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Five centuries of isolation succeed. In the Netherlands, as throughout
Europe, a thousand obscure and slender rills are slowly preparing the
great stream of universal culture. Five dismal centuries of feudalism:
during which period there is little talk of human right, little obedience
to divine reason. Rights there are none, only forces; and, in brief,
three great forces, gradually arising, developing themselves, acting upon
each other, and upon the general movement of society.
The sword—the first, for a time the only force: the force of iron. The
"land's master," having acquired the property in the territory and in the
people who feed thereon, distributes to his subalterns, often but a shade
beneath him in power, portions of his estate, getting the use of their
faithful swords in return. Vavasours subdivide again to vassals,
exchanging land and cattle, human or otherwise, against fealty, and so
the iron chain of a military hierarchy, forged of mutually interdependent
links, is stretched over each little province. Impregnable castles,
here more numerous than in any other part of Christendom, dot the level
surface of the country. Mail-clad knights, with their followers, encamp
permanently upon the soil. The fortunate fable of divine right is
invented to sanction the system; superstition and ignorance give currency
to the delusion. Thus the grace of God, having conferred the property in
a vast portion of Europe upon a certain idiot in France, makes him
competent to sell large fragments of his estate, and to give a divine,
and, therefore, most satisfactory title along with them. A great
convenience to a man, who had neither power, wit, nor will to keep the
property in his own hands. So the Dirks of Holland get a deed from
Charles the Simple, and, although the grace of God does not prevent the
royal grantor himself from dying a miserable, discrowned captive, the
conveyance to Dirk is none the less hallowed by almighty fiat. So the
Roberts and Guys, the Johns and Baldwins, become sovereigns in Hainault,
Brabant, Flanders and other little districts, affecting supernatural
sanction for the authority which their good swords have won and are ever
ready to maintain. Thus organized, the force of iron asserts and exerts
itself. Duke, count, seignor and vassal, knight and squire, master and
man swarm and struggle amain. A wild, chaotic, sanguinary scene. Here,
bishop and baron contend, centuries long, murdering human creatures by
ten thousands for an acre or two of swampy pasture; there, doughty
families, hugging old musty quarrels to their heart, buffet each other
from generation to generation; thus they go on, raging and wrestling
among themselves, with all the world, shrieking insane war-cries which no
human soul ever understood—red caps and black, white hoods and grey,
Hooks and Kabbeljaws, dealing destruction, building castles and burning
them, tilting at tourneys, stealing bullocks, roasting Jews, robbing the
highways, crusading—now upon Syrian sands against Paynim dogs, now in
Frisian quagmires against Albigenses, Stedingers, and other heretics—
plunging about in blood and fire, repenting, at idle times, and paying
their passage through, purgatory with large slices of ill-gotten gains
placed in the ever-extended dead-hand of the Church; acting, on the
whole, according to their kind, and so getting themselves civilized or
exterminated, it matters little which. Thus they play their part, those
energetic men-at-arms; and thus one great force, the force of iron, spins
and expands itself, century after century, helping on, as it whirls, the
great progress of society towards its goal, wherever that may be.
Another force—the force clerical—the power of clerks, arises; the might
of educated mind measuring itself against brute violence; a force
embodied, as often before, as priestcraft—the strength of priests: craft
meaning, simply, strength, in our old mother-tongue. This great force,
too, develops itself variously, being sometimes beneficent, sometimes
malignant. Priesthood works out its task, age after age: now smoothing
penitent death-beds, consecrating graves! feeding the hungry, clothing
the naked, incarnating the Christian precepts, in an, age of rapine and
homicide, doing a thousand deeds of love and charity among the obscure
and forsaken—deeds of which there shall never be human chronicle, but a
leaf or two, perhaps, in the recording angel's book; hiving precious
honey from the few flowers of gentle, art which bloom upon a howling
wilderness; holding up the light of science over a stormy sea; treasuring
in convents and crypts the few fossils of antique learning which become
visible, as the extinct Megatherium of an elder world reappears after the
gothic deluge; and now, careering in helm and hauberk with the other
ruffians, bandying blows in the thickest of the fight, blasting with
bell, book, and candle its trembling enemies, while sovereigns, at the
head of armies, grovel in the dust and offer abject submission for the
kiss of peace; exercising the same conjury over ignorant baron and
cowardly hind, making the fiction of apostolic authority to bind and
loose, as prolific in acres as the other divine right to have and hold;
thus the force of cultivated intellect, wielded by a chosen few and
sanctioned by supernatural authority, becomes as potent as the sword.
