V.

Obscure but important movements in the regions of eternal twilight,

revolutions, of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths

of Asia, outpourings of human rivets along the sides of the Altai

mountains, convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties,

shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying

upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as

precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire--as dying symptoms of the

proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of

sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hovering

with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and

perpetually reappearing in ever-increasing swarms, guided thither by a

fierce instinct, or by mysterious laws--such are the well known phenomena

which preceded the fall of western Rome. Stately, externally powerful,

although undermined and putrescent at the core, the death-stricken empire

still dashed back the assaults of its barbarous enemies.

During the long struggle intervening between the age of Vespasian and

that of Odoacer, during all the preliminary ethnographical revolutions

which preceded the great people's wandering, the Netherlands remained

subject provinces. Their country was upon the high road which led the

Goths to Rome. Those low and barren tracts were the outlying marches of

the empire. Upon that desolate beach broke the first surf from the

rising ocean of German freedom which was soon to overwhelm Rome. Yet,

although the ancient landmarks were soon well nigh obliterated, the

Netherlands still remained faithful to the Empire, Batavian blood was

still poured out for its defence.

By the middle of the fourth century, the Franks and Allemanians, alle-

mannez, all-men, a mass of united Germans are defeated by the Emperor

Julian at Strasburg, the Batavian cavalry, as upon many other great

occasions, saving the day for despotism. This achievement, one of the

last in which the name appears upon historic record, was therefore as

triumphant for the valor as it was humiliating to the true fame of the

nation. Their individuality soon afterwards disappears, the race having

been partly exhausted in the Roman service, partly merged in the Frank

and Frisian tribes who occupy the domains of their forefathers.

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the

swarming nations are now in full career. The Netherlands are

successively or simultaneously trampled by Franks, Vandals, Alani, Suevi,

Saxons, Frisians, and even Sclavonians, as the great march of Germany to

universal empire, which her prophets and bards had foretold, went

majestically forward. The fountains of the frozen North were opened,

the waters prevailed, but the ark of Christianity floated upon the flood.

As the deluge assuaged, the earth had returned to chaos, the last pagan

empire had been washed out of existence, but the dimly, groping,

faltering, ignorant infancy of Christian Europe had begun.

After the wanderings had subsided, the Netherlands are found with much

the same ethnological character as before. The Frank dominion has

succeeded the Roman, the German stock preponderates over the Celtic, but

the national ingredients, although in somewhat altered proportions,

remain essentially the same. The old Belgae, having become Romanized in

tongue and customs, accept the new Empire of the Franks. That people,

however, pushed from their hold of the Rhine by thickly thronging hordes

of Gepidi, Quadi, Sarmati, Heruli, Saxons, Burgundians, move towards the

South and West. As the Empire falls before Odoacer, they occupy Celtic

Gaul with the Belgian portion of the Netherlands; while the Frisians,

into which ancient German tribe the old Batavian element has melted, not

to be extinguished, but to live a renovated existence, the "free

Frisians;" whose name is synonymous with liberty, nearest blood relations

of the Anglo-Saxon race, now occupy the northern portion, including the

whole future European territory of the Dutch republic.

The history of the Franks becomes, therefore, the history of the

Netherlands. The Frisians struggle, for several centuries, against their

dominion, until eventually subjugated by Charlemagne. They even encroach

upon the Franks in Belgic Gaul, who are determined not to yield their

possessions. Moreover, the pious Merovingian faineans desire to plant

Christianity among the still pagan Frisians. Dagobert, son of the second

Clotaire, advances against them as far as the Weser, takes possession of

Utrecht, founds there the first Christian church in Friesland, and

establishes a nominal dominion over the whole country.

Yet the feeble Merovingians would have been powerless against rugged

Friesland, had not their dynasty already merged in that puissant family

of Brabant, which long wielded their power before it assumed their crown.

It was Pepin of Heristal, grandson of the Netherlander, Pepin of Landen,

who conquered the Frisian Radbod (A.D. 692), and forced him to exchange

his royal for the ducal title.

