estimated, in 1557, at ten thousand dollars--[1885 approximation. The
decimal point more places to the right would in 2000 not be out of line.
D.W.]--; his property in ready money, "furniture, tapestry, and the
like," at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. When it is considered
that, as compared with our times, these sums represent a revenue of a
hundred thousand, and a capital of two millions and a half in addition,
it may be safely asserted that the prelate had at least made a good
beginning. Besides his regular income, moreover, he had handsome
receipts from that simony which was reduced to a system, and which gave
him a liberal profit, generally in the shape of an annuity, upon every
benefice which he conferred. He was, however, by no means satisfied.
His appetite was as boundless as the sea; he was still a shameless
mendicant of pecuniary favors and lucrative offices. Already, in 1552,
the Emperor had roundly rebuked his greediness. "As to what you say of
getting no 'merced' nor 'ayuda de costa,'" said he, "'tis merced and
ayuda de costa quite sufficient, when one has fat benefices, pensions,
and salaries, with which a man might manage to support himself." The
bishop, however, was not easily abashed, and he was at the epoch which
now occupies us, earnestly and successfully soliciting from Philip the
lucrative abbey of Saint Armand. Not that he would have accepted this
preferment, "could the abbey have been annexed to any of the new
bishoprics;" on the contrary, he assured the king that "to carry out so
holy a work as the erection of those new sees, he would willingly have
contributed even out of his own miserable pittance."
It not being considered expedient to confiscate the abbey to any
particular bishop, Philip accordingly presented it to the prelate of
Arras, together with a handsome sum of money in the shape of an "ayuda de
costa" beside. The thrifty bishop, who foresaw the advent of troublous
times in the Netherlands, however, took care in the letters by which he
sent his thanks, to instruct the King to secure the money upon crown
property in Arragon, Naples, and Sicily, as matters in the provinces were
beginning to look very precarious.
Such, at the commencement of the Duchess Margaret's administration, were
the characters and the previous histories of the persons into whose hands
the Netherlands were entrusted. None of them have been prejudged. We
have contented ourselves with stating the facts with regard to all, up to
the period at which we have arrived. Their characters have been
sketched, not according to subsequent developments, but as they appeared
at the opening of this important epoch.
The aspect of the country and its inhabitants offered many sharp
contrasts, and revealed many sources of future trouble.
The aristocracy of the Netherlands was excessively extravagant,
dissipated, and already considerably embarrassed in circumstances. It
had been the policy of the Emperor and of Philip to confer high offices,
civil, military, and diplomatic, upon the leading nobles, by which
enormous expenses were entailed upon them, without any corresponding
salaries. The case of Orange has been already alluded to, and there were
many other nobles less able to afford the expense, who had been indulged
with these ruinous honors. During the war, there had been, however, many
chances of bettering broken fortunes. Victory brought immense prizes to
the leading officers. The ransoms of so many illustrious prisoners as
had graced the triumphs of Saint Quentin and Gravelines had been
extremely profitable. These sources of wealth had now been cut off; yet,
on the departure of the King from the Netherlands, the luxury increased
instead of diminishing, "Instead of one court," said a contemporary, "you
would have said that there were fifty." Nothing could be more sumptuous
than the modes of life in Brussels. The household of Orange has been
already painted. That of Egmont was almost as magnificent. A rivalry in
hospitality and in display began among the highest nobles, and extended
to those less able to maintain themselves in the contest. During the war
there had been the valiant emulation of the battlefield; gentlemen had
vied with each other how best to illustrate an ancient name with deeds of
desperate valor, to repair the fortunes of a ruined house with the spoils
of war. They now sought to surpass each other in splendid extravagance.
It was an eager competition who should build the stateliest palaces, have
the greatest number of noble pages and gentlemen in waiting, the most
gorgeous liveries, the most hospitable tables, the most scientific cooks.
There was, also, much depravity as well as extravagance. The morals of
high society were loose. Gaming was practised to a frightful extent.
Drunkenness was a prevailing characteristic of the higher classes. Even
the Prince of Orange himself, at this period, although never addicted to
habitual excess, was extremely convivial in his tastes, tolerating scenes
and companions, not likely at a later day to find much favor in his
sight. "We kept Saint Martin's joyously," he wrote, at about this
period, to his brother, "and in the most jovial company. Brederode was
one day in such a state that I thought he would certainly die, but he has
now got over it." Count Brederode, soon afterwards to become so
conspicuous in the early scenes of the revolt, was, in truth, most
notorious for his performances in these banqueting scenes. He appeared
to have vowed as uncompromising hostility to cold water as to the
inquisition, and always denounced both with the same fierce and ludicrous
vehemence. Their constant connection with Germany at that period did not
improve the sobriety of the Netherlands' nobles. The aristocracy of that
country, as is well known, were most "potent at potting." "When the
German finds himself sober," said the bitter Badovaro, "he believes
himself to be ill." Gladly, since the peace, they had welcomed the
opportunities afforded for many a deep carouse with their Netherlands
cousins. The approaching marriage of the Prince of Orange with the Saxon
princess--an episode which will soon engage our attention--gave rise to
tremendous orgies. Count Schwartzburg, the Prince's brother-in-law, and
one of the negotiators of the marriage, found many occasions to
strengthen the bonds of harmony between the countries by indulgence of
these common tastes. "I have had many princes and counts at my table,"
he wrote to Orange, "where a good deal more was drunk than eaten. The
Rhinegrave's brother fell down dead after drinking too much malvoisie;
but we have had him balsamed and sent home to his family."
