The Story of Nations - Holland/Chapter 18

It is difficult to say whether the freedom of the Netherlands was served better by the death of Farnese or the recognition of Henry as King of France by the principal persons who had intrigued with Philip, had taken his money, and were now negotiating with Henry for more money and place and pardon. Certainly a more rapacious and shameless crew never existed than the French nobility. Fortunately for Holland, the miller and the weaver, the sailor and the trader, were in the ascendant in the Dutch Republic. Had that republic been cursed by nobles, even like those in Flanders, it might well have been despaired of. Henry of France renounced the Reformed religion for that of Rome, was willing, as he said, to win his kingdom by hearing mass, and his future career little concerns us.

After an interval of little more than a year, a successor was appointed to Parma, a middle-aged, fat, gouty, lethargic person, the Archduke Ernest of Austria. In the meantime, Maurice had not been idle. He had captured Geertruydenberg in June, 1593. He got possession of Groningen, the capital of Friesland, in July, 1594, and now the republic was constituted, almost within the limits from which so much that was heroic and wonderful was to proceed for a century or more. But for a long time the Hollanders strove to recover the whole of the Spanish Netherlands. Had they succeeded, their history would have been a different one, for it is certain that the narrowness of the republic, and the great demands made on it for the work which it had to effect, were the ultimate causes of its weakness and decay, at a time when Europe still wondered, and believed that its resources were exhaustless. The Hollanders were unable to bestow freedom on the Flemings.

After two ineffectual, and easily-discovered plots, in which Philip had bribed assassins to murder Elizabeth and Maurice, after the Hollanders had spent much treasure and blood on behalf of Henry of France, who was quite prepared to abandon them and make peace with Spain as soon as ever his own purposes were served, and after Henry had been absolved by the Pope, and the Archduke Ernest had died, Philip determined to surrender the Netherlands to his son-in-law and daughter. The son-in-law was a brother of Ernest, Archbishop of Toledo, and a Cardinal. It was therefore necessary that he should be released from his vows and his orders, in order to fulfil his new function of secular prince. With him was sent that son of William the Silent who had been kidnapped twenty-eight years before, and had been carefully educated by the Spanish Jesuits. All the memory that he now retained of his father was a profound reverence for his name and character.

The English and the Dutch now determined to make a concentrated attack on certain of the Spanish ports. The exploit of Drake, ten years before, gave, no doubt, its stimulus to the expedition of 1596. Drake and Hawkins, indeed, had just passed away. But there were Essex, Raleigh, Howard, and Vere to take part with the Dutch admirals. They reached Cadiz on June 30th, and destroyed the Spanish fleet there, landed their troops, captured the fort, drove the Spanish troops into headlong flight, and got possession of city and citadel. They would have captured the fleet also, but the Spanish admiral, who, eight years before, had commanded the great Armada, chose to destroy his fleet rather than suffer it to fall into his enemies' hands. It was an object with Essex and Vere to fortify Cadiz and hold it, or at least to make a dash at the great fleet of Indiamen which was hourly expected. But Lord Howard peremptorily refused to permit either attempt, and the fleet sailed back to England.

The capture and sack of Cadiz had no immediate military results. In some particulars it was even a disaster, as much of the spoil taken at Cadiz was the property of Dutch merchants, who were, during the time that they were waging war with Philip, carrying on a lucrative trade with his Spanish dominions, and resenting with the greatest wrath any interference with that trade, as they did a century later. Indeed the profits of the trade with the Indies, now for the most part in Philip's hands, were vital to the Dutch, because from it alone they regularly derived the means for carrying on the war. Their own Indian Empire, soon after to be so important, was not yet founded, hardly imagined. Hence they were reproached with supplying the very means by which Philip could carry on the war, and were said to have sold the Spaniards the gunpowder with which Dutch cities were assailed and Dutch soldiers slain. But, on the other hand, the trade operations of the Dutch were equally essential to Philip, for without them he could have been excluded from the markets for which these products were designed, and from the profits which he found it so necessary to realize.

But the military importance of the sack of Cadiz was enormous. The Dutch and the English were not afraid of the Spanish war vessels on the Dutch and English shores, and had more than once given a good a account of them. The English, too, under Drake, had singed the King of Spain's beard. The Dutch had now done the same thing under the guns of a fortress and a fortified city, and with scarce any loss to themselves. Henceforth we shall see that the exploit of 1596 suggested to the Hollanders far wider and bolder schemes, which they were not slow to carry to a successful issue. In these expeditions the English would have shared had not James of Scotland and England set his heart on peace with Spain and a marriage alliance between that decrepid family and his own. Unfortunately, Holland was so weakened by the temporary withdrawal of some of her best troops to Cadiz, that she lost an important port to the Spaniards. In the same year a treaty, offensive and defensive, was made between England, France and Holland, and Philip, despite the destruction of his fleet at Cadiz, fitted out another Armada, with which he attempted to attack England by landing on Ireland. But the Second Armada had the same fate as the first. It was overtaken, shortly after it set sail, by a tremendous storm, in which forty vessels foundered with five thousand men on board.