It was Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, whose tremendous blows

completed his father's work. The new mayor of the palace soon drove the

Frisian chief into submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's

indiscretion, however, neutralized the apostolic blows of the mayor. The

pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal

font, when a thought struck him. "Where are my dead forefathers at

present?" he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. "In Hell, with

all other unbelievers," was the imprudent answer. "Mighty well," replied

Radbod, removing his leg, "then will I rather feast with my ancestors in

the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling hand of

Christians in Heaven." Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The

Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal

separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a

heathen. His son, Poppa, succeeding to the nominal sovereignty, did not

actively oppose the introduction of Christianity among his people, but

himself refused to be converted. Rebelling against the Frank dominion,

he was totally routed by Charles Martell in a great battle (A.D.750) and

perished with a vast number of Frisians. The Christian dispensation,

thus enforced, was now accepted by these northern pagans. The

commencement of their conversion had been mainly the work of their

brethren from Britain. The monk Wilfred was followed in a few years by

the Anglo-Saxon Willibrod. It was he who destroyed the images of Woden

in Walcheren, abolished his worship, and founded churches in North

Holland. Charles Martell rewarded him. with extensive domains about

Utrecht, together with many slaves and other chattels. Soon afterwards

he was consecrated Bishop of all the Frisians. Thus rose the famous

episcopate of Utrecht. Another Anglo-Saxon, Winfred, or Bonifacius, had

been equally active among his Frisian cousins. His crozier had gone hand

in hand with the battle-axe. Bonifacius followed close upon the track of

his orthodox coadjutor Charles. By the middle of the eighth century,

some hundred thousand Frisians had been slaughtered, and as many more

converted. The hammer which smote the Saracens at Tours was at last

successful in beating the Netherlanders into Christianity. The labors of

Bonifacius through Upper and Lower Germany were immense; but he, too,

received great material rewards. He was created Archbishop of Mayence,

and, upon the death of Willibrod, Bishop of Utrecht. Faithful to his

mission, however, he met, heroically, a martyr's death at the hands of

the refractory pagans at Dokkum. Thus was Christianity established in

the Netherlands.

Under Charlemagne, the Frisians often rebelled, making common cause with

the Saxons. In 785, A.D., they were, however, completely subjugated, and

never rose again until the epoch of their entire separation from the

Frank empire. Charlemagne left them their name of free Frisians, and the

property in their own land. The feudal system never took root in their

soil. "The Frisians," says their statute book; "shall be free, as long

as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." They agreed,

however, to obey the chiefs whom the Frank monarch should appoint to

govern them, according to their own laws. Those laws were collected, and

are still extant. The vernacular version of their Asega book contains

their ancient customs, together with the Frank additions. The general

statutes of Charlemagne were, of course, in vigor also; but that great

legislator knew too well the importance attached by all mankind to local

customs, to allow his imperial capitulara to interfere, unnecessarily,

with the Frisian laws.

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome,

were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united,

in their slavery to Rome. Eight centuries pass away, and they are again

united, in subjection to Charlemagne. Their union was but in forming a

single link in the chain of a new realm. The reign of Charlemagne had at

last accomplished the promise of the sorceress Velleda and other

soothsayers. A German race had re-established the empire of the world.

The Netherlands, like-the other provinces of the great monarch's

dominion, were governed by crown-appointed functionaries, military and

judicial. In the northeastern, or Frisian portion, however; the grants

of land were never in the form of revocable benefices or feuds. With

this important exception, the whole country shared the fate, and enjoyed

the general organization of the Empire.

But Charlemagne came an age too soon. The chaos which had brooded over

Europe since the dissolution of the Roman world, was still too absolute.

It was not to be fashioned into permanent forms, even by his bold and

constructive genius. A soil, exhausted by the long culture of Pagan

empires, was to lie fallow for a still longer period. The discordant

elements out of which the Emperor had compounded his realm, did not

coalesce during his life-time. They were only held together by the

vigorous grasp of the hand which had combined them. When the great

statesman died, his Empire necessarily fell to pieces. Society had need

of farther disintegration before it could begin to reconstruct itself

locally. A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

When did one man ever civilize a people? In the eighth and ninth

centuries there was not even a people to be civilized. The construction

of Charles was, of necessity, temporary. His Empire was supported by

artificial columns, resting upon the earth, which fell prostrate almost

as soon as the hand of their architect was cold. His institutions had

not struck down into the soil. There were no extensive and vigorous

roots to nourish, from below, a flourishing Empire through time and

tempest.