These disorders among the higher ranks were in reality so extensive as
to justify the biting remark of the Venetian: "The gentlemen intoxicate
themselves every day," said he, "and the ladies also; but much less than
the men." His remarks as to the morality, in other respects, of both
sexes were equally sweeping, and not more complimentary.
If these were the characteristics of the most distinguished society,
it may be supposed that they were reproduced with more or less intensity
throughout all the more remote but concentric circles of life, as far as
the seductive splendor of the court could radiate. The lesser nobles
emulated the grandees, and vied with each other in splendid
establishments, banquets, masquerades, and equipages. The natural
consequences of such extravagance followed. Their estates were
mortgaged, deeply and more deeply; then, after a few years, sold to the
merchants, or rich advocates and other gentlemen of the robe, to whom
they had been pledged. The more closely ruin stared the victims in the
face, the more heedlessly did they plunge into excesses. "Such were the
circumstances," moralizes a Catholic writer, "to which, at an earlier
period, the affairs of Catiline, Cethegus, Lentulus, and others of that
faction had been reduced, when they undertook to overthrow the Roman
republic." Many of the nobles being thus embarrassed, and some even
desperate, in their condition, it was thought that they were desirous of
creating disturbances in the commonwealth, that the payment of just debts
might be avoided, that their mortgaged lands might be wrested by main
force from the low-born individuals who had become possessed of them,
that, in particular, the rich abbey lands held by idle priests might be
appropriated to the use of impoverished gentlemen who could turn them to
so much better account. It is quite probable that interested motives
such as these were not entirely inactive among a comparatively small
class of gentlemen. The religious reformation in every land of Europe
derived a portion of its strength from the opportunity it afforded to
potentates and great nobles for helping themselves to Church property.
No doubt many Netherlanders thought that their fortunes might be improved
at the expense of the monks, and for the benefit of religion. Even
without apostasy from the mother Church, they looked with longing eyes
on the wealth of her favored and indolent children. They thought that
the King would do well to carve a round number of handsome military
commanderies out of the abbey lands, whose possessors should be bound
to military service after the ancient manner of fiefs, so that a splendid
cavalry, headed by the gentlemen of the country, should be ever ready to
mount and ride at the royal pleasure, in place of a horde of lazy
epicureans, telling beads and indulging themselves in luxurious vice.
Such views were entertained; such language often held. These
circumstances and sentiments had their influence among the causes which
produced the great revolt now impending. Care should be taken, however,
not to exaggerate that influence. It is a prodigious mistake to refer
this great historical event to sources so insufficient as the ambition of
a few great nobles, and the embarrassments of a larger number of needy
gentlemen. The Netherlands revolt was not an aristocratic, but a
popular, although certainly not a democratic movement. It was a great
episode--the longest, the darkest, the bloodiest, the most important
episode in the history of the religious reformation in Europe. The
nobles so conspicuous upon the surface at the outbreak, only drifted
before a storm which they neither caused nor controlled. Even the most
powerful and the most sagacious were tossed to and fro by the surge of
great events, which, as they rolled more and more tumultuously around
them, seemed to become both irresistible and unfathomable.
For the state of the people was very different from the condition of the
aristocracy. The period of martyrdom had lasted long and was to last
loner; but there were symptoms that it might one day be succeeded by a
more active stage of popular disease. The tumults of the Netherlands
were long in ripening; when the final outbreak came it would have been
more philosophical to enquire, not why it had occurred, but how it could
have been so long postponed. During the reign of Charles, the sixteenth
century had been advancing steadily in strength as the once omnipotent
Emperor lapsed into decrepitude. That extraordinary century had not
dawned upon the earth only to increase the strength of absolutism and
superstition. The new world had not been discovered, the ancient world
reconquered, the printing-press perfected, only that the inquisition
might reign undisturbed over the fairest portions of the earth, and
chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands. It was impossible
that the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe should not feel
sympathy with the great effort made by Christendom to shake off the
incubus which had so long paralyzed her hands and brain. In the
Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where
in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than
Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters--Waldenses, Lollards,
Hussites--had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was
inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the
deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom. In
those provinces, so industrious and energetic, the disgust was likely to
be most easily awakened for a system under which so many friars battened
in luxury upon the toils of others, contributing nothing to the taxation,
nor to the military defence of the country, exercising no productive
avocation, except their trade in indulgences, and squandering in taverns
and brothels the annual sums derived from their traffic in licences to
commit murder, incest, and every other crime known to humanity.
