Vote of the States-General on the groundwork of the treaty--
Meeting of the plenipotentiaries for arrangement of the truce--
Signing of the twelve years' truce--Its purport--The negotiations
concluded--Ratification by the States-General, the Archdukes, and
the King of Spain--Question of toleration--Appeal of President
Jeannin on behalf of the Catholics--Religious liberty the fruit of
the war--Internal arrangements of the States under the rule of
peace--Deaths of John Duke of Cleves and Jacob Arminius--Doctrines
of Arminius and Gomarus--Theological warfare--Twenty years' truce
between the Turkish and Roman empires--Ferdinand of Styria--
Religious peace--Prospects of the future.
On the 11th January, 1609, the States-General decided by unanimous vote
that the first point in the treaty should be not otherwise fixed than,
thus:--
"That the archdukes--to superfluity--declare, as well in their own name
as in that of the King of Spain, their willingness to treat with the
lords States of the United Provinces in the capacity of, and as holding
them for, free countries, provinces, and states, over which they have no
claim, and that they are making a treaty with them in those said names
and qualities."
It was also resolved not to permit that any ecclesiastical or secular
matters, conflicting with the above-mentioned freedom, should be
proposed; nor that any delay should be sought for, by reason of the India
navigation or any other point.
In case anything to the contrary should be attempted by the king or the
archdukes, and the deliberations protracted in consequence more than
eight days, it was further decided by unanimous vote that the
negotiations should at once be broken off, and the war forthwith renewed,
with the help, if possible, of the kings, princes, and states, friends of
the good cause.
This vigorous vote was entirely the work of Barneveld, the man whom his
enemies dared to denounce as the partisan of Spain, and to hold up as a
traitor deserving of death. It was entirely within his knowledge that a
considerable party in the provinces had grown so weary of the war, and so
much alarmed at the prospect of the negotiations for truce coming to
nought, as to be ready to go into a treaty without a recognition of the
independence of the States. This base faction was thought to be
instigated by the English Government, intriguing secretly with President
Richardot. The Advocate, acting in full sympathy with Jeannin, frustrated
the effects of the manoeuvre by obtaining all the votes of Holland and
Zeeland for this supreme resolution. The other five provinces dared to
make no further effort in that direction against the two controlling
states of the republic.
It was now agreed that the French and English ambassadors should delay
going to Antwerp until informed of the arrival in that city of Spinola
and his colleagues; and that they should then proceed thither, taking
with them the main points of the treaty, as laid down by themselves, and
accepted with slight alterations by the States.
When the Spanish commissioners had signed these points the
plenipotentiaries were to come to Antwerp in order to settle other
matters of less vital import. Meantime, the States-General were to be
summoned to assemble in Bergen-op-Zoom, that they might be ready to deal
with difficulties, should any arise.
The first meeting took place on the 10th February, 1609. The first
objection to the draught was made by the Spaniards. It was about words
and wind. They liked not the title of high and puissant lords which was
given to the States-General, and they proposed to turn the difficulty by
abstaining from giving any qualifications whatever, either to the
archdukes or the republican authorities. The States refused to lower
these ensigns of their new-born power. It was, however, at last agreed
that, instead of high and mighty, they should be called illustrious and
serene.
This point being comfortably adjusted, the next and most important one
was accepted by the Spaniards. The independence of the States was
recognised according to the prescribed form. Then came the great bone of
contention, over which there had been such persistent wrangling--the
India trade.
The Spanish Government had almost registered a vow in heaven that the
word India should not be mentioned in the treaty. It was no less certain
that India was stamped upon the very heart of the republic, and could not
be torn from it while life remained. The subtle diplomatists now invented
a phrase in which the word should not appear, while the thing itself
should be granted. The Spaniards, after much altercation, at last
consented.
By the end of February, most of the plenipotentiaries thought it safe to
request the appearance of the States-General at Bergen-op-Zoom.
Jeannin, not altogether satisfied, however, with the language of the
Spaniards in regard to India, raised doubts as to the propriety of
issuing the summons. Putting on his most reverend and artless expression
of countenance, he assured Richardot that he had just received a despatch
from the Hague, to the effect that the India point would, in all
probability, cause the States at that very moment to break off the
negotiations. It was surely premature, therefore, to invite them to
Bergen. The despatch from the Hague was a neat fiction on the part of the
president, but it worked admirably. The other president, himself quite as
ready at inventions as Jeannin could possibly be, was nevertheless taken
in; the two ex-leaguers being, on the whole, fully a match for each other
in the art of intrigue. Richardot, somewhat alarmed, insisted that the
States should send their plenipotentiaries to Antwerp as soon as
possible. He would answer for it that they would not go away again
without settling upon the treaty. The commissioners were forbidden, by
express order from Spain, to name the Indies in writing, but they would
solemnly declare, by word of mouth, that the States should have full
liberty to trade to those countries; the King of Spain having no
intention of interfering with such traffic during the period of the
truce.
