History of the United Netherlands, 1584-1609 Part 41

Certainly the selection of Leicester to fill so important a post had not been a very fortunate one; and the enthusiasm which had greeted him, "as if he had been a Messiah," on his arrival, had very rapidly dwindled away, as his personal character became known. The leading politicians of the country had already been aware of the error which they had committed in clothing with almost sovereign powers the delegate of one who had refused the sovereignty. They, were too adroit to neglect the opportunity, which her Majesty's anger offered them, of repairing what they considered their blunder. When at last the quarrel, which looked so much like a lovers' quarrel, between Elizabeth and 'Sweet Robin,' had been appeased to the satisfaction of Robin, his royal mistress became more angry with the States for circ.u.mscribing than she had before been for their exaggeration of his authority. Hence the implacable hatred of Leicester to Paul Buys and Barneveld.

Those two statesmen, for eloquence, learning, readiness, administrative faculty, surpa.s.sed by few who have ever wielded the destinies of free commonwealths, were fully equal to the task thrown upon their hands by the progress of events. That task was no slight one, for it was to the leading statesmen of Holland and England, sustained by the indomitable resistance to despotism almost universal in the English and Dutch nations, that the liberty of Europe was entrusted at that, momentous epoch. Whether united under one crown, as the Netherlands ardently desired, or closely allied for aggression and defence, the two peoples were bound indissolubly together. The clouds were rolling up from the fatal south, blacker and more portentous than ever; the artificial equilibrium of forces, by which the fate of France was kept in suspense, was obviously growing every day more uncertain; but the prolonged and awful interval before the tempest should burst over the lands of freedom and Protestantism, gave at least time for the prudent to prepare. The Armada was growing every day in the ports of Spain and Portugal, and Walsingham doubted, as little as did Buys or Barneveld, toward what sh.o.r.es that invasion was to be directed. England was to be conquered in order that the rebellious Netherlands might be reduced; and 'Mucio' was to be let slip upon the unhappy Henry III. so soon as it was thought probable that the Bearnese and the Valois had sufficiently exhausted each other. Philip was to reign in Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Edinburgh, without stirring from the Escorial. An excellent programme, had there not been some English gentlemen, some subtle secretaries of state, some Devons.h.i.+re skippers, some Dutch advocates and merchants, some Zeeland fly-boatsmen, and six million men, women, and children, on the two sides of the North Sea, who had the power of expressing their thoughts rather bluntly than otherwise, in different dialects of old Anglo-Saxon speech.

Certainly it would be unjust and ungracious to disparage the heroism of the great Queen when the hour of danger really came, nor would it be legitimate for us, who can scan that momentous year of expectation, 1587, by the light of subsequent events and of secret contemporaneous record, to censure or even sharply to criticise the royal hankering for peace, when peace had really become impossible. But as we shall have occasion to examine rather closely the secrets of the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch councils, during this epoch, we are likely to find, perhaps, that at least as great a debt is due to the English and Dutch people, in ma.s.s, for the preservation of European liberty at that disastrous epoch as to any sovereign, general, or statesman.

For it was in the great waters of the sixteenth century that the nations whose eyes were open, discovered the fountain of perpetual youth, while others, who were blind, pa.s.sed rapidly onward to decrepitude. England was, in many respects, a despotism so far as regarded governmental forms; and no doubt the Catholics were treated with greater rigour than could be justified even by the perpetual and most dangerous machinations of the seminary priests and their instigators against the throne and life of Elizabeth. The word liberty was never musical in Tudor ears, yet Englishmen had blunt tongues and sharp weapons which rarely rusted for want of use. In the presence of a parliament, and the absence of a standing army, a people accustomed to read the Bible in the vernacular, to handle great questions of religion and government freely, and to bear arms at will, was most formidable to despotism. There was an advance on the olden time. A Francis Drake, a John Hawkins, a Roger Williams, might have been sold, under the Plantagenets, like an ox or an a.s.s. A 'female villain' in the reign of Henry III. could have been purchased for eighteen s.h.i.+llings--hardly the price of a fatted pig, and not one-third the value of an ambling palfrey--and a male villain, such an one as could in Elizabeth's reign circ.u.mnavigate the globe in his own s.h.i.+p, or take imperial field-marshals by the beard, was worth but two or three pounds sterling in the market. Here was progress in three centuries, for the villains were now become admirals and generals in England and Holland, and const.i.tuted the main stay of these two little commonwealths, while the commanders who governed the 'invincible' fleets and armies of omnipotent Spain, were all cousins of emperors, or grandees of bluest blood. Perhaps the system of the reformation would not prove the least effective in the impending crisis.

