of their true value; he saw the menace as well as the merit of the
budding revolution and opposed it firmly because of its dangerous
elements, which were already revealing themselves. The great era of the
Middle Ages had come to an end, carrying with it in its fall many of
those elements of righteousness in thought and action for which Charles
cared almost passionately. He was of the older age rather than of the
new, and in the end the conviction that he had failed to stem the tide,
coupled with the progressive ruin of the old religion, the old
philosophy, the old order of life, led him to abdicate what was almost
the throne of the world and seek refuge in a monastery, where he devoted
the brief remainder of his life to prayer, meditation, and the making of
watches.
In the meantime, however, he had done Europe inestimable services,
amongst them the beating back of the Moslem host, the recovery to
Christianity of Hungary, the conquest of Tunis, and the general blocking
of the double lines of Mohammedan advance. He was successful in his new
crusade against the Eastern infidels, but he could not arrest the
progress of heresy and anarchy in the West, and he finally abandoned the
fight in despair, turning over to others a royalty too heavy to be
borne. To his son Philip were given Spain, the American possessions, and
the “Low Countries,” which then comprised all Belgium, Holland, and
Luxembourg as well as Artois and Cambrai. So began the Spanish dominion
over the very centre of the Heart of Europe. It was the richest state
in the world; when Philip II became sovereign there were seventeen
provinces with 208 great walled towns, 150 boroughs and more than 6,000
villages. The products were infinitely varied and were famous throughout
the world: woollen cloth, linen, silk, velvet, damask, embroideries,
gloves, metal-work of every kind. Antwerp was in the lead in commerce,
and it is said that the city had a population of 250,000, with 1,000
resident foreign merchants; 500 ships entered the port daily, and 300
wagons from across the frontiers of France and the Empire, while more
business was transacted there in a week than in two years in Venice, her
great commercial rival in the South. Such were the lands that came to
Philip of Spain: the richest prize that Europe could afford.
IV
A SPANISH NETHERLANDS
When Philip II came to the throne there was a new king in France, Henry
II, who forthwith broke the peace Charles V had engineered, and
proceeded to invade both Italy and Flanders. He was promptly beaten, in
the north by Egmont at St. Quentin, and after so disastrous a fashion
that hardly any one but Nevers and Condé escaped. It was in gratitude
for the brilliant victory of his Belgian troops that Philip built the
palace of the Escorial. Trying again the next year, Henry did indeed,
through the Duke de Guise (whose luck was better than that which
followed him when he met Alva the year before in Italy), regain Calais,
during the absence of the English garrison, who were home on a holiday;
but again Egmont came into the breech, crushed the French at Gravelines,
and so forced the treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis, which obliged France,
amongst other penalties, to give up to Philip more than two hundred
walled towns, though she was allowed to retain Calais, Mary of England
now being dead.
Flemish soldiers, now forming the best trained and most effective army
in Europe, had won the war for Philip, but out of the victory came in
the end the ruin of their country, for before leaving for Spain, which
he loved, he demanded of the Netherlands, which he disliked, three
million florins toward the expense of the war. This was granted, but
coupled with a request that the Spanish garrison be withdrawn. It
happened that this demand was made at the instigation of William, Prince
of Orange, who now appears on the scene, for he had discovered that
Henry and Philip had secretly agreed to stamp out Protestantism in the
Low Countries by introducing the Spanish Inquisition, and that the alien
garrison was to be the means of putting this plan into effect. William
of Orange was not a Fleming but a German; he had expected to be made
regent when the King went back to Spain, and had been disappointed. He
was neither a Catholic nor a Protestant, but a cold, silent, far-seeing
politician of extremely rationalistic views. He knew that the spirit of
independence in the Netherlands was so dominating that Catholics and
Protestants alike could be allied against both the Inquisition and a
foreign garrison. He cleverly united them on this basis, alienated the
last flicker of friendly feeling on the part of Philip, and so
precipitated the conflict that raged for almost a century to the ruin
and misery of all the seventeen provinces. Philip appeared to yield,
went back to Spain, and at once began his scheming for the destruction
of the Protestant heresy in his too-independent territories.
So far as the aristocracy, the rich burghers, and the cultivated classes
were concerned, Protestantism had made little if any headway in spite of
the wide corruption of the Church, but among the peasants and the
ignorant, particularly in the great cities, it had taken firm hold. To
Philip it was both a damnable heresy and a civil menace; he hated it as
his father had hated it, but Charles V was of a different mould and
temper. Philip was a Spanish Catholic, and therein (at that time) lay
all the difference. To him with his cold mind and pitiless temper there
was only one question: how to root out this accursed and poisonous
growth. The answer was at hand in the shape of the peculiar type of
inquisition which had been invented in Spain for the sole purpose of
completing the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from the Peninsula after
the final defeat of the Mohammedan invaders. It had proved its
efficiency to admiration, and, though it had never been used against
Christian heretics, Philip felt (as others have felt after him) that
both the righteous State and the Catholic Church were, through the King,
fighting for their lives, and that he had no right to balk at any means
that offered when it was a question of life or death.