A third force, developing itself more slowly, becomes even more potent
than the rest: the power of gold. Even iron yields to the more ductile
metal. The importance of municipalities, enriched by trade, begins to be
felt. Commerce, the mother of Netherland freedom, and, eventually, its
destroyer—even as in all human history the vivifying becomes afterwards
the dissolving principle—commerce changes insensibly and miraculously
the aspect of society. Clusters of hovels become towered cities; the
green and gilded Hanse of commercial republicanism coils itself around
the decaying trunk of feudal despotism. Cities leagued with cities
throughout and beyond Christendom-empire within empire-bind themselves
closer and closer in the electric chain of human sympathy and grow
stronger and stronger by mutual support. Fishermen and river raftsmen
become ocean adventurers and merchant princes. Commerce plucks up half-
drowned Holland by the locks and pours gold into her lap. Gold wrests
power from iron. Needy Flemish weavers become mighty manufacturers.
Armies of workmen, fifty thousand strong, tramp through the swarming
streets. Silk-makers, clothiers, brewers become the gossips of kings,
lend their royal gossips vast sums and burn the royal notes of hand in
fires of cinnamon wood. Wealth brings strength, strength confidence.
Learning to handle cross-bow and dagger, the burghers fear less the
baronial sword, finding that their own will cut as well, seeing that
great armies—flowers of chivalry—can ride away before them fast enough
at battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget insolence,
tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the
streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of
the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as
at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in the end,
unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural
as they are. And so, struggling along their appointed path, making
cloth, making money, making treaties with great kingdoms, making war by
land and sea, ringing great bells, waving great banners, they, too—these
insolent, boisterous burghers—accomplish their work. Thus, the mighty
power of the purse develops itself and municipal liberty becomes a
substantial fact. A fact, not a principle; for the old theorem of
sovereignty remains undisputed as ever. Neither the nation, in mass,
nor the citizens, in class, lay claim to human rights. All upper
attributes—legislative, judicial, administrative—remain in the land-
master's breast alone. It is an absurdity, therefore, to argue with
Grotius concerning the unknown antiquity of the Batavian republic.
The republic never existed at all till the sixteenth century, and was
only born after long years of agony. The democratic instincts of the
ancient German savages were to survive in the breasts of their cultivated
descendants, but an organized, civilized, republican polity had never
existed. The cities, as they grew in strength, never claimed the right
to make the laws or to share in the government. As a matter of fact,
they did make the laws, and shared, beside, in most important functions
of sovereignty, in the treaty-making power, especially. Sometimes by
bargains; sometimes by blood, by gold, threats, promises, or good hard
blows they extorted their charters. Their codes, statutes, joyful
entrances, and other constitutions were dictated by the burghers and
sworn to by the monarch. They were concessions from above; privileges
private laws; fragments indeed of a larger liberty, but vastly, better
than the slavery for which they had been substituted; solid facts instead
of empty abstractions, which, in those practical and violent days, would
have yielded little nutriment; but they still rather sought to reconcile
themselves, by a rough, clumsy fiction, with the hierarchy which they had
invaded, than to overturn the system. Thus the cities, not regarding
themselves as representatives or aggregations of the people, became
fabulous personages, bodies without souls, corporations which had
acquired vitality and strength enough to assert their existence.
As persons, therefore—gigantic individualities—they wheeled into the
feudal ranks and assumed feudal powers and responsibilities. The city
of Dort; of Middelburg, of Ghent, of Louvain, was a living being, doing
fealty, claiming service, bowing to its lord, struggling with its equals,
trampling upon its slaves.
Thus, in these obscure provinces, as throughout Europe, in a thousand
remote and isolated corners, civilization builds itself up, synthetically
and slowly; yet at last, a whole is likely to get itself constructed.
Thus, impelled by great and conflicting forces, now obliquely, now
backward, now upward, yet, upon the whole, onward, the new Society moves
along its predestined orbit, gathering consistency and strength as it
goes. Society, civilization, perhaps, but hardly humanity. The people
has hardly begun to extricate itself from the clods in which it lies
buried. There are only nobles, priests, and, latterly, cities. In the
northern Netherlands, the degraded condition of the mass continued
longest. Even in Friesland, liberty, the dearest blessing of the ancient
Frisians, had been forfeited in a variety of ways. Slavery was both
voluntary and compulsory. Paupers sold themselves that they might escape
starvation. The timid sold themselves that they might escape violence.
These voluntary sales, which were frequent, wore usually made to
cloisters and ecclesiastical establishments, for the condition of
Church-slaves was preferable to that of other serfs. Persons worsted
in judicial duels, shipwrecked sailors, vagrants, strangers, criminals
unable to pay the money-bote imposed upon them, were all deprived of
freedom; but the prolific source of slavery was war. Prisoners were
almost universally reduced to servitude. A free woman who intermarried
with a slave condemned herself and offspring to perpetual bondage. Among
the Ripuarian Franks, a free woman thus disgracing herself, was girt with
a sword and a distaff. Choosing the one, she was to strike her husband
dead; choosing the other, she adopted the symbol of slavery, and became a
chattel for life.