It was most important, then, that these two nations should be united in council, and should stand shoulder to shoulder as their great enemy advanced. But this was precisely what had been rendered almost impossible by the course of events during Leicester's year of administration, and by his sudden but not final retirement at its close. The two great national parties which had gradually been forming, had remained in a fluid state during the presence of the governor-general. During his absence they gradually hardened into the forms which they were destined to retain for centuries. In the history of civil liberty, these incessant contests, these oral and written disquisitions, these sharp concussions of opinion, and the still harder blows, which, unfortunately, were dealt on a few occasions by the combatants upon each other, make the year 1587 a memorable one. The great questions of the origin of government, the balance of dynastic forces, the distribution of powers, were dealt with by the ablest heads, both Dutch and English, that could be employed in the service of the kingdom and republic. It was a war of protocols, arguments, orations, rejoinders, apostilles, and pamphlets; very wholesome for the cause of free inst.i.tutions and the intellectual progress of mankind. The reader may perhaps be surprised to see with how much vigour and boldness the grave questions which underlie all polity, were handled so many years before the days of Russell and Sidney, of Montesquieu and Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, and Voltaire; and he may be even more astonished to find exceedingly democratic doctrines propounded, if not believed in, by trained statesmen of the Elizabethan school. He will be also apt to wonder that a more fitting time could not be found for such philosophical debate than the epoch at which both the kingdom and the republic were called upon to strain every sinew against the most formidable and aggressive despotism that the world had known since the fall of the Roman Empire.

The great dividing-line between the two parties, that of Leicester and that of Holland, which controlled the action of the States-General, was the question of sovereignty. After the declaration of independence and the repudiation of Philip, to whom did the sovereignty belong? To the people, said the Leicestrians. To the States-General and the States-Provincial, as legitimate representatives of the people, said the Holland party. Without looking for the moment more closely into this question, which we shall soon find ably discussed by the most acute reasoners of the time, it is only important at present to make a preliminary reflection. The Earl of Leicester, of all men is the world, would seem to have been precluded by his own action, and by the action of his Queen, from taking ground against the States. It was the States who, by solemn emba.s.sy, had offered the sovereignty to Elizabeth. She had not accepted the offer, but she had deliberated on the subject, and certainly she had never expressed a doubt whether or not the offer had been legally made. By the States, too, that governor-generals.h.i.+p had been conferred upon the Earl, which had been so thankfully and eagerly accepted. It was strange, then, that he should deny the existence of the power whence his own authority was derived. If the States were not sovereigns of the Netherlands, he certainly was nothing. He was but general of a few thousand English troops.

The Leicester party, then, proclaimed extreme democratic principles as to the origin of government and the sovereignty of the people. They sought to strengthen and to make almost absolute the executive authority of their chief, on the ground that such was the popular will; and they denounced with great acrimony the insolence of the upstart members of the States, half a dozen traders, hired advocates, churls, tinkers, and the like--as Leicester was fond of designating the men who opposed him--in a.s.suming these airs of sovereignty.

This might, perhaps, be philosophical doctrine, had its supporters not forgotten that there had never been any pretence at an expression of the national will, except through the mouths of the States. The States-General and the States-Provincial, without any usurpation, but as a matter of fact and of great political convenience, had, during fifteen years, exercised the authority which had fallen from Philip's hands. The people hitherto had acquiesced in their action, and certainly there had not yet been any call for a popular convention, or any other device to ascertain the popular will. It was also difficult to imagine what was the exact ent.i.ty of this abstraction called the "people" by men who expressed such extreme contempt for "merchants, advocates, town-orators, churls, tinkers, and base mechanic men, born not to command but to obey." Who were the people when the educated cla.s.ses and the working cla.s.ses were thus carefully eliminated? Hardly the simple peasantry--the boors--who tilled the soil. At that day the agricultural labourers less than all others dreamed of popular sovereignty, and more than all others submitted to the mild authority of the States. According to the theory of the Netherland const.i.tutions, they were supposed--and they had themselves not yet discovered the fallacies to which such doctrines could lead--to be represented by the n.o.bles and country-squires who maintained in the States of each Province the general farming interests of the republic.

