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

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MOTLEY'S HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS, PG EDITION, VOLUME 1.

THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

A History

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, D.C.L., LL.D.
Corresponding Member of the Institute of France, Etc.

1855

[Etext Editor's Note: JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY, born in Dorchester, Mass.
1814, died 1877. Other works: Morton's Hopes and Merry Mount, novels.
Motley was the United States Minister to Austria, 1861-67, and the United
States Minister to England, 1869-70. Mark Twain mentions his respect
for John Motley. Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 'An Oration delivered
before the City Authorities of Boston' on the 4th of July, 1863:
"'It cannot be denied,'--says another observer, placed on one of our
national watch-towers in a foreign capital,--'it cannot be denied
that the tendency of European public opinion, as delivered from high
places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause; but the people,'
he adds, 'everywhere sympathize with us, for they know that our cause
is that of free institutions,--that our struggle is that of the
people against an oligarchy.' These are the words of the Minister to
Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage
paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most
seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the
historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life
into our own,--John Lothrop Motley." D.W.]

PREFACE

The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the
leading events of modern times. Without the birth of this great
commonwealth, the various historical phenomena of: the sixteenth and
following centuries must have either not existed; or have presented
themselves under essential modifications.--Itself an organized protest
against ecclesiastical tyranny and universal empire, the Republic guarded
with sagacity, at many critical periods in the world's history; that
balance of power which, among civilized states; ought always to be
identical with the scales of divine justice. The splendid empire of
Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty. It is a
consolation to those who have hope in humanity to watch, under the reign
of his successor, the gradual but triumphant resurrection of the spirit
over which the sepulchre had so long been sealed. From the handbreadth
of territory called the province of Holland rises a power which wages
eighty years' warfare with the most potent empire upon earth, and which,
during the progress of the struggle, becoming itself a mighty state, and
binding about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of
earth, from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees to the empire of
Charles.

So much is each individual state but a member of one great international
commonwealth, and so close is the relationship between the whole human
family, that it is impossible for a nation, even while struggling for
itself, not to acquire something for all mankind. The maintenance of the
right by the little provinces of Holland and Zealand in the sixteenth, by
Holland and England united in the seventeenth, and by the United States
of America in the eighteenth centuries, forms but a single chapter in the
great volume of human fate; for the so-called revolutions of Holland,
England, and America, are all links of one chain.

To the Dutch Republic, even more than to Florence at an earlier day, is
the world indebted for practical instruction in that great science of
political equilibrium which must always become more and more important as
the various states of the civilized world are pressed more closely
together, and as the struggle for pre-eminence becomes more feverish and
fatal. Courage and skill in political and military combinations enabled
William the Silent to overcome the most powerful and unscrupulous monarch
of his age. The same hereditary audacity and fertility of genius placed
the destiny of Europe in the hands of William's great-grandson, and
enabled him to mould into an impregnable barrier the various elements of
opposition to the overshadowing monarchy of Louis XIV. As the schemes of
the Inquisition and the unparalleled tyranny of Philip, in one century,
led to the establishment of the Republic of the United Provinces, so, in
the next, the revocation of the Nantes Edict and the invasion of Holland
are avenged by the elevation of the Dutch stadholder upon the throne of
the stipendiary Stuarts.

To all who speak the English language; the history of the great agony
through which the Republic of Holland was ushered into life must have
peculiar interest, for it is a portion of the records of the Anglo-Saxon
race--essentially the same, whether in Friesland, England, or
Massachusetts.

A great naval and commercial commonwealth, occupying a small portion of
Europe but conquering a wide empire by the private enterprise of trading
companies, girdling the world with its innumerable dependencies in Asia,
America, Africa, Australia--exercising sovereignty in Brazil, Guiana, the
West Indies, New York, at the Cape of Good Hope, in Hindostan, Ceylon,
Java, Sumatra, New Holland--having first laid together, as it were, many
of the Cyclopean blocks, out of which the British realm, at a late:
period, has been constructed--must always be looked upon with interest by
Englishmen, as in a great measure the precursor in their own scheme of
empire.

