Part 3

The occasion of his first sermon in the cathedral was one long remembered in the city. The vast multitudes saw a gaunt figure whose thick hood covered the whole head and shoulders. From deeply sunken eye-sockets there looked out two eyes that blazed as with lightning. The nose was strong and prominent, with wide nostrils, capable of terrible distention under the stress of emotion. The mouth was full, with compressed, projecting lips, and large, as if made for a torrent of eloquence. The speaker was a visionary, and a seer. At one moment he melted his audience to tears, at another he stirred them to horror, again quickening their souls with prayer and pleadings, that had in them the sweetness of the very spirit of Christ. Soon the walls of the church reëchoed with sobs and wailings, dominated by one ringing voice. One scribe explains fragments of the sermon with these words: "Here I was so overcome with weeping that I could not go on." The poet, Mirandola, tells us that Savonarola's voice was like a clap of doom: a cold shiver ran through the marrow of his bones, and the hair of his head stood on end as he listened. The theme that morning was this: "Repent! A judgment of God is at hand. A sword is suspended over you. Italy is doomed for her iniquity." The speaker prophesied coming bloodshed, the ruin of cities, the trampling down of provinces, the passage of armies, and the devastating wars that were about to fall on Italy.

The great man of Florence at this moment was Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was the most powerful figure in Italy, the most widely-travelled, and the richest man of his time. Tiring of luxury and flattery, he was ambitious to be called the patron of art and literature. He had fitted up a great banqueting-room in his palace, in which he could assemble painters, sculptors, architects, actors, poets, philosophers. His seat at the head of the table was after the fashion of a throne, and he had made himself a kind of dictator in the realm of learning. Always open to flattery, he was surrounded by a group of citizens who never ceased burning incense at the altar of his egotism. He was at once a politician, a poet, an amateur actor, dramatist, and singer. At his table sat Ficino, who translated Plato's works into Latin, and Pico della Mirandola, who was the idol of Florentine society. It was the latter's boast that a single reading fixed in his memory any language, any essay or poem, and made it his forever. Other guests were Leo Alberti and Leonardo, the two men of comprehensive genius in all the group that lived in the palace of the Prince. Constant adulation made Lorenzo arrogant and vain to the last degree. In disguise he led a group of dissipated young men in the carnival fêtes. He wrote licentious carnival songs and so degraded were his followers that they went everywhither shouting his praises as a poet superior to Dante. And when, in July of the following year, Savonarola was elected Prior of St. Mark's, Lorenzo sent messengers to him, bidding him to show more respect to the head of the State.

Savonarola refused to do so. One day the Prince was seen walking in the garden of the monastery. An attendant came in to Savonarola, and announced that Lorenzo the Magnificent was in the garden. "Does he ask for me?" "No," replied the young monk. "Then let him walk." Shortly afterward the Prince sent a deputation to wait on the new Prior, telling him that it was not good form to preach against the Prince, who was the patron of St. Mark's, to which Savonarola replied, "Did I receive my position from Lorenzo, or from Almighty God?" Savonarola's eyes blazed, and he spake in tones of thunder and the answer was, "From Almighty God." "Then," went on the Prior, "to Almighty God will I render homage."

Lorenzo, as it chanced, was drawing near to the end of his life. One day a messenger came from the palace announcing his dangerous illness. Because Lorenzo had usurped the liberties of his country, had robbed and oppressed his own people, Savonarola would not go. Then a second messenger came, saying that the Prince was dying and asked absolution. The Prior found the Prince propped up upon velvet pillows, and lying in a great silken chamber. All his life long, Lorenzo had been accustomed to soft words and pliant service. Now this stern prophet of duty towered above his couch like a messenger of God. The Prior told him absolution could not be granted except upon certain conditions. "Three things are required of you; you must have a full and lively faith in God's mercy; you must restore your ill-gotten gains; you must restore liberty to Florence." Twice the Prince assented, but the third time his face went white. He shivered, as if in fear, and at length, in silence, he turned his face toward the wall. Savonarola turned his back. He would not grant absolution. Lorenzo died. The news was spread through the city by the relatives and servants standing about the bedside of the dead Prince. The event heaved the soul of Florence as the tides heave the sea.