The commissioners came to Antwerp. The States-General assembled at
Bergen. On the 9th April, 1609, the truce for twelve years was signed.
This was its purport:
The preamble recited that the most serene princes and archdukes, Albert
and Isabella Clara Eugenic, had made, on the 24th April, 1607, a truce
and cessation of arms for eight months with the illustrious lords the
States-General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, in quality of,
and as holding them for, states, provinces, and free countries, over
which they pretended to nothing; which truce was ratified by his Catholic
Majesty, as to that which concerned him, by letters patent of 18th
September, 1607; and that, moreover, a special power had been given to
the archdukes on the 10th January, 1608, to enable them in the king's
name as well as their own to do everything that they might think proper
to bring about a peace or a truce of many years.
It then briefly recited the rupture of the negotiations for peace, and
the subsequent, proposition, originated by the foreign ambassadors, to
renew the conference for the purpose of concluding a truce. The articles
of the treaty thus agreed upon were:
That the archdukes declared, as well in their own name as that of the
king, that they were content to treat with the lords the States-General
of the United Provinces in quality of, and as holding them for,
countries, provinces, and free states, over which they pretended to
nothing, and to, make with them a truce on certain following
conditions--to wit:
That the truce should be good, firm, loyal, inviolable, and for the term
of twelve years, during which time there was to be cessation of all acts
of hostility between the king, archdukes, and States-General, as well by
sea and other waters as by land, in all their kingdoms, countries, lands,
and lordships, and for all their subjects and inhabitants of whatever
quality and condition, without exception of places or of persons.
That each party should remain seized of their respective possessions, and
be not troubled therein during the truce.
That the subjects and inhabitants of the respective countries should
preserve amity and good correspondence during the truce, without
referring to past offences, and should freely and securely entertain
communication and traffic with each other by land and sea. This
provision, however, was to be expressly understood as limited by the king
to the kingdoms and countries possessed by him in Europe, and in other
places and seas where the subjects of other kings and princes, his
friends and allies, have amicable traffic. In regard, however, to places,
cities, ports, and harbours which he possessed outside of those limits,
the States and their subjects were to exercise no traffic, without
express permission of the king. They could, however, if they chose, trade
with the countries of all other princes, potentates, and peoples who were
willing to permit it; even outside those limits, without any hindrance by
the king;
That the truce should begin in regard to those distant countries after a
year from date, unless actual notification could be sooner served there
on those concerned;
That the subjects of the United Provinces should have the same liberty
and privilege within the States of the king and archdukes as had been
accorded to the subjects of the by the King of Great Britain, according
to the last treaty made with that sovereign;
That letters of marque and reprisal should not be granted during the
truce, except for special cause, and in cases permitted by the laws and
imperial constitutions, and according to the rules therein prescribed;
That those who had retired into neutral territory during the war were
also to enjoy the benefit of the truce, and could reside wherever they
liked without being deprived of their property;
That the treaty should be ratified by the archdukes and the
States-General within four days. As to the ratification of the king, the
archdukes were bound to deliver it in good and due form within three
months, in order that the lords the States-General, their subjects and
inhabitants, might enjoy effectively the fruits of the treaty;
That the treaty should be published everywhere immediately after the
ratification of the archdukes and States-General.
This document was signed by the ambassadors of the Kings of France and
Great Britain, as mediators, and then by the deputies of the archdukes,
and afterwards by those of the lords the States-General.
There were thirty-eight articles in all, but the chief provisions have
been indicated. The other clauses, relating to boundaries, confiscations,
regulations of duties, frontier fortifications, the estates of the Nassau
family, and other sequestrated property, have no abiding interest.
There was also a secret and special treaty which was demanded of the King
of Spain by the States-General, and by him accorded.
This secret treaty consisted of a single clause. That clause was made up
of a brief preamble and of a promise. The preamble recited textually
article fourth of the public treaty relative to the India trade. The
promise was to this effect.
For the period of the truce the Spanish commissioners pledged the faith
of the king and of his successors that his Majesty would cause no
impediment, whether by sea or land, to the States nor their subjects, in
the traffic that thereafter might be made in the countries of all
princes, potentates, and peoples who might permit the same, in whatever
place it might be, even without the limits designated, and everywhere
else, nor similarly to those carrying on such traffic with them, and that
the king and his successors would faithfully carry into effect everything
thus laid, down, so that the said traffic should be free and secure,
consenting even, in order that the clause might be the more authentic,
that it should be considered as inserted in the principal treaty, and as
making part thereof.
It will be perceived that the first article of all, and the last or
secret article, contained the whole marrow of the treaty. It may be well
understood, therefore, with what wry faces the Spanish plenipotentiaries
ultimately signed the document.
After two years and a quarter of dreary negotiation, the republic had
carried all its points, without swerving a hair's breadth from the
principles laid down in the beginning. The only concession made was that
the treaty was for a truce of twelve years, and not for peace. But as
after all, in those days, an interval of twelve years might be almost
considered an eternity of peace, and as calling a peace perpetual can
never make it so, the difference was rather one of phraseology than of
fact.
