Books: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1573
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John Lothrop Motley >> The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1573
Having thus flashed before the eyes of the country the full terrors of
his name, and vindicated the ancient military renown of his nation, the
Duke was at liberty to employ the consummate tactics, in which he could
have given instruction to all the world, against his most formidable
antagonist. The country, paralyzed with fear, looked anxiously but
supinely upon the scientific combat between the two great champions of
Despotism and Protestantism which succeeded. It was soon evident that
the conflict could terminate in but one way. The Prince had considerable
military abilities, and enthusiastic courage; he lost none of his well-
deserved reputation by the unfortunate issue of his campaign; he measured
himself in arms with the great commander of the age, and defied him, day
after day, in vain, to mortal combat; but it was equally certain that the
Duke's quiet game was, played in the most masterly manner. His positions
and his encampments were taken with faultless judgment, his skirmishes
wisely and coldly kept within the prescribed control, while the
inevitable dissolution of the opposing force took place exactly as he had
foreseen, and within the limits which he had predicted. Nor in the
disastrous commencement of the year 1572 did the Duke less signally
manifest his military genius. Assailed as he was at every point, with
the soil suddenly upheaving all around him, as by an earthquake, he did
not lose his firmness nor his perspicacity. Certainly, if he had not
been so soon assisted by that other earthquake, which on Saint
Bartholomew's Day caused all Christendom to tremble, and shattered the
recent structure of Protestant Freedom in the Netherlands, it might have
been worse for his reputation. With Mons safe, the Flemish frontier
guarded; France faithful, and thirty thousand men under the Prince of
Orange in Brabant, the heroic brothers might well believe that the Duke
was "at their mercy." The treason of Charles IX. "smote them as with a
club," as the Prince exclaimed in the bitterness of his spirit. Under
the circumstances, his second campaign was a predestined failure, and
Alva easily vanquished him by a renewed application of those dilatory
arts which he so well understood.
The Duke's military fame was unquestionable when he came to the
provinces, and both in stricken fields and in long campaigns, he showed
how thoroughly it had been deserved; yet he left the Netherlands a
baffled man. The Prince might be many times defeated, but he was not to
be conquered. As Alva penetrated into the heart of the ancient Batavian
land he found himself overmatched as he had never been before, even by
the most potent generals of his day. More audacious, more inventive,
more desperate than all the commanders of that or any other age, the
spirit of national freedom, now taught the oppressor that it was
invincible; except by annihilation. The same lesson had been read in the
same thickets by the Nervii to Julius Caesar, by the Batavians to the
legions of Vespasian; and now a loftier and a purer flame than that which
inspired the national struggles against Rome glowed within the breasts of
the descendants of the same people, and inspired them with the strength
which comes, from religious enthusiasm. More experienced, more subtle,
more politic than Hermann; more devoted, more patient, more magnanimous
than Civilis, and equal to either in valor and determination, William of
Orange was a worthy embodiment of the Christian, national resistance of
the German race to a foreign tyranny. Alva had entered the Netherlands
to deal with them as with conquered provinces. He found that the
conquest was still to be made, and he left the land without having
accomplished it. Through the sea of blood, the Hollanders felt that they
were passing to the promised land. More royal soldiers fell during the
seven months' siege of Harlem than the rebels had lost in the defeat of
Jemmingen, and in the famous campaign of Brabant. At Alkmaar the rolling
waves of insolent conquest were stayed, and the tide then ebbed for ever.
The accomplished soldier struggled hopelessly, with the wild and
passionate hatred which his tyranny had provoked. Neither his legions
nor his consummate strategy availed him against an entirely desperate
people. As a military commander, therefore, he gained, upon the whole,
no additional laurels during his long administration of the Netherlands.
