HOLLAND.*
HOLLAND, the " Holl " or " Low " Land, is the creation of the Rhine. " Its uplands," said Napoleon, " are mine by right of conquest ; its lowlands, which owe their existence to the river
I have appropriated, are mine by right of devolution." It is thus marked off geologically from the South-Western Nether- lands, known to-day as Belgium, the area of a shallow sea whose waters have retreated ; with the further ethnological difference that the Belgic races are mainly Celtic, the Dutch or Hollanders Teutonic. The Batavians of Caesar's days were mingled with the Frisian tribes which swarmed across the Rhine towards the close of the fourth century ; great part of their territory was swallowed up in the thirteenth century by what is still the " Zuyder " or " Southern " Zee. Under Charles the Great they became a province of the Holy Roman Empire, obeying the vicegerents of the Emperor, but enjoying domestic freedom of the widest kind ; and from that day to this, their history, as the Netherlands, the United Provinces, the Dutch Republic, the States-General, the Kingdom of Holland, has been continuous and distinct.
Their own annals, exceedingly copious and accurate, have been rendered for English readers into the elaborate work of Motley, and are still further summarised in this volume by Professor Rogers. They bear in his eyes a more than local interest ; Holland is to him the political focus of Europe. In its prolonged but successful struggle against Spain, he sees the first European precedent for civil and religious liberty, the stimulating cause of the English and American Revolutions, the beginning of modern political science and modern civilisa- tion. Holland not only taught the States of Europe the true purposes of civil government, but was their pioneer in rational agriculture, in navigation and discovery, in commerce and finance, in physical research, in international law ; boons ill- repaid by the nations it instructed, by none more thanklessly than by England. Its political decline, deeply mortifying to all who have traced and admired its well-won honours, is scarcely less instructive than its political supremacy.
Its rise to eminence began with the commercial success of its towns. They held, through the excellence of their weavers and their propinquity to the English markets, a virtual monopoly of woollen goods; the superiority of their linen cloth is still recorded in the names Holland and Diaper (D'ypres).
Hives of industry, devout, artistic, somewhat quarrelsome amongst themselves, but virtually independent of their nobles, they had reached in the fifteenth century, while other nations were impoverished and desolated by dynastic aggrandisements and quarrels, the height of prosperity and freedom. The first assault upon this beatitude came from the House of Burgundy.
By Philip the Good with caution, by Charles the Bold with ferocious brutality, a central despotism was established in Holland and a standing army maintained. Charles's ignominious death at Nancy brought relief ; his daughter
• "The Story of the Nations :"—Holland. By Professor J. E. Thorold Rogers. London : T. Fisher Unwin. 1886.
Mary granted the " Great Privilege," the Magna Charta of the Netherlands, a concession contemptuously violated by her grandson, Charles V. With his assault upon their liberties in 1539 began the famous duel, Holland single-handed on the one side, against Imperial, Spanish, and Burgundian power on the other; till the Truce of 1609 re-established on the basis of the Great Privilege the religious, commercial, and political independence of the Dutch Republic.
The "Revolt of the Netherlands," fascinating from its dramatic side, is greater in its political aims and achieve- ments. It repudiated the divine right of Kings, and the divine authority of the Papacy. It ranks, says Mr. Rogers, far above the heroic opposition of Athens to the Persian King : " the resistance was far more desperate, much more successful, and infinitely more significant, because it was a war in which the highest principles were vindicated, and vindicated irre- versibly." It was a battle of giants,—Alva, Parma, Don John of Austria, on the one side ; William the Silent and Prince Maurice on the other. But Alva and Parma were backed by the whole power of the mightiest Empire in Europe ; William and his son represented a league of small States, incoherent and disunited, some treasonable from the first, others mutually
jealous, all tenacious of their constitutional independence, only two, Holland and Zeeland, persistently patriotic. The motive of the struggle was twofold. The Netherlanders were content to accept the Burgundo-Spanish dynasty as overlords, and to pay them handsome tribute ; they refused to admit a Spanish garrison, and insisted on their Protestant freedom of worship. Charles V., on the other hand, discerned the truth, formulated later in the maxim of our James I. " No Bishop, no King," that resistance to the claim of the priest involved resistance to the claims of the despot, that religious liberty was subversive of absolutism even more than political autonomy. With one hand he introduced the Inquisition, burning, strangling, beheading, burying alive a hundred thousand heretics ; with the other he dragooned and taxed the towns, abrogated the Great Privilege, an- nulled charters, laws, immunities. The States were placed by Philip II., on his father's death, under the Viceroyalty of his half-sister Margaret ; and when her exactions were opposed by the famous association of the Gueux or Beggars, he collected an army of his finest troops, under the most merciless General whom the civilised world had seen, and sent them into the Netherlands to satiate themselves. Of the three leading nobles, Egmont and Horn were murdered, William the Silent, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder or King's representative in the Northern States, escaped. The Beggars took to the sea, seized on Brill and Flushing, captured the Lisbon fleet. Holland and Zeeland rallied round them, threw off the Spanish yoke, accepted William as their ruler. Alva was recalled ; the Beggars relieved Leyden, founding its University in memory of its deliverance ; filled their coffers by trading in the intervals of war; federated the entire Netherlands in the Pacification of Ghent. Don John, the hero of Lepanto, who had defeated the patriots at Gemblours, and but for William's insight and activity, would have broken up the Union, was succeeded by Alexander of Parma, a crafty diplomatist as well as a consummate General. By judicious bribes he won the greedy Flemish nobles, detached the half- hearted Southern States, placed William under the ban of Spain, and put a heavy price upon his head. Six attempts were made to assassinate him : the sixth succeeded. For a time, his nation's cause seemed hopeless. Town- after town was taken, province after province seceded from the federation whose great founder and maintainer had passed away. Two events interposed to save it,—Drake's buccaneers and the ruin of the Armada destroyed Philip's fleets and crippled his resources ; and a greater soldier and statesman than even Parma appeared in the person of Prince Maurice, William's son. Once more cities and strongholds were recovered, a splendid navy held the sea, Parma died, his successor was lethargic and insignificant, the flower of the Spanish Army was routed by the Hollanders at Turnhout, Philip's long life came to an end, and the Twelve Years' Truce which closed the war represented the entire surrender of the Spaniards and the final triumph of the Dutch.