The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons
into servitude. They fled, by throngs, to church and monastery, and were
happy, by enslaving themselves, to escape the more terrible bondage of
the sea-kings. During the brief dominion of the Norman Godfrey, every
free Frisian was forced to wear a halter around his neck. The lot of a
Church-slave was freedom in comparison. To kill him was punishable by a
heavy fine. He could give testimony in court, could inherit, could make
a will, could even plead before the law, if law could be found. The
number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number
belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht, enormous.
The condition of those belonging to laymen was much more painful. The
Lyf-eigene, or absolute slaves, were the most wretched. They were mere
brutes. They had none of the natural attributes of humanity, their life
and death were in the master's hands, they had no claim to a fraction of
their own labor or its fruits, they had no marriage, except under
condition of the infamous 'jus primoe noctis'. The villagers, or
villeins, were the second class and less forlorn. They could commute the
labor due to their owner by a fixed sum of money, after annual payment of
which, the villein worked for himself. His master, therefore, was not
his absolute proprietor. The chattel had a beneficial interest in a
portion of his own flesh and blood.
The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs. He
who became a soldier of the cross was free upon his return, and many were
adventurous enough to purchase liberty at so honorable a price. Many
others were sold or mortgaged by the crusading knights, desirous of
converting their property into gold, before embarking upon their
enterprise. The purchasers or mortgagees were in general churches and
convents, so that the slaves, thus alienated, obtained at least a
preferable servitude. The place of the absent serfs was supplied by free
labor, so that agricultural and mechanical occupations, now devolving
upon a more elevated class, became less degrading, and, in process of
time, opened an ever-widening sphere for the industry and progress of
freemen. Thus a people began to exist. It was, however; a miserable
people, with personal, but no civil rights whatever. Their condition,
although better than servitude, was almost desperate. They were taxed
beyond their ability, while priest and noble were exempt. They had no
voice in the apportionment of the money thus contributed. There was no
redress against the lawless violence to which they were perpetually
exposed. In the manorial courts, the criminal sat in judgment upon his
victim. The functions of highwayman and magistrate were combined in one
individual.
By degrees, the class of freemen, artisans, traders, and the like,
becoming the more numerous, built stronger and better houses outside the
castle gates of the "land's master" or the burghs of the more powerful
nobles. The superiors, anxious to increase their own importance, favored
the progress of the little boroughs. The population, thus collected,
began to divide themselves into guilds. These were soon afterwards
erected by the community into bodies corporate; the establishment of the
community, of course, preceding, the incorporation of the guilds. Those
communities were created by charters or Keuren, granted by the sovereign.
Unless the earliest concessions of this nature have perished, the town
charters of Holland or Zeland are nearly a century later than those of
Flanders, France, and England.
The oldest Keur, or act of municipal incorporation, in the provinces
afterwards constituting the republic, was that granted by Count William
the First of Holland and Countess Joanna of Flanders, as joint
proprietors of Walcheren, to the town of Middelburg. It will be seen
that its main purport is to promise, as a special privilege to this
community, law, in place of the arbitrary violence by which mankind, in
general, were governed by their betters.
"The inhabitants," ran the Charter, "are taken into protection by both
counts. Upon fighting, maiming, wounding, striking, scolding; upon
peace-breaking, upon resistance to peace-makers and to the judgment of
Schepens; upon contemning the Ban, upon selling spoiled wine, and upon
other misdeeds fines are imposed for behoof of the Count, the city, and
sometimes of the Schepens.......To all Middelburgers one kind of law is
guaranteed. Every man must go to law before the Schepens. If any one
being summoned and present in Walcheren does not appear, or refuses
submission to sentence, he shall be banished with confiscation of
property. Schout or Schepen denying justice to a complainant, shall,
until reparation, hold no tribunal again.......A burgher having a dispute
with an outsider (buiten mann) must summon him before the Schepens. An
appeal lies from the Schepens to the Count. No one can testify but a
householder. All alienation of real estate must take place before the
Schepens. If an outsider has a complaint against a burgher, the Schepens
and Schout must arrange it. If either party refuses submission to them,
they must ring the town bell and summon an assembly of all the burghers
to compel him. Any one ringing the town bell, except by general consent,
and any one not appearing when it tolls, are liable to a fine. No
Middelburger can be arrested or held in durance within Flanders or
Holland, except for crime."
This document was signed, sealed, and sworn to by the two sovereigns in
the year 1217. It was the model upon which many other communities,
cradles of great cities, in Holland and Zeland, were afterwards created.