Moreover, the Carlovingian race had been exhausted by producing a race

of heroes like the Pepins and the Charleses. The family became, soon,

as contemptible as the ox-drawn, long-haired "do-nothings" whom it had

expelled; but it is not our task to describe the fortunes of the

Emperor's ignoble descendants. The realm was divided, sub-divided, at

times partially reunited, like a family farm, among monarchs incompetent

alike to hold, to delegate, or--to resign the inheritance of the great

warrior and lawgiver. The meek, bald, fat, stammering, simple Charles,

or Louis, who successively sat upon his throne--princes, whose only

historic individuality consists in these insipid appellations--had not

the sense to comprehend, far less to develop, the plans of their

ancestor.

Charles the Simple was the last Carlovingian who governed Lotharingia,

in which were comprised most of the Netherlands and Friesland. The

German monarch, Henry the Fowler, at that period called King of the East

Franks, as Charles of the West Franks, acquired Lotharingia by the treaty

of Bonn, Charles reserving the sovereignty over the kingdom during his

lifetime. In 925, A.D., however, the Simpleton having been imprisoned

and deposed by his own subjects, the Fowler was recognized King, of

Lotharingia. Thus the Netherlands passed out of France into Germany,

remaining, still, provinces of a loose, disjointed Empire.

This is the epoch in which the various dukedoms, earldoms, and other

petty sovereignties of the Netherlands became hereditary. It was in the

year 922 that Charles the Simple presented to Count Dirk the territory of

Holland, by letters patent. This narrow hook of land, destined, in

future ages, to be the cradle of a considerable empire, stretching

through both hemispheres, was, thenceforth, the inheritance of Dirk's

descendants. Historically, therefore, he is Dirk I., Count of Holland.

Of this small sovereign and his successors, the most powerful foe for

centuries was ever the Bishop of Utrecht, the origin of whose greatness

has been already indicated. Of the other Netherland provinces, now or

before become hereditary, the first in rank was Lotharingia, once the

kingdom of Lothaire, now the dukedom of Lorraine. In 965 it was divided

into Upper and Lower Lorraine, of which the lower duchy alone belonged to

the Netherlands. Two centuries later, the Counts of Louvain, then

occupying most of Brabant, obtained a permanent hold of Lower Lorraine,

and began to call themselves Dukes of Brabant. The same principle of

local independence and isolation which created these dukes, established

the hereditary power of the counts and barons who formerly exercised

jurisdiction under them and others. Thus arose sovereign Counts of

Namur, Hainault, Limburg, Zutphen, Dukes of Luxemburg and Gueldres,

Barons of Mechlin, Marquesses of Antwerp, and others; all petty

autocrats. The most important of all, after the house of Lorraine,

were the Earls of Flanders; for the bold foresters of Charles the Great

had soon wrested the sovereignty of their little territory from his

feeble descendants as easily as Baldwin, with the iron arm, had deprived

the bald Charles of his daughter. Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overyssel,

Groningen, Drenthe and Friesland (all seven being portions of Friesland

in a general sense), were crowded together upon a little desolate corner

of Europe; an obscure fragment of Charlemagne's broken empire. They were

afterwards to constitute the United States of the Netherlands, one of the

most powerful republics of history. Meantime, for century after century,

the Counts of Holland and the Bishops of Utrecht were to exercise divided

sway over the territory.

Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of

sovereignty. The separate history of such half-organized morsels is

tedious and petty. Trifling dynasties, where a family or two were every

thing, the people nothing, leave little worth recording. Even the most

devout of genealogists might shudder to chronicle the long succession of

so many illustrious obscure.

A glance, however, at the general features of the governmental system now

established in the Netherlands, at this important epoch in the world's

history, will show the transformations which the country, in common with

other portions of the western world, had undergone.

In the tenth century the old Batavian and later Roman forms have faded

away. An entirely new polity has succeeded. No great popular assembly

asserts its sovereignty, as in the ancient German epoch; no generals and

temporary kings are chosen by the nation. The elective power had been

lost under the Romans, who, after conquest, had conferred the

administrative authority over their subject provinces upon officials

appointed by the metropolis. The Franks pursued the same course.