The old “Papal” Inquisition, which came into existence toward the end of
the Middle Ages, and was the corollary of the dawning spirit of the
Renaissance with which it synchronised, was legitimate enough, if you
hold, as every one held then, that spiritual evil is as wicked as
material evil, and just as worthy of formal punishment. Trials were
conducted according to civil law, they were public, and the secular arm
alone inflicted punishment. The “Spanish” Inquisition, which is the form
so bitterly condemned to-day, was a creature of the Renaissance in its
fulness. It was an engine of the most diabolical efficiency, for its
proceedings were secret, its finding irrevocable, its penalties
merciless and as cruel as English criminal law in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, though it lacked certain of the refinements of
torture that were first developed under “Good King Hal” when he was
waging his war against the monks and monasteries of his own England.
Had Philip been dealing with the Popes of the Middle Ages, he could
never have imposed the Spanish Inquisition on the Netherlands, but those
of the Renaissance were as different as possible, and he had no trouble
in gaining their consent. A few burnings took place, and then the loyal
and Catholic but intensely patriotic nobles took matters into their own
hands and through the regent, Margaret of Parma, warned the King that
unless the thing was stopped the provinces would act in defence of their
own rights and in accordance with their solemnly guaranteed privileges.
The Protestant mob also began to act after its own fashion, without
waiting for an answer from Philip, and week after week carried on a
course of destruction that wrecked cathedrals, monasteries, churches,
and destroyed more old stained glass, wonderful statues, great pictures,
jewelled vestments, and sacred vessels than have escaped to this day.
The senseless and sacrilegious fury of this mob of the baser sort not
only lashed the King into a cold fury but it even halted some of the
Catholic nobles, many of whom, including Egmont himself, began to wonder
if, after all, the Inquisition was not permissible in the light of the
revelations that were being made in the desecrated churches of Antwerp
and Ghent and Tournai. No advantage was taken of this changing
sentiment, however, and, ready at last, Philip struck, and the Duke of
Alva, with an army of 10,000 picked men, marched up from Genoa, occupied
Brussels, seized every disaffected leader, including even those like
Egmont and Horn, who were both loyal and devout Catholics (but barring
Orange, who had cautiously retreated to Germany), and established the
“Council of Blood,” which during the first week of its activities
executed more than eight hundred men whose only crime was protesting
against the denial of their guaranteed liberties and the maintenance of
the Inquisition.
The Prince of Orange organised in Germany a small armed force for the
deliverance of the cowed and horrified Netherlanders, but his first
victory over Alva’s forces was answered by immediate reprisals in
Brussels, a score of nobles being sent to the block, including Horn and
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF ALVA, MORO VAN DASHORST
_From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_]
Egmont, the latter being the most honoured of the nobles and as good a
Catholic as he was a soldier. The people remained absolutely crushed,
making no effort to rise in support of the Prince of Orange, who,
defeated by Alva, sought the aid of the French Protestants, attacked
from the sea by means of privateers who preyed on Spanish commerce, and
finally, by establishing a base in Holland, raised this portion of the
Spanish Netherlands against Alva and made himself actual head of a new
state. In the meantime a Huguenot army had laid siege to Mons, but just
as victory seemed near the Massacre of St. Bartholomew ended the
Protestant party in France for ever, destroyed all the hopes that had
been raised through the possibility of assistance from Coligny, and sent
Orange back again behind the Rhine, leaving Flanders and Brabant to
their fate. Alva saw to it that this was sufficiently awful, and then
began operations against Holland, but by this time Philip had become
thoroughly tired of the costly war and listened willingly to the enemies
of the terrible duke, recalled him, and sent in his place the
comparatively mild and accommodating Requesens.
The tale is now one of progressive and finally successful efforts at
pacifying the country, the undoing so far as possible of the bloody work
of Alva, the winning back to the Church and to the Spanish crown of all
those who had not gone over definitely to Protestantism and the Prince
of Orange. Both the Pope and the King offered full amnesty, and the
southern provinces, those, that is, that now form the kingdom of
Belgium, accepted at once and completely, for after all they were
solidly Catholic and in principle not averse to Spanish dominion. The
northern provinces--_i. e._, Holland--rejected all overtures, binding
themselves completely, implacably, and savagely to Protestantism, and
from now on the former Spanish Netherlands became two states: Holland,
soon to win its independence, and Belgium, now and for a long time to
come, a Spanish province.