On the other hand, the States had extorted from their former sovereign a
recognition of their independence.
They had secured the India trade.
They had not conceded Catholic worship.
Mankind were amazed at this result--an event hitherto unknown in history.
When before had a sovereign acknowledged the independence of his
rebellious subjects, and signed a treaty with them as with equals? When
before had Spain, expressly or by implication, admitted that the East and
West Indies were not her private property, and that navigators to those
regions, from other countries than her own, were not to be chastised as
trespassers and freebooters?
Yet the liberty of the Netherlands was acknowledged in terms which
convinced the world that it was thenceforth an established fact. And
India was as plainly expressed by the omission of the word, as if it had
been engrossed in large capitals in Article IV.
The King's Government might seek solace in syntax. They might triumph in
Cardinal Bentivoglio's subtleties, and persuade themselves that to treat
with the republic as a free nation was not to hold it for a free nation
then and for ever. But the whole world knew that the republic really was
free, and that it had treated, face to face, with its former sovereign,
exactly as the Kings of France or Great Britain, or the Grand Turk, might
treat with him. The new commonwealth had taken its place among the
nations of the earth. Other princes and potentates made not the slightest
difficulty in recognising it for an independent power and entering into
treaties and alliances with it as with any other realm.
To the republic the substantial blessing of liberty: to his Catholic
Majesty the grammatical quirk. When the twelve years should expire, Spain
might reconquer the United Provinces if she could; relying upon the great
truth that an adverb was not a preposition. And France or Great Britain
might attempt the same thing if either felt strong enough for the
purpose. Did as plausible a pretext as that ever fail to a state
ambitious of absorbing its neighbours?
Jeannin was right enough in urging that this famous clause of recognition
ought to satisfy both parties. If the United Provinces, he said, happened
not to have the best muskets and cannons on their side when it should
once more come to blows, small help would they derive from verbal
bulwarks and advantages in the text of treaties.
Richardot consoled himself with his quibbles; for quibbles were his daily
bread. "Thank God our truce is made," said he, "and we have only lost the
sovereignty for twelve years, if after that we have the means or the will
to resume the war--whatever Don Pedro de Toledo may say."
Barneveld, on his part, was devoutly and soberly pleased with the result.
"To-day we have concluded our negotiations for the truce," he wrote to
Aerssens. "We must pray to the Lord God, and we must do our highest duty
that our work may redound to his honour and glory, and to the nation's
welfare. It is certain that men will make their criticisms upon it
according to their humours. But those who love their country, and all
honest people who know the condition of the land, will say that it is
well done."
Thus modestly, religiously, and sincerely spoke a statesman, who felt
that he had accomplished a great work, and that he had indeed brought the
commonwealth through the tempest at last.
The republic had secured the India trade. On this point the negotiators
had taken refuge in that most useful figure of speech for hard-pressed
diplomatists and law-makers--the ellipsis. They had left out the word
India, and his Catholic Majesty might persuade himself that by such
omission a hemisphere had actually been taken away from the Dutch
merchants and navigators. But the whole world saw that Article IV. really
contained both the East and West Indies. It hardly needed the secret
clause to make assurance doubly sure.
President Richardot was facetiously wont to observe that this point in
the treaty was so obscure that he did not understand it himself. But he
knew better. He understood it very well. The world understood it very
well. The United Provinces had throughout the negotiations ridiculde the
idea of being excluded from any part of the old world or, the new by
reason of the Borgian grant. All the commissioners knew that the war
would be renewed if any attempt were to be seriously made to put up those
famous railings around the ocean, of which the Dutch diplomatists spoke
in such bitter scorn. The Spanish plenipotentiaries, therefore, had
insisted that the word itself should be left out, and that the republic
should be forbidden access to territories subject to the crown of Spain.
So the Hollanders were thenceforth to deal directly with the kings of
Sumatra and the Moluccas, and the republics of Banda, and all the rich
commonwealths and principalities of nutmegs; cloves, and indigo, unless,
as grew every day more improbable, the Spaniards and Portuguese could
exclude them from that traffic by main force. And the Orange flag of the
republic was to float with equal facility over all America, from the Isle
of Manhattan to the shores of Brazil and the Straits of Magellan,
provided Philip had not ships and soldiers to vindicate with the sword
that sovereignty which Spanish swords and Spanish genius had once
acquired.
As for the Catholic worship, the future was to prove that liberty for the
old religion and for all forms of religion was a blessing more surely to
flow from the enlightened public sentiment of a free people emerging out
of the most tremendous war for liberty ever waged, than from the
stipulations of a treaty with a foreign power.
It was characteristic enough of the parties engaged in the great
political drama that the republic now requested from France and Great
Britain a written recognition of its independence, and that both France
and England refused.
It was strange that the new commonwealth, in the very moment of extorting
her freedom from the ancient tyranny, should be so unconscious of her
strength as to think free papers from neutral powers a boon. As if the
sign-manual of James and Henry were a better guarantee than the trophies
of the Nassaus, of Heemskerk, of Matelieff, and of Olden-Barneveld!