Of all the other attributes to be expected in a man appointed to deal
with a free country, in a state of incipient rebellion, he manifested a
signal deficiency. As a financier, he exhibited a wonderful ignorance of
the first principles of political economy. No man before, ever gravely
proposed to establish confiscation as a permanent source of revenue to
the state; yet the annual product from the escheated property of
slaughtered heretics was regularly relied upon, during his
administration, to replenish the King's treasury, and to support
the war of extermination against the King's subjects. Nor did statesman
ever before expect a vast income from the commerce of a nation devoted to
almost universal massacre. During the daily decimation of the people's
lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible. His
persecutions swept the land of those industrious classes which had made
it the rich and prosperous commonwealth it had been so lately; while,
at the same time, he found a "Peruvian mine," as he pretended, in the
imposition of a tenth penny upon every one of its commercial
transactions. He thought that a people, crippled as this had been by the
operations of the Blood Council; could pay ten per cent., not annually
but daily; not upon its income, but upon its capital; not once only, but
every time the value constituting the capital changed hands. He had
boasted that he should require no funds from Spain, but that, on the
contrary, he should make annual remittances to the royal treasury at
home, from the proceeds of his imposts and confiscations; yet,
notwithstanding these resources, and notwithstanding twenty-five millions
of gold in five years, sent by Philip from Madrid, the exchequer of the
provinces was barren and bankrupt when his successor arrived. Requesens
found neither a penny in the public treasury nor the means of raising
one.
As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of the country,
Alva at once reduced its institutions to a frightful simplicity. In the
place of the ancient laws of which the Netherlanders were so proud, he
substituted the Blood Council. This tribunal was even more arbitrary
than the Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny devised,
than this great labor-saving machine. Never was so great a, quantity of
murder and robbery achieved with such despatch and regularity.
Sentences, executions, and confiscations, to an incredible extent, were
turned out daily with appalling precision. For this invention, Alva is
alone responsible. The tribunal and its councillors were the work and
the creatures of his hand, and faithfully did they accomplish the dark
purpose of their existence. Nor can it be urged, in extenuation of the
Governor's crimes, that he was but the blind and fanatically loyal slave
of his sovereign. A noble nature could not have contaminated itself with
such slaughter-house work, but might have sought to mitigate the royal
policy, without forswearing allegiance. A nature less rigid than iron,
would at least have manifested compunction, as it found itself converted
into a fleshless instrument of massacre. More decided than his master,
however, he seemed, by his promptness, to rebuke the dilatory genius of
Philip. The King seemed, at times, to loiter over his work, teasing and
tantalising his appetite for vengeance, before it should be gratified:
Alva, rapid and brutal, scorned such epicureanism. He strode with
gigantic steps over haughty statutes and popular constitutions; crushing
alike the magnates who claimed a bench of monarchs for their jury, and
the ignoble artisans who could appeal only to the laws of their land.
From the pompous and theatrical scaffolds of Egmont and Horn, to the
nineteen halters prepared by Master Karl, to hang up the chief bakers and
brewers of Brussels on their own thresholds--from the beheading of the
twenty nobles on the Horse-market, in the opening of the Governor's
career, to the roasting alive of Uitenhoove at its close-from the block
on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair
in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act
of vicarious mercy--from one year's end to another's--from the most
signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the
great master directed, without weariness, the task imposed by the
sovereign.
No doubt the work of almost indiscriminate massacre had been duly mapped
out. Not often in history has a governor arrived to administer the
affairs of a province, where the whole population, three millions strong,
had been formally sentenced to death. As time wore on, however, he even
surpassed the bloody instructions which he had received. He waved aside
the recommendations of the Blood Council to mercy; he dissuaded the
monarch from attempting the path of clemency, which, for secret reasons,
Philip was inclined at one period to attempt. The Governor had, as he
assured the King, been using gentleness in vain, and he was now
determined to try what a little wholesome severity could effect. These
words were written immediately after the massacres at Harlem.
With all the bloodshed at Mons, and Naarden, and Mechlin, and by the
Council of Tumults, daily, for six years long, still crying from the
ground, he taxed himself with a misplaced and foolish tenderness to the
people. He assured the King that when Alkmaar should be taken, he would,
not spare a "living soul among its whole population;" and, as his parting
advice, he recommended that every city in the Netherlands should be
burned to the ground, except a few which could he occupied permanently by
the royal troops. On the whole, so finished a picture of a perfect and
absolute tyranny has rarely been presented to mankind by history, as in
Alva's administration of the Netherlands.