In the beginning of the year 1597, Maurice, now reinforced by his friend Vere, attacked and routed the flower of the Spanish forces. It was the first time that the Spaniards had suffered so severe a reverse at the hands of Dutch and English troops. The success was due to the admirable discipline and training which Maurice had given to his cavalry. Perhaps the victory was to some extent aided by the fact that in the November preceding Philip had solemnly repudiated all his debts, and thereupon effectually destroyed his own credit. During the year Maurice continued his campaign, and completely liberated the navigation of the Rhine from the Spanish forts which barred its use. Meanwhile the financial policy of Philip was followed by a wholesale mutiny of his army. In the next year, 1598, little was done beyond the conclusion of a treaty of peace between Henry and Philip, ineffectual negotiations between Holland and Henry to prevent this result, and a renewal of the engagements between Elizabeth and the States. The Peace of Vervins, signed on May 2nd, was a full recognition of the right of Henry to the kingdom of France. Four days afterwards Philip formally handed over the Netherlands to his daughter and son-in-law, the Cardinal Archduke Albert, and with them his pretended sovereignty in Holland.

A few weeks after this formality Philip was on his death-bed. He had aspired to universal sovereignty, and he was now passing away from all authority and all power. He had sacrificed millions of lives to his ambition, millions to his superstition, and he was now perishing in tortures and agonies more terrible than any which had been inflicted by his generals and inquisitors. But so convinced was he that he had been all his life in the right, that he bore all his sufferings with patience, and constantly asserted, as he lay wasting away, that he had consciously wronged no one. During his long reign of forty-two years he had been the destroyer of mankind. It is not clear whether he preferred open violence, assassination, or treachery, but he used each or all with alacrity whenever he had the opportunity or thought the act expedient.

We, in these days of civil and religious liberty, find it difficult to recall the temper of an age when, over the greater part of the Christian and civilized world, these familiar experiences were not only unknown, but the vindication of them was held to be treason, and heresy worse than treason. The old-doctrine was that men should hold their lives and their property on the will of their sovereign, and though this doctrine was never accepted in England or the Netherlands, the only parts of Europe where, at the epoch of the Reformation, the doctrine was disputed, it was insisted on in every Court and inculcated from every State pulpit Before the Reformation it was still more uniformly affirmed that the creed of every man should be taken from a priest living in an ancient Italian town, elected by a corrupt and ambitious body of prelates, and not infrequently stained with grosser and more hateful vices than any secular potentate was. This is the account which writers of an age when no schism was dreamed of give of the Popes of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries.

The deference paid to the doctrine and discipline of these persons, the unhesitating obedience which they demanded or exacted, was more degrading than the worship of the bull Apis in Egypt, or of the Lama in Thibet, because the authority of the Pope was constantly exercised in enforcing that which the moral sense of all but the most depraved secretly or openly repudiated. It is true that for a long time these criticisms were whispered rather than uttered, were conveyed in a language which was not understood, and carefully noted by those whose books were never published; for that Authority took measures, never known in the history of any other religion, to suppress all free thought by the most relentless cruelties. Even when the revolt came it was the transference of the subjects' faith from a priestly to a royal despot. The doctrine of the Lutheran and the English episcopalian was, and long remained, that the religion of the prince must be the religion of the subject, and that all other opinion must be proscribed and punished. Calvin and Luther were as intolerant, though not cruel, as Torquemada and Titelmann.

The Dutch were the first to permit, and to acknowledge, religious toleration. Nothing shows how slowly men have been emancipated from priestly despotism than the fact that the word toleration, that is, the endurance, without any severe penalties, of religious differences, should be hailed as the first charter of religious liberty. This toleration the Dutch were the first to concede. They could not indeed permit the open performance of Roman Catholic rites. But it must be remembered that in the sixteenth century the faith of the Roman Church was a gigantic conspiracy, unsleeping and unscrupulous against any man, any state, any race which dissented from it. To give way to it, when its supremacy was repudiated, was to be treasonable to liberty, to hope, to progress, to justice.