In Charlemagne's time, the revolution is complete. Popular assemblies

and popular election entirely vanish. Military, civil, and judicial

officers-dukes, earls, margraves, and others--are all king's creatures,

'knegton des konings, pueri regis', and so remain, till they abjure the

creative power, and set up their own. The principle of Charlemagne,

that his officers should govern according to local custom, helps them

to achieve their own independence, while it preserves all that is left

of national liberty and law.

The counts, assisted by inferior judges, hold diets from time to time--

thrice, perhaps, annually. They also summon assemblies in case of war.

Thither are called the great vassals, who, in turn, call their lesser

vassals; each armed with "a shield, a spear, a bow, twelve arrows, and a

cuirass." Such assemblies, convoked in the name of a distant sovereign,

whose face his subjects had never seen, whose language they could hardly

understand, were very different from those tumultuous mass-meetings,

where boisterous freemen, armed with the weapons they loved the best,

and arriving sooner or later, according to their pleasure, had been

accustomed to elect their generals and magistrates and to raise them upon

their shields. The people are now governed, their rulers appointed by an

invisible hand. Edicts, issued by a power, as it were, supernatural,

demand implicit obedience. The people, acquiescing in their own

annihilation, abdicate not only their political but their personal

rights. On the other hand, the great source of power diffuses less and

less of light and warmth. Losing its attractive and controlling

influence, it becomes gradually eclipsed, while its satellites fly from

their prescribed bounds and chaos and darkness return. The sceptre,

stretched over realms so wide, requires stronger hands than those of

degenerate Carlovingians. It breaks asunder. Functionaries become

sovereigns, with hereditary, not delegated, right to own the people, to

tax their roads and rivers, to take tithings of their blood and sweat, to

harass them in all the relations of life. There is no longer a

metropolis to protect them from official oppression. Power, the more

sub-divided, becomes the more tyrannical. The sword is the only symbol

of law, the cross is a weapon of offence, the bishop is a consecrated

pirate, every petty baron a burglar, while the people, alternately the

prey of duke, prelate, and seignor, shorn and butchered like sheep,

esteem it happiness to sell themselves into slavery, or to huddle beneath

the castle walls of some little potentate, for the sake of his wolfish

protection. Here they build hovels, which they surround from time to

time with palisades and muddy entrenchments; and here, in these squalid

abodes of ignorance and misery, the genius of Liberty, conducted by the

spirit of Commerce, descends at last to awaken mankind from its sloth and

cowardly stupor. A longer night was to intervene; however, before the

dawn of day.

The crown-appointed functionaries had been, of course, financial

officers. They collected the revenue of the sovereign, one third of

which slipped through their fingers into their own coffers. Becoming

sovereigns themselves, they retain these funds for their private

emolument. Four principal sources yielded this revenue: royal domains,

tolls and imposts, direct levies and a pleasantry called voluntary

contributions or benevolences. In addition to these supplies were also

the proceeds of fines. Taxation upon sin was, in those rude ages, a

considerable branch of the revenue. The old Frisian laws consisted

almost entirely of a discriminating tariff upon crimes. Nearly all the

misdeeds which man is prone to commit, were punished by a money-bote

only. Murder, larceny, arson, rape--all offences against the person

were commuted for a definite price. There were a few exceptions,

such as parricide, which was followed by loss of inheritance; sacrilege

and the murder of a master by a slave, which were punished with death.

It is a natural inference that, as the royal treasury was enriched by

these imposts, the sovereign would hardly attempt to check the annual

harvest of iniquity by which his revenue was increased. Still, although

the moral sense is shocked by a system which makes the ruler's interest

identical with the wickedness of his people, and holds out a comparative

immunity in evil-doing for the rich, it was better that crime should be

punished by money rather than not be punished at all. A severe tax,

which the noble reluctantly paid and which the penniless culprit commuted

by personal slavery, was sufficiently unjust as well as absurd, yet it

served to mitigate the horrors with which tumult, rapine, and murder

enveloped those early days. Gradually, as the light of reason broke upon

the dark ages, the most noxious features of the system were removed,

while the general sentiment of reverence for law remained.