Moreover, the number of agricultural peasants was comparatively small.

The lower cla.s.ses were rather accustomed to plough the sea than the land, and their harvests were reaped from that element, which to Hollanders and Zeelanders was less capricious than the solid earth. Almost every inhabitant of those sea-born territories was, in one sense or another, a mariner; for every highway was a ca.n.a.l; the soil was percolated by rivers and estuaries, pools and meres; the fisheries were the nurseries in which still more daring navigators rapidly learned their trade, and every child took naturally to the ocean as to its legitimate home.

The "people," therefore, thus enthroned by the Leicestrians over all the inhabitants of the country, appeared to many eyes rather a misty abstraction, and its claim of absolute sovereignty a doctrine almost as fantastic as that of the divine right of kings. The Netherlanders were, on the whole, a law-abiding people, preferring to conduct even a revolution according to precedent, very much attached to ancient usages and traditions, valuing the liberties, as they called them, which they had wrested from what had been superior force, with their own right hands, preferring facts to theories, and feeling competent to deal with tyrants in the concrete rather than to annihilate tyranny in the abstract by a bold and generalizing phraseology. Moreover the opponents of the Leicester party complained that the princ.i.p.al use to which this newly discovered "people" had been applied, was to confer its absolute sovereignty unconditionally upon one man. The people was to be sovereign in order that it might immediately abdicate in favour of the Earl.

Utrecht, the capital of the Leicestrians, had already been deprived of its const.i.tution. The magistracy was, according to law, changed every year. A list of candidates was furnished by the retiring board, an equal number of names was added by the governor of the Province, and from the catalogue thus composed the governor with his council selected the new magistrates for the year. But De Villiers, the governor of the Province, had been made a prisoner by the enemy in the last campaign; Count Moeurs had been appointed provisional stadholder by the States; and, during his temporary absence on public affairs, the Leicestrians had seized upon the government, excluded all the ancient magistrates, banished many leading citizens from the town, and installed an entirely new board, with Gerard p.r.o.ninck, called Deventer, for chief burgomaster, who was a Brabantine refugee just arrived in the Province, and not eligible to office until after ten years' residence.

It was not unnatural that the Netherlanders, who remembered the scenes of bloodshed and disorder produced by the memorable attempt of the Duke of Anjou to obtain possession of Antwerp and other cities, should be suspicious of Leicester. Anjou, too, had been called to the Provinces by the voluntary action of the States. He too had been hailed as a Messiah and a deliverer. In him too had unlimited confidence been reposed, and he had repaid their affection and their grat.i.tude by a desperate attempt to obtain the control of their chief cities by the armed hand, and thus to const.i.tute himself absolute sovereign of the Netherlands. The inhabitants had, after a b.l.o.o.d.y contest, averted the intended ma.s.sacre and the impending tyranny; but it was not astonis.h.i.+ng that--so very, few years having elapsed since those tragical events--they should be inclined to scan severely the actions of the man who had already obtained by unconst.i.tutional means the mastery of a most important city, and was supposed to harbour designs upon all the cities.

No, doubt it was a most illiberal and unwise policy for the inhabitants of the independent States to exclude from office the wanderers, for conscience' sake, from the obedient Provinces. They should have been welcomed heart and hand by those who were their brethren in religion and in the love of freedom. Moreover, it was notorious that Hohenlo, lieutenant-general under Maurice of Na.s.sau, was a German, and that by the treaty with England, two foreigners sat in the state council, while the army swarmed with English, Irish, end German officers in high command.

Nevertheless, violently to subvert the const.i.tution of a Province, and to place in posts of high responsibility men who were ineligible--some whose characters were suspicious, and some who were known to be dangerous, and to banish large numbers of respectable burghers--was the act of a despot.

Besides their democratic doctrines, the Leicestrians proclaimed and encouraged an exclusive and rigid Calvinism.

It would certainly be unjust and futile to detract from the vast debt which the republic owed to the Geneva Church. The reformation had entered the Netherlands by the Walloon gate. The earliest and most eloquent preachers, the most impa.s.sioned converts, the sublimest martyrs, had lived, preached, fought, suffered, and died with the precepts of Calvin in their hearts. The fire which had consumed the last vestige of royal and sacerdotal despotism throughout the independent republic, had been lighted by the hands of Calvinists.