For America the spectacle is one of still deeper import. The Dutch
Republic originated in the opposition of the rational elements of human
nature to sacerdotal dogmatism and persecution--in the courageous
resistance of historical and chartered liberty to foreign despotism.
Neither that liberty nor ours was born of the cloud-embraces of a false
Divinity with, a Humanity of impossible beauty, nor was the infant career
of either arrested in blood and tears by the madness of its worshippers.
"To maintain," not to overthrow, was the device of the Washington of the
sixteenth century, as it was the aim of our own hero and his great
contemporaries.

The great Western Republic, therefore--in whose Anglo-Saxon veins flows
much of that ancient and kindred blood received from the nation once
ruling a noble portion of its territory, and tracking its own political
existence to the same parent spring of temperate human liberty--must look
with affectionate interest upon the trials of the elder commonwealth.
These volumes recite the achievement of Dutch independence, for its
recognition was delayed till the acknowledgment was superfluous and
ridiculous. The existence of the Republic is properly to be dated from
the Union of Utrecht in 1581, while the final separation of territory
into independent and obedient provinces, into the Commonwealth of the
United States and the Belgian provinces of Spain, was in reality effected
by William the Silent, with whose death three years subsequently, the
heroic period of the history may be said to terminate. At this point
these volumes close. Another series, with less attention to minute
details, and carrying the story through a longer range of years, will
paint the progress of the Republic in its palmy days, and narrate the
establishment of, its external system of dependencies and its interior
combinations for self-government and European counterpoise. The lessons
of history and the fate of free states can never be sufficiently pondered
by those upon whom so large and heavy a responsibility for the
maintenance of rational human freedom rests.

I have only to add that this work is the result of conscientious
research, and of an earnest desire to arrive at the truth. I have
faithfully studied al1 the important contemporary chroniclers and later
historians--Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, or German.
Catholic and Protestant, Monarchist and Republican, have been consulted
with the same sincerity. The works of Bor (whose enormous but
indispensable folios form a complete magazine of contemporary state-
papers, letters, and pamphlets, blended together in mass, and connected
by a chain of artless but earnest narrative), of Meteren, De Thou,
Burgundius, Heuterus; Tassis, Viglius, Hoofd, Haraeus, Van der Haer,
Grotius-of Van der Vynckt, Wagenaer, Van Wyn, De Jonghe, Kluit, Van
Kampen, Dewez, Kappelle, Bakhuyzen, Groen van Prinsterer--of Ranke and
Raumer, have been as familiar to me as those of Mendoza, Carnero,
Cabrera, Herrera, Ulloa, Bentivoglio, Peres, Strada. The manuscript
relations of those Argus-eyed Venetian envoys who surprised so many
courts and cabinets in their most unguarded moments, and daguerreotyped
their character and policy for the instruction of the crafty Republic,
and whose reports remain such an inestimable source for the secret
history of the sixteenth century, have been carefully examined--
especially the narratives of the caustic and accomplished Badovaro, of
Suriano, and Michele. It is unnecessary to add that all the publications
of M. Gachard--particularly the invaluable correspondence of Philip II.
and of William the Silent, as well as the "Archives et Correspondence" of
the Orange Nassau family, edited by the learned and distinguished Groen
van Prinsterer, have been my constant guides through the tortuous
labyrinth of Spanish and Netherland politics. The large and most
interesting series of pamphlets known as "The Duncan Collection," in the
Royal Library at the Hague, has also afforded a great variety of details
by which I have endeavoured to give color and interest to the narrative.
Besides these, and many other printed works, I have also had the
advantage of perusing many manuscript histories, among which may be
particularly mentioned the works of Pontua Payen, of Renom de France, and
of Pasquier de la Barre; while the vast collection of unpublished
documents in the Royal Archives of the Hague, of Brussels, and of
Dresden, has furnished me with much new matter of great importance.
I venture to hope that many years of labour, a portion of them in the
archives of those countries whose history forms the object of my study,
will not have been entirely in vain; and that the lovers of human
progress, the believers in the capacity of nations for self-government
and self-improvement, and the admirers of disinterested human genius and
virtue, may find encouragement for their views in the detailed history of
an heroic people in its most eventful period, and in the life and death
of the great man whose name and fame are identical with those of his
country.