The tens of thousands in those miserable provinces who fell victims to
the gallows, the sword, the stake, the living grave, or to living
banishment, have never been counted; for those statistics of barbarity
are often effaced from human record. Enough, however, is known, and
enough has been recited in the preceding pages. No mode in which human
beings have ever caused their fellow-creatures to suffer, was omitted
from daily practice. Men, women, and children, old and young, nobles
and paupers, opulent burghers, hospital patients, lunatics, dead bodies,
all were indiscriminately made to furnish food for-the scaffold and the
stake. Men were tortured, beheaded, hanged by the neck and by the legs,
burned before slow fires, pinched to death with red hot tongs, broken
upon the wheel, starved, and flayed alive. Their skins stripped from the
living body, were stretched upon drums, to be beaten in the march of
their brethren to the gallows. The bodies of many who had died a natural
death were exhumed, and their festering remains hanged upon the gibbet,
on pretext that they had died without receiving the sacrament, but in
reality that their property might become the legitimate prey of the
treasury. Marriages of long standing were dissolved by order of
government, that rich heiresses might be married against their will to
foreigners whom they abhorred. Women and children were executed for the
crime of assisting their fugitive husbands and parents with a penny in
their utmost need, and even for consoling them with a letter, in their
exile. Such was the regular course of affairs as administered by the
Blood Council. The additional barbarities committed amid the sack and
ruin of those blazing and starving cities, are almost beyond belief;
unborn infants were torn from the living bodies of their mothers; women
and children were violated by thousands; and whole populations burned and
hacked to pieces by soldiers in every mode which cruelty, in its wanton
ingenuity, could devise. Such was the administration, of which Vargas
affirmed, at its close, that too much mercy, "nimia misericordia," had
been its ruin.
Even Philip, inspired by secret views, became wearied of the Governor,
who, at an early period, had already given offence by his arrogance.
To commemorate his victories, the Viceroy had erected a colossal statue,
not to his monarch, but to himself. To proclaim the royal pardon, he had
seated himself upon a golden throne. Such insolent airs could be ill
forgiven by the absolute King. Too cautious to provoke an open rupture,
he allowed the Governor, after he had done all his work, and more than
all his work, to retire without disgrace, but without a triumph. For the
sins of that administration, master and servant are in equal measure
responsible.
The character of the Duke of Alva, so far as the Netherlands are
concerned, seems almost like a caricature. As a creation of fiction, it
would seem grotesque: yet even that hardy, historical scepticism, which
delights in reversing the judgment of centuries, and in re-establishing
reputations long since degraded to the dust, must find it difficult to
alter this man's position. No historical decision is final; an appeal to
a more remote posterity, founded upon more accurate evidence, is always
valid; but when the verdict has been pronounced upon facts which are
undisputed, and upon testimony from the criminal's lips, there is
little chance of a reversal of the sentence. It is an affectation
of philosophical candor to extenuate vices which are not only avowed,
but claimed as virtues.
[The time is past when it could be said that the cruelty of Alva, or
the enormities of his administration, have been exaggerated by party
violence. Human invention is incapable of outstripping the truth
upon this subject. To attempt the defence of either the man or his
measures at the present day is to convict oneself of an amount of
ignorance or of bigotry against which history and argument are alike
powerless. The publication of the Duke's letters in the
correspondence of Simancas and in the Besancon papers, together with
that compact mass of horror, long before the world under the title
of "Sententien van Alva," in which a portion only of the sentences
of death and banishment pronounced by him during his reign, have
been copied from the official records--these in themselves would be
a sufficient justification of all the charges ever brought by the
most bitter contemporary of Holland or Flanders. If the
investigator should remain sceptical, however, let him examine the
"Registre des Condamnes et Bannia a Cause des Troubles des Pays
Bas," in three, together with the Records of the "Conseil des
Troubles," in forty-three folio volumes, in the Royal Archives at
Brussels. After going through all these chronicles of iniquity, the
most determined historic, doubter will probably throw up the case.]
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