Throughout the blood-stained soil of France, too, the men who were fighting the same great battle as were the Netherlanders against Philip II. and the Inquisition, the valiant cavaliers of Dauphiny and Provence, knelt on the ground, before the battle, smote their iron b.r.e.a.s.t.s with their mailed hands, uttered a Calvinistic prayer, sang a psalm of Marot, and then charged upon Guise, or upon Joyeuse, under the white plume of the Bearnese. And it was on the Calvinist weavers and clothiers of Roch.e.l.le that the great Prince relied in the hour of danger as much as on his mountain chivalry. In England too, the seeds of liberty, wrapped up in Calvinism and h.o.a.rded through many trying years, were at last destined to float over land and sea, and to bear large harvests of temperate freedom for great commonwealths, which were still unborn. Nevertheless there was a growing aversion in many parts of the States for the rigid and intolerant spirit of the reformed religion. There were many men in Holland who had already imbibed the true lesson--the only, one worth learning of the reformation--liberty of thought; but toleration in the eyes of the extreme Calvinistic party was as great a vice as it could be in the estimation of Papists. To a favoured few of other habits of thought, it had come to be regarded as a virtue; but the day was still far distant when men were to scorn the very word toleration as an insult to the dignity of man; as if for any human being or set of human beings, in caste, cla.s.s, synod, or church, the right could even in imagination be conceded of controlling the consciences of their fellow-creatures.

But it was progress for the sixteenth century that there were individuals, and prominent individuals, who dared to proclaim liberty of conscience for all. William of Orange was a Calvinist, sincere and rigid, but he denounced all oppression of religion, and opened wide the doors of the Commonwealth to Papists, Lutherans, and Anabaptists alike. The Earl of Leicester was a Calvinist, most rigid in tenet, most edifying of conversation, the acknowledged head of the Puritan party of England, but he was intolerant and was influenced only by the most intolerant of his sect. Certainly it would have required great magnanimity upon his part to a.s.sume a friendly demeanour towards the Papists. It is easier for us, in more favoured ages, to rise to the heights of philosophical abstraction, than for a man, placed as was Leicester, in the front rank of a mighty battle, in which the triumph of either religion seemed to require the bodily annihilation of all its adversaries. He believed that the success of a Catholic conspiracy against the life of Elizabeth or of a Spanish invasion of England, would raise Mary to the throne and consign himself to the scaffold. He believed that the subjugation of the independent Netherlands would place the Spaniards instantly in England, and he frequently received information, true or false, of Popish plots that were ever hatching in various parts of the Provinces against the English Queen. It was not surprising, therefore, although it was unwise, that he should incline his ear most seriously to those who counselled severe measures not only against Papists, but against those who were not persecutors of Papists, and that he should allow himself to be guided by adventurers, who wore the mask of religion only that they might plunder the exchequer and rob upon the highway.

Under the administration of this extreme party, therefore, the Papists were maltreated, disfranchised, banished, and plundered. The distribution of the heavy war-taxes, more than two-thirds of which were raised in Holland only, was confided to foreigners, and regulated mainly at Utrecht, where not one-tenth part of the same revenue was collected. This naturally excited the wrath of the merchants and manufacturers of Holland and the other Provinces, who liked not that these hard-earned and lavishly-paid subsidies should be meddled with by any but the cleanest hands.

The clergy, too, arrogated a direct influence in political affairs. Their demonstrations were opposed by the anti-Leicestrians, who cared not to see a Geneva theocracy in the place of the vanished Papacy. They had as little reverence in secular affairs for Calvinistic deacons as for the college of cardinals, and would as soon accept the infallibility of Sixtus V. as that of Herman Modet. The reformed clergy who had dispossessed and confiscated the property of the ancient ecclesiastics who once held a const.i.tutional place in the Estates of Utrecht--although many of those individuals were now married and had embraced the reformed religion who had demolished, and sold at public auction, for 12,300 florins, the time-honoured cathedral where the earliest Christians of the Netherlands had wors.h.i.+pped, and St. Willibrod had ministered, were roundly rebuked, on more than one occasion, by the blunt matters beyond their sphere.

The party of the States-General, as opposed to the Leicester party, was guided by the statesmen of Holland. At a somewhat later period was formed the States-right party, which claimed sovereignty for each Province, and by necessary consequence the hegemony throughout the confederacy, for Holland. At present the doctrine maintained was that the sovereignty forfeited by Philip had naturally devolved upon the States-General. The statesmen of this party repudiated the calumny that it had therefore lapsed into the hands of half a dozen mechanics and men of low degree.

