Books: The Rise of the Dutch Republic, Introduction II.

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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.

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