The people were numerous, industrious, accustomed for centuries to a
state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by
which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry. It was
natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the
concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract
character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities,
were a commercial nation. Commerce was the mother of their freedom, so
far as they had acquired it, in civil matters. It was struggling to give
birth to a larger liberty, to freedom of conscience. The provinces were
situated in the very heart of Europe. The blood of a world-wide traffic
was daily coursing through the thousand arteries of that water-in-woven
territory. There was a mutual exchange between the Netherlands and all
the world; and ideas were as liberally interchanged as goods. Truth was
imported as freely as less precious merchandise. The psalms of Marot
were as current as the drugs of Molucca or the diamonds of Borneo. The
prohibitory measures of a despotic government could not annihilate this
intellectual trade, nor could bigotry devise an effective quarantine to
exclude the religious pest which lurked in every bale of merchandise, and
was wafted on every breeze from East and West.
The edicts of the Emperor had been endured, but not accepted. The
horrible persecution under which so many thousands had sunk had produced
its inevitable result. Fertilized by all this innocent blood, the soil
of the Netherlands became as a watered garden, in which liberty, civil
and religious, was to flourish perennially. The scaffold had its daily
victims, but did not make a single convert. The statistics of these
crimes will perhaps never be accurately adjusted, nor will it be
ascertained whether the famous estimate of Grotius was an exaggerated or
an inadequate calculation. Those who love horrible details may find
ample material. The chronicles contain the lists of these obscure
martyrs; but their names, hardly pronounced in their life-time, sound
barbarously in our ears, and will never ring through the trumpet of fame.
Yet they were men who dared and suffered as much as men can dare and
suffer in this world, and for the noblest cause which can inspire
humanity. Fanatics they certainly were not, if fanaticism consists in
show, without corresponding substance. For them all was terrible
reality. The Emperor and his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake
were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the
hand and walked into the flames, or with which women sang a song of
triumph while the grave-digger was shovelling the earth upon their living
faces, was a reality also.
Thus, the people of the Netherlands were already pervaded, throughout the
whole extent of the country, with the expanding spirit of religious
reformation. It was inevitable that sooner or later an explosion was to
arrive. They were placed between two great countries, where the new
principles had already taken root. The Lutheranism of Germany and the
Calvinism of France had each its share in producing the Netherland
revolt, but a mistake is perhaps often made in estimating the relative
proportion of these several influences. The Reformation first entered
the provinces, not through the Augsburg, but the Huguenot gate. The
fiery field-preachers from the south of France first inflamed the
excitable hearts of the kindred population of the south-western
Netherlands. The Walloons were the first to rebel against and the first
to reconcile themselves with papal Rome, exactly as their Celtic
ancestors, fifteen centuries earlier, had been foremost in the revolt
against imperial Rome, and precipitate in their submission to her
overshadowing power. The Batavians, slower to be moved but more
steadfast, retained the impulse which they received from the same source
which was already agitating their "Welsh" compatriots. There were
already French preachers at Valenciennes and Tournay, to be followed,
as we shall have occasion to see, by many others. Without undervaluing
the influence of the German Churches, and particularly of the garrison-
preaching of the German military chaplains in the Netherlands, it may be
safely asserted that the early Reformers of the provinces were mainly
Huguenots in their belief: The Dutch Church became, accordingly, not
Lutheran, but Calvinistic, and the founder of the commonwealth hardly
ceased to be a nominal Catholic before he became an adherent to the same
creed.
In the mean time, it is more natural to regard the great movement,
psychologically speaking, as a whole, whether it revealed itself in
France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, or Scotland. The policy of
governments, national character, individual interests, and other
collateral circumstances, modified the result; but the great cause was
the same; the source of all the movements was elemental, natural, and
single. The Reformation in Germany had been adjourned for half a century
by the Augsburg religious peace, just concluded. It was held in suspense
in France through the Macchiavellian policy which Catharine de Medici had
just adopted, and was for several years to prosecute, of balancing one
party against the other, so as to neutralize all power but her own. The
great contest was accordingly transferred to the Netherlands, to be
fought out for the rest of the century, while the whole of Christendom
were to look anxiously for the result. From the East and from the West
the clouds rolled away, leaving a comparatively bright and peaceful
atmosphere, only that they might concentrate themselves with portentous
blackness over the devoted soil of the Netherlands. In Germany, the
princes, not the people, had conquered Rome, and to the princes, not the
people, were secured the benefits of the victory--the spoils of churches,
and the right to worship according to conscience. The people had the
right to conform to their ruler's creed, or to depart from his land.