Victorious in arms by land and sea, the heroic little nation had found means amid its death-struggle to develop economic and Colonial enterprise. Even while the war was at its height, the entire trade of North-Western Europe passed through
Amsterdam ; it throve on the decay of the vanquished Flemish province, absorbing and adding to its own the commerce of Antwerp, the manufactures of Ghent and Bruges, as fast as they surrendered to Philip. Fourteen years before the peace, it had laid the foundation of its East India Company, a measure speedily imitated by Englarid ; had settled in Malabar, annexed Amboyna and the Spice Islands, and founded Batavia, to this day the head-quarters of its Colonial empire. During the century which followed the Truce of 1609, it occupied the most conspicuous place in Europe. No city was so large or so opulent as Amsterdam, transacting the business of the entire Continent, and stored with the markets of the world. Its cattle, fed on the rich pastures of the redeemed Beemster Lake ; its garden produce, introducing winter roots unknown before; its artificial grasses, saint- fain, lucerne, clover,—excited the envious admiration of less skilled English and foreign farmers. Students crowded from all parts to Leyden, the youngest of its Universities ; in its schools were originated international law and modern physic; more books were issued by Dutch publishers in the seventeenth century than from all the presses of Europe ; its school of painters and engravers attained widespread fame before England had attempted either art ; our Milton imitated the Dutch poet Vondel ; from the Bank of Amsterdam sprang the first conception of the Bank of England. One stain alone dims the lustre of the Seven Provinces in this their century of glory; tarnishes, unhippily, too, the character of their greatest hero,—the Republic was dishonoured by the theologi- cal bitterness of the Arminian and Calvinistic controversy; the fame of Maurice was everlastingly sullied by the exile of Grotius and the judicial murder of Barnevelt.
Our interest in Holland as a military State culminates with the Peace. Its share in the Thirty Years' War was subsidiary, its quarrel with Cromwell a scandal to the English Parliament, its connection with the Stuarts in all respects disastrous to itself. Its first downward step was to make the office of Stadt- holder hereditary, entangling the country in dynastic alliances which committed it to fatal wars, and beginning that forma- tion of discordant democratic and monarchic parties of which the immediate outcome was the disgraceful murder of De Witt. The English Revolution, the Grand Alliance, the humiliation of Louis, the Treaties of Ryswick and Utrecht, are not exclusively Dutch, and have been abundantly ex- pounded. With the close of the Spanish Succession War, the decay of Holland began. The States, welded by common danger, fell asunder in time of peace; the War of the Austrian Succession crippled them with irretrievable debt ; their com- merce was shamefully destroyed by England in the Seven Years' War, more shamefully still in the War of American Independence. For a time the party known as the Patriots struggled to regain their ancient place among the nations ; but the King of Prussia, brother-in-law to the Stadtholder, invaded Holland in his sister's interest, and left it, weakened and enslaved, to become an appanage of Napoleon's Empire, to accept a monarchy from the Congress of Vienna, to be joined to and disjoined from Belgium, to take final rank as a third-rate military Power on the Continent which once looked to it as a leader.
We lay down the book with strong feelings of gratitude to its accomplished author. It is not always easy reading, for omniscient instructors teach occasionally by implication, a process which demands from their disciples considerable previous equipment. The narrative is now and then obscured, and its action broken by the parenthetic pursuit of incidental episodes; verbal tautologies and confusion, as on pp. 101, 131, 206, seem due to imperfect revisal of the press ; the strong personality of the writer peeps forth ever and anon with amusing effect, but with some slight sacrifice of judicial im- partiality. The Portraits of Charles and Philip, of the four great Orange Princes, of Alva, Parma, Barnevelt, Grotius, De Witt, add highly to the interest with which we read of them ; the remaining illustrations, scattered freely through the book, are for the most part familiar, trivial, or inartistic ; if specially prepared, they must have added unnecessarily to the cost of printing. It is to be wished that Mr. Rogers could have spared a closing chapter to describe the Holland of to- day; to indicate its successful landed system, its mar- vellous experiment in home colonisation at Frederiksoord, its handling of the Poor-Law problem, at once productive and humane, whereby workhouses are unknown, and paupers,
costing £21 per annum each in England, are maintained in Holland at less than 28 a head. He would have enforced a creed of which he is a devout professor, that militarism is not the highest source of national pre-eminence ; that " Peace bath her victories no less renowned than War ;" that, as in her successful defiance of tyranny three hundred years ago, so in her recovery from social and political prostration through the present century, Holland redeems and justifies the proud boast of her ancient motto, " Luctor et Emergo."
Previous page