The States of each Province were, they maintained, composed of n.o.bles and country-gentlemen, as representing the agricultural interest, and of deputies from the 'vroedschappen,' or munic.i.p.al governments, of every city and smallest town.

Such men as Adrian Van der Werff, the heroic burgomaster of Leyden during its famous siege, John Van der Does, statesman, orator, soldier, poet, Adolphus Meetkerke, judge, financier, politician, Carl Roorda, Noel de Carom diplomatist of most signal ability, Floris Thin, Paul Buys, and Olden-Barneveld, with many others, who would have done honour to the legislative a.s.semblies and national councils in any country or any age, were constantly returned as members of the different vroedschaps in the commonwealth.

So far from its being true then that half a dozen ignorant mechanics had usurped the sovereignty of the Provinces, after the abjuration of the Spanish King, it may be a.s.serted in general terms, that of the eight hundred thousand inhabitants of Holland at least eight hundred persons were always engaged in the administration of public affairs, that these individuals were perpetually exchanged for others, and that those whose names became most prominent in the politics of the day were remarkable for thorough education, high talents, and eloquence with tongue and pen.

It was acknowledged by the leading statesmen of England and France, on repeated occasions throughout the sixteenth century, that the diplomatists and statesmen of the Netherlands were even more than a match for any politicians who were destined to encounter them, and the profound respect which Leicester expressed for these solid statesmen, these "substantial, wise, well-languaged" men, these "big fellows," so soon as he came in contact with them, and before he began to hate them for outwitting him, has already appeared. They were generally men of the people, born without any of the accidents of fortune; but, the leaders had studied in the common schools, and later in the n.o.ble universities of a land where to be learned and eloquent was fast becoming almost as great an honour as to be wealthy or high born.

The executive, the legislative, and the judiciary departments were more carefully and scientifically separated than could perhaps have been expected in that age. The lesser munic.i.p.al courts, in which city-senators presided, were subordinate to the supreme court of Holland, whose officers were appointed by the stadholders and council; the supplies were in the hands of the States-Provincial, and the supreme administrative authority was confided to a stadholder appointed by the states.

The States-General were const.i.tuted of similar materials to those of which the States-Provincial were constructed, and the same individuals were generally prominent in both. They were deputies appointed by the Provincial Estates, were in truth rather more like diplomatic envoys than senators, were generally bound very strictly by instructions, and were often obliged, by the jealousy springing from the States-right principle, to refer to their const.i.tuents, on questions when the times demanded a sudden decision, and when the necessary delay was inconvenient and dangerous.

In religious matters, the States-party, to their honour, already leaned to a wide toleration. Not only Catholics were not burned, but they were not banished, and very large numbers remained in the territory, and were quite undisturbed in religious matters, within their own doors. There were even men employed in public affairs who were suspected of papistical tendencies, although their hostility, to Spain and their attachment to their native land could not fairly be disputed. The leaders of the States-party had a rooted aversion to any political influence on the part of the clergy of any denomination whatever. Disposed to be lenient to all forms of wors.h.i.+p, they were disinclined to an established church, but still more opposed to allowing church-influence in secular affairs. As a matter of course, political men with such bold views in religious matters were bitterly a.s.sailed by their rigid opponents. Barneveld, with his "nil scire tutissima fides," was denounced as a disguised Catholic or an infidel, and as for Paul Buys, he was a "bolsterer of Papists, an atheist, a devil," as it has long since been made manifest.

Nevertheless these men believed that they understood the spirit of their country and of the age. In encouragement to an expanding commerce, the elevation and education of the ma.s.ses, the toleration of all creeds, and a wide distribution of political functions and rights, they looked for the salvation of their nascent republic from destruction, and the maintenance of the true interests of the people. They were still loyal to Queen Elizabeth, and desirous that she should accept the sovereignty of the Provinces. But they were determined that the sovereignty should be a const.i.tutional one, founded upon and limited by the time-honoured laws and traditions of their commonwealth; for they recognised the value of a free republic with an hereditary chief, however anomalous it might in theory appear. They knew that in Utrecht the Leicestrian party were about to offer the Queen the sovereignty of their Province, without conditions, but they were determined that neither Queen Elizabeth nor any other monarch should ever reign in the Netherlands, except under conditions to be very accurately defined and well secured.