Still, as a matter of fact, many of the princes being Reformers, a large
mass of the population had acquired the privilege for their own
generation and that of their children to practise that religion which
they actually approved. This was a fact, and a more comfortable one than
the necessity of choosing between what they considered wicked idolatry
and the stake--the only election left to their Netherland brethren. In
France, the accidental splinter from Montgomery's lance had deferred the
Huguenot massacre for a dozen years. During the period in which the
Queen Regent was resolved to play her fast and loose policy, all the
persuasions of Philip and the arts of Alva were powerless to induce her
to carry out the scheme which Henry had revealed to Orange in the forest
of Vincennes. When the crime came at last, it was as blundering as it
was bloody; at once premeditated and accidental; the isolated execution
of an interregal conspiracy, existing for half a generation, yet
exploding without concert; a wholesale massacre, but a piecemeal plot.
The aristocracy and the masses being thus, from a variety of causes, in
this agitated and dangerous condition, what were the measures of the
government?
The edict of 1550 had been re-enacted immediately after Philip's
accession to sovereignty. It is necessary that the reader should be made
acquainted with some of the leading provisions of this famous document,
thus laid down above all the constitutions as the organic law of the
land. A few plain facts, entirely without rhetorical varnish, will prove
more impressive in this case than superfluous declamation. The American
will judge whether the wrongs inflicted by Laud and Charles upon his
Puritan ancestors were the severest which a people has had to undergo,
and whether the Dutch Republic does not track its source to the same
high, religious origin as that of our own commonwealth.
"No one," said the edict, "shall print, write, copy, keep, conceal, sell,
buy or give in churches, streets, or other places, any book or writing
made by Martin Luther, John Ecolampadius, Ulrich Zwinglius, Martin Bucer,
John Calvin, or other heretics reprobated by the Holy Church; nor break,
or otherwise injure the images of the holy virgin or canonized saints....
nor in his house hold conventicles, or illegal gatherings, or be present
at any such in which the adherents of the above-mentioned heretics
teach, baptize, and form conspiracies against the Holy Church and the
general welfare..... Moreover, we forbid," continues the edict, in name
of the sovereign, "all lay persons to converse or dispute concerning the
Holy Scriptures, openly or secretly, especially on any doubtful or
difficult matters, or to read, teach, or expound the Scriptures, unless
they have duly studied theology and been approved by some renowned
university..... or to preach secretly, or openly, or to entertain any of
the opinions of the above-mentioned heretics..... on pain, should anyone
be found to have contravened any of the points above-mentioned, as
perturbators of our state and of the general quiet, to be punished in the
following manner." And how were they to be punished? What was the
penalty inflicted upon the man or woman who owned a hymn-book, or who
hazarded the opinion in private, that Luther was not quite wrong in
doubting the power of a monk to sell for money the license to commit
murder or incest; or upon the parent, not being a Roman Catholic doctor
of divinity, who should read Christ's Sermon on the Mount to his children
in his own parlor or shop? How were crimes like these to be visited upon
the transgressor? Was it by reprimand, fine, imprisonment, banishment,
or by branding on the forehead, by the cropping of the ears or the
slitting of nostrils, as was practised upon the Puritan fathers of New
England for their nonconformity? It was by a sharper chastisement than
any of these methods. The Puritan fathers of the Dutch Republic had to
struggle against a darker doom. The edict went on to provide--
"That such perturbators of the general quiet are to be executed, to wit:
the men with the sword and the women to be buried alive, if they do not
persist in their errors; if they do persist in them, then they are to be
executed with fire; all their property in both cases being confiscated to
the crown."
Thus, the clemency of the sovereign permitted the repentant heretic to be
beheaded or buried, alive, instead of being burned.
The edict further provided against all misprision of heresy by making
those who failed to betray the suspected liable to the same punishment as
if suspected or convicted themselves: "we forbid," said the decree, "all
persons to lodge, entertain, furnish with food, fire, or clothing, or
otherwise to favor any one holden or notoriously suspected of being a
heretic;..... and any one failing to denounce any such we ordain shall be
liable to the above-mentioned punishments."
The edict went on to provide, "that if any person, being not convicted of
heresy or error, but greatly suspected thereof, and therefore condemned
by the spiritual judge to abjure such heresy, or by the secular
magistrate to make public fine and reparation, shall again become
suspected or tainted with heresy--although it should not appear that he
has contravened or violated any one of our abovementioned commands--
nevertheless, we do will and ordain that such person shall be considered
as relapsed, and, as such, be punished with loss of life and property,
without any hope of moderation or mitigation of the above-mentioned
penalties."