These charters are certainly not very extensive, even for the privileged
municipalities which obtained them, when viewed from an abstract stand-
point. They constituted, however, a very great advance from the stand-
point at which humanity actually found itself. They created, not for all
inhabitants, but for great numbers of them, the right, not to govern them
selves but to be governed by law: They furnished a local administration
of justice. They provided against arbitrary imprisonment. They set up
tribunals, where men of burgher class were to sit in judgment. They held
up a shield against arbitrary violence from above and sedition from
within. They encouraged peace-makers, punished peace-breakers. They
guarded the fundamental principle, 'ut sua tanerent', to the verge of
absurdity; forbidding a freeman, without a freehold, from testifying—
a capacity not denied even to a country slave. Certainly all this was
better than fist-law and courts manorial. For the commencement of the
thirteenth century, it was progress.
The Schout and Schepens, or chief magistrate and aldermen, were
originally appointed by the sovereign. In process of time, the election
of these municipal authorities was conceded to the communities. This
inestimable privilege, however, after having been exercised during a
certain period by the whole body of citizens, was eventually monopolized
by the municipal government itself, acting in common with the deans of
the various guilds.
Thus organized and inspired with the breath of civic life, the
communities of Flanders and Holland began to move rapidly forward.
More and more they assumed the appearance of prosperous little republics.
For this prosperity they were indebted to commerce, particularly with
England and the Baltic nations, and to manufactures, especially of wool.
The trade between England and the Netherlands had existed for ages,
and was still extending itself, to the great advantage of both countries.
A dispute, however, between the merchants of Holland and England, towards
the year 12l5, caused a privateering warfare, and a ten years' suspension
of intercourse. A reconciliation afterwards led to the establishment of
the English wool staple, at Dort. A subsequent quarrel deprived Holland
of this great advantage. King Edward refused to assist Count Florence in
a war with the Flemings, and transferred the staple from Dort to Bruges
and Mechlin.
The trade of the Netherlands with the Mediterranean and the East was
mainly through this favored city of Bruges, which, already in the
thirteenth century, had risen to the first rank in the commercial world.
It was the resting-place for the Lombards and other Italians, the great
entrepot for their merchandise. It now became, in addition, the great
marketplace for English wool, and the woollen fabrics of all the
Netherlands, as well as for the drugs and spices of the East. It had,
however, by no means reached its apogee, but was to culminate with
Venice, and to sink with her decline. When the overland Indian trade
fell off with the discovery of the Cape passage, both cities withered.
Grass grew in the fair and pleasant streets of Bruges, and sea-weed
clustered about the marble halls of Venice. At this epoch, however, both
were in a state of rapid and insolent prosperity.
The cities, thus advancing in wealth and importance, were no longer
satisfied with being governed according to law, and began to participate,
not only in their own, but in the general government. Under Guy of
Flanders, the towns appeared regularly, as well as the nobles, in the
assembly of the provincial estates. (1386-1389, A.D.) In the course of
the following century, the six chief cities, or capitals, of Holland
(Dort, Harlem, Delft, Leyden, Goads, and Amsterdam) acquired the right
of sending their deputies regularly to the estates of the provinces.
These towns, therefore, with the nobles, constituted the parliamentary
power of the nation. They also acquired letters patent from the count,
allowing them to choose their burgomasters and a limited number of
councillors or senators (Vroedschappen).
Thus the liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger.
A great physical convulsion in the course of the thirteenth century came
to add its influence to the slower process of political revolution.
Hitherto there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, and nearly
all the territory of the future republic. A slender stream alone
separated the two great districts. The low lands along the Vlie, often
threatened, at last sank in the waves. The German Ocean rolled in upon
the inland Lake of Flevo. The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by
engulfing thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and
by spreading a chasm between kindred peoples. The political, as well as
the geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this
tremendous deluge. The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in
the east by as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their
Anglo-Saxon brethren in Britain. The deputies to the general assemblies
at Aurich could no longer undertake a journey grown so perilous. West
Friesland became absorbed in Holland. East Friesland remained a
federation of rude but self-governed maritime provinces, until the brief
and bloody dominion of the Saxon dukes led to the establishment of
Charles the Fifth's authority. Whatever the nominal sovereignty over
them, this most republican tribe of Netherlanders, or of Europeans, had
never accepted feudalism. There was an annual congress of the whole
confederacy. Each of the seven little states, on the other hand,
regulated its own internal affairs. Each state was subdivided into
districts, each district governed by a Griet-mann (greatman, selectman)
and assistants. Above all these district officers was a Podesta, a
magistrate identical, in name and functions, with the chief officer of
the Italian republics. There was sometimes but one Podesta; sometimes
one for each province. He was chosen by the people, took oath of
fidelity to the separate estates, or, if Podesta-general, to the federal
diet, and was generally elected for a limited term, although sometimes
for life. He was assisted by a board of eighteen or twenty councillors.