No apology is offered for this somewhat personal statement. When an
unknown writer asks the attention of the public upon an important theme,
he is not only authorized, but required, to show, that by industry and
earnestness he has entitled himself to a hearing. The author too keenly
feels that he has no further claims than these, and he therefore most
diffidently asks for his work the indulgence of his readers.

I would take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to Dr. Klemm,
Hofrath and Chief Librarian at Dresden, and to Mr. Von Weber,
Ministerial-rath and Head of the Royal Archives of Saxony, for the
courtesy and kindness extended to me so uniformly during the course of my
researches in that city. I would also speak a word of sincere thanks to
Mr. Campbell, Assistant Librarian at the Hague, for his numerous acts of
friendship during the absence of, his chief, M. Holtrop. To that most
distinguished critic and historian, M. Bakhuyzen van den Brinck, Chief
Archivist of the Netherlands, I am under deep obligations for advice,
instruction, and constant kindness, during my residence at the Hague; and
I would also signify my sense of the courtesy of Mr. Charter-Master de
Schwane, and of the accuracy with which copies of MSS. in the archives
were prepared for me by his care. Finally, I would allude in the
strongest language of gratitude and respect to M. Gachard, Archivist-
General of Belgium, for his unwearied courtesy and manifold acts of
kindness to me during my studies in the Royal Archives of Brussels.

THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.

Part 1.

I.

The north-western corner of the vast plain which extends from the German
ocean to the Ural mountains, is occupied by the countries called the
Netherlands. This small triangle, enclosed between France, Germany, and
the sea, is divided by the modern kingdoms of Belgium and Holland into
two nearly equal portions. Our earliest information concerning this
territory is derived from the Romans. The wars waged by that nation with
the northern barbarians have rescued the damp island of Batavia, with its
neighboring morasses, from the obscurity in which they might have
remained for ages, before any thing concerning land or people would have
been made known by the native inhabitants. Julius Caesar has saved from,
oblivion the heroic savages who fought against his legions in defence of
their dismal homes with ferocious but unfortunate patriotism; and the
great poet of England, learning from the conqueror's Commentaries the
name of the boldest tribe, has kept the Nervii, after almost twenty
centuries, still fresh and familiar in our ears.

Tacitus, too, has described with singular minuteness the struggle between
the people of these regions and the power of Rome, overwhelming, although
tottering to its fall; and has moreover, devoted several chapters of his
work upon Germany to a description of the most remarkable Teutonic tribes
of the Netherlands.

Geographically and ethnographically, the Low Countries belong both to
Gaul and to Germany. It is even doubtful to which of the two the
Batavian island, which is the core of the whole country, was reckoned by
the Romans. It is, however, most probable that all the land, with the
exception of Friesland, was considered a part of Gaul.

Three great rivers--the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Scheld--had deposited
their slime for ages among the dunes and sand banks heaved up by the
ocean around their mouths. A delta was thus formed, habitable at last
for man. It was by nature a wide morass, in which oozy islands and
savage forests were interspersed among lagoons and shallows; a district
lying partly below the level of the ocean at its higher tides, subject to
constant overflow from the rivers, and to frequent and terrible
inundations by the sea.

The Rhine, leaving at last the regions where its storied lapse, through
so many ages, has been consecrated alike by nature and art-by poetry and
eventful truth----flows reluctantly through the basalt portal of the
Seven Mountains into the open fields which extend to the German sea.
After entering this vast meadow, the stream divides itself into two
branches, becoming thus the two-horned Rhine of Virgil, and holds in
these two arms the island of Batavia.

The Meuse, taking its rise in the Vosges, pours itself through the
Ardennes wood, pierces the rocky ridges upon the southeastern frontier of
the Low Countries, receives the Sambre in the midst of that picturesque
anthracite basin where now stands the city of Namur, and then moves
toward the north, through nearly the whole length of the country, till it
mingles its waters with the Rhine.

The Scheld, almost exclusively a Belgian river, after leaving its
fountains in Picardy, flows through the present provinces of Flanders and
Hainault. In Caesar's time it was suffocated before reaching the sea in
quicksands and thickets, which long afforded protection to the savage
inhabitants against the Roman arms; and which the slow process of nature
and the untiring industry of man have since converted into the
archipelago of Zealand and South Holland. These islands were unknown
to the Romans.