Order was still far away. It was in the year 1573 that Requesens came to
reverse the policy of Alva, and not until the Peace of Utrecht in 1715,
when Spanish rule was finally terminated, that there was any rest or
relief for the tortured and ruined provinces of Flanders and Brabant.
Requesens died; the Spanish troops mutinied, were joined by the German
mercenaries, and began a war on their own account, burning and sacking
Antwerp, butchering 6,000 of the population, and harrying the country
right and left. Then came Don John of Austria, Philip’s new
governor-general, the victor of Lepanto, and a figure out of the pages
of mediæval romance. He came too late; anarchy was firmly fixed in the
saddle, riding rough-shod over the desolated garden of Europe.
Abandoning his original policy of pacification, he turned to war and was
successful, but only to find about every power in Europe represented in
the roaring inferno. Orange was fighting from Antwerp as his
headquarters, the provincial representatives, with Brussels as their
centre, were howling for help from any source; the Protestant faction
called John Casimir, Count Palatine, to their assistance, while the
Catholics appealed to the Duke d’Alençon, and both put in an appearance,
the latter seizing Maubeuge and working thence into the interior, while
the former defeated Don John in a pitched battle and drove him back to
Namur, where in a few months he died of chagrin and a broken heart,
after making his nephew Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma, his
successor in the field.
Hell is the only name that can be applied to the unhappy land, the
condition of which was not unlike that of Mexico in this year of
enlightenment, 1915. The Renaissance and the Reformation together had
extinguished both civilisation and culture over the greater part of
Europe; war was everywhere and incessant, all principle had been
abandoned and the ethical standards of society had disappeared.
Slaughter, civil war, assassination, treason, and sacrilege howled
through an ever-widening desolation and the end of the world seemed at
hand. Fortunately, in a way, the outrageous career of the Protestants
served as an impulse to union; their savagery in Ghent and Brussels
somehow pulled the people of Belgium together and enabled Parma to win
some small order out of the insane chaos. He began a new campaign, drove
out the French, laid siege to the Calvinists in Ghent, and at last (the
Prince of Orange having been assassinated at the instigation of Philip)
broke down the last Protestant resistance in Brussels and Antwerp and
for the moment restored peace over a deserted, ruined, and blood-stained
land. And then Philip II died and dying abandoned the country he had
received as the richest in Europe and left as the most miserable and
poverty-stricken, handing it over to new rulers in the persons of his
daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria.
The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy
had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant
state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions
were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that
still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a
geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and
burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the
cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or
fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and
Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and
mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the
old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not
even remembered.
To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted
country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of
the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at
last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its
acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of
peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if
evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and
commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the
red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of
those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from
it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and
the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were
opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that
are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of
religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses
of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development
of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a
new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the
great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens
and Vandyck.
It was all temporary, however, and ephemeral. Spain took charge once
more, the Dutch continued their policy of commercial and religious
aggression, the Thirty Years’ War drew the unfortunate provinces into
its whirlpool; the war between France and Spain was largely fought on
their territory, the war of France against the United Netherlands
resulted in the seizure by the unsuccessful party--France--of Belgian
territory as a salve to its wounded pride. Year after year Belgium was
subject to renewed devastations; what the Protestants and Spaniards had
left the French despoiled. Brussels, which had now become the richest
and most splendid of the cities, was bombarded with red-hot cannon balls
and almost wholly destroyed, sixteen churches and four thousand houses
being burned, and the great city deprived of almost its last examples of
the great art of the Middle Ages.
And so the wretched tale goes on, generation after generation. God alone
knows how or why anything was left in Belgium, either of art or culture
or character or religion, or even of the rudiments of civilisation.
Still something did remain for destruction, as was proved a little later
by the revolutionists of France and recently by the Prussians, both of
whom have performed the final work quite perfectly. The Heart of Europe
had been torn, lacerated, crushed, for one hundred and sixty years, and
yet somehow it continued to beat on. A great Christian culture, a great
congeries of Christian peoples, product of the splendid centuries from
1000 to 1500 A. D., had been destroyed and superseded by the very
different force engendered by Renaissance and Reformation. If there are
those who still, despite the blazing enlightenment of the last
twelvemonth, retain any illusions as to the comparative beneficence of
the two epochs, it would be well for them to consider in detail the
annals and the peoples and the personalities of the Heart of Europe
during the five centuries of mediævalism, and the same during the five
centuries of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The contrast is
striking, the revision of judgments unescapable, the lesson, immediately
to be applied in the present crisis, pregnant of possible benefits.