The Prior was now the most influential man in Italy. His sermons took on a new boldness, and his denunciation of vices filled the city with excitement. Ever increasing his power as a preacher, he now added certain addresses as a patriot. He hated the tyranny of the Medici with an undying hatred. Taking upon himself full responsibility, he sent a letter of welcome to Charles VIII and his French army, believing that if Florence opened her gates to the French, the Florentines might recover their own liberty. Having expelled the family of the Medici, he found it necessary to write a constitution for Florence, and his influence in shaping that constitution was the most powerful influence exerted in that critical time. Leaving to others the task of writing the code, he told the people plainly that, of necessity, a government by one man strengthened the single ruler toward despotism and autocracy, while self-government, through the choice of representatives, worked for the diffusion of strength and responsibility. He proposed a grand council of 3,000 citizens appointed by the city judges, a body that answers to our House of Representatives, and another superior council of eighty citizens, all over forty years of age, who, in turn, were to share with the magistrates the task of appointing the higher officers of the State. Then he brought about a reform of taxation, full amnesty for political offenders, made usury a treasonable act, founded a bank that loaned money to the poor on their character and to the rich on their collateral. He organized a movement against licentious plays, against luxury, extravagance, ostentatious dress and houses. And when the exiled princes made an alliance with the Pope, he denounced the crimes of the Papacy.

Little by little, a great moral revival swept over Florence and Italy, a revival that culminated in the coming together of the Florentines in the public square, where the people threw upon a blazing fire their vanities, with all the implements of gambling, fraud, and trickery, of vice and drunkenness. Without being himself an ascetic, without making any sweeping attack upon pleasure through music or the drama, Savonarola was an opponent of every form of sensuality, and the gilded vices that undermine sound morals. He was first of all a preacher, changing men's lives and, incidentally, stating the reasons for their personal reformation. Luther changed men's thinking first, and showed men why this was wrong, and that was right, and therefore wrought fundamental changes. But Savonarola was less of a thinker and more of an evangelist. He had all the action of Demosthenes, all the earnestness of Peter the Hermit, all the voice, the gestures and the manner of Whitefield. He believed that the inevitable end of sin was the Inferno of Dante, and therefore his language was full of fire, his voice full of tears, and he plead with men to flee from Vanity Fair as Lot fled from Sodom.

His uncompromising spirit had long since aroused the hatred of political adversaries as well as of the degraded court of Rome. Even now, when his authority was at its height, when his fame filled the land, and the vast cathedral and its precincts lacked space for the crowds flocking to hear him, his enemies were secretly preparing his downfall. From the beginning it was plain that Socrates was fighting a losing battle against the wicked judges of Athens. From the beginning it must have been plain to Dante that his cunning and insidious foes, who felt that he alone stood between them and their own enrichment, would drive him an exile from Florence. And when Savonarola came into collision with Pope Alexander VI, it was like a bird of paradise going up against some Gibraltar of granite and steel.

Pope Alexander's two ambitions were the advancement of his family and the strengthening of his temporal power. It was Alexander who, knowing that the Sultan had a rival in the person of the young Prince Djem, seized the young noble and put him in jail, on condition that forty thousand ducats yearly should be paid for his jail fee. It was to Alexander that, later, the Turk sent dispatches offering three hundred thousand ducats if he would do away with the youth. History has extenuated many of the crimes of Alexander, but this traffic in murder for the Turks can never be forgiven. It was Alexander also who made impossible liberty of the press, by forcing printers to submit their books to the control of archbishops. It was Alexander who maintained a harem in the Vatican. It was Alexander whose spies were in every inn, in every village. His secret agents were in all the audiences of Savonarola. Alexander looked upon the Prior as a traitor, disloyal and dangerous to the Papacy. At first he sent agents to Florence, and offered bribes to Savonarola, asked if he would accept a cardinal's hat, and invited him to Rome to visit the Vatican. Savonarola answered by redoubling his attacks. He called Rome a harlot church, till the Pope ordered his excommunication. And at length, becoming alarmed for their city, the magistrates of Florence forbade Savonarola's preaching, and closed the cathedral to his work.