Such were the rivers, which, with their numerous tributaries, coursed
through the spongy land. Their frequent overflow, when forced back upon
their currents by the stormy sea, rendered the country almost
uninhabitable. Here, within a half-submerged territory, a race of
wretched ichthyophagi dwelt upon terpen, or mounds, which they had
raised, like beavers, above the almost fluid soil. Here, at a later day,
the same race chained the tyrant Ocean and his mighty streams into
subserviency, forcing them to fertilize, to render commodious, to cover
with a beneficent network of veins and arteries, and to bind by watery
highways with the furthest ends of the world, a country disinherited by
nature of its rights. A region, outcast of ocean and earth, wrested at
last from both domains their richest treasures. A race, engaged for
generations in stubborn conflict with the angry elements, was
unconsciously educating itself for its great struggle with the
still more savage despotism of man.

The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests. An
extensive belt of woodland skirted the sea-coast; reaching beyond the
mouths of the Rhine. Along the outer edge of this carrier, the dunes
cast up by the sea were prevented by the close tangle of thickets from
drifting further inward; and thus formed a breastwork which time and art
were to strengthen. The, groves of Haarlem and the Hague are relics of
this ancient forest. The Badahuenna wood, horrid with Druidic
sacrifices, extended along the eastern line of the vanished lake of
Flevo. The vast Hercynian forest, nine days' journey in breadth, closed
in the country on the German side, stretching from the banks of the Rhine
to the remote regions of the Dacians, in such vague immensity (says the
conqueror of the whole country) that no German, after traveling sixty
days, had ever reached, or even heard of; its commencement. On the
south, the famous groves of Ardennes, haunted by faun and satyr,
embowered the country, and separated it from Celtic Gaul.

Thus inundated by mighty rivers, quaking beneath the level of the ocean,
belted about by hirsute forests, this low land, nether land, hollow land,
or Holland, seemed hardly deserving the arms of the all-accomplished
Roman. Yet foreign tyranny, from the earliest ages, has coveted this
meagre territory as lustfully as it has sought to wrest from their native
possessors those lands with the fatal gift of beauty for their dower;
while the genius of liberty has inspired as noble a resistance to
oppression here as it ever aroused in Grecian or Italian breasts.

II.

It can never be satisfactorily ascertained who were the aboriginal
inhabitants. The record does not reach beyond Caesar's epoch, and he
found the territory on the left of the Rhine mainly tenanted by tribes of
the Celtic family. That large division of the Indo-European group which
had already overspread many portions of Asia Minor, Greece, Germany, the
British Islands, France, and Spain, had been long settled in Belgic Gaul,
and constituted the bulk of its population. Checked in its westward
movement by the Atlantic, its current began to flow backwards towards its
fountains, so that the Gallic portion of the Netherland population was
derived from the original race in its earlier wanderings and from the
later and refluent tide coming out of Celtic Gaul. The modern
appellation of the Walloons points to the affinity of their ancestors
with the Gallic, Welsh, and Gaelic family. The Belgae were in many
respects a superior race to most of their blood-allies. They were,
according to Caesar's testimony, the bravest of all the Celts. This may
be in part attributed to the presence of several German tribes, who, at
this period had already forced their way across the Rhine, mingled their
qualities with the Belgic material, and lent an additional mettle to the
Celtic blood. The heart of the country was thus inhabited by a Gallic
race, but the frontiers had been taken possession of by Teutonic tribes.

When the Cimbri and their associates, about a century before our era,
made their memorable onslaught upon Rome, the early inhabitants of the
Rhine island of Batavia, who were probably Celts, joined in the
expedition. A recent and tremendous inundation had swept away their
miserable homes, and even the trees of the forests, and had thus rendered
them still more dissatisfied with their gloomy abodes. The island was
deserted of its population. At about the same period a civil dissension
among the Chatti--a powerful German race within the Hercynian forest--
resulted in the expatriation of a portion of the people. The exiles
sought a new home in the empty Rhine island, called it "Bet-auw," or
"good-meadow," and were themselves called, thenceforward, Batavi, or
Batavians.