The deputies to the general congress were chosen by popular suffrage in
Easter-week. The clergy were not recognized as a political estate.
Thus, in those lands which a niggard nature had apparently condemned to
perpetual poverty and obscurity, the principle of reasonable human
freedom, without which there is no national prosperity or glory worth
contending for, was taking deepest and strongest root. Already in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Friesland was a republic, except in
name; Holland, Flanders, Brabant, had acquired a large share of self-
government. The powerful commonwealth, at a later period to be evolved
out of the great combat between centralized tyranny and the spirit of
civil and religious liberty, was already foreshadowed. The elements,
of which that important republic was to be compounded, were germinating
for centuries. Love of freedom, readiness to strike and bleed at any
moment in her cause, manly resistance to despotism, however
overshadowing, were the leading characteristics of the race in all
regions or periods, whether among Frisian swamps, Dutch dykes, the
gentle hills and dales of England, or the pathless forests of America.
Doubtless, the history of human liberty in Holland and Flanders, as every
where else upon earth where there has been such a history, unrolls many
scenes of turbulence and bloodshed; although these features have been
exaggerated by prejudiced historians. Still, if there were luxury and
insolence, sedition and uproar, at any rate there was life. Those
violent little commonwealths had blood in their veins. They were compact
of proud, self-helping, muscular vigor. The most sanguinary tumults
which they ever enacted in the face of day, were better than the order
and silence born of the midnight darkness of despotism. That very
unruliness was educating the people for their future work. Those
merchants, manufacturers, country squires, and hard-fighting barons, all
pent up in a narrow corner of the earth, quarrelling with each other and
with all the world for centuries, were keeping alive a national pugnacity
of character, for which there was to be a heavy demand in the sixteenth
century, and without which the fatherland had perhaps succumbed in the
most unequal conflict ever waged by man against oppression.
To sketch the special history of even the leading Netherland provinces,
during the five centuries which we have thus rapidly sought to
characterize, is foreign to our purpose. By holding the clue of
Holland's history, the general maze of dynastic transformations
throughout the country may, however, be swiftly threaded. From the time
of the first Dirk to the close of the thirteenth century there were
nearly four hundred years of unbroken male descent, a long line of Dirks
and Florences. This iron-handed, hot-headed, adventurous race, placed as
sovereign upon its little sandy hook, making ferocious exertions to swell
into larger consequence, conquering a mile or two of morass or barren
furze, after harder blows and bloodier encounters than might have
established an empire under more favorable circumstances, at last dies
out. The courtship falls to the house of Avennes, Counts of Hainault.
Holland, together with Zeland, which it had annexed, is thus joined to
the province of Hainault. At the end of another half century the
Hainault line expires. William the Fourth died childless in 1355. His
death is the signal for the outbreak of an almost interminable series of
civil commotions. Those two great, parties, known by the uncouth names
of Hook and Kabbeljaw, come into existence, dividing noble against noble,
city against city, father against son, for some hundred and fifty years,
without foundation upon any abstract or intelligible principle. It may
be observed, however, that, in the sequel, and as a general rule, the
Kabbeljaw, or cod-fish party, represented the city or municipal faction,
while the Hooks (fish-hooks), that were to catch and control them, were
the nobles; iron and audacity against brute number and weight.
Duke William of Bavaria, sister's son—of William the Fourth, gets
himself established in 1354. He is succeeded by his brother Albert;
Albert by his son William. William, who had married Margaret of
Burgundy, daughter of Philip the Bold, dies in 1417. The goodly heritage
of these three Netherland provinces descends to his daughter Jacqueline,
a damsel of seventeen. Little need to trace the career of the fair and
ill-starred Jacqueline. Few chapters of historical romance have drawn
more frequent tears. The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to
Netherlanders she is endued with the palpable form and perpetual
existence of the Iphigenias, Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other
consecrated individualities. Exhausted and broken-hearted, after
thirteen years of conflict with her own kinsmen, consoled for the
cowardice and brutality of three husbands by the gentle and knightly
spirit of the fourth, dispossessed of her father's broad domains,
degraded from the rank of sovereign to be lady forester of her own
provinces by her cousin, the bad Duke of Burgundy, Philip surnamed "the
Good," she dies at last, and the good cousin takes undisputed dominion of
the land. (1437.)
The five centuries of isolation are at end. The many obscure streams of
Netherland history are merged in one broad current. Burgundy has
absorbed all the provinces which, once more, are forced to recognize a
single master. A century and a few years more succeed, during which this
house and its heirs are undisputed sovereigns of the soil.
Philip the Good had already acquired the principal Netherlands, before
dispossessing Jacqueline. He had inherited, beside the two Burgundies,
the counties of Flanders and Artois. He had purchased the county of
Namur, and had usurped the duchy of Brabant, to which the duchy of
Limburg, the marquisate of Antwerp, and the barony of Mechlin, had
already been annexed. By his assumption of Jacqueline's dominions, he
was now lord of Holland, Zeland, and Hainault, and titular master of
Friesland. He acquired Luxemburg a few years later.