It was not strange that the two sovereigns should decline the
proposition; for we well know the secret aspirations of each, and it was
natural that they should be unwilling to sign a formal quit-claim,
however improbable it might be that those dreams should ever become a
reality.
Both powers, however, united in a guarantee of the truce.
This was signed on the 17th June, and stipulated that, without their
knowledge and consent, the States should make no treaty during the period
of truce with the King of Spain or the archdukes. On the other hand, in
case of an infraction of the truce by the enemy, the two kings agreed to
lend assistance to the States in the manner provided--by the treaties
concluded with the republic previously to the negotiation of the truce.
The treaty had been at once ratified by the States-General, assembled for
the purpose with an extraordinary number of deputies at Bergen-op-Zoom.
It was also ratified without delay by the archdukes. The delivery of the
confirmation by his Catholic Majesty had been promised within three
months after the signatures of the plenipotentiaries.
It would however have been altogether inconsistent with the dignity and
the traditions of the Spanish court to fulfil this stipulation. It was
not to be expected that "I the King" could be written either by the
monarch himself, or by his alter ego the Duke of Lerma, in so short a
time as a quarter of a year.
Several weeks accordingly went by after the expiration of the stated
period. The ratification did not come, and the Netherlanders began to be
once more indignant. Before the storm had risen very high, however, the
despatches arrived. The king's signature was ante-dated 7th April, being
thus brought within the term of three months, and was a thorough
confirmation of what had been done by his plenipotentiaries.
His Majesty, however, expressed a hope that during the truce the States
would treat their Catholic subjects with kindness.
Certainly no exception could be taken to so reasonable an intimation as
this. President Jeannin, too, just before his departure, handed in to the
States-General an eloquent appeal on behalf of the Catholics of the
Netherlands; a paper which was not immediately made public.
"Consider the great number of Catholics," he said, "in your territory,
both in the cities and the country. Remember that they have worked with
you; spent their property, have been exposed to the same dangers, and
have always kept their fidelity to the commonwealth inviolate as long as
the war endured, never complaining that they did not enjoy liberty of
religious worship, believing that you had thus, ordained because the
public safety required such guaranty. But they always promised
themselves, should the end of the war be happy, and should you be placed
in the enjoyment of entire freedom, that they too would have some part in
this good fortune, even as they had been sharers in the inconveniences,
the expenses, and the perils of the war.
"But those cannot be said to share in any enjoyment from whom has been
taken the power of serving God according to the religion in which they
were brought up. On the contrary, no slavery is more intolerable nor more
exasperates the mind than such restraint. You know this well, my lords
States; you know too that it was the principal, the most puissant cause
that made you fly to arms and scorn all dangers, in order to effect your
deliverance from this servitude. You know that it has excited similar
movements in various parts of Christendom, and even in the kingdom of
France, with such fortunate success everywhere as to make it appear that
God had so willed it, in order to prove that religion ought to be taught
and inspired by the movements which come from the Holy Ghost, and not by
the force of man. Thus kings and princes should be induced by the evils
and ruin which they and their subjects have suffered from this cause, as
by a sentiment of their own interest, to take more care than has hitherto
been taken to practise in good earnest those remedies which were wont to
be used at a time when the church was in its greatest piety, in order to
correct the abuses and errors which the corruption of mankind had tried
to introduce as being the true and sole means of uniting all Christians
in one and the same creed."
Surely the world had made progress in these forty years of war. Was it
not something to gain for humanity, for intellectual advancement, for
liberty of thought, for the true interests of religion, that a Roman
Catholic, an ex-leaguer, a trusted representative of the immediate
successor of Charles IX. and Henry III., could stand up on the
blood-stained soil of the Netherlands and plead for liberty of conscience
for all mankind?
"Those cannot be said to share in, any enjoyment from whom has been taken
the power of serving God according to the religion in which they have
been brought up. No slavery is more intolerable nor more exasperating to
the mind than such restraint."
Most true, O excellent president! No axiom in mathematics is more certain
than this simple statement. To prove its truth William the Silent had
lived and died. To prove it a falsehood, emperors, and kings, and
priests, had issued bans, and curses, and damnable decrees. To root it
out they had butchered, drowned, shot, strangled, poisoned, tortured,
roasted alive, buried alive, starved, and driven mad, thousands and tens
of thousands of their fellow creatures. And behold there had been almost
a century of this work, and yet the great truth was not rooted out after
all; and the devil-worshippers, who had sought at the outset of the great
war to establish the Holy Inquisition in the Netherlands upon the ruins
of religious and political liberty, were overthrown at last and driven
back into the pit. It was progress; it was worth all the blood and
treasure which had been spilled, that, instead of the Holy Inquisition,
there was now holy liberty of thought.