Retiring to St. Mark's, the great leader wrote letters to the crowned heads of Europe, and called for a general council. He reviewed the crimes of which the Pope had been guilty, and the list of vices was long and black. His letters to various princes were intercepted, and taken to Alexander. Then agents, with large sums of money, were sent to Florence to organize a movement to destroy the Prior. Every conceivable plot was organized against him, but he escaped poison, the knife, and the assassin's club. His enemies challenged him to the ordeal by fire, and when he asked that he might be allowed to carry the crucifix and the sacrament in his hand they withdrew the challenge. Thrown into prison, the inquisitors subjected him to the most cruel torture. He was drawn up to the ceiling by a rope fourteen times, and then suddenly dropped, until muscles, tendons and bones were all but torn from their sockets. He was denied food and water and sleep. And finally his reason gave way. Bodily pain so injured and inflamed the brain that it refused its action. Among his last words were the words of the dying Saviour, "In thee, O Lord, have I trusted. Let me never be confounded."

When he was condemned to the flames, he appealed to the government of Florence, but the rulers hastened to support the papal decree, and insisted upon the execution of the sentence. On the morning upon which he was to die, the great public square in Florence was crowded with citizens. Multitudes who had wept during his sermons and whose lives had been changed by his teachings, stood in grief and trepidation around the funeral pyre, just as the multitudes in Jerusalem stood in fear about the cross of Christ. In pronouncing the sentence of death, the bishop of Verona, overwhelmed with fear and confusion, said, "I separate thee from the Church militant and the Church triumphant." To which Savonarola answered, "From the Church militant, yes, but from the Church triumphant, that is not given unto you." The soldiers pushed the lowest dregs of the city, thieves, drunkards, diseased criminals, close to his scaffold, and encouraged them to assail him with vile words and vile deeds. At ten o'clock of the 23d of May, 1498, his enemies achieved his death. Like Elijah he ascended unto heaven in a chariot of fire. But soon thereafter the guilty leaders of the Church discovered that his work had just begun. He had aroused the conscience of the people, who followed Luther in a revolt against the sale of indulgences that gave the right for the crime and sin. His assertion of personal liberty put strength into Luther's arm and faith into the heart of Calvin. Erasmus borrowed from Savonarola his teachings of reasonableness and light. In exalting the Bible as the final source of authority, he had enthroned that Book and the teachings of Jesus above all popes and cardinals and bishops. Practical men, Galileo, and Bacon, and Erasmus, and Tyndale, borrowed courage from his life and writings. And to this day the influence of this preacher, prophet, martyr, is still potent, not alone in Italy, but throughout the world.

III

WILLIAM THE SILENT

(1533-1584)

_And Brave Little Holland_

Be the reasons what they may, liberty owes much to little lands and confined peoples. Go back to any age and continent, place side by side a little nation and a large one, and if the first has made for liberty and progress, the second has often made for bondage and superstition. For the beginnings of morals and religion we go back, not to that widely extended state named Babylon, but to little Palestine, shut in between the desert and the deep sea. For the beginnings of art and culture we go not to the vast, rich plains of Asia Minor, but to that little rocky land named Greece. For the beginnings of the republic we go not to the sunny plains of Italy, but to the narrow valleys between the Alpine Mountains. What great contribution to civilization has Russia made to the world? But the little Swiss Republic has given us the international postal system, international arbitration and the referendum. Commerce owes a great debt to little Venice. Modern banking owes a great debt to little Scotland. Asia and Africa owe a great debt to little England. And though Holland was a narrow strip of land but twenty miles wide and one hundred miles long, yet the world can never repay the debt it owes to this mother of republics.