Lord of so many opulent cities and fruitful provinces, he felt himself
equal to the kings of Europe. Upon his marriage with Isabella of
Portugal, he founded, at Bruges, the celebrated order of the Golden
Fleece. What could be more practical or more devout than the conception?
Did not the Lamb of God, suspended at each knightly breast, symbolize at
once the woollen fabrics to which so much of Flemish wealth and
Burgundian power was owing, and the gentle humility of Christ, which was
ever to characterize the order? Twenty-five was the limited number,
including Philip himself, as grand master. The chevaliers were emperors,
kings, princes, and the most illustrious nobles of Christendom; while a
leading provision, at the outset, forbade the brethren, crowned heads
excepted, to accept or retain the companionship of any other order.
The accession of so potent and ambitious a prince as the good Philip
boded evil to the cause of freedom in the Netherlands. The spirit of
liberty seemed to have been typified in the fair form of the benignant
and unhappy Jacqueline, and to be buried in her grave. The usurper, who
had crushed her out of existence, now strode forward to trample upon all
the laws and privileges of the provinces which had formed her heritage.
At his advent, the municipal power had already reached an advanced stage
of development. The burgher class controlled the government, not only of
the cities, but often of the provinces, through its influence in the
estates. Industry and wealth had produced their natural results. The
supreme authority of the sovereign and the power of the nobles were
balanced by the municipal principle which had even begun to preponderate
over both. All three exercised a constant and salutary check upon each
other. Commerce had converted slaves into freemen, freemen into
burghers, and the burghers were acquiring daily, a larger practical hold
upon the government. The town councils were becoming almost omnipotent.
Although with an oligarchical tendency, which at a later period was to
be more fully developed, they were now composed of large numbers of
individuals, who had raised themselves, by industry and intelligence,
out of the popular masses. There was an unquestionably republican tone
to the institutions. Power, actually, if not nominally, was in the hands
of many who had achieved the greatness to which they had not been born.
The assemblies of the estates were rather diplomatic than representative.
They consisted, generally, of the nobles and of the deputations from the
cities. In Holland, the clergy had neither influence nor seats in the
parliamentary body. Measures were proposed by the stadholder, who
represented the sovereign. A request, for example, of pecuniary,
accommodation, was made by that functionary or by the count himself in
person. The nobles then voted upon the demand, generally as one body,
but sometimes by heads. The measure was then laid before the burghers.
If they had been specially commissioned to act upon the matter; they
voted, each city as a city, not each deputy, individually. If they had
received no instructions, they took back the proposition to lay before
the councils of their respective cities, in order to return a decision
at an adjourned session, or at a subsequent diet. It will be seen,
therefore, that the principle of national, popular representation was
but imperfectly developed. The municipal deputies acted only under
instructions. Each city was a little independent state, suspicious not
only of the sovereign and nobles, but of its sister cities. This mutual
jealousy hastened the general humiliation now impending. The centre of
the system waging daily more powerful, it more easily unsphered these
feebler and mutually repulsive bodies.
Philip's first step, upon assuming the government, was to issue a
declaration, through the council of Holland, that the privileges and
constitutions, which he had sworn to as Ruward, or guardian, during
the period in which Jacqueline had still retained a nominal sovereignty,
were to be considered null and void, unless afterwards confirmed by him
as count. At a single blow he thus severed the whole knot of pledges,
oaths and other political complications, by which he had entangled
himself during his cautious advance to power. He was now untrammelled
again. As the conscience of the smooth usurper was, thenceforth, the
measure of provincial liberty, his subjects soon found it meted to them
more sparingly than they wished. From this point, then, through the
Burgundian period, and until the rise of the republic, the liberty of the
Netherlands, notwithstanding several brilliant but brief laminations,
occurring at irregular intervals, seemed to remain in almost perpetual
eclipse.
The material prosperity of the country had, however, vastly increased.
The fisheries of Holland had become of enormous importance. The
invention of the humble Beukelzoon of Biervliet, had expanded into a mine
of wealth. The fisheries, too, were most useful as a nursery of seamen,
and were already indicating Holland's future naval supremacy. The
fishermen were the militia of the ocean, their prowess attested in the
war with the Hanseatic cities, which the provinces of Holland and Zeland,
in Philip's name, but by their own unassisted exertions, carried on
triumphantly at this epoch. Then came into existence that race of cool
and daring mariners, who, in after times, were to make the Dutch name
illustrious throughout the world, the men, whose fierce descendants, the
"beggars of the sea," were to make the Spanish empire tremble, the men,
whose later successors swept the seas with brooms at the mast-head, and
whose ocean-battles with their equally fearless English brethren often
lasted four uninterrupted days and nights.