With the Peace of Utrecht all that is now Belgium passed to the Emperor
Charles VI, and Austrian dominion began. In contrast to the preceding
horrors it was comparatively uneventful; while Prince Charles of
Lorraine was governor the country was quiet and prosperous and a
certain advance occurred on cultural lines. This enlightened prince
deserves well of history in one respect at least, for, by an imperial
decree he caused to be issued, it was solemnly asserted that a gentleman
did not lose his status as such if he indulged in the practice of the
arts or letters! Joseph II, who followed him, was a pedantic reformer of
laudable intentions, who set himself to the perfecting of everything,
both religious and secular, to the extreme irritation of his people who
simply wanted to govern themselves and apparently cared little whether
this were well done or ill. In the end the whole country broke up again
in rebellion and disorder, the nobles leagued in one group under the
Duke d’Arenberg, the lower classes in a second with a vulgar and noisy
demagogue, Van der Noot, as its leader. Somehow or other they managed to
get together at Breda, raised an army, defeated the Austrian garrisons,
and drove the Emperor Joseph across the Meuse when he forthwith died of
sheer discouragement.
Then followed a short-lived “republic” engineered by Van der Noot, who
was an adherent of the new French ideas, with an attack on the nobles
which was sufficiently successful to bring their party to an end. Next,
the powers who looked most askance at the fast-growing
revolution--England, Holland, and Prussia--united for the restoration of
Austrian authority, on general principles, and the Emperor Leopold II,
with their support, asserted, and then established his authority,
capturing Namur and within two weeks occupying the whole country (which
accepted him contentedly enough), driving the ambitious advocate with
the revolutionary tendencies into a well-merited exile. Austria tried
honestly enough to conciliate the country, but its temper and
inclinations were otherwise, so France was asked to intervene, which she
was not loath to do, sending Dumouriez to undertake the task. Badly
beaten at first, he succeeded finally at Valmy and Jemappes, and the
French Revolution assumed control. The cabal of assassins then in power
in Paris decreed that Belgium should be saved, but that first she must
be purged, and a choice assortment of thirty ruffians was sent to
Brussels to see that this was done. A guillotine was set up at once, and
clerics, nobles, and the wealthier merchants became its victims, while
the patriot army, supported by the local revolutionists, acted after
their kind and sacked the remaining churches, destroyed religious
houses, and generally plundered whatever they safely could, _i. e._,
whatever was unable to defend itself. Dumouriez countenanced none of
this, but he was playing a double game, acting ostensibly for the cabal
in Paris though with the idea always before him that if he could control
Belgium and conquer Holland he would be in a good position from which to
turn on his employers, crush them, and then restore the monarchy on
constitutional lines. Unfortunately for his plans, he was defeated by
the allies and again Austria won back her insecure provinces. She was
received with the facile enthusiasm which now seemed chronic with the
shattered Belgian character, but after a few months was driven out for
the last time when France was finally victorious over the half-hearted,
selfish, and ineffectual allies, only one of whom, England, was waging
war against the republic with anything approaching sincerity and
determination.
Again the French--or rather the republican faction--entered into
possession, and unhappy Belgium felt the full force of its grinning
hypocrisy, its satanic savagery, and its unscrupulous greed. “Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity” was painted on the walls, and simultaneously
the country was robbed of its last coins, its laws and privileges were
overthrown, its citizens deprived of even the most fundamental rights of
liberty and property, while the few remaining abbeys and castles were
sacked, burned, and their ruins razed to the ground. Alva had been an
amateur compared with the new apostles of liberty, and when at last
Belgium was declared regenerate and was incorporated in the French
“republic,” nothing remained for incorporation except a name, a memory,
and a huddle of entirely ruined and perfectly hopeless victims of four
centuries of cumulative enlightenment and progress.
Of course they rebelled; of course whole groups of desperate men took to
the forests and moors, robbing, killing, existing as best they could,
and of course they were crushed again and again; at last, however,
Bonaparte began to bring some order out of the republican anarchy, and
conditions improved. When at last he proclaimed himself Emperor the
Belgians accepted him with the same avidity they always had shown for
any man who promised some alleviation of their intolerable sufferings.
Holland was occupied and given a king of its own, Napoleon’s brother
Louis, who was not only the strongest and finest character in the
family, but so righteous in his kingship and so whole-heartedly devoted
to his Dutch that he soon alienated the sympathies of his imperial
brother while failing to gain those of his somewhat difficult subjects.