That there should have been a party, that there should have been an
individual here and there, after the great victory was won, to oppose the
doctrine which the Catholic president now so nobly advocated, would be
enough to cause every believer in progress to hide his face in the dust,
did we not know that the march of events was destined to trample such
opposition out of existence, and had not history proved to us that the
great lesson of the war was not to be rendered nought by the efforts of a
few fanatics. Religious liberty was the ripened and consummate fruit, and
it could not but be gathered.
"Consider too," continued the president, "how much injury your refusal,
if you give it, will cause to those of your religion in the places where
they are the weakest, and where they are every day imploring with tears
and lamentations the grace of those Catholic sovereigns to whom they are
subject, to enable them to enjoy the same religious liberty which our
king is now demanding in favour of the Catholics among you. Do not cause
it to come again into the minds of those sovereigns and their peoples,
whom an inconsiderate zeal has often driven into violence and ferocity
against protestants, that a war to compel the weakest to follow the
religion of the strongest is just and lawful."
Had not something been gained for the world when this language was held
by a Catholic on the very spot where less than a half century before the
whole population of the Netherlands, men, women, and children, had been
condemned to death by a foreign tyrant, for the simple reason that it was
just, legal, and a Christian duty to punish the weak for refusing to
follow the religion of the strong?
"As for the perils which some affect to fear," said Jeannin, further, "if
this liberty of worship is accorded, experience teaches us every day that
diversity of religion is not the cause of the ruin of states, and that a
government does not cease to be good, nor its subjects to live in peace
and friend ship with one another, rendering due obedience to the laws and
to their rulers as well as if they had all been of the same religion,
without having another thought, save for the preservation of the dignity
and grandeur of the state in which God had caused them to be born. The
danger is not in the permission, but in the prohibition of religious
liberty."
All this seems commonplace enough to us on the western side of the
Atlantic, in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it would have been
rank blasphemy in New England in the middle of the seventeenth, many
years after Jeannin spoke. It was a horrible sound, too, in the ears of
some of his audience.
To the pretence so often urged by the Catholic persecutors, and now set
up by their Calvinistic imitators; that those who still clung to the old
religion were at liberty to depart from the land, the president replied
with dignified scorn.
"With what justice," he asked, "can you drive into, exile people who have
committed no offence, and who have helped to conquer the very country
from which you would now banish them? If you do drive them away, you will
make solitudes in your commonwealth, which will, be the cause of evils
such as I prefer that you should reflect upon without my declaring them
now. Although these reasons," he continued, "would seem sufficient to
induce you to accord the free and public exercise of the Catholic
religion, the king, not hoping as much as that, because aware that you
are not disposed to go so far, is content to request only this grace in
behalf of the Catholics, that you will tolerate them, and suffer them to
have some exercise of their religion within their own households, without
interference or inquiry on that account, and without execution of the
rigorous decrees heretofore enforced against them."
Certainly if such wholesome, moderate, and modest counsels as these had
been rejected, it would have been sound doctrine to proclaim that the
world did not move. And there were individuals enough, even an
influential party, prepared to oppose them for both technical and
practical reasons. And the cause of intolerance derived much warmth and
comfort at this juncture from that great luminary of theology and
political philosophy, the King of Great Britain. Direful and solemn were
the warnings uttered by James to the republic against permitting the old
religion, or any religion save his own religion, to obtain the slightest
foothold within her borders.
"Let the religion be taught and preached in its parity throughout your
provinces without the least mixture," said Sir Ralph Winwood, in the name
of his sovereign.
"On this foundation the justice of your cause is built. There is but one
verity. Those who are willing to tolerate any religion, whatever it may
be, and try to make you believe that liberty for both is necessary in
your commonwealth, are paving the way towards atheism."
Such were the counsels of King James to the united States of the
Netherlands against harbouring Catholics. A few years later he was
casting forth Calvinists from his own dominions as if they had been
lepers; and they went forth on their weary pilgrimage to the howling
wilderness of North America, those exiled Calvinists, to build a greater
republic than had ever been dreamed of before on this planet; and they
went forth, not to preach, but in their turn to denounce toleration and
to hang heretics. "He who would tolerate another religion that his own
may be tolerated, would if need be, hang God's bible at the devil's
girdle." So spoke an early Massachusetts pilgrim, in the very spirit,
almost the very words of the royal persecutor; who had driven him into
outer darkness beyond the seas. He had not learned the lesson of the
mighty movement in which he was a pioneer, any more than Gomarus or
Uytenbogaart had comprehended why the Dutch republic had risen.
Yet the founders of the two commonwealths, the United States of the
seventeenth and of the nineteenth centuries, although many of them
fiercely intolerant, through a natural instinct of resistance, not only
to the oppressor but to the creed of the oppressor, had been breaking out
the way, not to atheism, as King James believed, but to the only garden
in which Christianity can perennially flourish--religious liberty.
Those most ardent and zealous path-finders may be forgiven, in view of
the inestimable benefits conferred by them upon humanity, that they did
not travel on their own road. It should be sufficient for us, if we make
due use of their great imperishable work ourselves; and if we never cease
rendering thanks to the Omnipotent, that there is at least one great
nation on the globe where the words toleration and dissenter have no
meaning whatever.