The main strength of Holland was derived from the ocean, from whose
destructive grasp she had wrested herself, but in whose friendly embrace
she remained. She was already placing securely the foundations of
commercial wealth and civil liberty upon those shifting quicksands which
the Roman doubted whether to call land or water. Her submerged
deformity, as she floated, mermaid-like, upon the waves was to be
forgotten in her material splendor. Enriched with the spoils of
every clime, crowned with the divine jewels of science and art, she was,
one day, to sing a siren song of freedom, luxury, and power.
As with Holland, so with Flanders, Brabant, and the other leading
provinces. Industry and wealth, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures,
were constantly augmenting. The natural sources of power were full to
overflowing, while the hand of despotism was deliberately sealing the
fountain.
For the house of Burgundy was rapidly culminating and as rapidly
curtailing the political privileges of the Netherlands. The contest was,
at first, favorable to the cause of arbitrary power; but little seeds
were silently germinating, which, in the progress of their gigantic
development, were, one day, to undermine the foundations of Tyranny and
to overshadow the world. The early progress of the religious reformation
in the Netherlands will be outlined in a separate chapter. Another great
principle was likewise at work at this period. At the very epoch when
the greatness of Burgundy was most swiftly ripening, another weapon was
secretly forging, more potent in the great struggle for freedom than any
which the wit or hand of man has ever devised or wielded. When Philip
the Good, in the full blaze of his power, and flushed with the triumphs
of territorial aggrandizement, was instituting at Bruges the order of the
Golden Fleece, "to the glory of God, of the blessed Virgin, and of the
holy Andrew, patron saint of the Burgundian family," and enrolling the
names of the kings and princes who were to be honored with its symbols,
at that very moment, an obscure citizen of Harlem, one Lorenz Coster, or
Lawrence the Sexton, succeeded in printing a little grammar, by means of
movable types. The invention of printing was accomplished, but it was
not ushered in with such a blaze of glory as heralded the contemporaneous
erection of the Golden Fleece. The humble setter of types did not deem
emperors and princes alone worthy his companionship. His invention sent
no thrill of admiration throughout Christendom; and yet, what was the
good Philip of Burgundy, with his Knights of the Golden Fleece, and all
their effulgent trumpery, in the eye of humanity and civilization,
compared with the poor sexton and his wooden types?
Philip died in February, 1467. The details of his life and career do not
belong to our purpose. The practical tendency of his government was to
repress the spirit of liberty, while especial privileges, extensive in
nature, but limited in time, were frequently granted to corporations.
Philip, in one day, conferred thirty charters upon as many different
bodies of citizens. These were, however, grants of monopoly not
concessions of rights. He also fixed the number of city councils or
Vroedschappen in many Netherland cities, giving them permission to
present a double list of candidates for burgomasters and judges, from
which he himself made the appointments. He was certainly neither a good
nor great prince, but he possessed much administrative ability. His
military talents were considerable, and he was successful in his wars.
He was an adroit dissembler, a practical politician. He had the sense to
comprehend that the power of a prince, however absolute, must depend upon
the prosperity of his subjects. He taxed severely the wealth, but he
protected the commerce and the manufactures of Holland and Flanders.
He encouraged art, science, and literature. The brothers, John and
Hubert Van Eyck, were attracted by his generosity to Bruges, where they
painted many pictures. John was even a member of the duke's council.
The art of oil-painting was carried to great perfection by Hubert's
scholar, John of Bruges. An incredible number of painters, of greater or
less merit, flourished at this epoch in the Netherlands, heralds of that
great school, which, at a subsequent period, was to astonish the world
with brilliant colors; profound science, startling effects, and vigorous
reproductions of Nature. Authors, too, like Olivier de la Marche and
Philippe de Comines, who, in the words of the latter, "wrote, not for the
amusement of brutes, and people of low degree, but for princes and other
persons of quality," these and other writers, with aims as lofty,
flourished at the court of Burgundy, and were rewarded by the Duke with
princely generosity. Philip remodelled and befriended the university of
Louvain. He founded at Brussels the Burgundian library, which became
celebrated throughout Europe. He levied largely, spent profusely, but
was yet so thrifty a housekeeper, as to leave four hundred thousand
crowns of gold, a vast amount in those days, besides three million marks'
worth of plate and furniture, to be wasted like water in the insane
career of his son.
