
the Emperor was holding a diet, upon the 25th of September. Its severity
had so appalled the Dowager Queen of Hungary, that she had made a journey
to Augsburg expressly to procure a mitigation of some of its provisions.
The principal alteration which she was able to obtain of the Emperor was,
however, in the phraseology only. As a concession to popular, prejudice,
the words "spiritual judges" were substituted for "inquisitors" wherever
that expression had occurred in the original draft.
The edict had been re-enacted by the express advice of the Bishop of
Arras, immediately on the accession of Philip: The prelate knew the value
of the Emperor's name; he may have thought, also, that it would be
difficult to increase the sharpness of the ordinances. "I advised the
King," says Granvelle, in a letter written a few years later, "to make no
change in the placards, but to proclaim the text drawn up by the Emperor,
republishing the whole as the King's edict, with express insertion of the
phrase, 'Carolus,' etc. I recommended this lest men should calumniate
his Majesty as wishing to introduce novelties in the matter of religion."
This edict, containing the provisions which have been laid before the
reader, was now to be enforced with the utmost rigor; every official
personage, from the stadholders down, having received the most stringent
instructions to that effect, under Philip's own hand. This was the first
gift of Philip and of Granvelle to the Netherlands; of the monarch who
said of himself that he had always, "from the beginning of his
government, followed the path of clemency, according to his natural
disposition, so well known to all the world;" of the prelate who said of
himself, "that he had ever combated the opinion that any thing could be
accomplished by terror, death, and violence."
During the period of the French and Papal war, it has been seen that the
execution of these edicts had been permitted to slacken. It was now
resumed with redoubled fury. Moreover, a new measure had increased the
disaffection and dismay of the people, already sufficiently filled with
apprehension. As an additional security for the supremacy of the ancient
religion, it had been thought desirable that the number of bishops should
be increased. There were but four sees in the Netherlands, those of
Arras, Cambray, Tournay, and Utrecht. That of Utrecht was within the
archiepiscopate of Cologne; the other three were within that of Rheims.
It seemed proper that the prelates of the Netherlands should owe no
extraprovincial allegiance. It was likewise thought that three millions
of souls required more than four spiritual superintendents. At any rate,
whatever might be the interest of the flocks, it was certain that those
broad and fertile pastures would sustain more than the present number of
shepherds. The wealth of the religious houses in the provinces was very
great. The abbey of Afflighem alone had a revenue of fifty thousand
florins, and there were many others scarcely inferior in wealth. But
these institutions were comparatively independent both of King and Pope.
Electing their own superiors from time to time, in nowise desirous of any
change by which their ease might be disturbed and their riches
endangered, the honest friars were not likely to engage in any very
vigorous crusade against heresy, nor for the sake of introducing or
strengthening Spanish institutions, which they knew to be abominated by
the people, to take the risk, of driving all their disciples into revolt
and apostacy. Comforting themselves with an Erasmian philosophy, which
they thought best suited to the times, they were as little likely as the
Sage of Rotterdam himself would have been, to make martyrs of themselves
for the sake of extirpating Calvinism. The abbots and monks were, in
political matters, very much under the influence of the great nobles, in
whose company they occupied the benches of the upper house of the States-
general.
Doctor Francis Sonnius had been sent on a mission to the Pope, for the
purpose of representing the necessity of an increase in the episcopal
force of the Netherlands. Just as the King was taking his departure,
the commissioner arrived, bringing with him the Bull of Paul the Fourth,
dated May 18, 1559. This was afterwards confirmed by that of Pius the
Fourth, in January of the following year. The document stated that
"Paul the Fourth, slave of slaves, wishing to provide for the welfare of
the provinces and the eternal salvation of their inhabitants, had
determined to plant in that fruitful field several new bishoprics. The
enemy of mankind being abroad," said the Bull, "in so many forms at that
particular time, and the Netherlands, then under the sway of that beloved
son of his holiness, Philip the Catholic, being compassed about with
heretic and schismatic nations, it was believed that the eternal welfare
of the land was in great danger. At the period of the original
establishment of Cathedral churches, the provinces had been sparsely
peopled; they had now become filled to overflowing, so that the original
ecclesiastical arrangement did not suffice. The harvest was plentiful,
but the laborers were few."