For the Dutch fanatics of the reformed church, at the moment of the
truce, to attempt to reverse the course of events, and to shut off the
mighty movement of the great revolt from its destined expanse, was as
hopeless a dream as to drive back the Rhine, as it reached the ocean,
into the narrow channel of the Rheinwald glacier whence it sprang.
The republic became the refuge for the oppressed of all nations, where
Jews and Gentiles, Catholics, Calvinists, and Anabaptistis, prayed after
their own manner to the same God and Father. It was too much, however, to
hope that passions which had been so fiercely bubbling during fifty years
would subside at once, and that the most intense religious hatreds that
ever existed would exhale with the proclamation of truce. The march of
humanity is rarely rapid enough to keep pace with the leaders in its most
sublime movements, and it often happens that its chieftains are dwarfed
in the estimation of the contemporaneous vulgar, by the very distance at
which they precede their unconscious followers. But even if the progress
of the human mind towards the truth is fated to be a spiral one, as if to
remind us that mankind is of the earth, earthy--a worm in the dust while
inhabiting this lower sphere--it is at least a consolation to reflect
upon the gradual advancement of the intellect from age to age.
The spirit of Torquemada, of Charles, of Philip, of Titelmann, is even
now not extinct on this globe, but there are counter forces at work,
which must ultimately blast it into insignificance. At the moment of the
great truce, that evil spirit was not exorcised from the human breast,
but the number of its victims and the intensity of its influence had
already miraculously diminished.
The truce was made and announced all over the Netherlands by the ringing
of bells, the happy discharge of innocent artillery, by illuminations, by
Te Deums in all the churches. Papist and Presbyterian fell on their knees
in every grand cathedral or humblest village church, to thank God that
what had seemed the eternal butchery was over. The inhabitants of the
united and of the obedient Netherlands rushed across the frontiers into a
fraternal embrace; like the meeting of many waters when the flood-gates
are lifted. It was pity that the foreign sovereignty, established at
Brussels, could not then and there have been for ever swept away, and
self-government and beneficent union extended over all the seventeen
Netherlands, Walloon and Flemish, Catholic and reformed. But it hardly
needs a word to show that the course of events had created a deeper chasm
between the two sections than the gravest physical catastrophe could have
produced. The opposing cliffs which religious hatred had rent asunder,
and between which it seemed destined to flow for ever, seemed very close,
and yet eternally separated.
The great war had established the republic; and apparently doomed the
obedient Netherlands to perpetual servitude.
There were many details of minor importance to be settled between the
various governments involved in these great transactions; but this
history draws to its predestined close, and it is necessary to glide
rapidly over matters which rather belong to a later epoch than the one
now under consideration.
The treaty between the republic and the government of Great Britain,
according to which each was to assist the other in case of war with four
thousand troops and twenty ships of war, was confirmed in the treaty of
truce. The debt of the United Provinces to the Crown of England was
definitely reckoned at 8,184,080 florins, and it was settled by the truce
that 200,000 florins should be paid semi-annually, to begin with the year
1611, until the whole debt should be discharged.
The army establishment of the republic was fixed during the truce at
thirty thousand infantry and three thousand horse. This was a reduction
from the war footing of fifteen thousand men. Of the force retained, four
thousand were a French legion maintained by the king, two thousand other
French at the expense of the States, and distributed among other troops,
two thousand Scotch, three thousand English, three thousand Germans. The
rest were native Netherlanders, among whom, however, were very few
Hollanders and Zeelanders, from which races the navy, both public and
mercantile, was almost wholly supplied.
The revenue of the United Provinces was estimated at between seven and
eight millions of florins.
It is superfluous to call attention again to the wonderful smallness of
the means, the minuteness of the physical enginry, as compared with more
modern manifestations, especially in our own land and epoch, by which so
stupendous a result had been reached. In the midst of an age in which
regal and sacerdotal despotism had seemed as omnipotent and irreversible
as the elemental laws of the universe, the republic had been reproduced.
A commonwealth of sand-banks, lagoons, and meadows, less than fourteen
thousand square miles in extent, had done battle, for nearly half a
century, with the greatest of existing powers, a realm whose territory
was nearly a third of the globe, and which claimed universal monarchy.
And this had been done with an army averaging forty-six thousand men,
half of them foreigners hired by the job, and by a sea-faring population,
volunteering into ships of every class and denomination, from a fly-boat
to a galleot of war.
And when the republic had won its independence, after this almost eternal
warfare, it owed four or five millions of dollars, and had sometimes an
annual revenue of nearly that amount.
It was estimated by Barneveld, at the conclusion of the truce, that the
interest on the public debt of Spain was about thrice the amount of the
yearly income of the republic, and it was characteristic of the financial
ideas of the period, that fears were entertained lest a total repudiation
of that burthen by the Spanish Government would enable it to resume the
war against the provinces with redoubled energy.