Thus, contrasted, then, were the two great parties in the Netherlands, at the conclusion of Leicester's first year of administration. It may easily be understood that it was not an auspicious moment to leave the country without a chief.

The strength of the States-party lay in Holland, Zeeland, Friesland. The main stay of the democratic or Leicester faction was in the city of Utrecht, but the Earl had many partizans in Gelderland, Friesland, and in Overyssel, the capital of which Province, the wealthy and thriving Deventer, second only in the republic to Amsterdam for commercial and political importance, had been but recently secured for the Provinces by the vigorous measures of Sir William Pelham.

The condition of the republic and of the Spanish Provinces was, at that moment, most signally contrasted. If the effects of despotism and of liberty could ever be exhibited at a single glance, it was certainly only necessary to look for a moment at the picture of the obedient and of the rebel Netherlands.

Since the fall of Antwerp, the desolation of Brabant, Flanders, and of the Walloon territories had become complete. The King had recovered the great commercial capital, but its commerce was gone. The Scheldt, which, till recently, had been the chief mercantile river in the world, had become as barren as if its fountains had suddenly dried up. It was as if it no longer flowed to the ocean, for its mouth was controlled by Flus.h.i.+ng. Thus Antwerp was imprisoned and paralyzed. Its docks and basins, where 2500 s.h.i.+ps had once been counted, were empty, gra.s.s was growing in its streets, its industrious population had vanished, and the Jesuits had returned in swarms. And the same spectacle was presented by Ghent, Bruges, Valenciennes, Tournay, and those other fair cities, which had once been types of vigorous industry and tumultuous life. The sea-coast was in the hands of two rising commercial powers, the great and free commonwealths of the future. Those powers were acting in concert, and commanding the traffic of the world, while the obedient Provinces were excluded from all foreign intercourse and all markets, as the result of their obedience. Commerce, manufactures, agriculture; were dying lingering deaths. The thrifty farms, orchards, and gardens, which had been a proverb and wonder of industry were becoming wildernesses. The demand for their produce by the opulent and thriving cities, which had been the workshops of the world, was gone. Foraging bands of Spanish and Italian mercenaries had succeeded to the famous tramp of the artizans and mechanics, which had often been likened to an army, but these new customers were less profitable to the gardeners and farmers. The clothiers, the fullers, the tapestry-workers, the weavers, the cutlers, had all wandered away, and the cities of Holland, Friesland, and of England, were growing skilful and rich by the lessons and the industry of the exiles to whom they afforded a home. There were villages and small towns in the Spanish Netherlands that had been literally depopulated.

Large districts of country had gone to waste, and cane-brakes and squalid mora.s.ses usurped the place of yellow harvest-fields. The fog, the wild boar, and the wolf, infested the abandoned homes of the peasantry; children could not walk in safety in the neighbourhood even of the larger cities; wolves littered their young in the deserted farm-houses; two hundred persons, in the winter of 1586-7, were devoured by wild beasts in the outskirts of Ghent. Such of the remaining labourers and artizans as had not been converted into soldiers, found their most profitable employment as brigands, so that the portion of the population spared by war and emigration was a.s.sisting the enemy in preying upon their native country. Brandschatzung, burglary, highway-robbery, and murder, had become the chief branches of industry among the working cla.s.ses. n.o.bles and wealthy burghers had been changed to paupers and mendicants. Many a family of ancient lineage, and once of large possessions, could be seen begging their bread, at the dusk of evening, in the streets of great cities, where they had once exercised luxurious hospitality; and they often begged in vain.

For while such was the forlorn aspect of the country--and the portrait, faithfully sketched from many contemporary pictures, has not been exaggerated in any of its dark details--a great famine smote the land with its additional scourge. The whole population, soldiers and brigands, Spaniards and Flemings, beggars and workmen, were in danger of peris.h.i.+ng together. Where the want of employment had been so great as to cause a rapid depopulation, where the demand for labour had almost entirely ceased, it was a necessary result, that during the process, prices should be low, even in the presence of foreign soldiery, and despite the inflamed' profits, which such capitalists as remained required, by way not only of profit but insurance, in such troublous times. Accordingly, for the last year or two, the price of rye at Antwerp and Brussels had been one florin for the veertel (three bushels) of one hundred and twenty pounds; that of wheat, about one-third of a florin more. Five pounds of rye, therefore, were worth, one penny sterling, reckoning, as was then usual, two s.h.i.+llings to the florin. A pound weight of wheat was worth about one farthing. Yet this was forty-one years after the discovery of the mines of Potosi (A.D. 1545), and full sixteen years after the epoch; from which is dated that rapid fall in the value of silver, which in the course of seventy years, caused the average price of corn and of all other commodities, to be tripled or even quadrupled. At that very moment the average cost of wheat in England was sixty-four s.h.i.+llings the quarter, or about seven and sixpence sterling the bushel, and in the markets of Holland, which in truth regulated all others, the same prices prevailed. A bushel of wheat in England was equal therefore to eight bushels in Brussels.