These Batavians, according to Tacitus, were the bravest of all the
Germans. The Chatti, of whom they formed a portion, were a pre-eminently
warlike race. "Others go to battle," says the historian, "these go to
war." Their bodies were more hardy, their minds more vigorous, than
those of other tribes. Their young men cut neither hair nor beard till
they had slain an enemy. On the field of battle, in the midst of carnage
and plunder, they, for the first time, bared their faces. The cowardly
and sluggish, only, remained unshorn. They wore an iron ring, too, or
shackle upon their necks until they had performed the same achievement,
a symbol which they then threw away, as the emblem of sloth. The
Batavians were ever spoken of by the Romans with entire respect. They
conquered the Belgians, they forced the free Frisians to pay tribute, but
they called the Batavians their friends. The tax-gatherer never invaded
their island. Honorable alliance united them with the Romans. It was,
however, the alliance of the giant and the dwarf. The Roman gained glory
and empire, the Batavian gained nothing but the hardest blows. The
Batavian cavalry became famous throughout the Republic and the Empire.
They were the favorite troops of Caesar, and with reason, for it was
their valor which turned the tide of battle at Pharsalia. From the death
of Julius down to the times of Vespasian, the Batavian legion was the
imperial body guard, the Batavian island the basis of operations in the
Roman wars with Gaul, Germany, and Britain.

Beyond the Batavians, upon the north, dwelt the great Frisian family,
occupying the regions between the Rhine and Ems, The Zuyder Zee and the
Dollart, both caused by the terrific inundations of the thirteenth
century and not existing at this period, did not then interpose
boundaries between kindred tribes. All formed a homogeneous nation of
pure German origin.

Thus, the population of the country was partly Celtic, partly German.
Of these two elements, dissimilar in their tendencies and always
difficult to blend, the Netherland people has ever been compounded.
A certain fatality of history has perpetually helped to separate still
more widely these constituents, instead of detecting and stimulating the
elective affinities which existed. Religion, too, upon all great
historical occasions, has acted as the most powerful of dissolvents.
Otherwise, had so many valuable and contrasted characteristics been early
fused into a whole, it would be difficult to show a race more richly
endowed by Nature for dominion and progress than the Belgo-Germanic
people.

Physically the two races resembled each other. Both were of vast
stature. The gigantic Gaul derided the Roman soldiers as a band of
pigmies. The German excited astonishment by his huge body and muscular
limbs. Both were fair, with fierce blue eyes, but the Celt had yellow
hair floating over his shoulders, and the German long locks of fiery red,
which he even dyed with woad to heighten the favorite color, and wore
twisted into a war-knot upon the top of his head. Here the German's love
of finery ceased. A simple tunic fastened at his throat with a thorn,
while his other garments defined and gave full play to his limbs,
completed his costume. The Gaul, on the contrary, was so fond of dress
that the Romans divided his race respectively into long-haired, breeched,
and gowned Gaul; (Gallia comata, braccata, togata). He was fond of
brilliant and parti-colored clothes, a taste which survives in the
Highlander's costume. He covered his neck and arms with golden chains.
The simple and ferocious German wore no decoration save his iron ring,
from which his first homicide relieved him. The Gaul was irascible,
furious in his wrath, but less formidable in a sustained conflict with a
powerful foe. "All the Gauls are of very high stature," says a soldier
who fought under Julian. (Amm. Marcel. xv. 12. 1). "They are white,
golden-haired, terrible in the fierceness of their eyes, greedy of
quarrels, bragging and insolent. A band of strangers could not resist
one of them in a brawl, assisted by his strong blue-eyed wife, especially
when she begins, gnashing her teeth, her neck swollen, brandishing her
vast and snowy arms, and kicking with her heels at the same time, to
deliver her fisticuffs, like bolts from the twisted strings of a
catapult. The voices of many are threatening and formidable. They are
quick to anger, but quickly appeased. All are clean in their persons;
nor among them is ever seen any man or woman, as elsewhere, squalid in
ragged garments. At all ages they are apt for military service. The old
man goes forth to the fight with equal strength of breast, with limbs as
hardened by cold and assiduous labor, and as contemptuous of all dangers,
as the young. Not one of them, as in Italy is often the case, was ever
known to cut off his thumbs to avoid the service of Mars."

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