The annual salary of Prince Maurice, who was to see his chief occupation
gone by the cessation of the war, was fixed by the States at 120,000
florins. It was agreed, that in case of his marriage he should receive a
further yearly sum of 25,000 florins, and this addition was soon
afterwards voted to him outright, it being obvious that the prince would
remain all his days a bachelor.
Count Frederic Henry likewise received a military salary of 25,000
florins, while the emoluments of Lewis William were placed at 36,000
florins a year.
It must be admitted that the republic was grateful. 70,000 dollars a
year, in the seventeenth century, not only for life, but to be inherited
afterwards by his younger brother, Frederic Henry, was surely a
munificent sum to be accorded from the puny exchequer of the
States-General to the chief magistrate of the nation.
The mighty transatlantic republic, with its population of thirty or forty
millions, and its revenue of five hundred millions of dollars, pays
25,000 dollars annually for its president during his four years of
office, and this in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a
dollar is worth scarcely one-fifth of its value two hundred and fifty
years ago.
Surely here is improvement, both in the capacity to produce and in the
power to save.
In the year 1609, died John, the last sovereign of Cleves and Juliers,
and Jacob Arminius, Doctor of Divinity at Leyden. It would be difficult
to imagine two more entirely dissimilar individuals of the human family
than this lunatic duke and that theological professor. And yet, perhaps,
the two names, more concisely than those of any other mortals, might
serve as an index to the ghastly chronicle over which a coming generation
was to shudder. The death of the duke was at first thought likely to
break off the negotiations for truce. The States-General at once declared
that they would permit no movements on the part of the Spanish party to
seize the inheritance in behalf of the Catholic claimants. Prince
Maurice, nothing loth to make use of so well-timed an event in order to
cut for ever the tangled skein at the Hague, was for marching forthwith
into the duchies.
But the archdukes gave such unequivocal assurances of abstaining from
interference, and the desire for peace was so strong both in the obedient
and in the United Provinces, that the question of the duchies was
postponed. It was to serve as both torch and fuel for one of the longest
and most hideous tragedies that had ever disgraced humanity. A thirty
years' war of demons was, after a brief interval, to succeed the forty
years' struggle between slaves and masters, which had just ended in the
recognition of Dutch independence.
The gentle Arminius was in his grave, but a bloody harvest was fast
ripening from the seeds which he had sown. That evil story must find its
place in the melancholy chapter where the fortunes of the Dutch republic
are blended with the grim chronicle of the thirty years' war. Until the
time arrives for retracing the course of those united transactions to
their final termination in the peace of Westphalia, it is premature to
characterize an epoch which, at the moment with which we are now
occupied, had not fairly begun.
The Gomarites accused the Arminians of being more lax than Papists, and
of filling the soul of man with vilest arrogance and confidence in good
works; while the Arminians complained that the God of the Gomarites was
an unjust God, himself the origin of sin.
The disputes on these themes had been perpetual in the provinces ever
since the early days of the Reformation. Of late, however, the acrimony
of theological conflict had been growing day by day more intense. It was
the eternal struggle of religious dogma to get possession of the State,
and to make use of political forces in order to put fetters on the human
soul; to condemn it to slavery where most it requires freedom.
The conflict between Gomarus and Arminius proceeded with such ferocity in
Leyden, that, since the days of the memorable siege, to which the
university owed its origin, men's minds had never been roused to such
feverish anxiety: The theological cannonades, which thundered daily from
the college buildings and caused all Holland to quake, seemed more
appalling to the burghers than the enginry of Valdez and Boisot had ever
seemed to their fathers.
The Gomarite doctrine gained most favour with the clergy, the Arminian
creed with the municipal magistracies. The magistrates claimed that
decisions concerning religious matters belonged to the supreme authority.
The Gomarites contended that sacred matters should be referred to synods
of the clergy. Here was the germ of a conflict which might one day shake
the republic to its foundations.
Barneveld, the great leader of the municipal, party, who loved political
power quite as well as he loved his country; was naturally a chieftain of
the Arminians; for church, matters were no more separated from political
matters in the commonwealth at that moment than they were in the cabinets
of Henry, James, or Philip.
It was inevitable therefore that the war party should pour upon his head
more than seven vials of theological wrath. The religious doctrines which
he espoused were, odious not only because they were deemed vile in
themselves but because he believed in them.
Arminianism was regarded as a new and horrible epidemic, daily gaining
ground, and threatening to destroy the whole population. Men deliberated
concerning the best means to cut off communication with the infected
regions, and to extirpate the plague even by desperate and heroic
remedies, as men in later days take measures against the cholera or the
rinderpest.
Theological hatred was surely not extinct in the Netherlands. It was a
consolation, however, that its influence was rendered less noxious by the
vastly increased strength of principles long dormant in the atmosphere.
Anna van der Hoven, buried alive in Brussels, simply because her
Calvinistic creed was a crime in the eyes of the monks who murdered her,
was the last victim to purely religious persecution. If there were one
day to be still a tragedy or two in the Netherlands it was inevitable
that theological hatred would be obliged to combine with political party
spirit in its most condensed form before any deadly effect could be
produced.