Thus the silver mines, which were the Spanish King's property, had produced their effect everywhere more signally than within the obedient Provinces. The South American specie found its way to Philip's coffers, thence to the paymasters of his troops in Flanders, and thence to the commercial centres of Holland and England. Those countries, first to feel and obey the favourable expanding impulse of the age, were moving surely and steadily on before it to greatness. Prices were rising with unexampled rapidity, the precious metals were comparatively a drug, a world-wide commerce, such as had never been dreamed of, had become an every-day concern, the arts and sciences and a most generous culture in famous schools and universities, which had been founded in the midst of tumult and bloodshed, characterized the republic, and the golden age of English poetry, which was to make the Elizabethan era famous through all time, had already begun.

In the Spanish Netherlands the newly-found treasure served to pay the only labourers required in a subjugated and almost deserted country, the pikemen of Spain and Italy, and the reiters of Germany. Prices could not sustain themselves in the face of depopulation. Where there was no security for property, no home-market, no foreign intercourse, industrial pursuits had become almost impossible. The small demand for labour had caused it, as it were, to disappear, altogether. All men had become beggars, brigands, or soldiers. A temporary reaction followed. There were no producers. Suddenly it was discovered that no corn had been planted, and that there was no harvest. A famine was the inevitable result. Prices then rose with most frightful rapidity. The veertel of rye, which in the previous year had been worth one florin at Brussels and Antwerp, rose in the winter of 1586-7 to twenty, twenty-two, and even twenty-four florins; and wheat advanced from one and one-third florin to thirty-two florins the veertel. Other articles were proportionally increased in market-value; but it is worthy of remark that mutton was quoted in the midst of the famine at nine stuyvers (a little more than ninepence sterling) the pound, and beef at fivepence, while a single cod-fish sold for twenty-two florins. Thus wheat was worth sixpence sterling the pound weight (reckoning the veertel of one hundred and twenty pounds at thirty florins), which was a penny more than the price of a pound of beef; while an ordinary fish was equal in value to one hundred and six pounds of beef. No better evidence could be given that the obedient Provinces were relapsing into barbarism, than that the only agricultural industry then practised was to allow what flocks and herds were remaining to graze at will over the ruined farms and gardens, and that their fishermen were excluded from the sea.

The evil cured itself, however, and, before the expiration of another year, prices were again at their previous level. The land was sufficiently cultivated to furnish the necessaries of life for a diminis.h.i.+ng population, and the supply of labour was more than enough, for the languis.h.i.+ng demand. Wheat was again at tenpence the bushel, and other commodities valued in like proportion, and far below the market-prices in Holland and England.

On the other, hand, the prosperity of the republic was rapidly increasing. Notwithstanding the war, which had beer raging for a terrible quarter of a century without any interruption, population was increasing, property rapidly advancing in value, labour in active demand.

Famine was impossible to a state which commanded the ocean. No corn grew in Holland and Zeeland, but their ports were the granary of the world.

The fisheries were a mine of wealth almost equal to the famous Potosi, with which the commercial world was then ringing. Their commerce with the Baltic nations was enormous. In one month eight hundred vessels left their havens for the eastern ports alone. There was also no doubt whatever--and the circ.u.mstance was a source of constant complaint and of frequent ineffective legislation--that the rebellious Provinces were driving a most profitable trade with Spain and the Spanish possessions, in spite of their revolutionary war. The mines of Peru and Mexico were as fertile for the Hollanders and Zeelanders as for the Spaniards themselves. The war paid for the war, one hundred large frigates were constantly cruising along the coasts to protect the fast-growing traffic, and an army of twenty thousand foot soldiers and two thousand cavalry were maintained on land. There were more s.h.i.+ps and sailors at that moment in Holland and Zeeland than in the whole kingdom of England.