The exploits of that son require but few words of illustration. Hardly a
chapter of European history or romance is more familiar to the world than
the one which records the meteoric course of Charles the Bold. The
propriety of his title was never doubtful. No prince was ever bolder,
but it is certain that no quality could be less desirable, at that
particular moment in the history of his house. It was not the quality
to confirm a usurping family in its ill-gotten possessions. Renewed
aggressions upon the rights of others justified retaliation and invited
attack. Justice, prudence, firmness, wisdom of internal administration
were desirable in the son of Philip and the rival of Louis. These
attributes the gladiator lacked entirely. His career might have been a
brilliant one in the old days of chivalry. His image might have appeared
as imposing as the romantic forms of Baldwin Bras de Fer or Godfrey of
Bouillon, had he not been misplaced in history. Nevertheless, he
imagined himself governed by a profound policy. He had one dominant
idea, to make Burgundy a kingdom. From the moment when, with almost the
first standing army known to history, and with coffers well filled by his
cautious father's economy, he threw himself into the lists against the
crafty Louis, down to the day when he was found dead, naked, deserted,
and with his face frozen into a pool of blood and water, he faithfully
pursued this thought. His ducal cap was to be exchanged for a kingly
crown, while all the provinces which lay beneath the Mediterranean and
the North Sea, and between France and Germany, were to be united under
his sceptre. The Netherlands, with their wealth, had been already
appropriated, and their freedom crushed. Another land of liberty
remained; physically, the reverse of Holland, but stamped with the same
courageous nationality, the same ardent love of human rights.
Switzerland was to be conquered. Her eternal battlements of ice and
granite were to constitute the great bulwark of his realm. The world
knows well the result of the struggle between the lord of so many duchies
and earldoms, and the Alpine mountaineers. With all his boldness,
Charles was but an indifferent soldier. His only merit was physical
courage. He imagined himself a consummate commander, and, in
conversation with his jester, was fond of comparing himself to Hannibal.
"We are getting well Hannibalized to-day, my lord," said the bitter fool,
as they rode off together from the disastrous defeat of Gransen. Well
"Hannibalized" he was, too, at Gransen, at Murten, and at Nancy. He
followed in the track of his prototype only to the base of the mountains.
As a conqueror, he was signally unsuccessful; as a politician, he could
out-wit none but himself; it was only as a tyrant within his own ground,
that he could sustain the character which he chose to enact. He lost the
crown, which he might have secured, because he thought the emperor's son
unworthy the heiress of Burgundy; and yet, after his father's death, her
marriage with that very Maximilian alone secured the possession of her
paternal inheritance. Unsuccessful in schemes of conquest, and in
political intrigue, as an oppressor of the Netherlands, he nearly carried
out his plans. Those provinces he regarded merely as a bank to draw
upon. His immediate intercourse with the country was confined to the
extortion of vast requests. These were granted with ever-increasing
reluctance, by the estates. The new taxes and excises, which the
sanguinary extravagance of the duke rendered necessary, could seldom be
collected in the various cities without tumults, sedition, and bloodshed.
Few princes were ever a greater curse to the people whom they were
allowed to hold as property. He nearly succeeded in establishing a
centralized despotism upon the ruins of the provincial institutions.
His sudden death alone deferred the catastrophe. His removal of the
supreme court of Holland from the Hague to Mechlin, and his maintenance
of a standing army, were the two great measures by which he prostrated
the Netherlands. The tribunal had been remodelled by his father; the
expanded authority which Philip had given to a bench of judges dependent
upon himself, was an infraction of the rights of Holland. The court,
however, still held its sessions in the country; and the sacred
privilege—de non evocando—the right of every Hollander to be tried in
his own land, was, at least, retained. Charles threw off the mask; he
proclaimed that this council—composed of his creatures, holding office
at his pleasure—should have supreme jurisdiction over all the charters
of the provinces; that it was to follow his person, and derive all
authority from his will. The usual seat of the court he transferred to
Mechlin. It will be seen, in the sequel, that the attempt, under Philip
the Second, to enforce its supreme authority was a collateral cause of
the great revolution of the Netherlands.
Charles, like his father, administered the country by stadholders. From
the condition of flourishing self-ruled little republics, which they had,
for a moment, almost attained, they became departments of an ill-
assorted, ill-conditioned, ill-governed realm, which was neither
commonwealth nor empire, neither kingdom nor duchy; and which had no
homogeneousness of population, no affection between ruler and people,
small sympathies of lineage or of language.
His triumphs were but few, his fall ignominious. His father's treasure
was squandered, the curse of a standing army fixed upon his people, the
trade and manufactures of the country paralyzed by his extortions, and he
accomplished nothing. He lost his life in the forty-fourth year of his
age (1477), leaving all the provinces, duchies, and lordships, which
formed the miscellaneous realm of Burgundy, to his only child, the Lady
Mary. Thus already the countries which Philip had wrested from the
feeble hand of Jacqueline, had fallen to another female. Philip's own
granddaughter, as young, fair, and unprotected as Jacqueline, was now
sole mistress of those broad domains.
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