Thus the year 1609 is a memorable one in the world's history. It forms a
great landmark in human progress. It witnessed the recognition of a
republic, powerful in itself, and whose example was destined to be most
influential upon the career of two mighty commonwealths of the future.
The British empire, just expanding for wider flight than it had hitherto
essayed, and about to pass through a series of vast revolutions,
gathering strength of wing as it emerged from cloud after cloud; and the
American republic, whose frail and obscure beginnings at that very
instant of time scarcely attracted a passing attention from the
contemporaneous world--both these political organisms, to which so much
of mankind's future liberties had been entrusted, were deeply indebted to
the earlier self-governing commonwealth.
The Dutch republic was the first free nation to put a girdle of empire
around the earth. It had courage, enterprise, intelligence, perseverance,
faith in itself, the instinct of self-government and self-help, hatred of
tyranny, the disposition to domineer, aggressiveness, greediness,
inquisitiveness, insolence, the love of science, of liberty, and of
money--all this in unlimited extent. It had one great defect, it had no
country. Upon that meagre standing ground its hand had moved the world
with an impulse to be felt through all the ages, but there was not soil
enough in those fourteen thousand, square miles to form the metropolis of
the magnificent empire which the genius of liberty had created beyond the
seas.
That the political institutions bequeathed by the United States of the
seventeenth century have been vastly improved, both in theory and
practice, by the United States of the nineteenth, no American is likely
to gainsay. That the elder Republic showed us also what to avoid, and was
a living example of the perils besetting a Confederacy which dared not
become a Union, is a lesson which we might take closely to heart.
But the year 1609 was not only memorable as marking an epoch in Dutch
history. It was the beginning of a great and universal pause. The world
had need of rest. Disintegration had been going on too rapidly, and it
was absolutely necessary that there should be a new birth, if
civilization were not to vanish.
A twenty years' truce between the Turkish and Holy Roman empires was
nearly simultaneous with the twelve years' truce between Spain and the
United Provinces. The Emperor Rudolph having refused to ratify the treaty
which his brother Matthias had made, was in consequence partially
discrowned. The same archduke who, thirty years before, had slipped away
from Vienna in his nightgown; with his face blackened, to outwit and
outgeneral William the Silent at Brussels, was now--more successful in
his manoeuvres against his imperial brother. Standing at the head of his
army in battle array, in the open fields before the walls of Prague, he
received--from the unfortunate Rudolph the crown and regalia of Hungary,
and was by solemn treaty declared sovereign of that ancient and
chivalrous kingdom.
His triumphal entrance into Vienna succeeded, where, surrounded by great
nobles and burghers, with his brother Maximilian at his side, with
immense pomp and with flowers strewn before his feet, he ratified that
truce with Ahmed which Rudolph had rejected. Three months later he was
crowned at Pressburg, having first accepted the conditions proposed by
the estates of Hungary. Foremost among these was the provision that the
exercise of the reformed religion should be free in all the cities and
villages beneath his sceptre, and that every man in the kingdom was to
worship God according to his conscience.
In the following March, at the very moment accordingly when the
conclusive negotiations were fast ripening at Antwerp, Matthias granted
religious peace for Austria likewise. Great was the indignation of his
nephew Leopold, the nuncius, and the Spanish ambassador in consequence,
by each and all of whom the revolutionary mischief-maker, with his
brother's crown on his head, was threatened with excommunication.
As for Ferdinand of Styria, his wrath may well be imagined. He refused
religious peace in his dominions with scorn ineffable. Not Gomarus in
Leyden could have shrunk from Arminianism with more intense horror than
that with which the archduke at Gratz recoiled from any form of
Protestantism. He wrote to his brother-in-law the King of Spain and to
other potentates--as if the very soul of Philip II. were alive within
him--that he would rather have a country without inhabitants than with a
single protestant on its soil. He strongly urged upon his Catholic
Majesty--as if such urging were necessary at the Spanish court--the
necessity of extirpating heresy, root and branch.
Here was one man at least who knew what he meant, and on whom the dread
lessons of fifty years of bloodshed had been lost. Magnificent was the
contempt which this pupil of the Jesuits felt for any little progress
made by the world since the days of Torquemada. In Ferdinand's view Alva
was a Christian hero, scarcely second to Godfrey of Bouillon, Philip II.
a sainted martyr, while the Dutch republic had never been born.
And Ferdinand was one day to sit on the throne of the holy Roman Empire.
Might not a shudder come over the souls of men as coming events vaguely
shaped themselves to prophetic eyes?
Meantime there was religious peace in Hungary, in Austria, in Bohemia, in
France, in Great Britain, in the Netherlands. The hangman's hands were
for a period at rest, so far as theology had need of them. Butchery in
the name of Christ was suspended throughout Christendom. The Cross and
the Crescent, Santiago and the Orange banner, were for a season in
repose.
There was a vast lull between two mighty storms. The forty years' war was
in the past, the thirty years' war in the not far distant future.