While the sea-ports were thus rapidly increasing in importance, the towns in the interior were advancing as steadily. The woollen manufacture, the tapestry, the embroideries of Gelderland, and Friesland, and Overyssel, were becoming as famous as had been those of Tournay, Ypres, Brussels, and Valenciennes. The emigration from the obedient Provinces and from other countries was very great. It was difficult to obtain lodgings in the princ.i.p.al cities; new houses, new streets, new towns, were rising every day. The single Province of Holland furnished regularly, for war-expenses alone, two millions of florins (two hundred thousand pounds) a year, besides frequent extraordinary grants for the same purpose, yet the burthen imposed upon the vigorous young commonwealth seemed only to make it the more elastic. "The coming generations may see," says a contemporary historian, "the fortifications erected at that epoch in the cities, the costly and magnificent havens, the docks, the great extension of the cities; for truly the war had become a great benediction to the inhabitants." Such a prosperous commonwealth as this was not a prize to be lightly thrown away. There is no doubt whatever that a large majority of the inhabitants, and of the States by whom the people were represented, ardently and affectionately desired to be annexed to the English crown. Leicester had become unpopular, but Elizabeth was adored, and there was nothing unreasonable in the desire entertained by the Provinces of retaining their ancient const.i.tutions, and of transferring their allegiance to the English Queen.

But the English Queen could not resolve to take the step. Although the great tragedy which was swiftly approaching its inevitable catastrophe, the execution of the Scottish Queen, was to make peace with Philip impossible--even if it were imaginable before--Elizabeth, during the year 1587, was earnestly bent on peace. This will be made manifest in subsequent pages, by an examination of the secret correspondence of the court. Her most sagacious statesmen disapproved her course, opposed it, and were often overruled, although never convinced; for her imperious will would have its way.

The States-General loathed the very name of peace with Spain. The people loathed it. All knew that peace with Spain meant the exchange of a thriving prosperous commonwealth, with freedom of religion, const.i.tutional liberty, and self-government, for provincial subjection to the inquisition and to despotism: To dream of any concession from Philip on the religious point was ridiculous. There was a mirror ever held up before their eyes by the obedient Provinces, in which they might see their own image, should, they too return to obedience. And there was never a pretence, on the part of any honest adviser of Queen Elizabeth in the Netherlands, whether Englishman or Hollander, that the idea of peace-negotiation could be tolerated for a moment by States or people.

Yet the sum of the Queen's policy, for the year 1587, may be summed up in one word--peace; peace for the Provinces, peace for herself, with their implacable enemy.

In France, during the same year of expectation, we shall see the long prologue to the tragic and memorable 1588 slowly enacting; the same triangular contest between the three Henrys and their partizans still proceeding. We shall see the misguided and wretched Valois lamenting over his victories, and rejoicing over his defeats; forced into hollow alliance with his deadly enemy; arrayed in arms against his only protector and the true champion of the realm; and struggling vainly in the toils of his own mother and his own secretary of state, leagued with his most powerful foes. We shall see 'Mucio,' with one 'hand extended in mock friends.h.i.+p toward the King, and with the other thrust backward to grasp the purse of 300,000 crowns held forth to aid his fellow-conspirator's dark designs against their common victim; and the Bearnese, ever with lance in rest, victorious over the wrong antagonist, foiled of the fruits of victory, proclaiming himself the English Queen's devoted knight, but railing at her parsimony; always in the saddle, always triumphant, always a beggar, always in love, always cheerful, and always confident to outwit the Guises and Philip, Parma and the Pope.

And in Spain we shall have occasion to look over the King's shoulder, as he sits at his study-table, in his most sacred retirement; and we shall find his policy for the year 1587 summed up in two words--invasion of England. Sincerely and ardently as Elizabeth meant peace with Philip, just so sincerely did Philip intend war with England, and the dethronement and destruction of the Queen. To this great design all others were now subservient, and it was mainly on account of this determination that there was sufficient leisure in the republic for the Leicestrians and the States-General to fight out so thoroughly their party-contests.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Acknowledged head of the Puritan party of England (Leicester) Geneva theocracy in the place of the vanished Papacy Hankering for peace, when peace had really become impossible Hating nothing so much as idleness Mirror ever held up before their eyes by the obedient Provinces Rigid and intolerant spirit of the reformed religion Scorn the very word toleration as an insult The word liberty was never musical in Tudor ears

HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS

From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce--1609

By John Lothrop Motley