For lovers of liberty the most sacred spot in modern Europe is the square of the Binnenhof at The Hague. A tablet there records the words with which William the Silent challenged Philip II--words that were first made the foundation of the Dutch Republic, words that our pilgrim fathers took as the basis of their New England institutions.

"We declare to you that you have no right to interfere with the conscience of any one so long as he has done nothing to work injury to another person or public scandal."

We can never forget that Holland gave the founders of our Republic their shelter, with safety and leisure for working out their dreams and visions of self-government. But a full century before the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in Leyden, Holland had become a shelter to foreign exiles, and her citizens had pledged themselves to a deathless hatred of all forms of tyranny. To the cities of Holland had fled those men who were denied liberty of thought in Paris and Nuremburg. To Holland had come the victims of oppression in Venice and Florence. It was in Holland that the great Humanist had lived and died, that scholar and philosopher Erasmus, who wrought as powerfully for reform in religion as Huss and Savonarola. It was Erasmus who forged the intellectual weapons used by Luther in Germany, and Calvin in Geneva. It was Erasmus who first made a correct text for the Greek Testament. It was Erasmus who put the Bible into the common languages of Europe. And it was a group of Dutchmen who first demanded the separation of Church and State. Two generations before William Bradford gathered his little band in Leyden, William the Silent stood forth to challenge the divine right of kings.

John Ruskin once called attention to the fact that as every great art-age has been a reaction from an era of unendurable ugliness, so every movement for liberty has been a reaction precipitated by unwonted tyranny. Certain it is that as Oliver Cromwell represented a rebound from feudalism, and Abraham Lincoln a reaction from the cruelty of slavery, so William the Silent represented a thrilling protest against the crime of a foreign usurper. His career is as romantic and many-coloured as the career of David, the fugitive, fleeing from Saul, or that of Robert Bruce, hiding in caves and dens from the pursuers who threatened his life. In youth he was the companion of kings, but he became the champion of the people against their king, the idol of his followers, and the hero of a lost cause. Like David, he knew the weariness and painfulness of the exile's lot. Like Lincoln, he had a face furrowed with anxiety, and fell a victim to the assassin's bullet. Reared in luxury, the heir to titles and vast estates, the head of a dynasty, whose blood still flows in the veins of Europe's rulers, for the cause of liberty he resigned his rank, that he might serve the poor and oppressed. He was a statesman, and had the foresight that organizes out of defeat, and is unconquerable because it never knows when it is defeated. He was a reformer, and attacked injustice and despotism in an era when of necessity his labours were fruitless. He was a soldier, and had the personal daring and the strong arm that count for more than strategic skill. He was a hero, and though daily the hired poisoners sought entrance to his palace, and assassins ever dogged his steps upon the streets, despite the six attempts upon his life, he maintained his courage and his boundless hope. In an age when society had not yet doubted the divine right of kings, William of Orange fronted Philip II with a denial of this citadel of tyranny and injustice, affirmed the principle that the creed of a nation and the creed of individuals is a matter of their own choice and their own conscience.

Our libraries hold no more instructive volumes than Motley's story of the Netherlands, their rise to material prosperity and their struggle for liberty under the leadership of this man known as William the Silent. The tale of their slow growth as a maritime nation is an epic of indomitable courage in the face of every conceivable form of obstacle. We see these people for the sake of liberty retreating from the rich plains of central Europe into the morass that the Roman historian said was "neither land nor water." With infinite labour they built barriers and dikes against the North Sea, developed a system of veins and arteries through which they compelled the ocean to fertilize their fields, and constructed watery highways for carrying their commerce into distant lands. At length a region outcast of earth and ocean alike "wrestled from both domains their richest treasure." Brave cities floated mermaid-like upon the bosom of the sea. Standing upon the canal boats, travellers looked down upon cattle grazing below the level of the ocean, beheld orchards and gardens whose tree-tops scarcely reached the level of the waves. Unconsciously this race that had struggled so long and victoriously over storms and seas was educating itself of the struggle with the still more savage despotism of man.

With intelligence and enterprise came the development of trade, and in the fifteenth century the Hollanders became the carriers of the world's commerce. Their ships and their sailors made their way around into the Baltic, to the ports of all northern Europe, to the ports of France and Spain, of Genoa and Naples and Venice, to Constantinople and Alexandria, and from thence south into all countries and continents. As bees flitting from orchard to orchard fertilize the fruit, so these ships passing from port to port and continent to continent fertilized the minds of men. Returning home they brought bulbs, roots and seeds that soon made Holland the gayest flower-garden in Europe and the home of modern floriculture and horticulture. From the Far East they brought the suggestion of movable types. The bleached linens, the tapestries and woollen goods of Holland won fame throughout the world. The homes of her burghers were models of comfort and even luxury. Small merchants of Amsterdam and Leyden and Rotterdam became merchant princes. Weavers and spinners of linen and silk, workers in iron, as well as silver and gold, left the other lands of Europe and settled in the Dutch seaports.

In that little strip of land were inclosed 208 walled cities and 6,300 villages guarded by a belt of sixty fortresses. Little wonder that Spain looked longingly toward this people and meditated plans for breaking down its fortresses, subjugating its peoples and transferring its accumulated treasure from the chests of the burghers to the vaults of the Spanish dons and cavaliers. And when at length it began to look as if the scepter of the sea might pass from Spain to Holland, King Philip and his soldiers, under Bloody Alva, resolved to draw a circle of fire around little Holland and rob her of the treasure she had so slowly earned.

Fully to understand the heroic struggle of the Hollanders under William of Orange, we must know the immediate cause of the controversy and the source of the tyranny they opposed. That cause was the Inquisition and the tyranny was that of Spain's ambitious rulers. At the moment of the outbreak, Spain was the richest and the most powerful nation in Europe. Victorious in Africa and Italy, her emperor had carried war into France and now reigned over Germany as well as those provinces now known as Belgium and Holland. If we ask from whence Spain derived the money for these wars of conquest the answer is found in the vast treasure she acquired in the New World. Prescott tells us that when the Spanish soldiers captured the capital of Peru, the soldiers spent days in melting down the golden vessels which they found in the vaults of temples and palaces. In that era, when the yellow metal was worth so much, a single ship carried to Spain $15,500,000 in gold, besides vast treasures of silver and jewels. When Cortez approached the palace of Montezuma the king's messengers met the general bearing gifts from their lord. These gifts included 200 pounds (avoirdupois) of gold for the leader and two pounds of gold for each soldier. The full value of the treasure that Spain carried from the cities and states of the New World will, doubtless, never be known.

But it must be remembered that the Spanish soldiers who went into Mexico and Peru turned those two countries into a wilderness. For a full half-century these brutal soldiers, burning with avarice, went everywhither, looting towns, pillaging cities, butchering the people, lifting the torch upon cottage and palace alike. The awful anguish and suffering that Spain wrought upon the helpless people of Mexico and Peru is one of the bloodiest chapters in history. The eagle pouncing upon the dove, the panther leaping upon the young fawn, but faintly interpret to us the savage cruelty of the Spaniard as he raged through the new world. And when the Spanish ships came home, laden with gold and silver the Emperor found means to prosecute his plans for military conquest. Spanish armies were soon marching into northern Italy, into Austria and Germany, into France and finally into Holland. Flushed with victory and greedy of Holland's treasures, Philip determined to punish these people for their refusal to vote supplies to his army, by establishing there the Inquisition by the sword.